Smithsonian Institution Secretary, Charles Doolittle Walcott

Ellis Yochelson

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780873386807
• eBook ISBN:
  9781612772646
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850-1927) is a highly respected figure in the history of geology and paleontology. Perhaps his most notable contribution to his field was his discovery of the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale, one of the most important fossil discoveries ever made. In addition to his distinguished field work, Walcott's career included years of service as an administrative leader in the scientific community: as director of the U.S. Geological Survey, as secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, as organizer of the National Space and Aeronautics Administration, as a founding member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Smithsonian Institution Secretary continues the story Ellis L. Yochelson began in Charles Doolittle Walcott, Paleontologist (1998). Using Walcott's letters and journals and the recollections of friends and colleagues, Yochelson discusses Walcott's life and career as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

Accompanied by illustrations and photographs from private collection

1

The Kindly Years (1907–1910): Great Family, Grand Fossils, Good Fortune

It was the best of times…

—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

DRAMATIC CHANGES were coming to the Smithsonian. Secretary Abbot, who succeeded Walcott, would write, “When Dr. Walcott became Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution we all saw that a man of very different temperament from Secretary Langley was with us. Where Langley was shrinking from publicity, Walcott enjoyed it. He was an athletic, breezy type of man, who would go for a brisk early morning walk in Rock Creek Park and turn up for breakfast with some influential Representative or Senator, or perhaps the President. Without apparent guile, and with a cheerful humorous talk, he would put in just the right words to lead his host in the way of promoting some good thing he had at heart” (Abbot 1958, 97).

January 31, 1907, began the Walcott era at the SI, which was to last for two decades. His formal letter of acceptance was the first step in the physical and psychological transition from one organization to another. Walcott had considered resigning from the board of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, but he convinced himself he could carry on CIW responsibilities without harm to the Smithsonian. One extra benefit of the change was that his salary was increased from $6,000 to $7,500 by the Board of Regents; he was receiving more money for less work. In December 1910, the salary was raised to ten thousand, but by then Walcott was as heavily engaged as he has been on the USGS.

As to “regents,” the boards of most organizations have “trustees.” However, the University of the State of New York is governed by regents, and, seemingly, this term dates back to the early Dutch influence in that state. During 1846, in the closing days of the congressional debate on establishing the SI, a congressman from New York used “regent,” and the term stayed. (In framing a definition forthe word, the Oxford English Dictionary mentions its use in connection with the Smithsonian “Institute,” not Institution; shame on it.) Earlier, in 1904, Walcott had been appointed an honorary curator and head of a new Department of Mineral Technology; for a few years he also retained that title, along with that of secretary.

In his first meeting with the Board of Regents, Walcott directed attention to the tradition of personal research by the three earlier secretaries. “The Secretary added that his own research work had been in the line of geology and paleozoology, and that he desired to continue it as opportunity and time permitted” (“Proceedings” 1908, xxv). A year later he remarked, “I wish to take the opportunity of saying here that my going to the charge of the Smithsonian Institution by no means indicates any break in interest in research work in geology and paleontology. Indeed, I am looking forward to devoting a greater share of time to research work than I have in the past, for it has been a well established custom that the Secretaries of the Smithsonian Institution shall carry on researches in the particular subject to which they are devoted, and the organization, large as it is, is of such a nature as to render this reasonably possible.”¹

At the March regents’ meeting, only six members were present. The main new business was negotiating with the new museum building’s architects, who wanted more money. Walcott, ever the businessman, had noted that only the Superintendent of Construction could disburse funds and that if he were incapacitated, all work would stop; before the meeting, Walcott had arranged for the Sundry Civil Bill to include a provision giving the regents the power to act, and he requested their approval after the fact. This is a trivial point, but Walcott saw details that escaped others and worked behind the scenes to achieve his ends; it is a cameo of his style.

There was good news after the regents’ meeting. William Evans made a significant donation of painting to the new National Gallery of Art. As the gallery was a paper organization, with no space of its own, these pictures hung for a time in the private Corcoran Gallery of Art. Walcott also arranged for summaries of research and abstracts of some articles in the Annual Report to be distributed to the press.

