Four Staffers Walk Out and Start the Humane Society of the United States

On November 22, 1954, four staff members of the American Humane Association broke away from the organization that employed them and started their own. Fred Myers, Larry Andrews, Helen Jones, and Marcia Glaser had watched a schism split the AHA over pound seizure, rodeo cruelty, and how donations should be spent, and they decided the cause needed its own independent voice. They incorporated in Delaware as the National Humane Society, based in Washington, D.C., with Robert J. Chenoweth as president and Oliver M. Evans as director. There was almost no money behind the mission: three of the founders borrowed against their own life insurance policies just to keep a four-person staff going. That threadbare start grew into the Humane Society of the United States, now one of the largest animal protection organizations in the country.