How Dinosaurs Became Tyrants of the Prehistoric

Lukas Rieppel In the summer of 1902, a small crew of fossil hunters from the American Museum of Natural History left New York in search of dinosaur bones. Acting on a tip from the noted conservationist William Temple Hornaday, they ventured to a remote part of Montana with exposed rocks from the Cretaceous period known as the Hell Creek Formation. Although they were primarily looking for Triceratops bones, it was not long before something else caught their attention. As the young men gradually unearthed their discovery using dynamite and a heavy metal scraper dragged by a horse, it became clear that they had found something special. The specimen was large and imposing, and it was noticeably different from anything previously known to science. And, before long, it would be the most famous dinosaur of all time: Tyrannosaurus rex.1 From the moment that it was unveiled to the public, T. rex was consistently described as an especially ferocious predator. Barnum Brown, who led the 1902 expedition, characterized this “newly discovered monster” as the “absolute war lord of the earth in his day,” telling a newspaper reporter that it was “so formidable a fighting machine that he easily preyed upon herbivorous neighbors twice his own size.”2 Even its name, which translates to “tyrant lizard king,” was chosen by Brown’s boss at the museum, Henry Fairfield Osborn, to highlight the creature’s proclivity for extreme violence.3 At the same time, paleontologists always emphasized the small size of its C The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the V American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Lukas Rieppel , “How Dinosaurs Became Environmental History 25 (2020): 774–787 Tyrants doi: 10.1093/envhis/emaa029 Advance Access Publication Date: 24 September 2020 of the Prehistoric,” Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 How Dinosaurs Became Tyrants of the Prehistoric How Dinosaurs Became Tyrants of the Prehistoric brain. Indeed, the animal’s stupidity and ferocity were thought to go hand in hand. As one scientist speculated, T. rex probably had “just about enough intelligence to look for food when he was hungry.”4 Only a few years later, Barnum Brown stumbled upon another rich trove of dinosaur bones. As luck would have it, this second quarry contained many of the parts that still remained missing from the first T. rex specimen. Buoyed by their good fortune, museum curators hatched the idea of creating a “composite mount” that would combine bits and pieces of both specimens with plaster cast reproductions and other sculptural elements to create an imposing paleontological group display. To try out a number of different ideas, they fashioned a pair of scale models, which were then photographed in a variety of poses. After several weeks of experimentation, they settled on the ambitious design shown in figure 1.5 According to Brown, this scene represented a “psychological moment of tense inertia” that unfolded into a gripping drama of primitive competition. Visitors were explicitly directed to imagine that one of the two Tyrannosaur specimens had recently killed a duckbilled dinosaur, shown as a pile of bones on the ground. But just as “this monster crouches over the carcass,” Brown continued, another T. rex arrives “to grapple the more fortunate hunter and dispute the prey.” In response, the first T. rex “stops eating and accepts the challenge, partly rising to spring on its adversary.”6 In the end, this gruesome scene was never completed. With all of the fossils already on exhibition, there simply was not enough room to accommodate such a large, and costly, display. Instead, curators settled for mounting just one of the two T. rex skeletons in a more static and upright posture with its tail on the ground for added stability. They hoped to expand the museum’s dinosaur hall eventually, at Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 Figure 1. A scale model of two T. rex specimens fighting over their prey. Credit: Image no. 35575, American Museum of Natural History Library. 775 776 Environmental History 25 (October 2020) which point they would add the second T. rex specimen. But, for the time being, the scaled-back version shown in figure 2 would have to suffice. Still, the ferocious predator remained undeniably impressive. When visitors at the museum first got to lay eyes on T. rex, they faced down a massive carnivore that stood fully erect, with its jaws torn wide open to reveal a row of razor-sharp teeth and a pair of diminutive arms held straight out in front, as if grasping for prey. Tyrannosaurus rex was hardly the first dinosaur to be described as a prehistoric monster. Much of the groundwork to construct this familiar trope was put into place during the first half of the nineteenth century, when the British anatomist Richard Owen coined the word “Dinosauria” to designate these “terrible lizards.”7 But the ubiquitous image of extinct reptiles as bloodthirsty predators did not fully take form until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was during this period that a series of spectacular discoveries in the Rocky Mountain West introduced the world to what arguably remain the most iconic dinosaurs of all time, including Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and, of course, T. rex. These fossils made headlines across the globe, setting off a much-publicized dinosaur rush among American scientists like Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 Figure 2. The fossil remains of T. rex mounted for public display in New York. Credit: Image no. 311977, American Museum of Natural History Library. How Dinosaurs Became Tyrants of the Prehistoric Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 Marsh. In turn, the race over who could