The Maximum of Wilderness: The Jungle in the American Imagination

By Kelly Enright

Danger in the Congo! The unexplored Amazon! Long perceived as a place of mystery and danger, and more recently as a fragile system requiring our protection, the tropical forest captivated America for over a century. In The Maximum of Wilderness, Kelly Enright traces the representation of tropical forests--what Americans have typically thought of as "jungles"--and their place in both our perception of "wildness" and the globalization of the environmental movement.

In the early twentieth century, jungle adventure--as depicted by countless books and films, from Burroughs’s Tarzan novels to King Kong--had enormous mass appeal. Concurrent with the proliferation of a popular image of the jungle that masked many of its truths was the work of American naturalists who sought to represent an "authentic" view of tropical nature through museums, zoological and botanical gardens, books, and film. Enright examines the relationship between popular and scientific representations of the forest through the lives and work of Martin and Osa Johnson (who with films such as Congorilla and Simba blended authenticity with adventure), as well as renowned naturalists John Muir, William Beebe, David Fairchild, and Richard Evans Schultes. The author goes on to explore a startling shift at midcentury in the perception of the tropical forest--from the "jungle," a place that endangers human life, to the "rain forest," a place that is itself endangered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9780813932439

Book preview

THE MAXIMUM OF WILDERNESS

THE MAXIMUM OF WILDERNESS

THE JUNGLE IN THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION

KELLY ENRIGHT

University of Virginia Press | Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2012 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2012

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Enright, Kelly.

The maximum of wilderness : the jungle in the American imagination / Kelly Enright.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3228-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-3243-9 (e-book)

1. Natural history literature — United States — History — 20th century. 2. American literature — 20th century — History and criticism. 3. Tropics — In literature 4. Jungles in literature. 5. Wilderness areas in literature. 6. Tropics — Historiography. 7. Tropics — In popular culture. 8. Tropics — Foreign public opinion, American. 9. United States — Civilization — 20th century. 10. United States — Intellectual life — 20th century. I. Title.

QH13.45.E67    2012

508 — dc23

2011026499

It is not down on any map; true places never are.

— Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1  Locating a New Wilderness: Nature and Conservation at the Start of the Twentieth Century

2  Tame Adventures and Wild Homes: Encountering the Jungle with Martin and Osa Johnson

3  Discovering Jungle Peace: The Prolonged Observations of William Beebe

4  Ingesting the Jungle: The Botanical Experiences of David Fairchild and Richard Evans Schultes

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THROUGH RESEARCH and writing, my work has benefited from the guidance of many. Early in my academic career, H. Daniel Peck, Rebecca Edwards, and Judith Ostrowitz sparked my interest in questions about nature, history, and culture. In formulating this research project, I am particularly indebted to Ann Fabian, whose patience and dedication helped ground my abstract ideas in a solid research project. The advice of Jackson Lears, Susan Schrepfer, and Paul Clemens at various points throughout my research and writing proved invaluable. Nigel Rothfels, Neil Maher, and Paul Israel also provided much-needed support, encouragement, and advice along the way.

Conferences have brought valuable insights from scholars in various fields whose diversity of perspectives challenged and helped shape the final product. Aaron Sachs, Paul Sutter, and Aaron Skabelund shared their research, asked thoughtful questions, and encouraged further inquiry. I’m grateful for my colleagues in the Colorado Regional Environmental History Workshop who read and critiqued a portion of the manuscript during its final stages.

Several archivists have enriched this project with helpful investigations into their collections: Jacquelyn Borgeson at the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum, Barbara Mathe at the American Museum of Natural History, Nancy Korber at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, and Stephen Johnson at the Wildlife Conservation Society. I’m also thankful for the patience of Kerry Prendergast at the Wildlife Conservation Society and Wendy Glassmire at National Geographic Society, who helped secure a few elusive images and confirm copyrights. The Claudia Clark–Megan McClintock–Rebecca Gershenson Memorial Fund of the History Department of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey–New Brunswick, offered much-appreciated financial assistance that allowed me to reproduce the images that appear in this volume.

Boyd Zenner enthusiastically supported this manuscript and helped in the process of turning it into a book. Also at the University of Virginia Press, Mark Mones, Susan Murray, and Angie Hogan carefully saw the manuscript through to its publication.

Over the course of several years, research trips, and chapter drafts, family and friends have supported my motivation and provided solid ground to which to return when my ideas got away from me. This book is dedicated to my parents, Dennis and Patricia Enright, who encouraged my education and fostered my curiosity.

