Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (41 page)
Read Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History Online
Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
4.3. The entire Walcott family in Provo, Utah, in 1907. Standing, from left to right: Sidney, age fifteen; Charles junior, age nineteen; Charles, age fifty-seven; Helena, age forty-two; Stuart, age eleven. Sitting: Helen, age thirteen.
Amidst these extraordinary personal tragedies, the regular affairs of family and business also ate into Walcott’s time. He worked with millions invested in the Telluride Power Company, while advising a local bank about the importance of limited credit for his son:
My son, B. S. Walcott, is a freshman at Princeton. He has an allowance and up to date has been accustomed to paying his bills promptly. I would not, however, credit him or any other boy for more than 30 days, and then only to a limited amount. The effect of credit is bad on the boy and apt to lead to complications.
How could the Burgess Shale possibly have fitted into this caldron, this madhouse of imposed and necessary activity? Walcott needed his summers in the Canadian Rockies for collecting—if only as therapy. But he could never find time for scientific study of the specimens in Washington. A telling indication of Walcott’s own growing realization of his predicament may be found in the most revealing set of letters on the Burgess fossils themselves—his correspondence with his former assistant Charles Schuchert, then professor at Yale and one of America’s leading paleontologists. In 1912, Walcott was embroiled in committee work, but anticipated only a minor delay in studying some trilobites that Schuchert had sent:
As to the trilobites, I will not express an opinion until I have a chance to study the whole group next week. I have been so busy with Congressional Committees and other matters the past 10 days that there has been very little opportunity for research.
By 1926, he had admitted defeat, and put off into an indefinite future something far less time-consuming than the study of specimens—the consideration of an argument raised by Schuchert about the anatomy of trilobites: “Someday when I get time I will look over your comments about the structure of trilobites. At present, I am too busy with administrative work.”
Several statements from the end of Walcott’s life well illustrate his conflicts, his hopes, and the inevitability of his failure to study the Burgess fossils properly. On January 8, 1925, he told the French paleontologist Charles Barrois that he was slowly shedding administrative roles in order to study the Burgess fossils:
I hope to take up a considerable group of Burgess Shale fossils of great interest, which have not yet been published. Over 100 drawings and photographs have been prepared. They would have been published before this if it had not been for the time given to administrative duties and matters connected with our scientific organization. I am about through with the latter, as I gave my address as retiring president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on 12/29, and am also out of the Council of the National Academy. I am planning to resign as a member of the Board of three organizations that are carrying on most interesting and valuable work, but I think my duty to them has been done.
On April 1, 1926, in a letter to L. S. Rowe, Walcott combined his genuine love for research with the canonical, but I think disingenuous, claim that administration was neither enjoyed nor deemed important (relative to scholarship), but only done from sense of duty. (I do not believe that most people are sufficiently self-sacrificial to spend the best years of a life on something that they could put aside with no loss of respect, but only of power. The ethos of science requires that administration be publicly identified as done for duty, but surely most people in such roles take pleasure in their responsibility and influence):
I would derive the greatest happiness from being able to go on with my research work up to the point of placing on record the data which I have been gathering for the past 15 years in the mountains of the West.… Administrative duties have not been unpleasant or disappointing, but I regard them as a passing incident, and not serious work, although of course at times one is called upon to put his best efforts into the solution of the questions that arise.
A week later, he wrote to David Starr Jordan, the great ichthyologist who had served as president of Stanford University, and had been more successful than Walcott in shedding administrative burdens:
You were a wise man to free yourself from administrative duties. I hope to do so in due time and be free to do some of the things that I have been dreaming of for the past 50 years. It has been a pleasure to dream of them in the past, and every hour that I can get in my laboratory for work is a delight.
On September 27, 1926, Walcott took some action to implement this dream. He wrote to Andrew D. White:
I wish very much to have a talk with you
in re
Smithsonian Institution and my withdrawing from all executive and administrative work May 1, 1927—when I will have completed 20 years active service as Secretary. Henry, Baird, and Langley died in office but I do not think it is wise for the Smithsonian Institution or for me to go on. I have writing to do that will take all my energy up to 1949.… What fun it would be to watch the evolution of democracy up to 1950. Just now I am not looking ahead beyond 1930. I was told I might pass on at 26, again at 38 and 55 but being of an obdurate temperament I declined.
Charles Doolittle Walcott died in office on February 9, 1927. His remaining, heavily annotated notes on Burgess fossils were published in 1931.
Walcott’s failure to give his Burgess fossils adequate scrutiny left him free to interpret them along the path of least resistance. Virtually unconstrained by the truly odd anatomy of his specimens, Walcott read the Burgess Shale in the light of his well-established view of life—and the fossils therefore reflected his preconceptions. Since Walcott was such a conservative stalwart—an archtraditionalist not by jerk of the knee but by deep and well-considered conviction—he becomes the finest symbol that I have ever encountered for the embodiment of conventional beliefs.
*
To unravel the mystery of the shoehorn, we need to consider Walcott’s traditionalism at three levels of increasing specificity—the general cast of his political and social beliefs, his attitude toward organisms and their history, and his approach to the particular problems of the Cambrian.
Walcott, an “old American” with rural roots and pure Anglo-Saxon background, became a wealthy man, primarily through judicious investment in power companies. He moved, at least for the last thirty years of his life, in the highest social circles of Washington as an intimate of several presidents and some of America’s greatest industrial magnates, including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. He was a conservative by belief, a Republican in politics, and a devout Presbyterian who almost never missed (or failed to record in his diary) a Sunday morning in church.
