Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,191

This is the grave of Charles Otis Whitman.

Born in Woodstock, Maine in 1842, Whitman grew up in a Seventh-Day Adventist family, one of the weird new religious movements of the era. He wasn’t a fan. He wanted to join the Union Army in 1862. Defeating the South, ending slavery, keeping the nation together, these seemed like worthy things to the young man. But his parents would not let him since war violated their principles. So he left the church and became a Unitarian.

Whitman went to Bowdoin and graduated in 1868 and then became a school principal for several years. He got interested in the natural world during these years and decided to study it seriously. He wanted to be a scientist. By this time, he was in his 30s and it would have been easy for him to just do this as an amateur and continue his career, but he was quite determined. The only real way to do this at the time was to go to Europe. So he enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Leipzig in 1875 and spent the next three years there, training to be a biologist.

Whitman briefly returned to the U.S. and taught at the new university of Johns Hopkins that brought the European social sciences to this nation. But then he got an interesting offer. The Japanese government wanted to hire him to bring biology to their nation. He wasn’t the first in that job. That was Edward Sylvester Morse, one of the very first American academics to enter the transforming Japan. When Morse returned, he recommended Whitman, who worked there from 1879 to 1881. He brought the modern microscope to Japan. After that, he continued his world tour by working at the University of Naples for a year in 1882. Later, he wrote a book, published in 1886, called The Leeches of Japan. Turns out it wasn’t even about the U.S. military in postwar Okinawa.

Upon his return to the U.S., Whitman at first took a job at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and then ran the Allis Lake Laboratory in Milwaukee, an important early laboratory dedicated to animal research. He also founded the Journal of Morphology in 1887, working with Edward Phelps Allis. That journal still exists today. He took a job at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts and was there from 1889 to 1892. But then the University of Chicago came calling and as it was one one of the fast-rising institutions of higher education with a lot of money and dedication to both the sciences and social sciences, it was perfect for someone like Whitman. He worked there from 1892 until his death.

During this whole period, Whitman was also the founding director of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He was there most summers and given that I’m sure he didn’t have a lot of required teaching duties at Chicago. probably most of the rest of the time too. He really combined research and education in the creation of this laboratory. He strongly believed that researchers also needed to be educators and so he wanted the scientists at the lab to involved in that too. It started by providing a six-week course to rising scientists, a course on invertebrate biology. The MBL is still around today and still an important part of the scientific community, one of several important institutes based in Woods Hole. Today, it is formally affiliated with the University of Chicago, which I guess brings Whitman’s involvement full circle.

Although Whitman’s early work was on invertebrates, not to mention those exciting Japanese leeches, he moved toward being the global expert on pigeons later in his career. In fact, he was in charge of the last existing passenger pigeons before their extinction in 1902 after rapacious Americans slaughtered the entirely of the most common bird species in the United States, not to mention destroying its habitat. He eventually sent the last pigeon, which he called Martha, to the Cincinnati Zoo so that Americans could see it before its death and the extinction of the species. Great job America! Whitman tried to get them to breed to save the species and he tried placing eggs under rock doves, but it didn’t work. Well, none of this is Whitman’s fault, it’s part of the collective sin of Americans.

Whitman refused to accept the theory of evolution as articulated by Charles Darwin and his followers. He was an orthogenesis guy. This was the idea–and this feels very related to Christianity to me, though I make no claims to expertise on 19th century ideas-that all species had an innate desire to improve and that they were determined to get better over time. So this didn’t mean that Whitman totally rejected everything Darwin had written, but he believed that there was a more conscious goal at its core, not just a blind scientific force. In short, evolution was a thing, but that’s because somewhere deep inside, all species wanted greater complexity. But people really want to believe in “progress.”

You see this with discussions of technology too. Everyone who doesn’t like what is happening is a “Luddite” and how can one not support “progress”? The problem with this is that there’s nothing inherently to it. It’s all people projecting their own values onto what is happening in the world, usually people deeply infused with a Christian capitalism, even if they don’t in fact identify as either of those things. But you grow up in it, you are a Christian capitalist. I mean, I just talked about the collective sin of American above and I haven’t been to church except for family functions since the early 90s. Anyway, I digress. But there’s no such thing as “progress.” The term is meaningless except for what it says about the subjective values of the person using it, usually to shut down arguments against whatever they are arguing for. In any case, Whitman actually never addressed this stuff publicly in his lifetime. He never published on it. But in 1919, after his death, a volume of his writings was published posthumously and it included material on this. He may not have wanted it to see the light of day.

Whitman got sick in 1910. It’s said he “caught a chill.” I assume that means he had something and it developed into the pneumonia that killed him. He was 68 years old.

Charles Otis Whitman is buried in Woods Hole Village Cemetery, Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other zoologists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Herbert Haviland Field is in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Malcolm Playfair Anderson is in Oakland, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.