Biographical Materials: John Treadwell Nichols

Today I spent some time looking into the box marked Biographical Materials. This is only one of the eighteen boxes of the John Treadwell Nichols’ collection that I’ve been cataloguing this spring. The Biographical Materials section generally takes up a folder or two in collections that center around an individual, and it generally consists of letters between the individual’s relatives and the institution acquiring the personal materials. Although it’s surprising to see the difference in the font, the speech, and the tone, the most jarring thing about the Biographical Materials is realizing how the world really saw the person. In the case of John Treadwell Nichols, the majority of the folder was devoted to the correspondence between his youngest son, David G. Nichols, and various naturalists around the United States.

During his career here at the Museum, John Treadwell Nichols not only over-saw the development of the Department of Herpetology and Ichthyology when it was organized in 1909, but he became the first curator of the newly separated Department of Ichthyology in 1919 after Bashford Dean stepped down. In addition, Nichols founded the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH) and its journal, Copeia, out of his small office here in 1913 while still in his twenties.

The letters in this box between David G. Nichols and the zoologists around the United States date from the early to mid-eighties. Interest in the founding of Copeia had begun to emerge among the zoologist community as the ASIH publication approached its 75^th Anniversary. However, in the letters addressed to David, the members confess that they haven’t found any information relating to Nichols and the journal’s founding. A zoologist from Ohio State University observed that even the Museum of Natural History didn’t have a collection of Nichols’ records and “kn[e]w nothing of his files” or their whereabouts. This lack of information on John Treadwell Nichols was shocking, when he contributed hundreds of articles and was President of ASIH during the early thirties in addition to his position as curator for the Museum.

The responses from David G. Nichols introduced a portion of his father’s life that his personal journals and letters hadn’t conveyed. In one letter David, the youngest of Nichols’ four children, recalled his childhood and the relationship with his father. Whereas his siblings had lost their interest in zoology and instead “emerged into the business world” after college, David was removed from high school during his sophomore year and spent the next few years collecting mammals for the Museum throughout North America and Europe. On the outset of World War II, David didn’t even have a high school diploma but had traveled extensively around the world. Despite that his father and he “were unusually close along a number of dimensions…spending much field time together studying mammals and birds,” he never knew about his father’s involvement with ASIH or the journal until a Museum lecturer took him aside and told him.

In addition to his father’s modesty however, letters also alluded to an “isolation” between John Treadwell Nichols and his peers in the fields of Ichthyology or Herpetology. One especially sad letter dated November 18, 1987 from James W. Atz, a Curator Emeritus of the Museum, apologized to Nichols’ son for “these slights and neglect” by the scientific community to his father’s memory. Atz went on to observe that despite Nichols’ accomplishments, “your Father became increasingly isolated” from the two fields he’d been so instrumental in organizing. The entire field, including Charles Breder Jr. a fellow ichthyologist whom Nichols co-authored many articles with and Carl Hubbs who took over as editor of Nichols’ journal, he concluded, “rather discounted your Father’s accomplishments.” It was sad to think that the isolation of his waning years should obscure the rest of his career.

The saddest part—conveyed by the various requests made by zoologists and other scientists on David G. Nichols for his father’s personal records—was that Nichols had become relatively unknown and undocumented after his death, despite how successful and esteemed ASIH and Copeia had become. At the end of the letter, Atz made a revealing analogy when he compared the legacies of Nichols and his peer, Breder. Both of these men became isolated for the field of ichthyology in the years preceding their deaths, but Breder made sure a friend wrote his obituary so he would “not suffer the final dishonor of having that duty performed” by a stranger or a competitor in his field.

This observation illustrates the importance of archives. In the case of John Treadwell Nichols, his life and contributions could’ve been contained in a bibliography or an obituary. The American Museum of Natural History has a brief file on him consisting of a few newspaper articles, printed interviews, and various copies of his obituary. So why can’t this replace a collection of Nichols’ personal materials?

This file is a collection of people writing on Nichols’ life. That’s history, but is it enough? The file doesn’t cover any of the contrasting views I encountered in the Biographical Materials. There’s nothing about how his reputation soured among the scientific community during the last years of his life, and there’s very little on the nature of his relationships with his family, friends, or even peers.

I believe, and I don’t think many would disagree, that archival collections are much more reliable at capturing the true nature of a person or an event—the different threads and contradictions, etc—than history. Archival collections aren’t accessible to everyone and so the historians process the information and analyze it for the public. They aren’t objective, and two historians looking at the same material can come up with different conclusions. That’s how history changes and brings life to the past, and archives fuel these debates. Without archives, history would be at a standstill. If we destroyed a collection after someone wrote on it, then that person would get the last word. If interest hadn’t reemerged for John Treadwell Nichols, there would only be a collection of obituaries. All the other views and aspects of the man would die with his relatives, his friends, and his peers. Everything would be gone. I almost consider the archives alive because the same materials can be analyzed so differently. A few years from now, another intern might discuss Biographical Materials and propose that this reveals something entirely different about Nichols’ personality. Who knows?