Page 65 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Figure 2 Detail of rhinoceros diorama, the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at
the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Source: Photograph by the author with kind permission of the AMNH.

Theodore Roosevelt and several of the trustees of the AMNH amongst its
wealthy and influential members. These men viewed their passion for big game
hunting as compatible with a belief in nature conservation and the Boone and
Crocket club initiated some of the first conservation projects and legislation in
the United States (Wonders 1993: 153).
The sportsmen’s conservation efforts helped protect their access to recre-
ational hunting as the spread of settlement closed the American frontier, and
also helped preserve their socioeconomic position. The AMNH and the Boone
and Crocket club were dominated by men whose inherited fortunes were heavily
invested in the industrial exploitation of the wilderness, yet who campaigned
for recreational nature reserves (Brechin 1996). As the feminist historian of
science, Donna Haraway (1989) has pointed out, the same men were involved in
the eugenics movement and the anti-immigration movement. Henry Fairfield
Osborn, president of the AMNH from 1908 till 1933, and the inheritor of a
shipping and railroad fortune, used his expertise in vertebrate palaeontology to
justify scientific breeding, immigration restriction and anti-Semitism. Madison
Grant, anthropologist, trustee of the museum, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and
member of the Boone and Crocket club wrote the book Adolf Hitler described
as his ‘bible’, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), in which scientific rhetoric