THE MAXIMUM OF WILDERNESS

INTRODUCTION

For first was the Jungle. Always will be the Jungle. From the beginning until the end of Time it stretches … the Unconquered … the Unconquerable!

—Merian C. Cooper, Chang (1927)

The unsolved mysteries of the rain forest are formless and seductive. They are like unnamed islands hidden in the blank spaces of old maps, like dark shapes glimpsed descending the far wall of a reef into the abyss. They draw us forward and stir strange apprehensions. The unknown and prodigious are drugs to the scientific imagination, stirring insatiable hunger with a single taste. In our hearts we hope we will never discover everything. We pray there will always be a world like this one at whose edge I sat in darkness. The rain forest in its richness is one of the last repositories on earth of that timeless dream.

—Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992)

THE 1937 DOCUMENTARY Borneo opens with a shot of the filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson flying over the dense vegetation of a tropical island. A narrator informs the viewer that the Johnsons are about to enter the isle of the unimaginable … the maximum of wilderness. The voice describes the landscape as full of weird and fascinating natural objects. Among the freaks of nature the Johnsons encounter are flying snakes, gibbons, proboscis monkeys (rarest of rare), orangutans (jungle beast), and, most strikingly, climbing fish (evidence of evolution). A vocalizing monkey is a jungle Caruso, Tingara natives have jungle jitters, and their conflicts are jungle drama.

By the time Borneo was released, the Johnsons were famous for their daring and unusual film footage of African and South Asian landscapes, natives, and wildlife. Martin’s career of adventure was launched in 1908, when he accompanied the explorer and writer Jack London as cook on his planned, but not completed, trip around the world aboard the Snark. Upon his return, Martin married Osa Leighty, a fellow Kansan who had never left the state. He whisked her into vaudeville, where she sang Hawaiian tunes alongside Martin’s photo-slide lecture about his Snark voyage. In 1917, they embarked on their first overseas adventure, to the South Pacific, to film the lives of so-called cannibal peoples. The next twenty years of their lives were spent shooting films of native peoples and wildlife in natural environments. Attempting to meet the demand for such footage from the disparate fields of science and entertainment, the Johnsons used the same reels to create both Hollywood-style films such as Borneo and more scientific productions that they used to illustrate their lecture tours. Throughout their working lives, the Johnsons struggled with this tension between the scientific purpose of their films and the necessity of producing a financially profitable narrative, and their images of the jungle were characterized by these tensions. Released after Martin’s untimely death, Borneo reflected years of perfecting their craft, but the narration revealed the complexity of the idea of the jungle in American culture.

In the popular imagination, the jungle was a dynamic mixture of myth and reality, and even serious scientists could not deny the allure of its mythos. Writing about her collecting expedition to the Amazon in 1928, the botanist Ynes Mexia observed that most Americans have felt the fascination of the Amazon region. Though her journey was botanical, Mexia found the tropical forests of South America as alluring as the Johnsons had found those of Asia and Africa. So much have we heard, she wrote, of its rivers, its tropical beauty, its luxuriant forests, the wild life and wilder Indians that lurk in its depths, that the pictures drawn by our imagination are vivid and unique. Mexia’s jungle was a decidedly less animated landscape than the Johnsons’, however. She was drawn not by adventure, but by the vision of the unspoiled wilderness.¹

BEGINNING IN the second decade of the twentieth century and extending through the 1950s, Americans cast the jungle as a place of both adventure and natural diversity. Theodore Roosevelt saw in the Amazon his last chance to be a boy. Near the end of his life, the naturalist John Muir sought the trees of South America and Africa, enjoying scenery he had dreamed of since youth. Roosevelt and Muir’s generation was central to defining the meaning of wilderness in America at the end of the nineteenth century. Their turn to tropical forests hints at an emerging placement of wildness onto landscapes farther away.