Again, this was an action that no one else had thought of; a bit of history is behind it. The Hoee Iron Building, which housed the USGS, was close to what was then “newspaper row,” and Walcott cultivated the press. He probably taught F. H. Newell, who was in charge of water investigations, to issue press releases on activities in guaging the flow of rivers. One Washington legend is of a reporter on Pennsylvania Avenue fleshing out a feature story by offering to sell silver dollars for a penny to passing tourists, all of whom suspected a trick and refused. When the USGS director came along, he immediately made a purchase and humorously asked for five more to augment the appropriation. Walcott knew how to stroke reporters just as well as the politicians.

Social life at home and in the city continued. Cousin Fred Walcott came from New York to dine and brought along his fiancée; “She is a sensible, homelike appearing woman & apparently a good mate for Fred” (March 10, 1907). March 13 brought Walcott a “great dinner,” mounted for him by the USGS. L. L. Nunn of Provo, Utah, came to town, and his business necessitated a quick trip to New York; there will be more of Nunn, no pun intended. Before that trip, however, Walcott had to attend the funeral of W. J. Rhees. Rhees had joined the Smithsonian in 1852 and had been chief clerk almost forever. What we have of the early days of the institution was preserved due to his efforts, and he deserves to be remembered.

The New York trip took the edge off the emotion of leaving the Geological Survey. Walcott had E. H. Harriman, the railway tycoon, and Nunn meet; whatever the issue, Walcott loved putting people and pieces together. His commercial business out of the way, Walcott attended to Carnegie Institution of Washington business at the Ex Comm meeting. Board president John Shaw Billings was the most faithful attender of these meetings, but Walcott ran a close second.

Other Andrew Carnegie interests then caused him to travel on to Pittsburgh. Walcott represented the SI at the opening of new laboratories and buildings at Carnegie Tech. He took along Joseph A. Holmes, head of the new Technologic Branch of the USGS (and no relationship to the Smithsonian anthropologist-artist William Henry Holmes). The two men looked at the heating plant, the picture gallery, and the new laboratories. This order reflected, in a way, Walcott’s eclectic interests.

The secretary was in Washington in time to attend the National Academy of Sciences annual meeting; he was elected vice president, a point not worthy of notice in his pocket diary, or else he was so busy he forgot to jot it down. Near the end of the month, Walcott contributed to a memorial meeting for the late minister of the Church of the Covenant. He took an unusual tack in his remarks, but one that provides insight into how Walcott viewed the world: “From the inception of religious thought men have to a greater or less degree magnified the temporalities of their religion. The spiritualities have often followed rather than dominated. With Dr. Hamlin there was such a strong sense of the reality and power of his religious belief, and he so clearly manifested it, that few fully realized the business sagacity and common sense with which he treated all matters pertaining to the temporal affairs of the church and to the educational and charitable organizations with which he was connected” (Walcott 1907, 32).

On May 1, the USGS was officially behind him. On that day Walcott was back in New York, on an art initiative. The Frederick Church painting Aurora Borealis was being considered as a donation to the new National Gallery of Art. Walcott inspected it and called in William Henry Holmes for his opinion. They agreed on its merits, and eventually this magnificent canvas came to Washington. Walcott got back to Washington in time to put in a few Saturday afternoon hours at the office.

On what was essentially his first full day in the Castle, Walcott wrote: “Spent the day at the Smithsonian engaged with administrative matters & the monograph on the Cambrian brachiopoda. Much work remains to be done on the latter” (May 6, 1907). He was tired, but the brachiopod investigations had to go on to completion. Fortunately, young Lancaster Burling agreed to transfer from the USGS to the Smithsonian; Walcott would not have to train a new research assistant. Arthur Brown, officially a messenger but actually far more than that, also came from the USGS. “A son of a slave, he had been a waiter on a dining car, worked at the White House under Grover Cleveland, and had known presidents and many other distinguished people. His fund of stories was unlimited, and his judgement of human nature exceedingly keen.”²

Interior arrangements within the Castle had been modified in the past (Hafertepe 1984) and have since been changed again; at this late date it is uncertain where anything or anyone was placed, though it seems reasonable that Arthur Brown had only a chair outside Walcott’s inner office. It is hard to tell where Burling sat, though probably he was on the third floor. One source suggests that before 1910, Walcott also occasionally used the services of A. Dickout, a USGS preparator in the brick museum building, to help extract fossils from the matrix.

