The Wizard and the Prophet2 Read online

  Gradually he recovered enough to return to school, though he was “still flopping about rather badly.” Hauling himself on a cane, he continued hiking in the hills. When he climbed Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondacks, he didn’t care that he had been forced to crawl up the steep trail. Favoring his frail left leg would over the years twist his spine. His lungs were so weak he sometimes had trouble breathing. He never liked being told he was courageous.

  The first member of his family to finish high school, Vogt was also the first to attend college: St. Stephen’s College, eighty miles north of New York City. (In 1934 the school changed its name to Bard College, after its founder, John Bard.) A Brooklyn minister who admired his Boy Scout leadership found him a scholarship. Avoiding courses in mathematics and science, Vogt majored in French literature and focused on the theater and writing. He had been president of his high school literary club; now he co-edited the St. Stephen’s literary magazine, contributing poems and stories. He won the college poetry prize.

  Because poetry would not pay the rent, he went to work after graduation as an insurance investigator, with a sideline in freelance drama criticism. The insurance job was short-lived; his boss fired him because of his disability. “The next thing I knew,” Vogt wrote, “I was editing the publication of the New York Drama League, and a few months later was its Executive Secretary.” His title was impressive; his salary was not. On the make but not getting anywhere, trading on flashing blue eyes, an engaging baritone, and a sympathy-inducing limp, Vogt talked his way into multiple jobs on the fringes of publishing and theater. By 1928 he was the editor of a new monthly targeted at boys. Before it could appear, the magazine morphed into The Funnies, a comic-strip-filled tabloid that was an early precursor of today’s comic books. Vogt lost the job. By then he was married.

  Vogt (circled) was president of the Brooklyn Manual High School literary magazine, the Scribe. Credit 6

  Juana Mary Allraum was born in southern California on April 27, 1903. Six months later, the baby’s parents tied the knot. Soon afterward her father decamped, leaving no forwarding address. Although her mother had little money, Juana was able to attend the Southern Branch of the Los Angeles State Normal School, precursor to today’s University of California at Los Angeles. Her interest in drama grew after she transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. Petite and vivacious, clever and adaptable, she won the lead in the Berkeley Parthenaia within weeks of her arrival. The biggest social event of the year, the Parthenaia was an outdoor pageant set in ancient Greece. Several hundred female students gamboled about a college garden dressed as nymphs, dryads, and other mythological entities. Juana played Marpessa, a symbol of maidenhood wooed by a randy sun god. In her slightly risqué costume, she was twice featured on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. After graduation, she moved to New York City, her mother in tow, intending to become an actress. One can picture how the aspiring actress and the freelance drama critic might have met. They wed on July 7, 1928, and moved into a tiny bungalow on the Hudson River, about twenty miles north of the Broadway theaters that fascinated them both.

  Juana Allraum, 1922 Credit 7

  “The Mosquito Racket”

  Ornithology is an outlier in the history of science. At a time when physics and chemistry were transforming themselves from amateur endeavors into professions that were inaccessible to the lay public, bird scientists were crowd-sourcers. Ornithologists could not keep track of millions of birds by themselves, so they sought to harness the energy of amateur birders. It was a good match. In those days, Vogt recalled, “the really active bird-watcher was still considered something of an odd-ball.” The American Ornithologists’ Union allowed hobbyists to become full members and asked them to contribute field observations. In return, the experts provided encouragement and acceptance—a balm, perhaps, to wounded egos.

