This year, 2024, the work of Thornton Burgess as a naturalist, wildlife advocate and children’s author will be honored by year-long events hosted by the Cape Cod Museum of Natural history and the Thornton W. Burgess Society in observation of the 150th anniversary of his birthday, January 14, 1874, in Sandwich, Massachusetts. These highlights of his life are taken from Nature’s Ambassador: The Legacy of Thornton W. Burgess:
It was an ordinary Monday morning in early summer, 1911 when Thornton Burgess, a Good Housekeeping associate editor, arrived at his job in Springfield, Massachusetts. But the brief, devastating memo he found waiting on his desk at the Phelps Publishing offices changed his life, in unimaginable ways, forever: “T.W.B. – Two weeks from date your services will be dispensed with.”
If he had forebodings when he first learned the magazine was moving to New York, nothing prepared the 33-year-old staff writer for the shock of being fired with two-weeks-notice from a company he had worked for, heart and soul, for 15 years. “There was no word of regret that the long association was to be severed, no sentiment whatever,” Burgess recalled.
He had practically no savings and no second job. Worse, just two months earlier he had re-married, six years after his beloved first wife Nina died in childbirth, to Fannie Johnson, a widow with two teenagers. Suddenly, he was unemployed, a new husband with six people to support, including his young son and mother.
In desperation, he turned to a project casually undertaken on a whim the previous year. Little, Brown, and Co. editors had asked to see and liked the handful of animal stories he wrote in letters to his child visiting with relatives. Old Mother West Wind was released in 1910, with modest sales of about 2,000 copies.
The journalist never expected – or desired - to be a children’s author. His first book was a frail lifeline, and he clung to it. Other titles quickly followed and soon attracted a voracious audience in the dawn of children’s literature. Within five years, between 1910 and 1915, he wrote 25 children’s books, including a series for the newly-formed Boy Scouts of America.
Combining a strong writing background with knowledge of nature, Burgess began writing for children full time. His wildlife characters like Reddy Fox, Sammy Jay, Grandfather Frog and Jimmy Skunk, were significantly based on personal observations during his Cape Cod childhood. Manomet Bird Observatory founder Betty Andersen said, “When I went outside, I saw what I had just read about in his books.”
His popularity soared. When the Kansas City Star offered membership to a Thornton Burgess "Bedtime Story Club" as an add-on feature for subscribers, the paper had 50,000 enrollees within three weeks. The New York Globe enrolled 198,000 children in its own “Bedtime Story Club:” "This meant we had 198,000 children who cried for the Globe every night," wrote Jason Rogers in his 1918 book Newspaper Building. "We carried the idea to … monster meetings of the Bedtime Story Club in the public parks, where we brought out 15,000 to 20,000 at a gathering."
Thornton Burgess’ massive readership and his passion for wildlife were not lost on Dr. William Hornaday, a prominent conservationist fighting for Congressional passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. If Burgess was awed by Hornaday's reputation, Hornaday was equally impressed by the tremendous reach of Burgess' influence.
When he asked Burgess to write stories about the plight of migrating birds running “the Gauntlet of Guns” from the Gulf to Canada while trying to find food and rest, the writer gladly complied with daily newspaper columns and the heart-wrenching book, The Adventures of Poor Mrs. Quack. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act passed; Hornaday, through his deep-pocked Permanent Wildlife Protection Fund, gave the writer a gold medal award, given on previous years to Margaret Sage and Aldo Leopold.
In the 1920s Burgess enthusiastically used radio technology to promote natural science, inviting prominent scientists like Smithsonian curator Austin Hobart Clark to appear on his popular Radio Nature League program which connected lepidopterists, arborists, and ornithologists with tens of thousands of RNL members.
Little known, even to environmental historians, Burgess conceived of and launched between 1918 and 1924 a bird sanctuary program promoted in the People’s Home Journal. In the midst of World War I’s devastation, the idea that an individual could help the natural world caught on like wildfire. Landowners across the US and Canada posted five million acres of private land as sanctuaries that prohibited hunting and supported bird populations with housing and food. It was an early, perhaps formative, model of citizen activism that laid groundwork for the 20thcentury nature movement.
It is impossible, of course, to definitively measure the impact Thornton Burgess had on public and political opinion and values, but the scope of Burgess’ influence as a naturalist through his books, newspaper columns, children’s organizations like the Green Meadow Club, and lectures for Mass Audubon cannot be overlooked.
However, Burgess’ influence on individuals is measurable. In 1964, the Boston Museum of Science’s distinguished director Bradford Washburn honored with a gold medal three individuals who influenced his “enthusiasm for nature and science:” Harvard professor Kirtley Mather; founder of the National Geographic Society Gilbert Grosvenor; and children’s author and naturalist Thornton Burgess. Of Burgess, Washburn wrote, “Thornton Burgess was the first person who did more than anyone else to give me an early love of nature.” David Brower, founder of the Sierra Club, acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni, and Wayne Petersen, distinguished Massachusetts ornithologist, also cite the importance of Burgess in cultivating their environmental values.
When a friend surprised President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office with an autographed copy of his favorite boyhood book, and the affairs of the United States were momentarily put on hold while he sat down in his Boston rocker to read The Adventures of Reddy Fox.