Characterizations of wilderness change with shifting understandings of civilization and of the human place in the natural world. Early European settlers in North America encountered virgin land and its savages in a place they called wilderness. As the East Coast became increasingly industrialized and settled in the nineteenth century, the place in which Americans located wilderness moved westward, to the frontiers of what would become the U.S. Midwest. In time, as people and industry came to these territories, wilderness was pushed farther west before them, and the notion developed that wilderness — as a space free from human imprint — was disappearing.²

Although Roosevelt and Muir disagreed on the types of experiences one should have in nature, they both sought to preserve America’s natural landscapes, and each played a role in the establishment of national forests and parks. The notion of wilderness, however, was challenged by such acts of preservation. Deliberately setting aside land and managing its use detracted from the landscape’s perceived wildness. As their journeys to tropical forests suggest, both Roosevelt and Muir were moved to pursue a more wild landscape. If Yosemite National Park was wilderness, then surely the jungle was the maximum of wilderness.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the jungle was a new addition to the American conception of natural places. It did not replace wild places on American soil, but provided a contrasting landscape in which people saw a new role for nature, themselves, and the nation. Just as many nineteenth-century Americans saw it as their destiny to replace wilderness with civilization, so did some in the early twentieth century begin to view themselves as victims of overcivilization. They dreamed of a landscape that defied Western culture, with its technology and consumerism. The Johnsons followed this urge to shake off civilization. As I realize that I am at last off again for the wilderness, I feel like a man recovering from a long illness, wrote Martin Johnson. Now, after nearly a year spent in civilization, I can begin to live once more.³

The jungle was a place coveted because of its discomforts, a place where human and nature were once again on equal footing. Like Martin and Osa Johnson, many visitors to tropical forests found a test for the individual. Here they were really living.

Actual experiences in this coveted new wilderness, of course, proved more complicated. By photographing the jungle, the Johnsons were indeed complicit in a certain type of taming and packaging of nature. From an aesthetic standpoint, their own experiences informed the vision of the jungle they projected for audiences. While the jungle provided explorers with individual tests in nature, audiences usually interpreted jungle images as abstract space. Without their own experiences in such a landscape, most Americans imagined tropical forests by drawing on the variety of literary and visual sources available in the mass market. Those who traveled there went through a process of replacing this imagined space with a place they labeled jungle. In order to render its strangeness familiar, visitors described, identified, experienced, and experimented with the jungle. But with what did they fill it?

The objects and experiences that North American visitors installed in the space of tropical forests created a highly symbolic place onto which American goals and desires could be projected. Individuals and intended audiences were reflected in this process as much as the landscape itself. Jungle stories spread across media throughout the first half of the twentieth century, stories that were born from changing attitudes toward tropical forests. Such representations also crossed genres — from the crudest film fakeries to the highest literary works. The popular image of the jungle cast it at a great remove from civilization, yet here was civilization, constantly projecting and creating meaning for it. The jungle was decidedly a product of mass culture, born with the rise of Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Those who journeyed to tropical forests inevitably maintained that they went to escape modern culture, yet they were instrumental in adding to the images of mass culture. Understanding how and why they did so requires examination of their experiences and representations.

During the first half of the twentieth century, many men and women went to tropical forests as filmmakers, scientists, entrepreneurs, adventurers, and naturalists. The careers of Martin Johnson, Osa Johnson, William Beebe, David Fairchild, and Richard Evans Schultes were founded on their experiences in this environment, and their works all critique modernity and overcivilization. What each sought to escape became part of the place he

THE maximum of wilderness

or she created and reveals the different tensions and anxieties at work for each individual. Why did the jungle represent success for the filmmaker Martin Johnson? Which aspects of modernity did Osa Johnson, a Kansas housewife, seek to escape by going to Africa? Why did Beebe, a scientist with a plum job at a prestigious metropolitan institution, prefer to spend his time in the forest? What inspired the horticulturalist David Fairchild to create a garden of decorative and succulent tropical plants? Why did the ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes imagine tropical products could bring health and wellness to American lives?

BY DEFINITION, tropical forests are equatorial regions, encircling the globe between 23.5° north and 23.5° south. They contain the greatest diversity of species on Earth. Tropical forests have only two seasons — rainy and dry — with little temperature variation and an annual precipitation rate that falls somewhere between 50 and 260 inches. Soil is acidic, and decomposition is swift. Although these regions are exposed to twelve hours of sunlight daily throughout the year, the forest floor is usually dark, heavily shaded by a multilayered and continuous forest canopy. This is a twenty-first-century definition of tropical forests, formed from more than a century of scientific investigations of landscapes from the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

Images of nature, however, are always interplays between scientific information and cultural narratives. Early-twentieth-century visions of the jungle were informed by the previous century’s ideas about tropical forests in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The concept of the jungle changed over time as scientists redefined the characteristics of geographic regions. Nineteenth-century naturalists defined tropics by the northern- and southernmost reaches of the path of the sun. The term defined conditions in which certain fauna and flora flourish, but did not directly refer to the physical attributes of the land itself.

