Picturing Nature and Childhood at the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Children's Museum, 1899-1930

A yearly visit to a science museum is an iconic feature of the childhoods of twenty-first-century American schoolchildren; however, in the early twentieth century, such visits were novelties. The American Museum of Natural History (founded 1869) and the Brooklyn Children's Museum (founded 1899) both began serious educational efforts with children in the New York City public schools in the first decade of the twentieth century. In this article, I will show how museum personnel represented child patrons' museum experiences to their donors, supporters, and the public, investigating links between the way each museum pictured the intersections of science, pedagogy, and childhood in the museum setting, and larger understandings about the way that modern knowledge advanced according to social class. Science, perceived as a powerful force, was understood as an integral part of the Progressive Era's ideology of cultural advancement; the adults teaching science to children in museum contexts were mediating knowledge and teaching habits of mind that they viewed as profoundly important.

In the magazines, films, and publicity that each museum produced for its networks of supporters and for the public, child patrons appeared in photographs, offering proof of the museum's good works. Historians agree that the widespread interest in childhood during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era coincided with the growing popularity of everyday photography in a mutually reinforcing way, resulting in a plethora of representations of children in photographs around the turn of the twentieth century.¹ Pierre Bourdieu has written about photography as an "ontological choice of an object which is perceived as worthy of being photographed, which is captured, stored, communicated, shown, and admired."² If this is the case, then the photographic record of the turn of the century shows that children, and in particular the education of children, was a subject that people found worthy of capture, communication, and admiration. Many expositions and conventions during the years between the Civil War and World War II featured photographs of children, often as part of exhibits designed to present the work of educational institutions and reform movements.³ In the Progressive Era, photographers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine used images of children to shock and move audiences, dramatizing not only material deprivation but also the loss of educational opportunity inherent in childhoods spent laboring.⁴ The same era saw a proliferation of pictorialist images of childhood made by photographers such as Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence H. White, and Alfred Stieglitz; these photographers joined popular illustrators such as Jessie Willcox Smith and Elizabeth Shippen Green in depicting childhood as an idyllic, idealized realm apart from adult activity—a place where learning was natural and joyful. As art historian Anne Higonnet shows, magazines and advertisers used sentimental illustrations by Smith, Green, and their contemporaries to sell consumer goods; these examples show how images of protected childhood could sell a vision of a middle-class life.⁵ Art historian George Dimock has written that the gap between Lewis Hine's photographs of child laborers and the serene portraits of children made by pictorialist contemporaries constitutes a dialectical relationship in which the working-class child is seen as exploited and yet somehow repellent, "in need of rescue," while the middle-class child is idealized, abstracted, and observed with attention to nostalgic detail.⁶ Photographers depicting children in the museum operated within both of these opposed modes of representation.

In museum publicity photographs of children from the first three decades of the twentieth century, child patrons sometimes appear, like the children in Hine's photographs, to be needy, empty, and deprived, desperate to make contact with any natural object, and grateful for the chance to do so; alternatively, they are happy, cute, hard-working, and full of universal potential, like the young people depicted by pictorialist photographers and sentimental illustrators of the time. In photographs and articles published in its magazine, the American Museum Journal (beginning in 1919, Natural History; I will use the abbreviations AMJ/NH), the AMNH generally appears as a site where masses of sensorially...