Muckrake (n): synonym for crusading journalist. From right: Fred Myers, Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers), Cleveland Amory, Ann Cottrell Free, & Henry Spira. (Beth & Merritt Clifton collage)

How five journalists helped to shape the world’s largest animal charity

(First of a 3-part series. Part 2, about Cleveland Amory & Ann Landers, and part 3, about Ann Cottrell Free & Henry Spira, will follow.)

WASHINGTON D.C.––Celebrating the 62nd anniversary of the founding of the Humane Society of the U.S. just before Thanksgiving 2016, current HSUS president Wayne Pacelle acknowledged debts of gratitude to “tens of millions of people” without––understandably––mentioning any of them by name.

HSUS president Wayne Pacelle.

Layoffs

Only days past laying off more personnel due to failing to meet fundraising targets than HSUS is known to have ever laid off before, and less than two weeks past endorsing the losing candidate in a U.S. presidential election that promises nothing good for animals, HSUS might be said to have had turned 62 with little to celebrate.

Yet even after implementing the layoffs, even with the economic losses, and despite the presidential election loss, HSUS is still the biggest, richest animal advocacy organization that has ever existed, and far more Congressional candidates endorsed by HSUS won than were defeated.

The late Cleveland Amory with an animal he considered morally superior to at least three generations of HSUS leadership,

Long list of names

There were too many names for Pacelle to recite from among “the five chief executives who preceded” him, “along with the seven chairs of the board, hundreds of board members, and today, hundreds of council members,” plus “thousands of staff members, lawmakers, corporate leaders, pro bono attorneys, thought leaders, writers, and other artists,” and of course the many millions of donors who by the time Pacelle ascended to the presidency in 2004 had already made the Humane Society of the U.S. the most influential animal advocacy organization in the world.

But if Pacelle had named names, the list might have begun with the five journalists, whose careers all coincided with the height of newspaper influence and the arrival of electronic media, whose work positioned the Humane Society of the U.S. somewhere between the American status quo for animals and what most Americans believe the status quo for animals should become: better than it is, albeit far short of the often unlikely ideals envisioned by the animal advocates who contribute most of the HSUS budget.

Fred Myer

Only one was on the payroll

Among those five journalists who in their various ways helped to build HSUS, Fred Myers became the HSUS founding president; syndicated columnists Cleveland Amory and Eppie Lederer gave HSUS early national influence; political reporter Ann Cottrell Free helped HSUS to win access to the White House and Congress; and Henry Spira developed the tactics and strategies that have helped HSUS to unprecedented growth and influence during the Pacelle years.

Ironically, only Myers was ever actually on the HSUS payroll.

Amory was among Myers’ founding advisors and was later a longtime HSUS board member and donor, but formed the Fund for Animals in 1967 as result of a split with other board members over how aggressively HSUS should oppose sport hunting, and left the HSUS board after another bitter split in 1974.

Pacelle, who had been national director of the Fund for Animals before moving to HSUS in 1994, arranged the merger of the Fund into HSUS nearly seven years after Amory’s death.

Fred Myer byline, 1934.

More known as critics than allies

Eppie Lederer, best remembered as the last of the several incarnations of the advice columnist “Ann Landers,” Ann Cottrell Free, and Henry Spira were all better known as outspoken critics of HSUS than as allies, especially during the long tenures of former HSUS presidents John Hoyt and Paul Irwin, who headed HSUS from 1970 to mid-2004.

But it could be said that among the present strengths of HSUS is that it largely absorbed and internalized the messages that Amory, Lederer, Free, and Spira sought to impart, and is today much closer to their visions than those of Hoyt and Irwin, whose legacy is more associated with fundraising success than with present programs, policies, and institutional structure.

Some of Fred Myers’ coverage of the Alf Landon presidential campaign and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.

