3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

CuratorofOrnithologyattheAmericanMuseumofNaturalHistory 123
in American ornithology as demonstrated by the percentage of various subjects
in the total of papers presented at the annual AOU meeting.” He felt that in the
future, such matters as nomenclature and faunistic lists should be eliminated from
the program. The number of papers on taxonomic topics should be reduced in
favor of life history, behavior and ecology. As long as T.S. Palmer was Secretary of
the AOU, there seemed to be no chance for improvement because “he is neither
a scientist nor an ornithologist; narrow and dictatorial.” Mayr opposed the custom
of paying one third of the total income of the Society to the Secretary, Treasurer
and Editor for their “services” and insisted that the election to fellowship should
be decided entirely on ornithological merit documented by relevant publications.
Moreover, there should be definite time limits not only for the President, but also
for the Secretary and Editor of the The Auk, the Society’s scientific journal.
When, at the 1935 meeting, the “Washingtonians” were again able to elect one
of their “buddies” into the only opening for Fellow, the reformers “became very
active in AOU politics with the major aim of breaking the total domination of the
AOU by the ‘Washington crowd.’ They were mostly staff members of the Biological
Survey, later called Fish and Wildlife Survey. By using all sorts of parliamentary
tricks the Washingtonians succeeded in electing most of the officers and other
Biological Survey people as Fellows. One year when they pushed through a person
with the name of Preble who had never been distinguished, and in fact had not
published anything in ornithology in 15 or 20 years, my tolerance had reached an
end. Mrs. Nice had also been on the slate, and she was by an order of magnitude
more deserving than Preble. Fortunately, there were a few others who felt like me,
particularly Herbert Friedmann who, although also a Washingtonian, shared my
sentiments. The trick of the Washingtonians was that the first ballot for any office
or honor was called a nomination ballot. The results of this first vote were put on
the blackboard and all the Washingtonians had reached a consensus before the
meeting whom to nominate. As a result, invariably their candidate had three or
four times as many votes as any other nominee. We young Turks adopted their
method. We established a carefully chosen slate of the people we considered most
deserving of election and then went to everybody else (except the Washingtonians)
urging them to vote for this slate. Since these were all good candidates we had little
trouble persuading them. When the first election took place after we had started
our campaign the Washingtonians were utterly astonished that all of a sudden for
each opening there was one nominee who had considerably more votes than their
candidate. It took only a couple of years before we had gotten the Washingtonians
out of all the offices and since we maintained the system they never again had
a chance to push an unworthy candidate through. It was at this time that through
the influence of Grinnell and Alden Miller in Berkeley and of Van Tyne in Michigan
American ornithology slowly shifted into an entirely different direction. The AOU
wasstillbackwardasshownparticularlybythecontentsoftheAuk.Forawhilethe
journaloftheWilsonClub,theWilson Bulletin, was indeed a better journal than the
Auk, and this is where I published my paper on the ‘History of the North American
Bird Fauna’ (1946h) and where Delacour and I published our subsequently so
famous classification of the duck family (1945e).”