All your strength is in your union.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha
By Bernard Unti
For those long familiar with the two organizations, there was a sense of something old, something new to the corporate combination of The Humane Society of the United States and The Fund for Animals, first made public on November 22. It was fitting that this memorable announcement came on a memorable occasion, 50 years to the day on which The HSUS formally launched its operations as the fledgling National Humane Society.
There was a sense of something old, because for almost four decades, The HSUS and The Fund have been linked by individual employees and by institutional issues. There was a sense of something new, because the intended alliance will result in the creation of a constellation of organizations, operated more efficientlyand to greater effectunder the same management.
In a certain respect, the new combination signifies a kind of reconciliation or reunion, because The Fund for Animals was founded by Cleveland Amory, author, magazine columnist, radio-television commentator, and an HSUS board member between 1962 and 1970. Amory created The Fund in 1967 and subsequently left the HSUS board to devote his energies full-time to the new organization's affairs.
On another level, the agreement to join forces simply formalizes strong, unofficial ties based on steady, significant, and productive collaboration dating to the early 1990s. There has always been more harmony than discord between the two organizations, and in shared litigation, ballot initiative work, and other activities, The HSUS and The Fund have enjoyed an especially close working relationship during the past decade.
The Conscience of a Curmudgeon
Born in 1917 to an affluent Boston family, and raised in a world of comfort and privilege, Cleveland Amory chose a life of service to animals. Brash, colorful, physically imposing, and self-confident, he became one of the most important critics of hunting, trapping, the killing of marine mammals, and the fur industry in the modern era.
Amory launched his literary career in 1939 as the editor of The Harvard Crimson. He joined The Saturday Evening Post upon graduation from college, at 22 its youngest editor ever. During World War II, he served in Army intelligence. After leaving the military, he wrote for The Post, Harpers, Readers Digest, and other magazines, and worked for several newspapers in Arizona. In 1950, he published a novel, Hometown, partly based on his experience managing The Evening Courier in Prescott, Arizona.
Amory's rise to celebrity came with his accounts of the social history of Americas elite classes. His three chronicles of high societyThe Proper Bostonians (1947), The Last Resorts (1952), and Who Killed Society? (1960)became classic works of Americana. By the early 1960s, Amory was well established as a columnist and television critic with the Saturday Review, TV Guide, and Parade magazine. He also had a continuing role as a commentator for NBC's Today show.
Although his great great uncle was George Thorndike Angell, one of the founding figures of anti-cruelty work, and while he fondly recalled the influence that Anna Sewell's Black Beauty had exerted upon him in childhood, Amory dated his true epiphany to a day in the late 1940s or early 1950s when he witnessed a bullfight in Nogales, Mexico. It was a searing experience, but a dozen years would pass before he began to search out organizations working actively to fight cruelty.
When he did get involved in the field, in the early 1960s, Amory found common ground with The HSUS, still in its first decade and still under the leadership of Fred Myers, whom he greatly admired. Amory joined the HSUS board of directors in 1962, and quickly became a national figure in the struggle for animals. Amory began to devote a larger share of his time and energy to humane issues, shifting the mordant wit he usually trained upon hapless television programs onto the perpetrators of cruelty.
His stature as a journalist gave Amory many opportunities to spread the word. In 1963, Amory wrote several Review columns that made the case to reform the transportation and treatment of animals used in research, testing, and educationcolumns that appeared as the U.S. Congress was considering legislation on the subject. Such beliefs sometimes carried lofty pricetags. Amory's piece on cruelty to animals in American laboratories, broadcast that same year on the Today show, proved controversial enough to end his 11-year association with the morning program.
Amory also took an active role in The HSUS's efforts to ban bullfights, then a strong organizational priority. He once stepped into a field with 100 bulls to demonstrate that the animals were docile until provoked. "Cleveland was constantly urging people to write letters of protest against bullfighting, especially in relation to the then booming American tourist trade in France and Spain," recalls longtime HSUS executive vice president Patrick B. Parkes.