possess more of these outlandish creatures turned the United States into a hotspot for vertebrate paleontology, and dinosaurs became widely associated with the deep canyons, windswept plains, and desert highlands of the North American West.8 This period also saw dinosaurs from the North American West become a truly mass public sensation. It was during the Long Gilded Age that urban museums began to assemble their fossilized bones into the impressive, freestanding displays that have captivated so many visitors ever since. The largest and most well funded of these museums were philanthropic organizations created by wealthy capitalists such as the department store magnate Marshall Field, who donated $1 million to help pay for the institution that still bears his name in Chicago. Around the same time, Andrew Carnegie also built an impressive cultural multiplex in Pittsburgh, while the New York natural history museum was made possible by a financial bequest from a group of socialites that included J. P. Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt.9 As pet projects of North America’s wealthy elite, philanthropic museums were designed to educate and uplift the public by leveraging nature to inculcate moral lessons of right living and appropriate conduct. For example, habitat dioramas were seen as a good way to teach object lessons on the importance of functional integration in nature as well as in society by emphasizing the role that individual organisms played as parts of a much larger whole.10 In contrast, paleontological groups offered a harsher, more unforgiving ecological vision. In effect, dinosaur displays invited audiences to imagine themselves back in the Age of Reptiles and witness the period’s bloody brutality in gory detail. In this respect, T. rex was just one case among many. Across the board, the story was nearly always the same: Dinosaurs were either shown in isolation, as solitary brutes from the depths of time. Or, if two or more extinct reptiles interacted with one another, their behavior always revolved around violence, usually an act of predation. When curators at the American Museum of Natural History assembled the bones of another carnivorous dinosaur named Allosaurus in 1907, they selected a pose to suggest that it had been caught feasting upon Brontosaurus. The bones of this meat-eating dinosaur were mounted as if it were standing on top of the tail vertebra of its prey, having just torn off a piece of flesh with its oversized jaws. As a visitor’s guide explained, this was “a characteristic scene in that bygone age” when “reptiles were the lords of creation and ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ had lost none of her primitive savagery.”11 But curators felt dinosaur bones, on their own, did not have the expressive potential to provide a sufficiently lifelike impression of prehistory. For that reason, they often paired mounted fossils with colorful paintings 777 778 Environmental History 25 (October 2020) such as the one shown in figure 3. This dramatic rendering by Charles Knight depicted an identical scene to the skeletons on display, except that the fearsome predator was now covered in skin, sinew, and flesh. Artworks like these brought an additional element of excitement into the exhibition space, virtually transporting visitors backwards in time to witness a world that was otherwise inaccessible to direct observation. As a whole, then, the museum’s dinosaur hall constituted a densely choreographed mixed media installation that was carefully calibrated to provide a vivid imaginative experience whose credibility was grounded on the solid bedrock of material fossils that survived from prehistory into the present day.12 Because philanthropically funded museums reliably portrayed dinosaurs as fierce predators engaged in a fight to the death, historians often interpret these exhibitions as an expression of Social Darwinism. On this view, museum displays that cast dinosaurs as primitive monsters struggling for survival helped to naturalize the competitive ethos of American capitalism by making an implicit claim that intense conflict long predated the evolution of modern society. Hence, revolutionary social movements that sought to reform the political economy from the ground up were unlikely to get very far. In the context of philanthropic museums, the argument goes, robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan used dinosaurs to help justify a ruthless, winner-take-all vision of society by projecting it back into the furthest depths of prehistory.13 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 Figure 3. A painting by Charles R. Knight showing the meat-eating dinosaur Allosaurus predating upon a section of Brontosaurus at the American Museum of Natural History. Credit: Image no. ptc-2418, American Museum of Natural History Library. How Dinosaurs Became Tyrants of the Prehistoric Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 The reality is more complex, but it is also more interesting. The wealthy elites who underwrote these exhibits did not want to be seen as cold-blooded predators engaged in a fierce struggle for survival. Nor did they seek to promote a vision of American capitalism ruled by unfettered competition. Quite the opposite. As a rule, they preferred to celebrate the managerial efficiency and organizational complexity that was supposed to characterize a political economy dominated by vertically integrated monopolies such as US Steel or Standard Oil. Moreover, rather than use dinosaurs to celebrate cutthroat competition, paleontologists inserted these creatures into a grand narrative of evolutionary progress. In this telling of Earth’s history, the superior intelligence of cooperative mammals triumphed over the dull-witted brutality of their saurian predecessors. Far