Roy Chapman Andrews – Thief of Time – Part 2

Posted on October 16, 2006 in Commons Theft

A continuation.

Gallenkamp characterizes Andrews as a man who didn’t really have many ideas. This allows him to write of Andrews’s life as an adventure story — which is how Andrews sold himself — rather than investigating those attitudes which informed his treatment of and negotiations with the peoples who he plundered.

First, Andrews hated Communists, so much so that he could not see their positive accomplishments through his bile. For example, before the Communist takeover of Mongolia, he observed a horrific prison: inmates were kept in coffins and forced to wallow in food crumbs and their own excrement. After the Communists took over, this system was abolished and replaced with a modern prison with spacious rooms and an exercise yard. Yet he gives the Communists no credit for the reform.

The existence of early twentieth century Communists — who derived many of their ideas from European and American Anabaptists and Evangelicals — belies Gallenkamp’s assertion that there just wasn’t anyone challenging Andrews’s core beliefs about imperialism and racism. They did confront him about his participation in the foreign plundering of China and Mongolia, but rather than redefine his presence in Central Asia, he sought to go around them and preserve his ambition to remove as many fossils as he could from these countries.

It never crossed Andrews’s mind while he was playing polo with his friends in the foreign legations why so many Chinese and Mongolians were voluntarilly joining the Party. He went on like slave owners and supporters of the Iraq War after him not acknowledging opposing views and consequently giving energy to terroristic and authoritarian movements.

Second, racism played a part. Gallenkamp conceals this under the name “ethnic concerns”. The reason why Andrews’s was tooling around Central Asia was that he was hoping to prove the thesis of his mentor — Henry Fairfield Osborn — that the human race had originated in Asia.

Osborn, the scion of a railroad fortune, believed in eugenics. He praised the Nazis and went to Germany to pick up an honorary degree. Given that American anthropologists — especially Franz Boas of Columbia University — had statistically shown the absurdity of hatred on the basis of ethnicity, we can’t say that Osborn was ignorant. Going along with his class, yes, but not ignorant.

During the 1920s, Raymond Dart announced the discovery of a very early hominid skull in South Africa. Called the Taung Baby, it challenged the notion that humanity had risen in Eurasia. Despite this, most paleontologists continued to believe in a Great Yellow Hope to come out of Asia. Despite the finding of Homo Erectus skulls in Java and China, this never materialized.

We can combine this with a third attitude which is Imperialism. When in Peking, Andrews spent most of his time hanging out at the polo grounds with other members of the foreign legations. He seldom talked to Communists and other nationalists except when it was necessary for the sake of his expeditions. Perhaps he thought that there was nothing they could offer him. This isolation enabled him to plunge forward in ignorance, pushing his explorations above all other considerations. It never crossed his mind that he might be contributing to the strife he saw all around him.

The chaos that overwhelmed China in those days allowed Andrews to play the role of the opportunist. He often bullied local militia and nomads with his auto caravan which was heavilly armed with guns guns knowing that there was little they could do to stop him. When the Mongolian and Chinese governments finally put a stop to his plundering, he approached first the puppet Pu Yi government in Manchuria and then the Soviet government(!) in attempts to reach the fabled land of fossils by routes not squatted upon by the Chinese or the Mongolians.

I do not discredit, entirely, Andrews’ contributions to paleontology because of these faults. I just feel that they have been underplayed and summarilly dismissed in a defense of the collections at the American Museum of Natural History. Do they belong in New York or in Mongolia/China? This is a good question not dissimilar to where should the Elgin Marbles go, London or Athens?

In this latter case, Lord Elgin, an opportunist of another time, arranged with the Turkish government to buy and transport the Parthenon friezes out of Greece. The Turks didn’t care about the Greek heritage. Elgin won for himself and for the British Museum an important gloating point. To this day a time of social upheaval(?) is used to justify the pilferage of a nation’s heritage. And the British Museum is not giving the Marbles back.

Who owns a nation? The Elgin Marbles and the archaeology carried out by colonialists certainly established the precedents for the Central Asiatic Expeditions. But what precedents did Andrews set and are followed today? Look to the cradles of civilization for your answer.

To be continued.