In contrast to the geographic definition of the tropics, when the term jungle came into wide use at the start of the twentieth century, it referred to no specific geographic locale. Rather, it described a spectrum of landscape features, foremost among them overgrown vegetation. To scientists, as well as to the general public, jungle meant a dense forest of tropical flora and fauna, denoting a certain kind of landscape with no clear geographic locale. The word conjured animated images of encounters with exotic landscape, animals, and natives. Follow them through jungle thickets, invited an ad for the Johnson-themed comic strip Danger Trails (ca. 1940), where glowing, lustful eyes flash with hatred, where muddy streams ripple with crocodiles weeping for their suppers. The jungle is a backdrop for adventure.⁴

The origin of the word jungle lies in Asia. Jangal is a Hindi word first recorded by Englishmen in 1776, meaning desert, forest, wasteland, uncultivated ground. The Oxford English Dictionary credits British colonialists with evolving the term to refer to a tangled mass of vegetation, or land in which this tangle exists, especially as the dwelling-place of wild beasts. By 1849, jungle referred specifically to tropical landscapes, and today this is the primary definition in most standard dictionaries. In America, the term began to appear regularly in the popular press during the 1860s, though there were uses recorded as early as 1830, referring less to specific regions of the world than to dense vegetation.⁵

By 1906, the word had enough meaning to be taken up as metaphor for something other than a natural landscape — the stockyards and slaughterhouses of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. Beginning in the 1930s, the word was used widely for non-natural settings, such as urban or asphalt jungles. Inner-city schools were blackboard jungles and camps of Depression-era homeless were hobo jungles. These metaphoric uses of the word offer evidence of the pervasiveness of the image in American culture. Jungles became synonymous with unordered, chaotic, dangerous, and often violent places.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel Tarzan, published in 1914, was serialized for decades in comics, films, and television, maintaining an audience throughout the 1950s. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) became a live-action film in 1942, and an animated one in 1967. One of the first rides at Disneyland, opened along with the park in 1955, was the Jungle Cruise, inspired in part by the Humphrey Bogart–Katherine Hepburn 1951 blockbuster The African Queen; it remains one of the most popular attractions at the park. Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1947) have been remade for modern audiences — the former at least twice. The continuing appeal of tropical forest narratives underlines their importance not only to American ideas of adventure and wilderness, but to their role in, and responsibility for, the nature of other nations.

To understand the resonance of these jungle images, we must also understand the relationship between popular notions and the narratives of those who studied tropical forests and who brought back with them stories, objects, and images of nature for both scientific and nonscientific audiences. How did their work inspire popular fictions, and what cultural baggage did they bring to their experiences? How did they convey their tales of the jungle to the public? What shaped their methods of observation? What were their advance expectations of the jungle experience and what role did they see for themselves (as filmmakers, as writers, as naturalists, as Americans, as public figures) in these landscapes? How and why did the image of tropical forests shift at midcentury from the jungle — a place that endangered human lives — to the rain forest — an endangered place invested with the power to save human lives?

This book explores some of the consequences of expanding an American image and ideology of wilderness beyond American shores. Tropical forests embodied both a narrative of adventure and a particular conception of a wild and beautiful nature. In the transition from jungle to rain forest, the narratives and aesthetics change, but the image of an unknown landscape persists, as nature beyond place. Does the fact that both are perceived as wilderness make them more alike, or the definition of wilderness more complex?

By looking at the changing image of the faraway jungle, we can follow the development of the twentieth-century abstraction of nature and of the antimodern belief that civilization was an obstacle to natural experiences. A central irony of Americans’ appreciation of nature has been a longing to experience that is inconsistent with a desire to preserve. The distance of tropical forests from most Americans’ experiences made it an ideal landscape for abstraction. But what effect did abstraction have upon the fate of the place itself?

The first chapter of this book focuses on the journeys of Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir, whose ideas about nature were formed by the nineteenth-century romanticizing of the tropics, frontier ideology, and conflicts over conservation. For both of them, the jungle was an escape from failures at home after long, successful careers. The second chapter examines jungle imagery at its height in popular culture through the lives, films, and books of Martin and Osa Johnson. The couple balanced competing visions of Hollywood and science, representing the jungle as a sensual and adventurous landscape of unlimited opportunity. Their work highlights ideas of evolution and competition, and presents the jungle as an actor in moral dramas about human-animal relationships. In the jungle, the Johnsons suggest through their work, traditional American values of home, family, and work close to nature could survive outside modern life.

The third chapter considers the work