washington, 1910
The American Hippo Bill
House Resolution 23261 asked Congress for a quarter million dollars to import hippopotamuses and turn the Louisiana bayou into a meat farm. It was not a joke. People testified.
problem one
America had run low on meat
By 1910 the country was growing faster than its cattle. Open range was vanishing, beef prices were climbing, and the public had worked itself into a fury at the meatpacking monopoly known as the Beef Trust. The newspapers called it the Meat Question, capital M, capital Q, the way you capitalize a thing you have decided is a crisis.
Into this walked a Louisiana congressman named Robert Broussard, who represented the bayou country and went by the nickname Cousin Bob. Broussard had a district full of warm, wet, underused swampland that cattle could not graze. He also had a second problem creeping up his rivers, and he believed one animal could fix both at the same time.
problem two
And a weed eating the waterways
Louisiana was choking on water hyacinth, a pretty purple South American flower that had been handed out at a New Orleans world's fair in the 1880s and then proceeded to carpet every bayou it could reach. It blocked boats, smothered fish, and doubled itself roughly every week or two. The state was losing the fight.
Broussard's logic, which is genuinely elegant if you do not think about it for more than a few seconds: hippos are enormous aquatic plant-eaters. Put hippos in the bayou, let them mow the hyacinth, and then harvest the hippos for meat. The weed becomes bacon. You can read the full sad career of that weed on the water hyacinth page.
the marketing
They called it lake cow bacon
The plan needed a friendly name, and the press obliged. The New York Times reportedly branded hippo meat lake cow bacon, the idea being that a hippo was basically a cow that preferred water, and that a little of him would go a long way at the dinner table. A real advocacy outfit formed to push the cause, generally remembered as the New Food Supply Society.
The USDA was on board
A Department of Agriculture researcher named William Newton Irwin became one of the loudest voices for the scheme. Irwin was, wonderfully, a fruit specialist, not a livestock man. He told audiences hippos could add as much as a million pounds of meat a year, and reported that the meat tasted like a combination of pork and beef. He had notes.
the cast
The three men who showed up to argue for it
Robert Broussard
Louisiana congressman, bayou native, the man who put the bill on paper. He moved on to the Senate in 1914 and died in office in 1918, the hippos forever unranched.
Frederick R. Burnham
An American frontier scout who fought in the Apache campaigns, became chief of scouts for the British in Africa, and taught woodcraft to the founder of the Boy Scouts. He helped inspire the lineage of adventure heroes that eventually led to Indiana Jones.
Fritz Duquesne
A Boer soldier and spy nicknamed the Black Panther, and Burnham's sworn personal enemy. Decades later he ran the Duquesne Spy Ring, the largest espionage case in US history. The FBI rolled it up days after Pearl Harbor.
The detail that sounds invented
Burnham and Duquesne had reportedly each been ordered to hunt down and kill the other during the Boer War, and had never actually met. They finally came face to face in 1910 in Washington, where they discovered they were both there lobbying for the same hippo bill, and ended up testifying side by side. The assassination detail comes mostly from Burnham's own telling, so enjoy it with one eyebrow raised.
the ending
So how close did it come?
The bill went to the House Committee on Agriculture in March 1910. Broussard, Burnham, and Duquesne all testified. And then the committee listened, considered the prospect of the American South being overrun by hippopotamuses, and quietly shelved it. The bill died in committee. It never reached a floor vote.
It was killed less by ecological foresight than by simple practicality and squeamishness. Americans did not particularly want to eat swamp animals, and Congress did not particularly want to be the body that made it happen.
Hold on, that one is a myth
You will read everywhere that the bill lost by a single vote. It is a great line and it is almost certainly false. There was no floor vote at all to lose by one. The bill stalled in committee. The careful sources, the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress among them, all say shelved, not narrowly defeated. The romance is fun; the truth is quieter.
One more careful footnote
Teddy Roosevelt is often listed as a backer, and that is true in spirit. He loved the whole idea of importing big game for food and sport. A documented, formal endorsement of this specific bill is harder to pin down, so file him under enthusiastic, not signed on the dotted line.