Another day and another tarnished hero appears in my #stampoftheday annals.
This time it’s John James Audubon, the famed ornithologist, naturalist and painter. Audubon, who died on January 27, 1851, appeared on a 3-cent stamp that was one of the 35 picturing “Famous Americans” issued in 1940. As I’ve noted in previous posts while many of those “Famous Americans” have faded into obscurity, others, including Audubon, continue to be well-known, at least in popular imagery.
Almost everyone has heard of Audubon. He’s the guy who drew pictures of all the birds, literally all of the birds in America. And his drawings are gorgeous. And he’s the guy whose name is one of the nation’s great environmental organization named after him. He is, in fact, a true American hero.
Perhaps. The real-life Audubon apparently is much more complicated.
To begin with, the path he took to America was convoluted, to say the least. Audubon was born in 1785 in Haiti, where his father owned a sugar plantation. His mother, who died not long after giving birth, supposedly was a chambermaid from Brittany. He was cared for by a mixed-race woman who had been his father’s mistress and later was his wife. In 1791, due to growing tensions in Haiti, the family moved to France. Even when he was young, Audubon had an affinity for birds. “I felt an intimacy with them…bordering on frenzy [that] must accompany my steps through life,” he once recalled.
In 1803, at age 18, he immigrated to the United States, where he changed his name to the anglicized John James Audubon. I won’t go into the details but suffice to say, in America, Audubon combined his interests in art and in ornithology and developed a plan to make a complete pictural record of all the bird species of North America.
Thinking about that immediately leads me to Annie Lamott’s wonderful book “Bird by Bird,” which takes its title from her childhood when Buddy, her brother, had to do a report on birds sat at the kitchen table overwhelmed by the task. Her father wisely said, “Bird by bird Buddy, bird by bird.” As she notes, it’s sage advice for how to finish any project and makes me wonder if somewhere along the way Audubon got discouraged until someone said, “Bird by bird, John James, bird by bird.”
However he did it, Audubon soldiered on. His major work, a color-plate book, “The Birds of America” which was published as a subscription series over more than a decade, is considered a one of history’s greatest ornithological works.
It’s also one of the more controversial books because over a variety of researchers have uncovered information indicating that Audubon falsified data, invented new species to both impress potential subscribers and to “prank” rivals, and probably stole a specimen from a collector who was who was one of his subscribers. He apparently also repeatedly lied about the details of his life.
Oh, and by the way, did I mention that he also owned slaves and held supremacist views? In July 2020, these uncomfortable truths led the National Audubon Society to announce that it would begin publishing pieces that would “reexamine the life and legacy of the organization’s namesake.”
In the first piece, Gregory Nobles, author of “John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman,” wrote “John James Audubon was a man of many identities: artist, naturalist, woodsman, adventurer, storyteller, myth maker. A now-legendary painter who traveled North America in the early 19th century, in an epic quest to document all of the continent’s avian life, he is above all known as a champion of birds. Today we see that legacy preserved in the National Audubon Society, but also in the cities, streets, and even birds that bear his name.”
But, Nobles added, “Audubon was also a slaveholder, a point that many people don’t know or, if they do, tend to ignore or excuse. ‘He was a man of his time,’ so the argument goes. That’s never been a good argument, even about Audubon’s time-and certainly not in this one.”
Nobles wrestles with his subject. On the one hand, he writes, “The Birds of America was a tremendous artistic and ornithological achievement, a product of personal passion and sacrifice….Audubon’s avian images can seem more real than reality itself, allowing the viewer to study each bird closer and longer than would ever be possible in the field. The visual impact proved stunning at the time, and it continues to be so today.”
On the other hand, Nobles notes, Audubon “never fully acknowledged [that] people of color-African Americans and Native Americans-had a part in making that massive project possible” by providing information on where to find birds and help in collecting specimens.
In addition, while Nobles concedes that “the veracity of his science has sometimes been called into question,” Audubon’s “major written work, ‘Ornithological Biography,’ remains a valuable resource and a very good read.” Moreover, he contends, Audubon “left in his wake a movement of people ardent in their passion for identifying and protecting bird life, including the founders of the first Audubon societies, which took his name long after he died.”
Nobles doesn’t quite decide what to do with this information other than grapple with it, writing “in this critical time of reckoning with racism, we must recognize that the institution of slavery in America’s past has a deep connection to institutions in the present-our governments, businesses, banks, universities, and also some of our most respected and beloved organizations. Audubon didn’t create the National Audubon Society, but he remains part of its identity. As much as we celebrate his environmental legacy, we need to grapple with his racial legacy. If we could train our binoculars on history, now is the time to do so.”
And here I thought that this was going to be a simple exercise in hagiography.
Be well, stay safe, train your binoculars on history, fight for justice, and work for peace.