Palace of Deception by Darrin Lunde describes the lives of three men, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Roy Chapman Andrews, and William Akeley, who were instrumental in the creation of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The book seeks to marry and intertwine what are really four separate stories into a coherent narrative. Each of the stories was interesting: but I felt the whole didn’t quite do justice to any of the stories.
I’ve always been a fan of Roy Chapman Andrews. I first learned of him as a graduate student when I attending a workshop at Beloit College. Chapman grew up in Beloit, graduated from Beloit College, and became an adventurer who was, in many ways, the inspiration for Indiana Jones. When I saw this book that aimed to describe his amazing stories of adventure, I was hooked.
The AMNH was actually founded by Albert Bickmore, who had trained with Louis Agassiz, with money raised from wealthy New York robber barons. But it was under Osborn that the AMNH grew and took shape as an institution.
Osborn was a follower of Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton was a statistician who extended the thinking of Darwin to create eugenics and social Darwinism. Osborn — not unlike racists today — became convinced that immigrants were endangering the “superior” race, and he began to use the museum to propagandize this theory. He was also suspicious of laboratory science, and preferred the term “naturalist” for people who were studying the natural world. He hired both Roy Chapman Andrews and William Akeley as part of his plan to develop the museum.
Roy Chapman Andrews, unlike Indiana Jones, was primarily a field biologist. He wanted to document and collect specimens of animals in regions of the world that had not yet been studied by Western science. He was successful at raising money for long expeditions to Asia (Japan, Korea, China, and Mongolia) that collected animals, and later fossils, to bring back to the AMNH. His exploits were extraordinary and the book touches on a number of them.
William Akeley was a taxidermist. He developed a number of innovative techniques to create elaborate dioramas that showed animals in their natural setting and also went on long expeditions, principally to Africa, to collect big game (elephants, lions, and gorillas). Many people believed that Africa would be settled by white people, much as North America had been, and that all of the large animals would be driven to extinction.
Each of the four stories, about the museum and these three men, is interesting in itself. There is a lot of fascinating detail, and the book does a good job of showing the complexity of the history around the subject. The book is also timely, given the current fascist push toward expelling immigrants and promulgating a racist “great replacement” theory.
At the same time, the whole doesn’t quite hang together as a coherent story. The individual stories have the feeling of being incomplete as each has been subordinated to the overarching narrative. It’s still a good read, however.
