(beep) - The end of the 19th century in America is often associated with the rise of profound social movements, like the temperance movement, the women's suffrage movement, and more darkly, even the eugenics movement.

Today's guest tells the story of the birth of the animal rights movement.

He's Dr. Ernest Freeberg this week on "Story in the Public Square".

(soft inspiring music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell center at Salve Regina University, alongside me is my friend and cohost G. Wayne Miller of the Providence Journal.

Each week, we talk about big issues with great guests, authors, journalists, scholars and more to make sense of the big stories shaping public life in the United States today.

To help us this week, we're joined by Dr. Ernest Freeberg, a historian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the author of a fascinating new book, "A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement" Ernie, thank you so much for being with us.

- Well, it's my pleasure.

Great to be here.

- So you began your career actually in radio.

Tell us about the trajectory from radio to the Academy.

- Yeah, that was really the most amazing liberal arts education you could imagine.

'Cause I was working for a public radio evening news program and I got to interview different people every single night one night it would be the visiting poet and the next night it would be the governor's budget committee and so forth.

So I got to really explore a wide range, got to feel comfortable asking questions and following up and, it was a great experience.

- Did that experience as a journalist, do you think help you as a historian?

- I think it taught me to see a good story when I saw one, you know, I had to find ways to take a very real, tangible moment and illuminate what it was, what its wider implications were about.

It got me to trust, asking my own questions, I suppose, which I think is an important thing for, for historians to learn to do, to sort of follow their own curiosity wherever it might lead them.

The drawback of it was that I was writing about a different topic every single night.

And I did come to admire the scholars, historians, the people who had devoted themselves, you know, more than 24 hours to a given topic.

And so that's really what drew me to, to think about going to graduate school, as well as the fact that most of the people who come into, you know, I was dealing with a lot of very complicated polemical issues like taxes and abortion and so forth.

And everybody who came in to talk to me evoked a different version of the American past in order to justify what they were doing.

And since I was an English major in college, I really didn't have the tools to keep them honest, you know, to think about what the past really does tell us.

I sort of naively thought graduate school would clarify that for me when in fact, it's actually made it a lot more complicated, one of those issues, but that that's really what led me to feel like, you know, I needed to, I needed to know the background in order to really even be a better journalist.

That was my first thought was go to graduate school and then come back to journalism.

- So your teaching and research passions are the cultural and intellectual history of the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th century.

What drew you to those periods in time as opposed to any other period in time that you could have chosen in the long history of our country?

- Right, well, I think it was because I really feel like the, especially the late 19th century, is the point where the world as we know it, begins to emerge, you know, and I know of historians could find that in a lot of other places as you're suggesting Wayne.

But it feels to me like when you look at the post Civil War period with the industrialization, urbanization, the issues about immigration and the melting pot controversies in America, the attempt to grapple with the legacy of slavery in a post-slavery world, all those things really, you know, if you wanna go back and trace the controversies and issues that we're dealing with today, pretty good place to start is in that late 19th century period.

- So do you find that your students today are attracted to it as well for the reasons that you mentioned or perhaps for other reasons?

- I think they're mainly interested in it.

I think, I think it helps, you know, obviously so many students come to a history class thinking that it's about memorizing names and dates and short-term memory and get them out on an exam as quickly as possible.

I think it helps them to link what's going on in the world today to things that are going on in the past.

So certainly I think I have an easier job than my colleagues who are teaching medieval history, or ancient history in making those sorts of connections.

- I wonder, Ernie, can you talk to us a little bit about that era at the end of the 19th century?

We think about the last quarter of that era as being the era of the robber barons.

It's the era of the, the women's rights movement, the suffrage movement, it's the era of even the eugenics movement, more darkly.

Why does the end of the 19th century produce such great social churn in the United States?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

I think it's a combination of factors.

I think the issues of immigration and racial conflict are central in this period.

The country is moving from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban environment, right by the 1920s, that seems complete.

But by the 1890s, you know, Frederick Jackson Turner declares that the frontier is over and people are dealing with urban problems in a new way and the problems are immense.

So I think that, you know, you can either emphasize how terrible things were and they certainly were, by our standards in the late 19th century but you can also see that this is a period where people felt empowered to try to make some changes so that the progressive movement emerges out of, out of all these problems without, without, the many problems we would not have the impulse both in terms of voluntary organizations but also in terms of calling on a greater and greater role for our government to deal with these problems.

You know, we're still, we're still struggling with those questions today.

- What about the role technology played in this period?