from functioning as a straightforward symbol of Social Darwinism, then, dinosaurs actually represented an older, laissez-faire model of social organization that much of the cultural and economic elite had already come to regard as obsolete.14 After the Civil War, the US economy grew at a stupendous pace, nearly doubling in size about once every two decades. Its explosive growth notwithstanding, however, American capitalism was in a state of crisis as well. The industrial juggernaut may have been booming, but it produced immense inequality too. Whereas the wealthiest 1 percent of US households only claimed about 15 percent of the country’s income at the time of its founding, their share exceeded 25 percent by 1890 and skyrocketed to nearly 50 percent during the 1920s. As the wealthy grew richer, the poor saw their wages stagnate and, at times, even fall. This led to frequent strikes and worker rebellions, which could be remarkably violent and bloody. Between 1877 and 1903 alone, soldiers from the US National Guard were mobilized over three hundred times to take care of so-called “labor troubles.”15 Faced with rising social unrest, wealthy industrialists became avid philanthropists, founding nonprofit organizations to demonstrate that modern capitalism could be altruistic as well as competitive. As Andrew Carnegie put it, philanthropy was “the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth, the reconciliation of the rich and the poor.”16 Alongside universities, libraries, and symphonies, they built large and impressive museums of natural history, where dinosaurs such as T. rex became icons of science and popular culture. Wealthy capitalists invested considerable resources into the acquisition and display of these creatures for a variety of reasons. Besides being prodigiously large, undeniably impressive, and distinctly American, dinosaurs were also immensely popular, which meant they could be trusted to entice working people into the museum’s public galleries. This was essential if these institutions were to succeed as a demonstration that modern capitalism could produce 779 780 Environmental History 25 (October 2020) genuine public goods in addition to profits, that it worked for the good of all in society, not just the 1 percent.17 Wealthy elites also loved dinosaurs because these towering behemoths could be used to project well-worn themes of American exceptionalism backwards in time. Whereas Andrew Carnegie’s art galleries largely contained paintings from Europe, and his libraries were primarily stocked with great works of literature composed there as well, the natural history museum offered a space in which to reverse the flow of cultural goods. For that reason, when curators at Carnegie’s museum in Pittsburgh named a new species of plant-eating sauropod in his honor during the late 1890s, he asked them to fashion a dozen plaster cast replicas of its fossilized skeleton. During the next several years, Carnegie embarked on a grand tour of Europe’s oldest and most august cultural institutions, depositing copies of Diplodocus carnegii wherever he went. Towering over its more diminutive cousins in European museums, Carnegie’s dinosaur was often interpreted as a fitting symbol for the United States (figure 4). As Lord Avebury remarked when accepting a copy for the British Museum in London, “it is appropriate that such a monster as this should have lived on a great continent like North America.”18 Perhaps because Carnegie’s ostentatious gift so clearly harkened back to Thomas Jefferson’s use of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 Figure 4. The American dinosaur Diplodocus carnegii on display at the Museum d’histoire naturelle in Paris, with a more diminutive duck-billed dinosaur exhumed from a Belgian coal mine on the right to the rear. Credit: Photograph by Lukas Rieppel. How Dinosaurs Became Tyrants of the Prehistoric Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 the mastodon to symbolize the power and fecundity of America’s wilderness, however, it was not always met with unvarnished gratitude. Indeed, Carnegie’s flamboyant gesture was widely received as the very picture of American ostentation and vulgarity, prompting the British satirical magazine Punch to joke that “even in the earliest periods, our American cousins did things on a more colossal scale.”19 Business leaders like Andrew Carnegie may have been eager to associate themselves with the immense size and power of American dinosaurs, but they remained wary of drawing a direct comparison between these lumbering giants and the industrial economy. Not only were dinosaurs widely regarded as dull-witted and ponderous creatures, but they also famously suffered a mass extinction event at the close of the Cretaceous period. Doomed to disappear from the earth, dinosaurs hardly served as a fitting symbol for a political economy that aspired to considerable longevity. Nor for that matter did merciless tyrants such as T. rex reflect the way social and economic elites sought to portray the evolution of American capitalism. Before the Civil War, the country’s business landscape was primarily made up of family-owned firms that specialized in a single product or service. By the early twentieth century, however, a wave of mergers and acquisitions resulted in a few vertically integrated monopolies dominating entire sectors of the economy. This transformation elicited enormous controversy, especially among rural farmers, western miners, and urban laborers who often found themselves on the receiving end of the bureaucratic machine. Eventually, popular discontent about monopoly capitalism grew so vociferous that Congress began to hold public hearings in which tycoons such as J. P. Morgan, J. D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie were publicly called to account