Retrospect

Thad to shad: Meet Bass

Thaddeus Norris knew more about fish than anyone. So, when he proposed bringing hungry black bass to live in local streams with the weak, declining shad, it seemed like a good idea.

Humans learn by trial and error.

It’s true in medicine, where treatments once accepted are found worthless or dangerous. For centuries, physicians bled the sick until they realized that the practice weakened (and, often, killed) patients.

It’s true with fish. Since ancient times, fishermen who want fish in a body of water have put them there. Only later did they discover the downside. Locally, fishermen led by 19^th Century “pisciculturist” Thaddeus Norris (1811-1877) decided to make their sport more interesting by introducing fish not previously found in local rivers and creeks. Later, fish experts discovered that the new fish – bass, in particular – eat the eggs and young of the American shad, and thereby helped push that species further into decline.

“People were struggling to figure out a way to simply get fish to live in increasingly polluted rivers as the Industrial Revolution transformed the landscape of America,” said Todd Larson, Ph.D., visiting professor of history at Xavier University, Cincinnati, and a blogger on the history of fishing. “It seemed a good idea at the time to try and replace a dying fish, the shad, with a heartier one, the bass.”

Born in Warrenton, Va., in 1811, Norris grew up in West Virginia, where he learned to fish. At 18, he moved to Philadelphia where he was a retailer for 40 years. Norris was sufficiently successful that, when his American Angler's Book was published in 1864, one reviewer was able to describe the author as "one of our rich merchants." He married Dorothea Abel in 1837, and had from three to nine children, depending on the source.

In 1861, Norris closed his business – Thaddeus Norris & Co. – and turned to fishing. According to Larson, the decision may have been a result of Union confiscation of his company’s New Orleans branch, which cost him more than $200,000 by modern reckoning.

As a rich man, Norris was similar to other rich Americans who, in the late 19^th Century, had the time and resources to convert mere pastimes into expensive hobbies. Often, these hobbies were an attempt to emulate European gentry. Golf, with ancient roots in Scotland, arrived in the 1880s and immediately inspired private clubs at which it could be played with others of the same social class. Tennis, too, has ancient roots, though the modern game dates to the mid-19^th Century. The first tournament was played at Wimbledon in 1877, and the U.S. National Lawn Tennis Association was formed in 1881. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs discovered a market for constantly improving gear. Both golf clubs and tennis rackets evolved from wood to metal to fiberglass and, now, modern composite materials.

Fishing is more ancient. Our utilitarian ancestors fished with bare hands, spears and, later, nets to catch as many fish as possible. The issue was survival, not sport. Fly fishing, the art of fooling a fish with an artificial “fly” that gently lands on the water, is also ancient. The Roman poet Martial (40-ca. 102) may have written the earliest reference to fly-fishing: “Who has not seen the scarus rise, decoyed and killed by fraudful flies?” But its purpose was utilitarian; fly fishing was used on rivers too shallow, fast and rocky for nets.

Modern fly fishing has been traced to Scotland and northern England. The first book on the subject, A Treatyse on Fysshynge with an Angle (1496), was very popular. Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler (1653) is still in print. (An angler is one who fishes with a hook.)

In America, recreational fishing was banned in some colonies, but not in liberal Philadelphia. In 1732, locals founded the Schuylkill Fishing Company, the oldest sporting club in the world. By the 1740s, Philadelphians could buy the latest imported English equipment from a variety of merchants. According to fishing-tackle expert Steve Vernon, George Washington and several delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention spent off-hours fishing at Valley Forge. Earlier, he wrote, Benjamin Franklin had designed a fishing boat with an oval sail that swiveled to the horizontal to function as an umbrella.

“(Franklin’s) drawing illustrates what appears to be a small fleet of rowboats equipped with satellite antennas,” wrote Vernon.

Before 1800, fishing tackle – hooks, lines, floats, rods and reels – was manufactured in several U.S. cities, including Philadelphia. Most were aimed at the mass market. The fussiest and richest anglers often chose to have their equipment handmade. Norris helped supply these wants.

Norris had returned to his boyhood sport in the mid-1840s, becoming a proficient fly fisher. In 1848, Philadelphia writer Jones Wister witnessed a fly-casting competition at which Norris bet $100 (more than $2,500 today) that he could outcast William Cadwalder:

Time and time again Cadwalder threw his 'fly' out over the water, trying to outdistance that thrown by Mr. Norris, but in vain, as the latter's 'fly' soared far beyond his own. Both men had beautifully equipped rods and reels, which were envied by me. The onlookers said that Norris had the best rod, which he had made himself. At any rate, it soon became evident that Cadwalder had lost the bet.

