Sidney Dillon Ripley | |
|---|---|
 Ripley in 1984 | |
| 8th Secretary of theSmithsonian Institution | |
| In office 1964–1984 | |
| Preceded by | Leonard Carmichael |
| Succeeded by | Robert McCormick Adams |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Sidney Dillon Ripley II September 20, 1913 |
| Died | March 12, 2001(2001-03-12) (aged 87) |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Yale University(BA) Harvard University(PhD) |
| Known for | Ornithology |
| Awards | Presidential Medal of Freedom (1985)[1] Padma Bhushan (1986)[2] |
Sidney Dillon Ripley II (September 20, 1913 – March 12, 2001) was an Americanornithologist andwildlife conservationist. He served as secretary of theSmithsonian Institution for 20 years, from 1964 to 1984, leading the institution through its period of greatest growth and expansion. For his leadership at the Smithsonian, he was awarded thePresidential Medal of Freedom byRonald Reagan in 1985.[3]
Ripley was born inNew York City, after a brother, Louis, was born in 1906 inLitchfield, Connecticut.[4] His mother was Constance Baillie Rose of Scottish descent while his father was Louis Arthur Dillon Ripley, a wealthy real estate agent who drove around in an 1898Renault Voiturette. Both his paternal grandparents, Julia and Josiah Dwight Ripley, died before he was born but he was connected to them through Cora Dillon Wyckoff. Great Aunt Cora and her husband, Dr. Peter Wyckoff, often hosted young Ripley at theirPark Avenue apartment. Cora's and Julia's father (his great-grandfather) and partial namesake wasSidney Dillon, twice President of theUnion Pacific Railroad.[5] and his uncle wasSidney Dillon Ripley I. BothGilded Age tycoons.
Ripley's early education was at the Montessori Kindergarten School on Madison Avenue. As a young boy, he traveled widely including to British Columbia where his mother's relatives lived. In April 1918, his mother, who had separated from his father, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1919 the family moved again to Boston, where he studied in a school called Rivers. At the age of ten, he traveled again with his mother across Europe. In 1924 Ripley went to a boarding school calledFay School in Southborough, Massachusetts.
In 1926 he followed in Louis' footsteps, attendingSt. Paul's School inConcord, New Hampshire. In 1936, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts fromYale University. While at Yale he briefly considered a more traditional career path after a conversation with his brother. "Louis told me we ought to have a lawyer in the family," he has said, "but I really hated the idea, and in the summer of 1936, after graduating from college, I resolved to abandon all thoughts of a prosperous and worthy future and devote myself to birds, the subject I was overpoweringly interested in."[6]
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A friend of the Ripleys,John, whose father founded the Young Men's Christian Association, and Celestine Mott were planning a visit to India to set up a YMCA hostel in India. This led to a visit toIndia at age 13, along with his sister. They stayed at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay and then went to Kashmir and included a walking tour intoLadakh and westernTibet. In Kashmir, they flew falcons with Colonel Biddulph. They also visited Calcutta and Nagpur. One of Ripley's brothers shot a tiger at a shoot hosted by a Maharaja.[7] This led to his lifelong interest in the birds ofIndia.[3] He returned to St Paul's to complete his studies. It was suggested to him that Yale would be the best for him. Ripley received a training in making specimens from Frank Chapman and even had tea once as a sophomore Erwin Stresemann.[8] He decided that birds were more interesting than law and after graduating from Yale in 1936 he was advised by Ernst Mayr that "the most important thing you can do is get a sound and broad biological training." He then enrolled at Columbia University. and he began studyingzoology atColumbia University. As a part of his study, Ripley participated in theDenison-Crockett Expedition toNew Guinea in 1937-1938 and theVanderbilt Expedition toSumatra in 1939.[9] He later obtained aPhD inZoology fromHarvard University in 1943.