Fred Myers worked his way up

“Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, where his father ran a newspaper stand, Fred Myers (1904-1963) made his way through the ranks from copy boy to cub reporter to mature journalist, working for the Kansas City Journal, the Associated Press, and the New York Mirror,” recounts HSUS senior policy advisor Bernard Unti in a capsule biography at the HSUS web site.

What Myers wrote about, including what he wrote concerning animals, if anything, is not easily researched, because in the pre-computer era most journalists did not receive individual bylines. Most breaking news coverage involved collaborations among beat reporters, who collected new information and telephoned it to desk reporters, also called “rewrite men” even if female, who integrated the new elements of each story with the essentials from past coverage.

Fred Myers covered labor issues.

Lindbergh, Landon, & labor issues

By the mid-1930s, however, Myers had earned sufficient seniority to often work alone and receive bylines for coverage of some of the biggest stories of the day: the 1932 kidnapping and murder of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s infant son, the 1936 Alf Landon presidential campaign, and labor issues.

“Myers was a strong unionist who helped to organize workers in the newspaper industry during the 1930s and 1940s,” says Unti––but union advocacy probably cost Myers his career in mainstream journalism.

From top: eugenics coverage by Fred Myer; some of the orphaned young women who were housed by the AHA; poster & pamphlet promoting eugenics; postcard satirizing it (the man with the cat resembles longtime AHA president Sydney Coleman); sign recalling the Eugenics Board; and the Mohawk & Hudson orphanage in 1918.

Eugenics

In hindsight, Myers’ most significant work as a journalist may have been his coverage of the eugenics movement, which sought what eugenicists called “the perfection of the human race” by sterilizing the mentally ill, mentally handicapped, convicts, and in many interpretations, members of racial and ethnic minorities.

The American Humane Association, founded in 1877, had long been fighting a long ultimately winning battle against eugenics — in particular against frequent legislative proposals to forcibly sterilize thousands of destitute girls and young women who had been abandoned to the custody of the American Humane Association.

Thousands were accommodated at an orphanage run by the Mohawk & Hudson Humane Society near the then-AHA headquarters in Albany, New York.

The orphanage at peak occupancy circa 1920 housed as many as 10,000 children, meaning that the futures of about 5,000 girls and young women were at risk.

Sydney Coleman

American Humane opposed spay/neuter

The American Veterinary Medical Association approved the basic dog and cat spaying and castration surgeries in 1923, but the American Humane Association immediately denounced the AVMA position as “vivisection,” although it had actually voted anti-vivisection societies out of eligibility for membership circa 40 years earlier.

Then-American Humane Association president Sydney Coleman, a devout Catholic, felt that if spay/neuter was accepted for use on animals, the AHA would have a much more difficult struggle to prevent spay/neuter from being inflicted on humans.

Coleman articulated his perspective repeatedly in The National Humane Review, the AHA monthly membership magazine, as did Coleman’s successor Richard Craven during a 10-year tenure as editor preceding his formation in 1940 of the AHA division that monitors U.S. screen productions through a contract with the Screen Actors Guild.

Fred Myers endorsed s/n

The Nazi embrace of eugenics brought the movement into disrepute after World War II, but the American Humane Association remained institutionally wary of accepting spay/neuter, even after the AHA/Mohawk & Hudson orphanage closed in 1950.

The AHA continued to formally oppose spay/neuter of dogs and cats until 1973, but Fred Myers, possibly because of his familiarity with the eugenics movement, made endorsing it an early policy plank of the Humane Society of the U.S.

Meanwhile, after his mainstream journalism career ended, and before joining the AHA in 1952, Until recalls, “Myers worked in public relations for the New School and the New York Central Railroad.”

This 1966 LIFE magazine photo essay by Stan Wayman turned the tide of public opinion against pound seizure.

Pound seizure

Returning to news work as editor of The National Humane Review, Myers stepped up original coverage of issues involving hunting, fishing, trapping, animal agriculture, and international humane work. But Myers also became frustrated by the compromising attitude of the then-AHA leadership toward institutional forms of animal abuse.