After retiring, Norris made rods for others at his home on Logan Square. His trout and salmon rods – made of ironwood, lancewood, greenheart and rent and glued bamboo – were considered among the best of their time. He even made his own ferrules – metal connectors that join a rod’s sections. In 1873, fishing writer William Cowper Prime mentioned taking “many hundred pounds of fish in Europe, Asia, Africa and America; and I would not part with either of my (Norris) rods for a hundred times its cost."

But it was The American Angler’s Book that made Norris famous, and his rods sought.

The 692-page book Norris produced, said a New York Times reviewer, “may almost be called an encyclopedia of the subject." In addition to describing each American game-fish and how to catch it, Norris told how to make a rod, how to tie flies and how to behave. “Fishing,” wrote Norris, “is a recreation, and a calmer of unquiet thoughts” which should be defended “from the aspersions and ridicule of those who cannot appreciate its quiet joys.” Fishing, he believed, was about being a better person, not about catching the bigger fish.

Norris used his prominence to advocate for fishing interests. In an 1869 article in Lippincott’s Magazine, for instance, he argued that dam owners should be required to build fish ladders to allow migrating fish to reach their spawning grounds. He also proposed heavy penalties for those who dumped “any poisonous or deleterious matter” into rivers and streams. Taken together, concluded Norris, pollution and dams were making the once-common American shad a rarity.

“A single shad furnished a substantial meal for a day laborer and his large family,” when Norris arrived in Philadelphia in 1829, he wrote. “Now, it is a luxury beyond his means.”

Among fisherman, “Uncle Thad” became a beloved figure. But he had an underside: Among African-American scholars, he is remembered as a racist whose magazine articles ridiculed “negroes” – and he didn’t use that word. His was also the first written account of “Bre’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby,” a story later made famous by Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus tales.

The American Angler’s Book was followed by another classic, American Fish Culture (1868), which detailed all then known about breeding trout, salmon and other water creatures, including oysters. This was an important contribution to the current diversity of fish in inland U.S. waters and was based on his own private efforts raising and stocking fish.

Norris started a trout farm soon after American Fish Culture was published, but sold the Bloomsbury, N.J., business in 1870. Perhaps merely getting it started was the point; state fish commissions later formed to assume this duty. (Private stocking of public streams is now illegal.) Also in 1870, Norris raised $1,116.50 from “a number of public spirited gentlemen” around Philadelphia to bring black bass to the Delaware.

According to the Delaware County Republican, this required an expedition to Harper’s Ferry, W.Va., where local men were paid 25 cents for each for 706 bass placed in two large tanks equipped with aerators. The tanks were loaded on a railroad car and, 46 hours later, arrived near Easton, Pa.

“Many of the bass were of noble proportions, about the size of an adult shad,” reported the newspaper. “The large number that survived the trip as soon as placed in the Delaware swam off as lively as if in their native Potomac.” This was later repeated in the Lehigh, Schuylkill and other rivers.

And once in local rivers, the bass ate.

Shad reproduce like salmon. They live in the ocean, but spawn by swimming upriver to release their eggs in fresh water. The eggs fall to the bottom where they adhere to grass or rocks, and are left unguarded. They hatch after a few days and, in theory, are large enough to survive on their own by the time the current carries them to the sea.

Bass, meanwhile, like to hide in nooks and crannies, among rocks and grass.

Predators had always preyed on young shad. And pollution and dams were probably bigger threats. But the bass didn’t help. And fishermen couldn’t agree there was a problem. Some liked bass better. Bass are a strong, energetic type of fish. They’re more fun to catch than shad. In 1876, Norris associate H.J. Reeder – insisting “no fish was more valuable” than bass – told the American Fish Culturists Association that they would “never interfere” with the value of shad streams.

In the 20^th Century, the shad nearly disappeared. In 1949 only three shad were caught by a commercial fisherman at Lambertville, N.J. By 1953, there were none. Shad have since rebounded since hurricane-driven floods in 1955 flushed from the rivers many pollutants and man-made obstacles. Perhaps the designer of the shad thought it time those errors were pointed out.