DuringWorld War II, he served underWilliam J. Donovan ("Coordinator of Information") in theOffice of Strategic Services, the predecessor of theCentral Intelligence Agency. In the early days Ripley acted as liaison with the British Security Coordination led by Sir William Stephenson at the Rockefeller Center. He later was in charge of American intelligence services inSoutheast Asia.[3] Others who joined the OSS early included Ripley's Yale friends Sherman Kent and Wilmarth S. Lewis.[10] Ripley held a high regard for his OSS colleagues and considered it unfair on the part of some to decry those who were socially inclined leading to some calling the organization as "Oh So Social".[11]
Ripley trained many Indonesian spies, all of whom were killed during the war.[12] He was posted briefly to Australia with the identity of a lieutenant colonel in case he was captured. He was to go through England, Egypt, China and then on to India and Ceylon. He then worked with Detachment 404 in Bangkok, working to recover Allied airmen who had been captured in the region with the help of friendly Thais who worked to keep them under cover from the Japanese forces. After this period he moved to Sri Lanka and never got to Australia as originally planned.[13] He worked with and "cultivated"Lord Mountbatten throughout this period. The two often met at dinners and parties both in New Delhi and at Trincomalee. On one occasion, Ripley noticed a green woodpecker and went off to shoot it while dressed only in a towel. The specimen label reads "Shot at cocktail party... towel fell off."[14]
It was in Kandy, Sri Lanka that he met his future wifeMary Livingston and her roommateJulia Child (then Julia McWilliams) both working with the OSS. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson was also here and he would introduce Julia to Paul Child, her future husband.[15] An article in the August 26, 1950New Yorker said that Ripley reversed the usual pattern, where spies posed as ornithologists in order to gain access to sensitive areas, and instead used his position as an intelligence officer to go birding in restricted areas.[16][17] The government ofThailand awarded him the Order of the White Elephant, a national award for his support of theThai underground during the war.[12] In 1947, Ripley enteredNepal pretending to be a close confidante ofJawaharlal Nehru and the Nepal government, eager to maintain diplomatic ties with its newly independent neighbour, allowed him and Edward Migdalski to collect bird specimens. Nehru came to hear of this from an article inThe New Yorker and was furious, leading to a difficult time for his collaborator and coauthor,Salim Ali. Salim Ali came to hear of Nehru's displeasure throughHorace Alexander and the matter was forgiven after some effort.[18] The OSS past however led to a growing suspicion that American scientists working in India were CIA agents.David Challinor, a formerSmithsonian administrator, noted that there were many CIA agents in India, with some posing as scientists. He noted that the Smithsonian sent a scholar to India for anthropological research who unknown to them was interviewingTibetan refugees from Chinese-occupiedTibet but went on to say that there was no evidence that Ripley worked for the CIA after he left the OSS in 1945.[12]
He joined theAmerican Ornithologists' Union in 1938, became an Elective Member in 1942, and a fellow in 1951. After the war he taught at Yale and was aFulbright fellow in 1950 and aGuggenheim fellow in 1954.[3] At Yale, one of the key scientific influences on Ripley was the ecologistG. Evelyn Hutchinson, who had led the Yale expedition to India in 1932.[19] Ripley became a full professor and director of thePeabody Museum of Natural History. Ripley served for many years on the board of theWorld Wildlife Fund in the U.S., and was the third president of theInternational Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP, nowBirdLife International).
He served as secretary of theSmithsonian Institution from 1964 to 1984. He set out to reinvigorate and expand the Smithsonian, building new museums, including the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, now theAnacostia Community Museum,Cooper-Hewitt,National Design Museum,Hirshhorn Museum andSculpture Garden,Renwick Gallery,National Air and Space Museum,National Museum of African Art,Enid A. Haupt Garden, the underground quadrangle complex known as theS. Dillon Ripley Center, and theArthur M. Sackler Gallery.[9]
In 1967, he helped found theSmithsonian Folklife Festival, and in 1970, he helped foundSmithsonian magazine. He believed that 75% to 80% of then-living animal species would become extinct in the next 25 years.[20]
In 1985 he was awarded thePresidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award of the United States. He was awarded honorary degrees from 15 colleges and universities, includingBrown, Yale,Johns Hopkins, Harvard, andCambridge. He was a member of theNational Academy of Sciences, theAmerican Philosophical Society, and theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.[21][22][23]
Ripley successfully defended theNational Museum of Natural History against a lawsuit that objected to theDynamics of Evolution exhibit.[9]
Ripley had intended to produce a definitive guide to the birds ofSouth Asia, but became too ill to play an active part in its realisation. However, the eventual authors, his assistant,Pamela C. Rasmussen, and artistJohn C. Anderton, named the final two-volume guide asBirds of South Asia. The Ripley Guide in his honor.
The Smithsonian's underground complex on theNational Mall, theS. Dillon Ripley Center, is named in his honor. A garden between theHirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and theArts and Industries Building was dedicated in 1988 to his wife,Mary Livingston Ripley.
The first-ever full-length biography of Ripley,The Lives of Dillon Ripley: Natural Scientist, Wartime Spy, and Pioneering Leader of the Smithsonian Institution byRoger D. Stone, was published in 2017.[24]
TheRipley Waterfowl Conservancy, a non-profit organization dedicated to research-driven breeding of rare and endangeredwaterfowl, is located on 150-acres of the Ripley estate in Litchfield, Connecticut. The Conservancy's history began in the 1920s when Ripley began keeping and breeding waterfowl as a teenager, and he is credited with the first captive breedings ofRed-breasted goose,Nene,Emperor goose, andLaysan Teal as well as the first US captive breedings ofNew Zealand scaup, GreenlandMallard (A. p. conboschas), andPhilippine duck. In 1985, Dillon and his wife, Mary Livingston Ripley, donated the portion of their estate that is today the Conservancy to the non-profit organization that continues to operate it. Today the Conservancy remains one of the only facilities in North America dedicated to breeding and rearing rare and endangered waterfowl and houses over 90 species of birds, totaling over 500 individuals. Ripley's daughters and grandchildren continue to their involvement with the Conservancy's as members of the board of directors.[25]
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