This of course was the advent, the dawn of the automobile.

This was when electricity began to be spread or brought to many areas.

It was the telegraph and other technologies.

That must've had an impact on what we're talking about here in terms of the culture.

- Sure, Yeah, yeah.

I wrote a book about the impact of electric light on American life.

And I explore that.

And I think that for me, this time period becomes the period where Americans start to think of themselves as a nation of inventors.

This was the end, that this was somehow a uniquely democratic process, both the inventiveness and enormous number of average Americans have filed for a patent and got into the businesses of trying to make a better mouse trap and, you know, try to get rich through this.

But also people, on the other end, experiencing this enormous technological advance, there was, you know, in spite of all these urban problems, I was trying to capture the incredible excitement that people felt about technology, even something as, you know, we think of as sort of mundane as the light bulb, was greeted as this, you know, enormous leap forward, as it certainly was.

- So for our audience sake, the name of that book is "The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America".

I've not read it, but I look forward to reading it.

- So Ernie, your first book though was "The Education of Laura Bridgman: First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language".

Laura preceded Helen Keller by several years, is that right?

- Yes, by decades, she was actually the, you know, the first person to be taught and when Helen Keller came along, people said, "Oh, here's a second Laura Bridgman," where now, when I explain the story I have to say, "Yeah, just like Helen Keller, but were here earlier."

And in fact, Helen Keller was taught through Anne Sullivan who was trained at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston where Laura Bridgman had her big breakthrough.

- So in 2008, you published, I guess this was your second book, "Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent".

And of course, Debs was what's a renowned socialist and trade unionist.

The book, by the way, was a Los Angeles Times book prize finalists.

Tell us about the book and about Eugene Debs.

- Yeah, this was his fifth run for the president in 1920 which he did while in the jail cell and got close to a million votes in the 1920 election.

And thrilling was that story.

I've taught I think my journalism background led me to be interested in free speech and free press issues.

And so for years, I've been teaching a course about the impact of war on democracy.

And I would tell the story about Eugene Debs and they're, you know, really great pictures of Debs campaigning in his prison denims behind bars and that he would get a million votes and the students were, you know, wanted to know more about this.

And I realized myself that was a great story.

And I think it really turned out to be something bigger than Debs.

It was the first nationwide free speech movement in order to get Debs out of prison.

He got into prison because of the antiwar policies, the Espionage Act in 1917.

He was sentenced to a 10 year prison sentence but he got out after three years.

And that's largely because of this, what was called the amnesty movement to try to get him and other people out of prison.

About 2,000 people were arrested.

1,200 were sent to prison for speaking against the war in that period.

But Debs was the most visible one and so this social movement organized around getting Debs out of prison, and it really pushed the conversation in ways that have shaped our own ideas about the right to free speech in wartime.

This is the beginning of what we would think of, the story and Eric Foner calls this, the birth of civil liberties.

You know, we think that we had the first amendment from the founding, but it didn't really mean much until these controversies that emerged out of World War I.

And Debs was sort of at the center of that process.

- So your latest book is "A Traitor to His Species", which we're gonna get into during the remainder of the program, is set in post-civil war America.

Talk generally about the relationship of people to animals at that time, still in the early in that period, was still a largely agrarian society.

And then of course, we moved into a more urban society but talk about the relationship of these two species.

- Right, well that's a good- - Many species are species- - Many, many species, right?

- Yes (Wayne chuckling) - Yeah, in many ways I think, you know, we have come, I sort of thought about this in terms of the way we think about a city now, and that cities are largely devoid of animals, except what one historian says, you know, we only tolerate pets and pests in urban environments now and this is, this sort of combination of this period.

But in the 1860s, when the SPCA movement starts, animals are very much a part of the city.

There are huge packs of stray dogs.

Livestock is penned right in downtown areas and slaughtered in downtown areas.

Horses of course are the central source of motive power.

We think of this as the era of the steam engine, but in fact, steam engines were helpless to do much without the support of horses, especially as local transportation and as support for the trains.

So there was an enormous interaction between humans and animals that I think is part of that transition from a rural environment to an urban environment, you know, it wasn't unusual for pigs to be (indistinct) in the alleys and clearing out the garbage or for people to keep a cow in the back alley of a tenement.

So, things that seem alien to us now, were very much a part of urban life in the 1860s and seventies.

- So who was Henry Berg and what led him to, to his role in this narrative?

- Yeah, he was a fascinating character.

He was the founder of the ASPCA, which was the first such branch in New York City and people- - That's the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals?