  Vogt was one of these amateurs. With his limited mobility, Vogt’s passion for long hikes had shifted at St. Stephen’s into a less arduous devotion to birdwatching. After graduation his passion grew into something close to obsession—he was always out on the Hudson or in the parks, binoculars clapped to his face. It was as if his childhood love of landscape were concentrated in the bodies of the birds. Zeal gained Vogt entrée at the American Museum of Natural History, where he befriended researchers like Frank Chapman, the museum’s curator of birds; Ludlow Griscom, arguably the progenitor of organized birdwatching in the United States; Ernst Mayr, an ornithologist who became a luminary in evolutionary biology; and, most important to Vogt, Robert Cushman Murphy, the seabird expert who had visited the guano islands. Going from college birding to ornithological fieldwork with Mayr and Murphy was like going from a small-town orchestra to playing with the Vienna Philharmonic. Vogt was thrilled to be taken into the inner sanctum of Science—who wouldn’t be? In return, the researchers acquired an assistant who had no scientific training but was boundlessly energetic and willing to work for no pay. The offers flowed in. Secretary of the Linnaean Society (an amateur natural-history group); editor for the New York Academy of Sciences; proofreader for the Audubon Society—Vogt was always ready to take on new duties.

  One of Vogt’s closest friends was another amateur, an art student named Roger Tory Peterson. The child of poor immigrants, Peterson had been fascinated by birds since boyhood, not least because the hours spent in their company were a refuge from the drunken, violent rants of his father. At seventeen, Peterson dropped out of high school and moved to New York City. He met Vogt at a birdwatching club in the Bronx. On one of their walks Peterson amazed Vogt by identifying pine siskins from barely audible snippets of their song. How do you do that? Vogt asked. It turned out that Peterson had figured out a set of rules to distinguish one bird from another quickly and easily. Vogt told Peterson he should write and illustrate a book about his techniques, grandly promising that he could ensure its publication.

  Peterson produced hundreds of simple drawings depicting the features he looked for in birds. A novice writer, he relied on Vogt as his muse, cheerleader, and editor. When the guide was finished, Vogt charged out to sell it.

  I again demonstrated the incompetence in salesmanship that has been a characteristic all my life. I took the manuscript and drawings to virtually every well-known publisher in New York. They were all sure it would not sell.

  Eventually the book was picked up by Houghton Mifflin in Boston for a small advance and a low royalty rate (the numerous pictures increased production costs). Dedicated to Vogt, Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds (1934) introduced a generation of children to the environment and was long the most popular book Houghton Mifflin ever published.

  As Vogt rose in the bird world, his wife floundered in the theater world. Juana Vogt had climbed the traditional ladder from regional stages to tiny off-Broadway productions to the Great White Way. Her first Broadway show, a George S. Kaufman–Alexander Woollcott vehicle called The Channel Road, opened on October 17, 1929. Twelve days after her debut the stock market crashed, lighting the fuse of the Great Depression. The U.S. job market collapsed with frightening speed, as did the job markets elsewhere in the developed world. With families no longer able to buy goods and services, businesses went bust across the nation. The theater industry was hit as badly as everything else. Juana’s career hopes turned to ash.

  Vogt’s drama-criticism income fell for the same reason. But he was rescued by his birdwatching friends, who had him appointed as director of the Jones Beach State Bird Sanctuary, an extension of a newly established park on the South Shore of Long Island. Created by Robert Moses, the “master builder” of twentieth-century New York City, the park was part of an ambitious plan to transform Long Island into a playground for the city’s middle-class families. The four-hundred-acre sanctuary was intended to introduce urbanites to the wonders of Nature.

  Living with Juana in a former hunting shack on the grounds, Vogt took Mayr’s advice—even amateurs, the scientist said, should “have a problem”—and used his new job fo
r research. He counted eggs and hatchlings. He recorded mating rituals (he won a prize for a study of courting behavior in the eastern willet). He made a census of the 270 bird species or subspecies that lived at the sanctuary. Often he was visited by Robert Cushman Murphy. A fourth-generation Long Islander, Murphy had a passion for understanding and conserving the creatures of his childhood. In the winter of 1932 he joined Vogt to observe an amazing, heartbreaking sight: hundreds of dovekies—eight-inch, black-and-white seabirds, round and puffy as plush toys, usually found only in the Arctic—being driven in from the sea by winter gales. Exhausted birds dropped out of the sky onto homes and yards all over Long Island—a phenomenon Murphy, for all his expertise, had never seen. Long Island was not the only venue: the birds rained down on the streets of New York City and washed ashore as far south as Florida. The two men collected hundreds of amateur reports about dovekie deaths for an article in The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union. Published in July 1933, it was Vogt’s first appearance in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