for their corrupt and collusive business practices.20 American capitalists responded by framing the transition to a political economy ruled by vast corporations as an example of evolutionary progress, celebrating the capacity of rational administration and organized planning to replace what they characterized as wasteful and “ruinous” competition between sole proprietorships. “Competition is no longer the life of trade,” J. P. Morgan’s right-hand man George W. Perkins remarked in 1911, adding that while he was “busy advancing the methods of doing business our lawmakers are equally active opposing them.”21 At times, this economic transition was explicitly compared to the extinction of dinosaurs. “Individualism is dead,” the journalist Arthur M. Lewis declared, being no more than “a surviving rudiment” that “links us with our extinct ancestors of the Silurian age.”22 Even the noted economist John Bates Clark agreed that unfettered competition was “a monster as completely antiquated as the saurian of which the geologists tell us.”23 781 782 Environmental History 25 (October 2020) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 The claim that intelligent planning and rational administration was destined to replace primitive competition was embraced by a wide range of natural scientists too. This included paleontologists who observed how the Darwinian struggle gave way to a more enlightened modernity after the Age of Reptiles came to a sudden and ignominious end about sixty-six million years ago. In a popular treatise from 1925, for example, the Yale University paleontologist Richard Swann Lull explicitly likened the extinction of dinosaurs to the Renaissance, rhapsodizing about how, “after a long era when brute force was dominant, came the close of the dark ages” and, with it, “the birth of intelligence.”24 According to most scientists, the extinction of dinosaurs served as a ground clearing, opening up the ecological space for more advanced and intelligent mammals—including early hominids—to put the struggle for existence behind them and begin to cooperate for the greater good. Thus, while the political economist Charles W. Baker urged that it was high time to abandon “the cruelly terse ‘survival of the fittest,’” the paleontologist-cumsociologist Lester Frank Ward proclaimed that “the power of the human intellect over vital, psychic and social phenomena” means that “Nature has . . . been made the servant of man.”25 With the power of hindsight, the exuberant optimism of selfdescribed “progressive” scientists such as Ward comes into focus as something more ominous. During the Long Gilded Age, a remarkably wide range of the social and economic elites agreed that scientific knowledge and technical expertise should be leveraged to manage nearly all aspects of life more efficiently from the top down. Besides the idea that rational planning should replace bottom-up competition in the economy, this led progressive reformers to establish controlled breeding programs and so-called “wilderness preserves” in hopes of saving charismatic megafauna such as the American bison from the threat of extinction. A similar desire animated the eugenics movement as well, which sought to intervene in the process of evolution by overseeing the most intimate features of people’s reproductive lives. In addition, several scientists also lobbied the federal government to exercise tighter control over immigration by implementing a system of race-based quotas, which directly led to the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924. Disparate although they certainly were, eugenics, nature conservation, and interventionist economic policies were all interconnected, demonstrating a fervent desire to regulate the body politic from above. Moreover, insofar as they concentrated enormous power in the hands of existing elites, such highly prescriptive reform efforts also served as a way to shore up the foundations of white male supremacy. The paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn even invented a new word for this paternalistic vision: “Aristogenesis.” By joining the Greek words “aristos” and “genesis,” Osborn sought to convey his conviction that social and How Dinosaurs Became Tyrants of the Prehistoric biological progress could only be guaranteed if the “best in its kind” were empowered to determine the future development of our species.26 The widespread idea that evolution inexorably drove biological organisms to abandon individual competition as they coalesced into functionally integrated social assemblages informed the design of museum exhibits as well. For example, when curators in New York mounted a number of giant ground sloths from the Pleistocene, the result was an explicit celebration of mammalian intelligence and organized teamwork. This display, pictured in figure 5, featured four Megatherium fossils working in concert to reach the most succulent leaves that were just out of reach near the top of a tree. Telling visitors that this “Ground Sloth Group is the most realistic that has yet been attempted in the mounting of fossil skeletons,” a museum guide urged them to interpret all four specimens as cooperating with one another to procure a common food source. While one animal was shown “standing on his hind legs” to “reach up and drag down branches of the tree,” another “is busily digging and tearing at the roots to loosen and break them” and “help his big friend to uproot and pull the tree down. A third animal is coming around the base of the tree to assist in the digging operations,” the guide leaflet Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 Figure 5. The giant ground sloth display at the American Museum of Natural History, completed in 1911. Credit: Image no. 35517, American Museum of Natural History Library. 