- Right, that's right.

And he came to this idea late in life.

He was, he was in 53 years old when he suddenly decided that this was his life's work.

He was wealthy, heir to an industrial fortune.

His father was a shipbuilder in New York City.

He took his inheritance and mostly wrote a lot of really bad porny plays and bad poetry (Jim and Wayne laughing) and, you know, sort of frittered away his life in- - I can relate to that (indistinct).

(all laughing) - [Jim] The bad poetry part.

- Yeah, so he, he was, just wandering the capitals of Europe living a very luxurious lifestyle in the, during the Civil War Lincoln appointed him to be part of the embassy in Russia in St. Petersburg.

He was out on the streets one day and he saw a teamster whipping his horse.

And it was, it was just too much.

He suddenly snapped and he demanded that the teamster stop because he was wearing the epaulets and the gold lace of an embassy employee, this teamster dropped the whip, and Berg said this was a transformative moment for him that he suddenly realized he could do something else with his life at this age.

He went to England on his way home from Russia and learned all he could about the Royal SPCA which had been founded in the 1820s by anti-slavery forces there.

And he brought that idea to the United States and adopted it in 1866, passed the first anti-cruelty law in the country, the first one with any sort of meaningful enforcement power and founded the first of what became, you know, a nationwide movement, these SPCA organizations, in order to stop human cruelty to animals.

- Talk about the treatment of horses in particular.

You mentioned that that was really the epiphany or the apocalyptic moment for Berg.

Take us back to Manhattan.

Let's say in the 1880, 1890, how were horses, horses were used and abused.

Do I have that correct?

- Yeah, sure.

I mean, they were providing the fundamental energy power for, to move the city, to build the city, you know, and this is a time of enormous growth and expansion of the city.

And it was done on the backs of horses.

The biggest problem that Berg pointed to, although they were many, was the overloading, you know, this was the beginnings of mass transportation and it was done through horse-drawn trolleys that replaced the stagecoaches and hacks that that were freewheeling.

But rather these were larger, looked like modern day trolleys on tracks and they were pulled by horses, but there was no regulation about how many human beings could pile onto those vehicles.

And so a vehicle that might be able to hold 35 would have 70 people with people riding on the roof and the horses were just, you know, burned up at a very rapid rate and, as a result of this.

And the owners of the horses were, you know, this was a huge, very powerful business.

This was, you know, a lot of money to be made in this.

And the horse owners became very good at figuring out the maximum amount of work they could get for the minimum amount of input of stabling and oats and hay and so forth.

So they would work these horses and they would burn out within a year or two.

And, you know, they weren't going out to pasture.

They were quickly rendered and recycled and new horses brought in.

So they were really treated as organic machines rather than as living intelligent beings.

In addition to that, of course, everything else was driven by horses.

And so there was a lot of whipping and enforcing of horses.

There were very few traffic regulations so there would be massive traffic jams and teamsters would be pounding their horses with bricks and, you know, would even set a fire underneath the horse in order to get it to get up, these sorts of things.

This was a commonplace site on the streets of New York.

So when Berg decided that he wanted to fight cruelty most Americans in New York, who signed on and they did very quickly, thought this is what they were fighting was to protect horses.

Berg was, you know, became controversial because he pushed the argument much further beyond horses but that was really the primary impetus for the movement.

- Ernie, is there a, I think about sort of the civil rights movement of various eras, there's a, in the American experience, there is a great role for religious organizations and faith organizations.

I think about the role of Christian theologians and ministers in the abolition movement in the first half of the 19th century, was there a role that religion or religious leaders played in the movement led by Henry Berg?

- I would say it was a form of liberal Christianity and Berg himself was not a conventional believer.

I think that people considered, associated Christianity with the spread of enlightenment, with the spread of generosity and kindness.

So Berg often appealed to the clergy and made arguments that these were essentially God's creatures not put here to, for us to exploit, but rather that we had an obligation to them.

You know, this was an ancient debate about our relationship with the rest of creation.

And it was sort of swept up into that same argument.

So I think it was a general religious but also social progressive impulse that was driving this for many people.

- So Berg had a talent for, for lack of a better word, showmanship.

And he also had a close relationship with the press.

He would bring journalists along with him on, on his various expeditions, and what, in campaigns.

Talk about that, I mean, in retrospect, that seems very smart to befriend the press so that you can get even greater attention to your cause.

- Yeah, you know, it reminds me of a question that I was trying to struggle with the book, in the book and that is why did this emerge as an urban movement?

