nov23-upload

Shooting buffalo from horseback looks exciting, but it’s not efficient. As the frenzy to obtain bison hides for industrial use grew in the 1870s, a young hunter had an idea: Why not use a gun specifically designed to kill buffalo? Manufacturers obliged. The hunters set these guns up on stationary stands overlooking herds, shot a lead bull through the lungs for a fast death, then picked off its baffled followers. They could kill up to a hundred on a profitable day. Over the Plains, millions were slaughtered, their skinned carcasses left to rot. Native Americans starved.

That’s among the many chilling narratives in Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo, by renowned documentary makers Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns. A companion book to the TV series “American Buffalo,” Blood Memory homes in on the near extinction of the North American bison—which the authors call “a profound tragedy.” Duncan and Burns use firsthand accounts, interviews and marvelous visual images to carry readers briskly from the rise of the bison in the species’ ideal ecosystem, through their crucial role in Native American culture, their swift destruction by white Euro-Americans and their current modest recovery.

Before horses and guns arrived, killing the large, resilient bison was difficult, and Native Americans made use of every facet of the animals. When the whites’ commercially motivated carnage began, Native cultures dependent on buffalo collapsed. Their desperate attempt to recover led to the Battle of Little Bighorn and other conflicts, until they were overwhelmed by federal firepower. 

Then the mythologizing began, and with it, a small turnaround. A group of upper-crust white men, among them Theodore Roosevelt, conspired to save some buffalo—for zoos, hunting trips and parks. Buffalo Bill needed buffalo for his show. Natives and whites started private herds. There are now some 350,000 bison in the United States, but rebuilding was slow and challenging. Duncan and Burns fight the belief that the near-extinction of the buffalo was “inevitable.” “People—nations—can make grievous mistakes,” Duncan writes in his afterward. “They’re also capable of learning from those mistakes . . . then deciding to go in a different direction.”

There are WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), the demographic that dominated American culture well into the 20th century, and there are WASPs, the subset of the demographic that the late political columnist Joseph W. Alsop labeled the “WASP Ascendancy.” These were the Americans who, Michael Gross writes in his delightfully provocative new book, formed “a hereditary oligarchic upper class” for most of our history. This ruling class, Gross admits, was not a monolith. But despite internal disputes, it ran the government and economy and defined the culture of the American experiment for 350 years.

Now WASP power is in eclipse. That’s not a completely bad thing, Gross says, because in addition to founding the Republic and enshrining lofty ideals, WASPs enslaved some, excluded others, fattened their wallets and jealously guarded their privileges. He writes that the presidency of Donald Trump “represented the clan’s nadir—a repudiation of the tattered remains of WASP virtue.” Still, Gross wonders if today, “a selfish, narcissistic, tribal, atomized nation might still look to WASPs for a restorative example of America’s civic conscience.”

This is the argument of Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class. The theory—though absorbing and debatable—isn’t the star of the show. The book’s real delight lies in its brisk biographies of the people who illustrate the ascent and descent of WASP hegemony. Gross begins with the Pilgrim leader William Bradford, who helped establish the New England theocracy that eventually gave rise to the ideals and practices of American self-government. A marvelous chapter spotlights the too-little appreciated Gouverneur Morris, often called “Penman of the Constitution.” Gross also describes less savory figures like John Randolph of Virginia, a virulent advocate for slavery who infamously caned an opponent on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, an esteemed paleontologist and longtime head of the American Museum of Natural History—and, alas, co-founder of the wildly racist American Eugenics Society.

Gross’ choices of biographical subjects are unexpected, even idiosyncratic. They will convince many readers of his overall argument, or send them on to further reading. Well-researched and well-written, Gross’ portrait gallery will, if nothing else, illuminate the odd corners of the lives of our nation’s elite and American history itself.