Henry Bergh

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Henry Bergh (portrait)
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Henry Bergh (born August 29, 1813 in New York City , † March 12, 1888 ibid) was an American reformer and diplomat. He was the key figure in the founding of the first Society for Animal Protection in the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in 1866, and finally various branches across the country. The company's statutes were adopted by the state of New York in the same year and the ASPCA was entrusted with the authority to enforce them.

Early years

Bergh was the youngest son of Christian and Elizabeth Bergh (nee Ivers) and grew up with his brother Edwin and sister Jane in a two-story house in southeast Manhattan . The region fell into a boom of immigration , particularly from Ireland, Europe in general, and China. Christian Bergh was a successful naval architect and benefited massively economically from the war of 1812 . During Henry's first years until 1815, Christian Bergh worked on Lake Ontario for the US Navy. Henry was educated at Columbia College in the 1834 class, but left without a degree in 1835 to work for C. Bergh and Co. - his father's company. Christian Bergh retired two years later and the brothers Henry and Edwin restructured the company. The big shipbuilding business had long been over by this time and the company ceased operations completely before Christian Bergh's death in 1843. Nonetheless, the family's business had made considerable fortunes, so that Henry Bergh never had to work for economic reasons.

Bergh as a diplomat

In 1839 Henry Bergh and the English noblewoman Catharine Matilda Taylor married, with whom he made the first of many trips to Europe in 1847. They traveled for three years and visited France, Spain, Germany, Austria, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Switzerland as well as England and Scotland. After their return, the childless couple continued to socialize in noble circles and visited the Orient and Russia on another trip, of which Henry Bergh was particularly impressed in his notes. Back in the United States, Bergh began to ask about a diplomatic post abroad, which was only granted to him with the appointment of Abraham Lincoln , whose Foreign Minister William H. Seward also resided in New York and had excellent contacts in Russia.

In early July of 1863, Heny and Matilda began their journey to the court of Tsar Alexander II in Saint Petersburg . Although Bergh initially reported enthusiastically about his work in letters and was also in the favor of the tsar, he resigned after just over a year with the official reason that the climate was not good for his health. ( Lane & Zawistowski 2006 ; pp. 9-10) assume that this is a pretext, although Bergh was indeed affected by various respiratory ailments throughout his life. Instead, they speculate, based on Bergh's notes, that an incident in a carriage in which Bergh prevented the driver from hitting an injured horse must have caused a radical change of heart in Bergh.

Foundation of the ASPCA

After his resignation, the couple returned to the USA via England. Bergh spent a few months there in 1865 with the Earl of Harrowby and John Colam , who at the time, as President and Secretary, directed the fortunes of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals , which must have had a significant influence on Bergh's later work. By then, Bergh himself had also assembled a considerable collection of articles on animal policy and philanthropic matters that went back to the 1820s. Richard Martin was one of the main influences on Bergh's thinking among the many authors .

Gap: founding process and charter.

The New York Times published the full minutes of the inaugural meeting of the ASPCA on May 22nd. Through the law of 1866, the ASPCA was given extensive executive powers by the state of New York: On the one hand, the employees of the company were allowed to enforce the "anti-cruelty laws" and, on the other hand, the New York City police were legally obliged to help the company if necessary. Bergh acquired a position as a prosecutor in New York City himself in 1868 with the chief prosecutor A. Oakey Hall . Charles S. Fairchild - then Attorney General of the state - finally authorized Bergh in 1876 to represent New York State before the state court. His attempts to place himself in the police commission and in the parks commission for the ASPCA failed, however.

Most of the cases, which Bergh managed double-digit numbers on typical days, involved the abuse of horses or animals that were about to be slaughtered. They went through the courts without significant controversy and typically ended with sentences of just under double-digit dollars and, somewhat less often, with a few days in prison. A few cases, however, caused a greater stir.

Shortly after the ASPCA was called up, Bergh sued a chicken slaughterhouse for removing the feathers from the conscious chickens using a scalding bath. According to the presentation of the entrepreneurs, which the court also followed, the chickens were stabbed in the brain beforehand. Bergh insisted that the chickens had to be beheaded according to the law, which the entrepreneurs blocked because they settled with their customers by weight. This early legal defeat on the one hand, but also because it became public that the court had to adjourn a domestic violence case because of this case, Bergh received a lot of bad press.

In another scandalous case, a crew abducted forty turtles from the Caribbean, unthreaded their fins, piled them on their shells and left them without food during the week-long crossing. In court, the status of the turtles as "animals" and thus the applicability of the anti-cruelty statutes was disputed. The court finally acquitted the crew and the captain because it found that the turtles were indeed animals, but that as insects they could in principle not feel any pain.

Bergh as a child protector

Probably the first documented case in which Bergh stood up for children concerns a certain eight-year-old Emily Thompson in 1871, who was abused by her foster mother. Bergh was made aware of the facts by an anonymous woman and had Emily investigated the injury and questioned the neighbors. Bergh subsequently took the case to court, but lost after Emily revoked her stepmother's incriminations in a hearing. Despite the legal failure, the surviving grandmother became aware of the case and finally took care of the child.

About three years after this case, Bergh was involved in the affair of the then nine-year-old Mary Ellen Wilson . An Etta Wheeler, who was employed by the Church as a social worker, first came up to Bergh and described her chance encounter with Mary, during which she had found severe injuries in the child. Bergh initially hesitated to take on the matter and was also not convinced by Wheeler of the argument that Mary, after all, was also an animal and at least as such could claim the activity of the ASPCA. He finally intervened as a "private person" and persuaded his lawyer friend, Elbridge Thomas Gerry , to investigate the matter. He confirmed the abuse and eventually took the case to a judge, who agreed to remove the child from the family and place it in a home. This case and the corresponding public reporting led to the founding of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1874 , whose initiators, in addition to Henry Bergh, were above all Elbridge Thomas Gerry and John D. Wright .