783 784 Environmental History 25 (October 2020) continued, “while a fourth stands at a short distance, ready to add his weight to drag down the branches when they are brought within reach.”27 If a museum visitor chose to continue on from the Hall of the Age of Mammals to the Hall of the Age of Man, they would have witnessed this teleological story reach its natural climax. Exhibits on early hominids not only reinforced widespread beliefs about the biological basis of white supremacy, but they also depicted anatomically modern humans from northern Europe as creative beings with an artistic drive. Charles Knight’s grand mural painting of “Cro-Magnon man,” for example, resembled the ground sloth display in that it depicted its subject engaged in a collaborative enterprise. But the spirit of cooperation was no longer just harnessed to accomplish the narrowly utilitarian goal of obtaining bodily nourishment. Now it was channeled to satisfy the increasingly refined aesthetic desires of mankind as well, echoing the paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh’s claim that “the big brains won, then as now.”28 The scene depicted in figure 6 could not have been further removed from the kinds of exhibits one would have encountered in the museum’s dinosaur hall, which illustrated the primordial brutality of ruinous competition by depicting the harsh reality of life in a prehistoric world wherein might made right. But as the museum always reminded its visitors, the dinosaur’s “era of brute force” was eventually tempered by the “gradual amelioration” that came “to pass in future ages through the predominance of superior intelligence.”29 Visitors could thus rest secure knowing the terrible reign of T. rex eventually came to an end, just as the political economy of American capitalism had evolved out of its laissez-faire past. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 Figure 6. Mural painting by Charles Knight of “Cro-Magnon man” in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of the Age of Man, 1920. Image no. 5375, American Museum of Natural History Library. How Dinosaurs Became Tyrants of the Prehistoric Notes I would like to thank Sarah Laskow and Finis Dunaway, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for helpful feedback during the process of writing this article. Its argument was inspired by an incisive question about “Social Darwinism” that Daniel Immerwahr posed when I presented my research at Northwestern University several years ago. Finally, a big thanks (as always!) to the librarians and archivists at the American Museum of Natural History (especially Kendra Meyer, Greg Raml, and Mai Ritmeyer) for sorting out the images in record time. 1 See correspondence between William Temple Hornaday, Barnum Brown, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, May 29, 1902 to September 22, 1905, Field Correspondence, box 2, folder 16, Archives of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology (ADVP), American Museum of Natural History (AMNH); Lowell Dingus and Mark Norell, Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus Rex (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 90–110. 2 “Mining for Mammoths in the Bad Lands,” New York Times, December 3, 1905, SM1; see also “Real King of Beasts,” Washington Post, November 26, 1905, A7. 3 Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Tyrannosaurus and Other Cretaceous Carnivorous Dinosaurs,” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 21 (1905): 259–65. 4 “The Prize Fighter of Antiquity Discovered and Restored,” New York Times, December 30, 1906, 21. 5 On the making of the “composite” mount, see 1912 Annual Report of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, ADVP; William Diller Matthew to Barnum Brown, November 18, 1912, Field Correspondence, box 3, folder 10, ADVP; Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Tyrannosaurus: Restoration and Model of the Skeleton,” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 32 (1913): 91–92. On the discovery of the second specimen, see correspondence between Barnum Brown and Henry Fairfield Osborn from July 15 to August 10, 1908, Field Correspondence, box 3, folder 4, ADVP. 6 Barnum Brown, “Tyrannosaurus, a Cretaceous Carnivorous Dinosaur,” Scientific American 113, no. 15 (1915): 322. 7 Richard Owen, “Report on British Fossil Reptiles: Pt. II,” in Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London: R. and J. E. Taylor, 1842), p. 103. For more on the popular representation of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures in nineteenth-century England, see Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); James A. Secord, “Monsters at the Crystal Palace,” in Models: The Third Dimension of Science, ed. Soraya de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 138–69. 8 Paul Brinkman, The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush: Museums and Paleontology in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Mark Jaffe, The Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War between E. D. Cope and O. C. Marsh and the Rise of American Science (New York: Crown, 2000). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 Lukas Rieppel is a historian of the life, earth, and environmental sciences, the history of museums, as well as the history of capitalism at Brown University. He recently published Assembling the Dinosaur (Harvard University Press, 2019) and co-edited a volume of the annual journal Osiris on “Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories.” 785 786 Environmental History 25 (October 2020) 9 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 10 On the history of museums in the United States, see Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For an account that foregrounds the importance of dinosaurs in philanthropic museums, see Lukas Rieppel, Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” Social Text 11 (1985): 20; see also Karen Rader and Victoria Cain, “The Drama of the Diorama,” in Life on Display, ed. Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 51–91; Karen Wonders, Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1993). William Diller Matthew, Dinosaurs, with Special Reference to the American Museum Collections (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1915), 42, 83. For more on paleontology displays as mixed media installations, see Lukas Rieppel, “Bringing Dinosaurs Back to Life: Exhibiting Prehistory at the American Museum of Natural History,” Isis 103, no. 3 (2012): 460–90. W. J. Thomas Mitchell, for example, argued that America’s Gilded Age, “so often portrayed as the era of ‘social Darwinism,’ economic ‘survival of the fittest,’ [and] ruthless competition . . . is aptly summarized by the Darwinian icon of giant reptiles in a fight to the death.” See W. J. Thomas Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 143. For similar interpretations, see Ronald Rainger, An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890–1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991); Hilde Hein, “The Art of Displaying Science: Museum Exhibitions,” in The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science, ed. Alfred I. Tauber, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996); Brian Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). On changing views of capitalism, see Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Harold Faulkner, The Decline of Laissez Faire, 1897–1917 (New York: Rinehart, 1951); Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). On progressive theories of evolution, see Michael Ruse, Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). On economic inequality during the Long Gilded Age, see Peter H. Lindert, “Distribution of Household Wealth: 1774–1998,” in Historical Statistics of the United States, ed. Susan B. Carter et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Table Be39-46; see also Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). On “labor troubles,” see Richard Oestreicher, “Two Souls of American Democracy,” in The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990, ed. George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 128. Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth, and Other Timely Essays (New York: Century, 1900), 12. For more on the history of philanthropy in the United States, see Jonathan Levy, “Altruism and the Origins of Nonprofit Philanthropy,” in Philanthropy and American Higher Education, ed. John R. Thelin and Richard W. Trollinger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 19–43; Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A How Dinosaurs Became Tyrants of the Prehistoric 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/4/774/5910735 by Brown University user on 13 October 2020 18 History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); see also Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). “The Presentation of a Reproduction of Diplodocus carnegii,” Annals of the Carnegie Museum 3 (1905): 452. “Moral Reflections at the Natural History Museum,” Punch; or the London Charivari, May 16, 1906, Press Cuttings, vol. 2, part I, DF5014/1/2, Archives of the Natural History Museum, London. For more on Carnegie and his dinosaur, see Ilja Nieuwland, American Dinosaur Abroad: A Cultural History of Carnegie’s Plaster Diplodocus (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). On the wilderness as an expression of American exceptionalism, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Paul Semonin, American Monster: How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2000). Naomi Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017); Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). “Perkins Calls This Get Together Age,” New York Times, May 8, 1911, 5; see also John A. Garraty, Right-Hand Man; the Life of George W. Perkins (New York: Harper, 1960). Arthur M. Lewis, Evolution: Social and Organic (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1909), 148. John Bates Clark, The Philosophy of Wealth: Economic Principles Newly Formulated (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1886), 151. Richard Swann Lull, The Ways of Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925), 176. Charles Whiting Baker, Monopolies and the People (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889), 187; Lester F. Ward, “Mind as a Social Factor,” Mind 9, no. 36 (1884): 569– 73. Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Aristogenesis, the Creative Principle in the Origin of Species,” The American Naturalist 68, no. 716 (1934): 193–235. Much has been written about the racist paternalism that informed progressive reform efforts like eugenics and nature conservation. See, for example, Mark Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Daniel Okrent, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants out of America (New York: Scribner, 2019); Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009). William Diller Matthew, “The Ground Sloth Group,” American Museum Journal 11, no. 4 (1911): 115–19. Othniel Charles Marsh, Introduction and Succession of Vertebrate Life in America: An Address Delivered before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Nashville, Tenn., Aug. 30, 1877 (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1877), 55. For more on the popular depiction of human evolution during this period, see Constance Areson Clark, God or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). William Diller Matthew, Dinosaurs, with Special Reference to the American Museum Collections (New York: AMNH, 1915), 42. 787