Within three years Myers perceived the need and opportunity to split with the American Humane Association and found the Humane Society of the U.S. instead, which he initially called The National Humane Society.

The most comprehensive book-length treatment of how random source animals were used in research was How Shelter Pets Are Brokered for Experimentation:
Understanding Pound Seizure by Allie Phillips.

“It was a specific disagreement over pound seizure––the surrender of animals from shelters and pounds [to laboratories] that precipitated the break,” Unti remembers. “Myers favored a vigorous challenge to the increasingly assertive biomedical research community and its efforts to secure animals from municipal pounds and privately financed shelters with a pound contract or other municipal subsidies. Ultimately, he left the AHA in disappointment over censorship of his writings on the topic.”

Co-conspirators

Joining Myers as HSUS cofounders were Larry Andrews, Marcia Glaser, and Helen Jones. While Andrews and Glaser are today little remembered, Jones (1925-1998) only five years later led a similar breakaway to form the National Catholic Humane Society, which in 1977 became the International Society for Animal Rights. Jones headed the society until 1995.

Edith J. Goode & Alice Morgan Wright late in life. (HSUS photo)

“Humane slaughter became an immediate priority,” Unti continued, “and took up a substantial portion of the organization’s resources. In 1956, Myers and HSUS director Edith J. Goode,” who with her lifelong companion Alice Morgan Wright was better known as a “suffragette” and pioneering feminist, “secured the endorsement of the 11-million-member General Federation of Women’s Clubs for a bill to require humane slaughter, and Myers provided two hours of testimony at congressional hearings on the subject. When the Humane Slaughter Act passed in 1958, Myers was ebullient that ‘hundreds of local societies could lift their eyes from local problems to a great national cruelty.’”

The cartoon hunter Elmer Fudd was reputedly modeled on Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. president from 1952 to 1960.

Lust to Kill

Myers, author of a 1952 anti-hunting pamphlet called Lust to Kill, agreed with Amory that opposing sport hunting should remain a humane priority, as if had been since the dawn of the U.S. humane movement in the mid-19th century. Many other humane leaders of the time disagreed, especially after Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. president 1953-1961, became the first president in generations to hunt during his term of office.

Wrote Unti, “While acknowledging the complexity of motives” among hunters and striving to avoid ‘a wholesale condemnation of hunters,’ Myers observed that one of the most ‘damning counts’ against hunting was that ‘its excitement, its genuine tests of skill, its moments of beauty, make good men participants in evil.’”

Added Myers, in a later and still accurate assessment of the limits of conservationism and environmentalism, “I know of no national conservation organization—including Audubon—that is officially interested in the suffering of animals. Most conservation organizations are dedicated to ‘management’ of animals for man’s benefit. That doesn’t run very close to our own philosophy.”

Mel Morse in 1958.
(Marin County Humane Society photo)

Heart attacks

Myers, according to Unti, in 1962 joined HSUS staff member Philip Colwell in “helping Mississippi law enforcement authorities to infiltrate a gang of dogfighters,” at a time and in a place where the Ku Klux Klan, with the help of friends in law enforcement, had run dogfighting as a fundraising protection racket since the 19th century.

But Myers had suffered his first heart attack in 1954, “just a few months before founding The HSUS,” according to Until, “and suffered a second one in 1958, during the campaign for humane slaughter.”

Myers retired from the leadership of HSUS in mid-1962, in favor of Oliver Evans, who headed the organization until 1968, preceding the brief tenure of Mel Morse. Morse, HSUS president 1968-1970, introduced policies more closely resembling those of HSUS today than those of his successors, Hoyt and Irwin, but rapidly lost control of the board.

(See Humane education classic: Ordeal of the Animals.)

Myers, meanwhile, died from his third heart attack on December 1, 1963, at age 59.

(Part 2, concerning Cleveland Amory and Ann Landers, and part 3, about Ann Cottrell Free and Henry Spira, will follow.)

Beth & Merritt Clifton at Vegfest 2015 in Seattle.