I mean, it was not a rural, people in rural areas did not form branches of the SPCA.

It was an urban thing.

And it really had to do with people being exposed in a visual way to cruelty.

I mean, you had more and more people crowded into cities fewer and fewer of them actually owned the horses and stray dogs and things that they were seeing but they were watching this cruelty.

And I think for Berg, the real challenge was to touch people's consciousness through making it visible to them.

You know, he felt it was frustratingly easy for people to, to look away, you know, he implored people when they're driving in their carriages up to central park to go strolling on a Sunday afternoon, they should turn and make sure they look at what's happening to the livestock that are being hauled off of the trains and kept in these pens in central Manhattan.

So I think the journalists were a powerful tool for him to try to tell his story.

And a lot of them found him to be ridiculous.

And that was part of, you know, the trade-off for him.

He was a man who did, had a pretty high opinion of himself and really did not take the sort of criticism well but he recognized the fact that if people were lampooning him for being an animal lover they were at least giving some publicity to the cause.

And so that was, that was his trade off.

He said he would, he would go home and he'd be weeping in his pillow from people making fun of him, but he pressed on.

- Ernie, this is the year of robber barons and of P. T. Barnum.

What kind of relationship did he have with those folks?

- Barnum was, you know, the great empresario of animals.

And I think, you know, from Barnum's perspective, he was the animal lover because he was roaming the world and bringing wild animals into his American museum in New York, which unfortunately burned down periodically and destroyed every animal in his collection.

And then he'd have to go and round them up again.

But his argument was, he was bringing the natural world to people's attention, you know, and it's really the case, the 19th century Americans saw a range of, of animals that was inconceivable up till this point.

You know, that this was one of the byproducts of industrialization and mass transportation and the commercial transatlantic trade, Barnum was able to, you know, pay enormous sums in order to bring animals from Africa and Asia into American ports.

But Berg considered this to be, not worth the pain and suffering that was inflicted on these animals.

And so they went back and forth quite a bit and, you know, Berg considered Barnum to be exploiting animals for entertainment and that this was inappropriate.

Barnum said, "I'm educating people.

I'm giving them something they want.

People are by fascinated animals."

And he often, Barnum often said, "Look, I'm on your side."

You know, "I'm the Berg of Bridgeport, Connecticut."

And so they sparred back and forth, but in the end, Barnum and Berg became sort of allies.

And when Berg died, Barnum gave some money in his will in order to build a fountain to, dedicated to Berg.

- So Berg believed correctly, that animals feel pain.

Did he have any perspective or sense of other emotions?

You know, did he believe that animals could love?

Or could be anxious or fearful or?

Things that I think we would recognize in our, in our own pets today, certainly during the pandemic of, you know, for different reasons, did he go that far, philosophically?

- Absolutely, absolutely.

I think he was less focused on this.

He was very much a person who hated human cruelty more than he loved animals.

And that was one of his, you know, the sort of mysterious things about him, was that you didn't, he wasn't not an animal lover.

He just hated the unnecessary suffering, but many people in the movement following his ideas, promoted what they called humane education.

And it's exactly what you're talking about.

What they're trying to do is, especially for the young, is to instill in them a sense that animals are like us.

And so the enormous literature that was sort of, anthropomorphized animals as, you know, loving their families and loyal to their masters and, you know, real fascination with the St. Bernard dogs in Switzerland, they were coming to the rescue of skiers and all these sorts of stories.

The most famous of these was the novel "Black Beauty" which is still considered a classic and was a British novel, but it was brought to the United States during this SPCA movement and became a bestseller at that point.

And it's similar idea, understand animals, not simply as, as property or as servants of our desires but rather as full live beings with souls.

- Ernie, I've got literally about a 25 seconds left here.

What is the legacy of Henry Berg and the SPCA today?

- Well, I think that idea that we have an obligation to other species is something which really begins in this, in this period in a profound way.

And I think for Berg, it was not simply the impulse but it was also, figuring out ways to institutionalize that to pass a law, to put agents in the field that enforced the law, to drag people into court.

All of this was a necessary part.

It was not simply a matter of encouraging people emotionally, but it was also a matter of building the institution that we still have today and many, many more that are actually doing the work of protecting animals.

- Well, it is a really fascinating and interesting read.

The book is "A Traitor to His Species".

He's Ernie Freeberg.

Ernie thank you so much for being with us.

- It's a pleasure.

- That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square", you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time, for more "Story in the Public Square".

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