Bergh and the press

In his forties, Bergh tried his hand at writing and published prose ( The Streets of New-York , The Portentous Telegram , The Ocean Paragon ), poetry ( Married Off ), and some theater pieces, of which Love's Alternative was produced in Philadelphia. These attempts flopped both with the audience and in the best of lukewarm reviews, with the content most frequently being accused of lack of humor.

The unsuccessful author benefited his later political projects, in which he worked carefully and intensively with the press. At all major events in the area of ​​the ASPCA, Bergh ensured through personal correspondence and his many contacts that many journalists were present. Bergh and his concerns were also often denigrated both as ridiculousness and as an affront to humanistic or religious values ​​in political and satirical writings of his time. Among the various polemical names, "The Great Meddler" (about the great meddler ) was particularly widespread and was to be understood as a satirical on Abraham Lincoln's nickname The Great Emancipator , which was common to everyone at the time.

  • Typical contemporary representations

  • Typical not only for his time, the accusation of silly emotionality in the face of animal suffering, as well as depictions in which political work for non-human animals is at the expense of people who in Bergh's caricatures often experience rejection, coldness or even violence.

  • Darwin experienced similar scorn from his contemporaries for his theses of an evolutionary continuity between humans and other animals. Here is a cartoon in which Bergh takes the side against Darwin for a crying gorilla, so that the gorilla does not have to pay alimony to people because of their relatives.

  • Scene in which Bergh sided with a horse in an "overcrowded" wagon. In the absence of motorized local transport, the massive use of and public violence against horses was both part of the city images and the political breeding ground that made the success of the early ASPCA possible.

Death and burial

Sculpture by John Mahoney (1891).

Bergh broke his collarbone in an accident in 1883 and his health generally deteriorated. After his wife died in May or June 1887 after a long illness, Henry Bergh hardly left the house either. He succumbed to heart disease and chronic breathing difficulties on March 12, 1888 at 5:00 a.m. The devotional took place on March 16 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church . The funeral was delayed until March 24th due to a severe storm. Bergh was buried next to his wife in Green-Wood Cemetery . Phineas Taylor Barnum , with whom Bergh had a lifelong private feud, was one of the pallbearers. In a eulogy probably applied to Bergh, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote :

Among the noblest of the land
Though he may count himself the least
That man I honor and revere
Who, without favor, without fear,
In the great city dares to stand
The Friend of every friendless Beast.

Movies

literature

  • Marion S. Lane, Stephen L. Zawistowski: Heritage of Care: The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals . Praeger, December 30, 2007, ISBN 0275990214 .
  • Diane L. Beers: For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States . Swallow Press, July 1, 2006, ISBN 0804010870 .
  • Michigan Historical Reprint Series: Married off. (A Newport sketch.) By Henry Bergh. With many comic illustrations. . Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library, December 20, 2005, ISBN 1425503098 .

Web links

Commons : Henry Bergh  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ ( Lane & Zawistowski 2006 ; pp. 1–3)
  2. ↑ ( Lane & Zawistowski 2006 ; pp. 5–8)
  3. ↑ ( Lane & Zawistowski 2006 ; p. 13)
  4. ↑ The signatories included John T. Hoffman , A. Oakey Hall , John A. Dix , Hamilton Fish , August Belmont , Alexander T. Stewart , George Talbot Olyphant , Peter Cooper , John Jacob Astor Jr. , Frank Leslie , Moses Beach , Horace Greeley , William Cullen Bryant , James Lenox , Horatio Potter , John McCloskey ( Lane & Zawistowski 2006 ; pp. 16-17)
  5. ↑ ( Lane & Zawistowski 2006 ; p. 20)
  6. ↑ ( Lane & Zawistowski 2006 ; p. 22)
  7. ↑ ( Lane & Zawistowski 2006 ; p. 23)
  8. ↑ Stephen Lazoritz, Eric A. Shelman: Before Mary Ellen. . In: Child Abuse & Neglect: The International Journal . 20, No. 3, 1996, pp. 235-37.
    • Frank R Ascione: Children and Animals: Exploring the Roots of Kindness , 1st Edition, Purdue University Press, February 2005, ISBN 1557533830 , pp. 7-10.
  9. ↑ Stephen Lazoritz: Whatever happened to Mary Ellen? . In: Child abuse & neglect . 14, No. 2, 1990, pp. 143-149.
  10. ↑ ( Lane & Zawistowski 2006 ; p. 6)
  11. ↑ Details on the sculpture.
  12. ↑ ( Lane & Zawistowski 2006 ; p. 29) Barnum apparently had a late change of heart, joined the ASPCA, founded a corresponding society in Bridgeport and erected a statue for Bergh.
  13. ↑ Possibly also was George Angell meant. See Rod Preece: Awe for the tiger, love for the lamb: a chronicle of sensibility to animals . Routledge, London 2003, ISBN 0415943639 , p. 285.
  14. ↑ Frances E., Illustrated By WF Stecher Clarke: Poetry's Plea for Animals: an Anthology of Justice and Mercy for Our Kindred in Fur and Feathers . Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., Inc., 1927, p 280 .
personal data
SURNAME Bergh, Henry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES The Great Meddler
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American reformer and diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH August 29, 1813
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 1888
Place of death New York City