Giving good meeting

In 1969, after a four-day conference at Haverford College, Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg came away with an idea.

Never underestimate the potential of a good meeting. Tough advice when you’re scheduled for back-to-back speakers and a chicken dinner. But there’s always the possibility of a “Eureka!” moment like that which came to a stressed-out consultant attending a four-day conference at Haverford College in 1969.

Dismayed about the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg (b. 1931) had begun attending anti-war meetings. In August, he came to Haverford to attend the 13^th Triennial Conference of War Resisters International. Inspired by attendees’ conviction that they could end the war – and their willingness to be imprisoned in the attempt – Ellsberg had a radical thought.

“As of this evening,” he later wrote, “I realized that I had the power and the freedom to act the same way.”

A month later, Ellsberg walked out of the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif., carrying the first of 7,000 pages of a secret report detailing the lies on which U.S. involvement in Vietnam was based. Newspapers would label the documents “The Pentagon Papers.”

Born in Chicago, Ellsberg was the son of an engineer and a secretary. He graduated from Harvard in 1952, and then joined the Marines in which he commanded a rifle company. Ellsberg later earned a Ph.D. in economics and joined RAND, a non-profit think tank that advises the U.S. military. (RAND is short for Research ANd Development.) His specialty was the control of nuclear weapons.

In 1964, Ellsberg joined the Pentagon to work on Vietnam. The following year, he was transferred to Saigon to evaluate the situation in the countryside.

“It didn’t take very long to discover in Vietnam that we weren’t likely to be successful there,” Ellsberg wrote in his 2002 book Secrets. “You don’t have to be an ichthyologist to know when a fish stinks.”

Ellsberg had been a committed Cold Warrior since high school. He remembered the Soviet Union’s overthrow, in 1948, of a budding democracy in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade. In Vietnam, he strongly desired a victory over that country’s Soviet-backed communists. But then Ellsberg had seen documentation of Johnson Administration lies that justified the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizing force in Vietnam. The chief result, he thought at the time, was to demonstrate Lyndon Johnson’s toughness and assure his victory in that year’s election.

In Vietnam, Ellsberg found a South Vietnamese army whose main criteria for promotion was connection to rich, Catholic, land-owning families that supported the unelected president, Ngo Dinh Diem. An army which avoided the Viet Cong. In Vung Tau province, Ellsberg and an officer were flagged down by a South Vietnamese lieutenant who explained that the road was closed because Viet Cong troops were crossing a mile or so ahead. The Americans ignored the officer’s protests, drove on and saw nothing.

“He was worried that, if we went through, he wouldn’t have any excuse for lying around,” the officer explained. “He’d have to move out with his troops and find out if there really was anything in there.”

Ellsberg observed a school-building program from which concrete was stolen and sold on the black market, usually going into private projects for the politically connected. The missing concrete was made up with sand, so new schools often began to crumble within a week. Such corruption, he concluded, made Vietnamese villagers angrier at their government and the Americans than if the program hadn’t existed at all.

Ellsberg also witnessed the power of Vietnamese nationalism; he saw insurgents – boys – pop up in the middle of American battalions and fire at U.S. troops surrounding them. “They thought they were shooting at trespassers, foreign occupiers,” he wrote, “that they had a right to be there and we didn’t.” And he noticed much casual brutality, when Americans and their allies burned houses and killed civilians for no compelling reason.

Finally, he observed the routine way in which U.S. officials lied. In 1967, on a long flight between Saigon and Washington, Ellsberg heard Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara despair about the deteriorating situation. Ten minutes after landing, McNamara told reporters: “Gentlemen, I’ve just come back from Vietnam, and I’m glad to be able to tell you that we’re showing great progress in every dimension of our effort.”

Already disillusioned, Ellsberg’s despair deepened when he returned to a Pentagon in which everyone knowledgeable about the war knew it to be hopeless, but said nothing. Asked to compile a study of the decision-making that had led to the conflict, he agreed to help draft one volume.

Ellsberg was a wonk. He didn’t take on the project so much because he wanted to but to gain “access to the whole study for a comparative analysis and search for patterns.” (His question: How could we have been so stupid?) What he eventually learned from the project was that Johnson’s approach was not an anomaly. U.S. presidents had been lying about Vietnam for more than 20 years. Truman had aided the French secretly; Eisenhower had OK’d the crushing of political dissent; Kennedy had sent the first troops and called them “advisers.”