The Ex Comm of the Carnegie met, but with Robert Woodward as president, meetings were increasingly routine. There was another trip to New York, to attend a reception for a senior Japanese officer. Walcott took the time to see Dr. Billings and George Kunz, the gemologist at Tiffany Jewelers, and to begin to cultivate Henry Frick. Walcott returned just in time to say goodbye to Charlie, his firstborn. Charlie had gone to Provo, Utah, the previous June, for work and school at Nunn’s establishment and had come home for a visit.

An old Albany friend came to town; Walcott “called for Prof. J. M. Clarke of Albany, N.Y. & took him over to see my work at Smithsonian on Cambrian fossils. Next took up plans for National Museum work for 1907–8 & in afternoon drove out to zoo to look over plans for its administration. Spent the evening with ex-Senator Cockrell” (May 22, 1907). Clarke’s visit meant a great deal, for there were few people who could appreciate the grinding work that went into the production of a monograph. As one who had also worked with James Hall on volumes of the Palaeontology of New York, Clarke knew what labor was involved.

By the next day, remaining plans for the Smithsonian and its various bureaus had been examined. Sunday School for the children and church continued as in past years, but occasionally Walcott would go to his office on a Sunday afternoon. The brachiopod work crept forward. Late in May, he was off to New York again to see the Frick art collection and to talk to railroad magnate Harriman. Being a trustee of George Washington University and presiding at the University Club filled in a few of the “spare” evenings. “About one half of my time is taken with administration & the remainder with Cambrian brachiopod studies—The latter will not be completed before I leave for the west” (June 10, 1907). This is the first indication in his diary of coming fieldwork, though there must have been a great deal of planning and letter writing in advance.

Walcott dropped by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to say goodbye to Theodore Roosevelt, who, like everyone else of importance, left Washington in the summer. He made a quick trip to see Mr. Harriman; it was a combination of SI and Southern Pacific business matters, not quite so far-fetched as it sounds when one is trying to obtain donations. Back in Washington, Walcott presided when the University Club finally decided to build. The result, in 1911, was a six-story building at 900 15th Street NW. Later the club built on 16th Street next to the Russian embassy.

When summer officially began, the Washington heat wave was already in full swing. Administration slackened, but odds and ends of monograph fifty-one kept coming up. Another quick trip was needed to New York to talk over electric power in Utah with Nunn and Harriman. After all, no law said that just because one was a scientist and an administrator, one could not also be a businessman. Walcott went back to Washington and sent the new puppy “Scald” north to Aunt Helen in Oneida, New York. Finally, on June 30, he put on his scientist’s hat; wife Helena and children Helen and Stuart accompanied their father west.

The party took the train to Buffalo and transferred for Toronto, Canada. The Canadian Pacific route was to Sudbury, Port Arthur, and then through the Canadian plains to Winnipeg. Independence Day was celebrated en route by hanging American flags from the coach window and the children setting off firecrackers. The next day they were in Calgary, and from there it was up into the mountains, by way of the Bow River Valley, a route to be traveled many times in the future. The train went through Banff and Laggan, the station for Lake Louise. They crossed the Continental Divide at Kicking Horse Pass and descended through the spiral tunnels completed that year. (These tunnels are a marvel of engineering, and they eased the railway slope on the west side from perilous to merely hair raising.) At Field, the first station in British Columbia, they were met by Mr. and Mrs. Lancaster Burling.

Walcott had a solid geologic reason for starting at this point. “The presence of the genus Olenellus in the Rocky Mountain regions of British Columbia has long been well known. In 1886 I identified for Dr. Geo. M. Dawson of the Canadian Geological Survey, among the fragments of fossils found at Kicking Hose Pass, a species of Olenellus that appeared to be Olenellus howelli Meek” (Walcott 1910, 317). From other collectors Walcott obtained more specimens from that area and correlated the faunas across a thousand miles to those he had collected from the Highland Range of Nevada (Walcott 1888). The correlations of the two sections were essentially correct, except that when he wrote the paper he had been still under the mistaken impression that Olenellus was an indicator of Middle Cambrian, not Early Cambrian. The 1907 trip allowed him to correct that error, obtain more material, and put this trilobite on record as a new species.