  As a rule, dovekies live in huge colonies atop protective cliffs on Arctic islands. Why, Vogt and Murphy wondered, were these creatures showing up thousands of miles from their icy homelands? Could the dovekies have overwhelmed their native habitats, forcing them into a blind search for new breeding grounds? Was the dovekie onslaught, the two men asked, “a peculiar herd psychosis,” a “rush emigration” driven by overpopulation?

  The theory was gloomy and overwrought. But Vogt himself was gloomy and overwrought. The primary focus of the Jones Beach sanctuary was mainly the scope of duck species native to Long Island, especially the black duck, prized by local hunters. Many duck species were more common than ever at Jones Beach. But the increase, Vogt suspected, was less because conditions at the sanctuary were improving under his stewardship than because conditions on the rest of their range were deteriorating. The crowd of birds at his sanctuary was like the crowd of patients at a hospital during an epidemic: nothing to celebrate. Overall, Vogt told The New York Times, black duck numbers were “dangerously low.”

  To Vogt, the cause of the decline was obvious. Long Island was one of the first places in North America to undergo extensive suburbanization. The landscapes of Vogt’s childhood—landscapes that had been, he thought, little changed for centuries—were being flattened by real-estate developers. The sweeping meadows outside his door in Garden City had been sliced into lots for commuter homes. The cathedral gardens had become a golf course. Highways were grinding across the land. The ducks were collateral damage. And all of this, Vogt realized, was fostered by his own boss, whom he came to call “the bulldozer-subdivider, Robert Moses.”

  Worse still, Vogt had lost his job, despite his reputation for competence. Moses had leased the sanctuary land for a dollar a year from the adjacent township of Oyster Bay. To raise funds to maintain Jones Beach, he put a toll on the roads leading to it. Suddenly people in Oyster Bay had to pay to visit a beach that had previously been free. In a fit of pique, the Oyster Bay town board revoked the sanctuary lease on May 20, 1935, shutting it down. Vogt’s job went with it. Again he was rescued by a birdwatching contact.

  In 1934 John H. Baker, an investment banker and amateur ornithologist, became director of the National Association of Audubon Societies, the umbrella organization for the many state and local birdwatching groups using the Audubon name. A brusque, forceful organizer and fund-raiser, he bought the journal Bird-Lore, made it the official Audubon publication, and asked Vogt to become editor. Unemployed at the height of the Depression, Vogt happily accepted, returning to Manhattan. Juana decided to reinvent herself and taught speech at Queens College while studying for a master’s degree at Columbia Teachers College.

  Vogt quickly shook up Bird-Lore, adding new artists and writers like his friends Peterson and Murphy, as well as Aldo Leopold, founder of the U.S. wilderness movement. Vogt was a charismatic figure at the office: five foot ten and 175 pounds, theatrically exuberant, wielding his cane like an actor’s prop. Constantly busy, he gave speeches to local Audubon groups, published a new version of John James Audubon’s Birds of America (a commercial hit), and helped to organize the society’s annual breeding-bird census, a major effort in which thousands of amateur birdwatchers write down their observations of nests and fledglings along randomly selected roadside routes throughout North America. He set up the Committee on Bird Protection, an early effort to protect the bald eagle, drawing in Leopold. As he hopscotched from place to place, Vogt learned that bird populations were falling not only on Long Island, but all along the East Coast. The decline had many causes, but he came to believe that one predominated: mosquito control.