Even as Amory frequently leveraged his own celebrity to attract the powerful and the influential to the cause, he did not shy from criticizing those who, however prominent, offended humane sensibilities. In 1966, after Jacqueline Kennedy praised two bullfights she'd attended in Spain as "exciting and beautiful," Amory commented that "it is a sad and singularly ironic footnote to our modern age of violence that Mrs. Kennedy, of all people, who has seen the barbarism of the present era at such tragic firsthand, should now see fit to condone and even compliment the bullfight, which is one of the last relics of the barbarism of the past era."
On occasion, Amory directly participated in HSUS investigations. In 1964, he joined HSUS president Oliver Evans and chief investigator Frank McMahon on a series of unannounced visits to laboratories in the New York area. And a few years later, he and McMahon went to the site of an infamous "bunny bop" in Harmony, North Carolina, where people would herd rabbits into an enclosed area and beat them to death. The incident led directly to the founding of a rabbit sanctuary still operated by The Fund.
Amory Launches The Fund for Animals
Amory's decision to launch The Fund for Animals in 1967 grew from his desire to do more direct care work for animals and more wildlife advocacy. At that time, however, The HSUS's limited budget precluded staff expansion and the adoption of a full-scale wildlife agenda.
Amory ended his association with The HSUS shortly after the appointment of John A. Hoyt as its president in 1970. The Fund for Animals was already operating, and with Amory devoting more of his energy and focus to it, the organization quickly gained a national reputation for wildlife-related activism. Among other accomplishments, Amory put his celebrity acquaintances to use in campaigns against trapping, the wearing of fur, and the clubbing of baby seals. The publication of Mankind: Our Incredible War on Wildlife (1974), an all-out indictment of hunting and wildlife management, established Amory as an advocate for wildlife in America. The book prompted an editorial in The New York Times and a CBS documentary, The Guns of Autumn.
Amory kept The Fund mean and lean, sometimes observing with irony that the name hed chosen had brought more seekers than donors of funds. He relied heavily upon longtime vice president Marian Probst and general counsel Ed Walsh to manage The Fund's day-to-day operations, legal strategy, and institutional defense work.
During the 1970s, an energetic network of field representatives made The Fund for Animals one of the most dynamic national organizations, and helped lay the groundwork for the expansion of grassroots activism throughout North America. If Amory found someone in the field whose work he liked, he would go the extra mile to keep that person working for animals.
Interestingly, Amory's willingness to give dedicated activists a chance to enlist in "a new kind of armythe army of the kind," sparked the careers of a number of individuals who later went to work for The HSUS. Fund alumni who joined HSUS staff included Humane Society International President Patricia Forkan, HSUS President and CEO Wayne Pacelle, and Gretchen Wyler, vice president of The HSUS's Hollywood Office.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Amory and his staff and field representatives extended The Fund's reputation as the central opponent of hunting in the United States. In addition, Amory placed organizational resources and the reputation of The Fund behind some highly ambitious initiatives. In the early 1980s, he opened the group's treasury to underwrite a large-scale removal by air and land of 580 Grand Canyon burros slated for destruction by the National Park Service. Later, he fought a similar battle to prevent the killing of San Clemente Island's goats by the Department of Defense. These efforts opened the way for improved collaboration between humane groups and federal agencies in the handling of imperiled animal populations.
In 1980, after receiving a request from a Fund donor, Amory founded the Black Beauty Ranch in Texas, named in honor of the novel that had inspired him and so many other humanitarians. Soon Black Beauty became the final destination for a parade of mistreated and unwanted animals, including many of the burros, goats, and pigs rescued from certain slaughter by government officials in various locations. This place of happy endings gave Amory special satisfaction, and was also the inspiration for his final book, Ranch of Dreams (1997).