Camp gear was overhauled, and the party moved up the northwest slope of Mount Stephen to “rough ground about 1350’ above the valley. Put up tents & made snug for the night. This is a beautiful spot in the heart of the mountains” (July 6, 1907). No one who has ever seen the Canadian Rockies will quarrel with Walcott’s aesthetic opinion. By the next day, early Sunday morning, Walcott had tried out the new camera and had a promising lead for his collecting. He dashed off a hasty letter to Assistant Secretary Rathbun in Washington: “A clear beautiful morning. Frosty last night. Snow banks above & below us—All well. Will you not have Mr. Smilie [the Smithsonian photographer] develope [sic] the accompanying film at once. Report result to you & then will you telegraph to Field B.C. whether the result is good, bad or indifferent. Found a slab of rock last eve with 6 entire trilobites averaging 3 in long. Will stir more up tomorrow.”³

The last portion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, prepared in 1886 when the route was completed. The territory Walcott traveled repeatedly during his fieldwork lies to the far right. The railway climbs sharply at Banff and continues up past Castle Mountain, Silver City, Eldona, and Laagen to the highest point, Stephen, at the provincial boundary. Hector is just beyond the crest of the dramatic grade down to Field. Westward along the line from the town of Field are Otter Trail, Leanchoil, Palliser, and Golden at the east floor of the Rocky Mountain trench. Glacier House, where Walcott measured glacial retreat with Mary, lies just west of Rogers Pass, at the summit of the Selkirk Mountains. Some of the marked locations are recognizable in the generic and specific names bestowed by Walcott on Burgess Shale fossils. Reproduced by permission of the Canadian Pacific Archives.

As soon as the letter was dispatched, serious fieldwork began. Walcott took young Stuart up the west slope of the mountain to locate the fossiliferous beds, about 1,500 feet above the camp. There ensued several days of collecting Middle Cambrian fossils, but Walcott decided that the section was too broken by faults to measure. Burling and Walcott found a slightly younger fossil horizon, and while Burling collected there, Walcott and family concentrated on the main bed. Helena located a fossiliferous loose block and proceeded to do her own collecting, for two days; everyone participated in finding fossils. After ten days in camp, they took the packed fossils to the train and treated themselves to a few nights at the hotel. It was a wonderfully interesting section for him, but Walcott felt understandably “sore and crooked.” He had been doing some long climbs and bringing down substantial loads of rock. He and Burling went east on the Canadian Pacific track by freight train and spent the day in a quick exa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue
• 1. The Kindly Years (1907–1910): Great Family, Grand Fossils, Good Fortune
• 2. The Dreadful Years (1911-1913): It Is Always Darkest before It Becomes Pitch Black
• 3. The Healing Years (Last Half of 1913-1915): Not All Ups and Downs Are in the Canadian Rockies
• 4. The Busy Years (End of 1915–mid-1917): Every Silver Lining Has Its Cloud
• 5. The Frantic Years (1917-1919): The Notion of Giving a Job to a Busy Man to Ensure That It Is Done May Be a Good Idea, but It Can Be Carried to Excess
• 6. The “Normalcy” Years (May 1919–May 1921): Time Flies Like an Arrow, but Fruit Flies Like a Banana—One Contribution to the Silly Season
• 7. The Fretful Years (1921–1922):Major Problems, Serious Concerns, Minor Aggravations, Plus Little Upsets
• 8. The Stasis Years (1922-1923): Sometimes a March Is Two Steps Forward and Three Steps Back
• 9. The Up and Down Years (1924-1925): Two Wrongs Do Not Make a Right, but Two Wrights Did Make a Plane
• 10. The Last Years (1925-1927): There Is An Old Saying That All Good Things Must Come to an End
• Epilogues
• Notes
• References
• Index