  Mosquito control was another way of saying malaria control. Malaria today is confined to poor, hot places, but in the 1930s it afflicted huge numbers of people on every continent but Antarctica—5 million in North America alone. Malaria is caused by a single-celled parasite that is spread by mosquitos. Because no treatment existed for the parasite, researchers believed that it could best be fought by eliminating the wetlands that were the breeding grounds for its mosquito hosts. During the First World War, according to the historian Gordon Patterson, workers in eastern states dug ditches to drain ponds and marshes, then sprayed heavy oil or insecticide into the water to poison remaining mosquito larvae. In the Depression, Patterson writes in The Mosquito Crusades (2009), Washington took over the campaign; ditch-digging was instant work for the jobless. Thousands of newly hired mosquito-fighters cut and poisoned tens of thousands of miles of drainage ditches. So many ditches were dug so fast that in some places local governments lost track of them and begged Washington to conduct surveys to identify them.

  Long Island was a focus of this haphazard crusade. Nassau County, where Vogt was born, had slashed more than a thousand miles of ditches through its meadows and marshes since mosquito control began. Suffolk County—the poorer, more rural eastern portion of the island—hadn’t begun ditch-digging until 1934, when Washington opened the cash spigot. But its mosquito-fighters made up for lost time. Draining and poisoning killed or drove away so many birds that the county tried to bring them back with a new program of excavating artificial ponds in the ditch-crossed marshes.

  Vogt was appalled. The meadows of his childhood were already being buried beneath parkways and suburban development. Now the mosquito brigades were slicing up the remains. He came to view his Audubon job as a chance to do something about it. In 1937, he wrote “Thirst on the Land,” a pamphlet intended to rally Audubon Society members against mosquito control. Its tone was lacerating: mosquito-control programs, “perilously close to destructive government-sponsored rackets,” were spreading “like some form of terrestrial erysipelas” (an infection that causes skin sores). Beneath the bluster, though, “Thirst on the Land” was prescient: Vogt anticipated the arguments that Rachel Carson—who later became a friend—made famous in Silent Spring.

  Strikingly, “Thirst on the Land” reintroduced an idea that mostly had lain dormant since its introduction in the 1860s by the innovative geographer George Perkins Marsh: landscapes and the species that live on them perform useful functions—purifying water, decomposing wastes, nourishing crops, housing wildlife, regulating air temperature—which are both free to the beneficiaries and costly to replace. (Today these functions are called “ecosystem services.”) If the economic benefits of mosquito control were weighed against the ecological costs, as Vogt believed they should be, mosquito control failed. Drained marshes were no longer able to store and filter stormwater; to replace them, towns would have to build protective dikes, impoundment reservoirs, and water-treatment facilities. If the costs of the dikes, reservoirs, and water plants were taken into account, Vogt argued, the untouched marsh often was worth more than the newly drained land. The government should leave marshes alone rather than destroy them to kill mosquitos.

  Stung by the attacks, federal mosquito-control officials in March 1938 faced off against Vogt and a new ally, U.S. Bio
logical Survey researcher Clarence Cottam, at the Third North American Wildlife Conference, a gathering of field biologists and land managers. Speaking before an audience full of mosquito-control officials, Cottam lambasted their projects as “ill-advised and woefully misdirected.” Vogt was harsher still: “Since every drainage ditch robs the land of its life blood, often wastes large sums of your money and mine, and wipes out wildlife, it seems to me there is considerable justification for contending that something is damnably wrong with mosquito control” (italics in transcript). The mosquito officials spluttered protests, but nobody in the room supported them.

  Despite winning (in his view) the debate, Vogt wasn’t satisfied: ditching and spraying went on just as before. What was needed, he told friends like Leopold, was to mobilize Audubon members into a mass anti-drainage movement. Advised by scientists, thousands of militant birders could act as an environmental warning system: a union of scientifically informed amateurs and politically informed scientists that would rise in defense of Nature. Vogt was groping toward the idea of changing Audubon from a circle for upper-middle-class hobbyists into what would now be called a large-scale, broad-based environmental organization—a pioneering step.*1