Martha, Taft, and the Lessons of Cincinnati

My mini-spring break trip to Cincinnati with my family took us to two sites today that are of surprisingly relevance 100 years after they became famous. (Though I use the word “famous” advisedly). Our first stop was the Cincinnati Zoo, beloved by children everywhere, including my older daughter Laura (who loved seeing the manatees) and my younger daughter Julia (who had to be pried away from watching the Mexican wolves). Both manatees and wolves are endangered, as are so many animals that we now see in zoos. That is a better fate, though, than what I wanted to see in the zoo. On September 1, 1914, at 1PM, a bird that had been named after Martha Washington fell off her perch at the zoo and died at the advanced age of 29. And passenger pigeons became extinct with Martha’s demise. The statistics of passenger pigeons in preceding centuries are legendary: perhaps five billion of the birds lived in what is now the United States in 1492, comprising between 25% and 40% of the continent’s entire population of birds. In the early nineteenth century, John James Audubon wrote of flocks of passenger pigeons that were so dense that they blocked out the sun. But they were easy prey for hunters, too, who shot them for food and sold them for as little as fifty cents per dozen. In 1878, 50,000 birds were killed every day for five months near Petoskey, Michigan. The Michigan legislature enacted a law regulating hunting of passenger pigeons, but it was both weakly enforced and too little, too late. Between 1909 and 1912, the American Ornithologists’ Union offered a $1,500 reward to anyone finding a passenger pigeon nest or colongy, but no one was able to claim the reward. The extinction of the species had become inevitable once only Martha survived in the Cincinnati Zoo. I knew all of this when I saw the bronze statue of Martha at the zoo this morning. The plaque on the statue states the hope of its benefactors “that people who visit this memoria will work toward the preservation of all the world’s fauna.”

While the American Ornithologists’ Union conducted its vain search for surviving passenger pigeons, William Howard Taft served as the President of the United States. Taft was a native of Cincinnati, too, and his boyhood home is now a historic site managed by the National Park Service. The home is well preserved and the tour was interesting, though I was disappointed that the Park Service gift shop did not have any Taft t-shirts for sale. What struck me, though — and what the ranger confirmed — is that Taft’s home is the only site among nearly 500 Park Service properties that can be said to honor anyone who served on the United States Supreme Court.  Why?  The northern Ohio home of Taft’s predecessor James Garfield is a Park Service property even though Garfield served only a few months in office before he was assassinated.  Not every former president is recognized by the Park Service, but no Supreme Court justices are.  I confess that I don’t know why.  Are Supreme Court justices regarded as of insufficient importance, contrary to our presumptions as law professors?  Conversely, are they too controversial?  I recall that the standard legislative memorial statement for a recently deceased New Jersey Supreme Court chief justice was fillibustered in the state legislature by those who opposed his rulings.  Two California governors — Ronald Reagan and Earl Warren — generated abundant admirers and enemies during the respective service as President and Chief Justice, but we are far more willing to memorialize Reagan than Warren.  Why we do so is not obvious to me, but it worthy of further thought for a nation that is so profoundly affected by the decisions of the Supreme Court.

So my day in Cincinnati reminded me that we really are capable of rendering another species extinct after all, and that we would do well to remember that even as we try to find more ways to remember the consequences of the work of the Supreme Court.