The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [414]
Hornaday was taken in by this racist hullabaloo. After seeing Ota Benga in Saint Louis he negotiated to have the pygmy—who had meanwhile been brought back to Africa—delivered to the Bronx Zoo for public display. At first Benga was startled by the diverse animals at the zoo. Being from the Congo had hardly prepared Benga for, say, the huge pythons that hung out of crooked tree limbs and were fed live rats. New Yorkers cheered the new acquisition, which enhanced their civic pride. In the tradition of the Bronx Zoo’s educational outreach, Hornaday dutifully wrote an article on Ota Benga for the October 1906 edition of the Zoological Society Bulletin; it was called “African Pygmy” and was positioned right before one called “The Collection of Lizards.”52
Reading that issue of the Bulletin is a frightening journey into the perils of Darwinism as applied to human beings. For all of his sophistication in husbandry Hornaday had a deplorable attraction to eugenics. So did Madison Grant, who had approved the Bronx Zoo’s abominable display. Hornaday—who was doubtlessly a better man than this ugly episode suggests—called Benga part of the “smallest racial division of the human genus and probably the lowest in cultural development.”53 Kept in a cage next to an orangutan named Dohong, who pedaled around on a tricycle, Benga was provided with straw and rope to weave. No monkey could do that! The pygmy had evolved! “He has much manual skill,” the article in the Bulletin noted, “and is quite expert in the making of hammocks and nets.” Sometimes Benga was encouraged to sleep with the chimpanzees for mutually beneficial socializing. To attract visitors, and hoping to build on the success of Teddy B and Teddy G, Hornaday advertised that something “New Under the Sun” in zookeeping had occurred at the Monkey House. It was as if the Bronx Zoo were trying to explain Mendel’s theories of heredity with regard to the trait of smallness versus largeness—using Benga as exhibit A. And the tourists did come in droves.
On September 8, opening day, a huge crowd gathered to see Hornaday’s prize exhibit. Expectations were high. And Benga, his teeth filed into arrowheads to add the allure of menace, didn’t disappoint the spectators. But the New York Times seemed appalled: “Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes.” To be fair to Hornaday, Benga had already become a Darwinian specimen at Saint Louis, where headlines such as “Pygmies Demand a Monkey Diet” and “Pygmy Dance Starts Panic in Fair Plaza” appeared. However, in New York the Times article of early September 1906 helped raise a public accusation of racism at the Bronx Zoo. The whole spectacle, which included white children laughing and taunting Benga in his cage, turned the “serious minded grave.” The Times questioned the morality of putting an African on public display in such a pseudoscientific way.
Likewise, African-American ministers in New York protested against putting a human being in a cage with a monkey. The Reverend Dr. R. S. MacArthur of Cavalry Baptist Church announced a coordinated “agitation” aimed at freeing Ota Benga. Reports of the whole affair were getting more and more sordid. “It is too bad,” MacArthur said, “that there is not some society like [the New York Society] for the Prevention of the Cruelty to Children.” MacArthur went so far as to say that Benga was a slave. “We send our missionaries to Africa to Christianize the people,” he remarked “and then we bring one here to brutalize him.” He also went directly after Hornaday, saying that “the person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as does the African.”54
In accordance with the Bronx Zoo’s educational mission, an informational plaque was placed outside Ota Benga’s cage. It read:
Ota Benga was degraded by being put in a cage as a supposedly Darwinian exhibit at the Bronx Zoo. Benga was often made to pose with monkeys and had his teeth sharpened