Amory was one of the animal protection movement's most popular conference speakers, and in public appearances his wit and passion were always on display. His self-identification as a curmudgeon set the tone for most of the anecdotes he told about his humane work. He was a masterful storyteller, combining a self-deprecating brand of humor with a more acerbic one that he reserved for hunters, furriers, animal fighters, and other targets.
In 1987, Amory struck gold with his storytelling skills with The Cat Who Came for Christmas, the tale of the abandoned cat, Polar Bear, whom he encountered in a New York alley. The book, along with two sequels, The Cat and the Curmudgeon and The Best Cat Ever, earned Amory a place in the pantheon of America's greatest cat authors, but they also shared the broader work of The Fund's animal defense and rescue activities with a mass audience.
Under Amory's leadership, The Fund kept pace with the changing circumstances and fortunes of animal protection in America. Fund activists were among the first to challenge hunter harassment laws in states like Connecticut and Maryland. The Fund revived interest in the ballot initiative process, using it to meaningful effect on issues related to hunting. Fund attorneys registered a slew of successes in endangered species litigation.
In 1990, The Fund stepped into the fight to halt pigeon shoots in Pennsylvania and other states. Skillfully modifying their tactics over the course of the decade, Fund staff members engineered the permanent cancellation of the Fred Coleman Memorial shoot at Hegins, Pennsylvania in 2000. This historic victory brought an end to the world's largest single-day slaughter of birds, held annually for more than six decades.
With Amory's death in 1998, Fund leadership faced the substantial challenge of extending the work of an organization that had been so identified with one man. Board and staff members attempted to reinforce Amory's legacy by maintaining a tight focus on the kinds of issues they'd worked on while Amory was alive. The Fund enjoyed a steady growth in membership support in the years that followed, growing its annual budget from $4.3 million in 1997 to $7.5 million in 2004 and increasing active donors from 35,000 to 85,000 during the same period.
The Union is Set
The proposal to bring The HSUS and The Fund together flowed naturally from a series of close collaborations during the 1990s. Together, the organizations brought successful lawsuits in relation to the Makah whale hunt in November 2003 and pheasant stocking on the Cape Cod National Seashore in September 2003. They also cooperated on a number of winning ballot initiatives, including those which banned cockfighting in Arizona (1998), Missouri (1998), and Oklahoma (2002); those which banned the use of steel-jaw leghold traps in Arizona (1994), California (1998), Colorado (1996), Massachusetts (1996), and Washington (2000); and one which banned gestation crates for sows in Florida (2002). During the same period, the two groups have also co-published HumaneLines, Humane Action Alert, and the Humane Scorecard, and worked to build the Humane Action Network.
The formal combination of The HSUS and The Fund is set for January 1, 2005. Among the immediate benefits of the agreement are the establishment of a litigation department and a central campaigns unit, and the creation of a new 501 (c) (4) organization, The HSUS Fund for Animals, which will focus resources and attention on the shaping of public policy and legislation around the country.
Officials from both organizations, including The Fund's Board of Directors Chair Marian Probst and President Michael Markarian, worked for months to iron out the basic details of the arrangement, and to address the myriad challenges it presented in the realm of legal affairs, human resources, program strategy, and other areas.
However, on the most important issuethe rationale for their unionall parties agreed. "Our groups have decided to join forces not out of necessity, but because we believe we can do more to help animals together than we can do operating separately," David O. Wiebers, M.D., chair of The HSUS's Board of Directors, commented. "By combining resources the new entity will bring unprecedented energy to the battles we take on."
"When I went to work for Cleveland in 1961, he was already deeply involved with The HSUS," says Probst. "In the decades since, there have been many exciting and forward-thinking developments in the world of animal protection, but in my view the union of The Fund and The HSUS is the most exciting and has the greatest potential for animals. This homecoming would be Cleveland's dream come true."
Bernard Unti, senior policy advisor and special assistant to the president, received his doctorate in U.S. history in 2002 from American University. His book, Protecting All Animals: A Fifty-Year History of The Humane Society of the United States, is available from Humane Society Press.