Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and the early history of three-dimensional paleontological art

ABSTRACT Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807–1894) was a British scientific illustrator and sculptor who illustrated many British exploration reports in the 1830s and 1840s. In the early 1850s, Hawkins was commissioned to create life-size, concrete sculptures of Iguanodon, ichthyosaurs, and other extinct animals for a permanent exhibition in south London. They were the first large sculptures of extinct vertebrates ever made, and they are still on view today. Inspired by his success in England, Hawkins launched a lecture tour and working trip to North America in 1868. Soon after his arrival, he was commissioned to “undertake the resuscitation of a group of animals of the former periods of the American continent” for public display in New York City. Had it been built, this would have been the first paleontological museum in the world. As part of this ambitious project, with the assistance of the American paleontologist Joseph Leidy, Hawkins cast the bones of a recently discovered Hadrosaurus specimen and used them to construct the first articulated dinosaur skeleton ever put on display in a museum. It was unveiled at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in November 1868. Hawkins worked tirelessly on New York’s proposed “Paleozoic Museum” for two years, until his funding was cut by William “Boss” Tweed, the corrupt leader of the Tammany Hall political machine, who grew hostile to the project and abolished the Central Park Commission that had made it possible. When Hawkins defiantly continued to work, without funding, Tweed dispatched a gang of thugs to break into his studio and smash all of the sculptures and molds. Although Hawkins would create several copies of his articulated Hadrosaurus skeleton for other institutions, the prospect of building a grand museum of paleontology in America was forever destroyed by Tweed’s actions.

The Empire Club Strikes Back

A key flaw in the standard, culturalist interpretation is that prohibitionism was a “whitelash” of conservative, rural, nativists “disciplining” of immigrants and blacks. The reality of 1840s New York was completely different: not only were Irish immigrants more likely to be temperate than their nativist, American counterparts (Chapter 5), but the focus of temperance activism—the money-making liquor traffic—was actually in the hands of established white nativists like “Captain” Isaiah Rynders, “Boss” Tweed, and the corrupt Tammany Hall machine. In upstate New York, temperance-abolitionist-suffragist reformers--including Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Susan B. Anthony--began a movement for women’s equality born of their temperance activism. Concurrent with the 1853 World’s Fair in New York, Rynders and his Know-Nothings clashed, physically, with the equal-rights reformers from upstate, whose temperance threatened the financial foundations of the Tammany Hall political machine.

Tammany Hall and the Machine Style in Black Politics

“I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” explained George Washington Plunkitt speaking to the journalist William L. Riordan at the dawn of the twentieth century. For many college students, William Riordan's collection of musings and reminiscences from New York State Senator Plunkitt, delivered at a shoeshine stand on Manhattan's West Side, offers a definitive introduction to the history of urban machine politics. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, first published in 1905, has become a ubiquitous text, frequently assigned in political science courses and excerpted in U.S. history source books. Plunkitt's reflections, while entertaining, present a transactional and opportunistic form of political practice. He famously differentiates between honest graft and dishonest graft; insists that showing up at fires to help victims is key to holding your district; declares the Irish to be natural born leaders; and derides reformers as “mornin’ glories.” He rages against the key urban reform project of the era, civil service examinations, as “the curse of the nation,” amounting to “a lot of fool questions about the number of cubic inches of water in the Atlantic and the quality of sand in the Sahara desert.” Civil service exams blocked machine politicians from distributing jobs to loyal followers, which in the case of the New York Democratic machine typically meant recently arrived Irish immigrants. As Plunkitt explains, “The Irishman is grateful. His one thought is to serve the city which gave him a home. He has this thought even before he lands in New York, for his friends here often have a good place in one of the city's departments picked out for him while he is still in the old country.” Plunkitt's characterization of the linkage between migrant arrival and municipal work points to the central role that access to city payrolls played in the economic and political history of the New York Irish. Arguably, the only other urban group that relied as heavily on city jobs for economic mobility has been African Americans.

Scandal in the Courts

In 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized an investigation first into New York City’s lower court system and then into its entire government. The investigation, known by the name of its head, retired judge Samuel Seabury, had a dramatic impact on the city’s politics and its powerful Democratic Party machine, Tammany Hall. Because the investigation began with an inquiry into the entrapment of women for alleged sex crimes and their subsequent treatment in the city’s women’s court, it attracted great interest from the city’s women civic activists. These women played significant roles in encouraging and later broadening the Seabury investigation and in making decisions about its consequences.

After the Vote

Soon after his first inauguration in 1934, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia began appointing women into his administration. By the end of his three terms he had installed almost a hundred women as lawyers, board and commission members and secretaries, deputy commissioners, and judges. No previous mayor had done anything comparable. These “Women of the La Guardia Administration” met frequently for mutual support and political strategizing. This book tells their stories. It begins with the city’s suffrage movement, which prepared them for political action. After they won the vote in 1917, they joined political party clubs and began to run for office. Their plan was to use political platforms to enact feminist and progressive public policies. Circumstances unique to mid-twentieth-century New York City advanced their progress. In 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized an inquiry into alleged corruption in the city’s government, long dominated by the Democratic Party’s machine, Tammany Hall. The inquiry turned first to charges of Vice Squad entrapment of women for sex crimes and their treatment in the city’s Women’s Court. Outraged by the inquiry’s disclosures and impressed by La Guardia’s pledge to rein in Tammany, many New York City women activists supported him for mayor. As appointees in his administration, they then helped him fulfill his plans for modernizing city government. This book argues that La Guardia’s women appointees contributed to his administration’s success and left a rich legacy of experience and political wisdom to oncoming generations of women in politics.