The letters already quoted have provided some insight into his traditional social attitudes—his differential treatment of sons and daughter, his ideas on frugality and responsibility. The archives reveal many other facets of this basic personality; I present a small sample just to provide a “feel” for the attitudes of a powerful conservative thinker during the last great age of confidence in American secular might and moral superiority.
In 1923, Walcott wrote to John D. Rockefeller about religion:
I was brought up at Utica, New York, by my mother and sister, who were consistent Christian women, and I have always adhered to the Presbyterian Church, as I believe in the essentials of the Christian religion and in carrying them out in cooperation with people who believe in the efficacy of the Church as an agency for the preservation and upbuilding of the human race.
I cite Walcott’s views on alcohol (to W. P. Eno on October 6, 1923), not because I regard them as quaint or antediluvian (in fact, I agree with Walcott’s individual stand, while doubting the political consequences that he envisions in the second paragraph), but because I regard the tone of this passage as so evocative of Walcott’s personality and general attitudes:
When I came to Washington 40 years ago, I used to meet with a group of young men in the afternoon to talk over matters of mutual interest, and we usually had beer and, those who wished, brandy or cocktails. I cared little for any of the drinks and concluded that I was just as well off without them. As time passed on, the homeopathic doses of alcohol gradually showed their effect upon the men by a certain deterioration of character, willpower and effectiveness, and years before they should have done so they passed out [he means died, not collapsed in inebriation] mainly as the result of difficulties with the liver, kidneys and stomach. Only one of them is living today and he gave up “nipping” twenty years ago or more.
I believe that if all alcoholic drinks could be absolutely dispensed with, the betterment and welfare of the human race would be so improved in a generation or two that a large percentage of the suffering, immorality and decadence of individuals and peoples would disappear.
In politics, Walcott seesawed between the conservative poles of jingoism and libertarian respect for untrammeled individual opportunity. In the latter mode, for example, he rejected the labeling of entire races or social classes as biologically inferior, and argued for equal access to education, so that socially widespread genius might always surface. He wrote to Mrs. Russell Sage on June 30, 1913:
I am particularly interested in your educational work as I believe that it is through education that the great masses of the people are to be brought up to a standard that will enable them to live healthful, clean lives.
It seems that talent or genius appears about as frequently in one social class as another, in working class children as in the children of the well-to-do. The fact that through the centuries most of the great men have sprung from the comfortable classes simply proves the might of opportunity.
Walcott’s jingoistic side emerged particularly in his anger toward Germany over World War I, where he lost a son in aerial combat. In a letter of December 11, 1918, he declined an invitation from the president of Princeton University to a memorial service for students who had died in battle (Walcott frequently used the common epithet of his generation in referring to Germans as Huns):
I have avoided all memorial meetings and services as the effect upon me is detrimental to my mental and moral poise owing to the depth of feelings aroused against the “Tribe of the Huns” and their allies. This feeling began with the invasion of Belgium, was emphasized by the sinking of the
Lusitania
and the many crimes committed during the war, and now it is not lessened by the many events that have taken place since the signing of the armistice.
All the worst of Walcott’s venom poured forth, as the archives reveal, in his confidential spearheading of an extraordinary campaign against the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas in 1920. Boas, as German by birth, Jewish by origin, left-leaning in politics, and pro-German in sympathy, inspired wrath from each and every corner of Walcott’s prejudices. In the December 12, 1919, issue of the
Nation
, Boas had published a short letter, entitled “Scientists as Spies,” charging that several anthropologists had gathered intelligence data for America during the war while claiming the immunity of science to gain access to areas and information that might otherwise have been declared off limits. He argued that although surreptitious gathering of intelligence is acceptable for men of politics, business, or the military because these professions practice duplicity as a norm, such chicanery can only be viewed as heinous and destructive of scientific principles. Boas’s letter would raise few emotions today, and would be read by most people as a somewhat naive evocation of scientific ideals.
But reactions were different in the intensely jingoistic climate of postwar America. To Walcott, Boas’s letter was the last straw from a long-standing, disloyal, foreign nuisance. Boas, he claimed, had directly accused President Wilson of lying, for Wilson had stated that “only autocracies maintain spies; these are not needed in democracies.” Walcott also interpreted Boas’s letter as impugning the integrity of American science
in toto
because a handful of practitioners might have acted as “double agents,” both for knowledge and intelligence.
Walcott used this exaggerated reading as the basis for a vigorous campaign to censure Boas, and perhaps to drive him out of American science altogether. Walcott immediately and peremptorily canceled Boas’s honorary position at the Smithsonian. He then wrote to all his important and well-placed conservative colleagues, seeking advice on how Boas might be punished. For example, to Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University (where Boas taught), Walcott wrote on January 3, 1920:
The position that Dr. Boas had in connection with the Smithsonian Institution was abolished, as it was specially created for him by Secretary Langley in 1901.
The article published by Dr. Boas in the Nation of 12/20 was of such a character that I did not consider a man holding such sentiments a proper person to have an official connection with the Smithsonian. I prefer to have 100 per cent Americans, and have no use personally or officially for the addle-minded Bolshevik type, whether it be Russian or German, Hebrew or Gentile. I realize that the fighting is over with Germany, but it is only begun with the elements that would spread distrust, internal conflict, and ultimate ruin to all that Americans have stood for.