With no solution that might be called victory to allow U.S. withdrawal, Ellsberg placed his hopes on a new president. Those hopes died when it became apparent that Richard Nixon – equally reluctant to stain his reputation by losing a war – would escalate the war. Dismayed, Ellsberg turned to people he had previously dismissed: Anti-war protesters.

“My knowledge of such people still came almost exclusively from media accounts, overwhelmingly negative, in which they were presented as being, in varying degree, extremist, simplistic, pro-Communist or pro-NLF, fanatic, anti-American, dogmatic,” wrote Ellsberg, “ I went to Haverford in part to find out if these labels were accurate.”

Founded in 1921, War Resisters International and its U.S. affiliate, the War Resisters League, were full of such people. They had opposed both world wars, nuclear testing and civil defense drills. Many were involved in the civil rights movement.

Igal Roodenko (1917-1991), vice chairman, had been arrested with Bayard Rustin in 1947 for violating a North Carolina law requiring segregated seating on buses. When the judge learned Roodenko was Jewish, he sentenced him to 90 days – three times Rustin’s sentence – as a lesson to other “Jews from New York” who might “upset the customs of the South.”

Ralph DiGia (1914-2008), administrative secretary, was a conscientious objector jailed during World War II because the draft didn’t recognize his secular rationale. In jail, he organized hunger strikes to integrate the dining halls.

In 1969, WRL – based in Manhattan – was focused on protest organizing. League minutes record 200 participants in an April 4 vigil outside New York’s Selective Service headquarters and a “tremendous” turnout for a rally and parade the next day. Also on the agenda was a planned visit to Cuba and a campaign to organize tax resistance.

“Some felt that adults should match the challenge of the young who are saying ‘no’ to the draft by saying ‘no’ to war taxes,” read the minutes.

It was a shoestring organization with a counter-culture sensibility. WRL’s April financial report showed “cash on hand” of $760 and payables of $14,385. In July, the group found it was no longer welcome at the New Jersey farm it had used for summer retreats. Too much marijuana and nude sunbathing, said the landlord.

Plus, the feds were watching: When WRL staged a fund-raiser to finance relocation of its office, FBI agents recorded the names of those who entered. In May, after WRL offices were ransacked, New York police showed no inclination to investigate.

WRI had never convened in the United States. Some activists thought it shouldn’t do so as long as the war continued. But others, arguing that the war made the United States the logical choice, carried the day. Haverford agreed to host the event for $10 per person, room and board. The theme, “Liberation and Revolution – Gandhi’s Challenge,” marked the centennial of Gandhi’s birth and provided coherence to topics that ranged from U.S. militarism to economic justice in southern India.

There were last-minute changes. David Harris (Joan Baez’s husband) was scheduled to speak about draft resistance. But he had been jailed by the time the conference started.

Ellsberg was impressed by Robert Eaton (b. 1944), a Quaker who, in 1967, had sailed to Hanoi on the Phoenix to deliver medical supplies; in 1968 had been arrested in Hungary for protesting Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia; and, that week, was scheduled to be imprisoned for refusing the draft. So, when attendees took a break on Wednesday to hold a vigil outside the U.S. courthouse where Eaton was being sentenced, Ellsberg went along.

Still professionally connected to RAND and the Pentagon, Ellsberg worried about being recognized. But he couldn’t decline. “A man I admired was being sentenced to prison for an act of conscience,” he recalled. “There was an invitation to join…in the company of one of the heroes of the century, Pastor Martin Niemoller, and others I admired no less. How could I not go?” Handing out leaflets left him feeling liberated.

(Niemoller [1892-1984], the anti-Nazi theologian most famous for his poem “First they came…”, was a WRI vice chair and conference participant.)

Ellsberg’s epiphany came the last day. In concluding remarks, Randy Kehler, head of WRL-San Francisco, told of being the only male left his office. All the others were in prison.

“When I go, it will be all women in the office,” Kehler said. “But I can look forward to jail, without any remorse or fear… because I know that everyone here and lots of people around the world like you will carry on.” The audience stood and cheered. Ellsberg slipped into a men’s room and sobbed.

“I had never cried like this before except when I learned that Bobby Kennedy was dead,” he wrote. “A line kept repeating itself in my head: We are eating our young.”

A few weeks later, Ellsberg asked a friend if he knew anyone with access to a copier.

A productive meeting, indeed.