Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740-1870

Prologue:

Prologue: Thesis, Definitions, and Structure The thesis of this book is essentially a refutation of two points of view regarding the pre-187° history of museums in America, which I shall call the professional criticism and the democratic criticism. These approaches are utterly contradictory, and just as completely unfounded, but they have until now completely shaped our view of the first century of museum history in America . Both criticisms will be considered in detail in the Epilogue, btlt it is necessary here to summarize them. The professional criticism is the more venerable of the two, for Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution , had sketched it out as early as the I840s. It received a full statement in the first formal attempt at American museum history , "Museum-History and Museums of History," by George Brown Goode, the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in charge of the National Museum. Goode, an early museum professional, speaking to the third annual meeting of the American Historical Association, dismissed these early institutions, saying that they were "a chance assemblage of curiosities ... rather [than] a series of objects selected with reference to their value to investigators, or their possibilities for public enlightenment."l The professional criticism, then, holds that pre-187° American museums consisted ofspectacular or bizarre objects with no scien- 2 Prologue tific or educational value; in short, they were sideshows aimed at public gratification. The democratic criticism takes an opposing view. Goode, whose thought on the subject of museum history was complex and wide ranging, was the first to take this position as well. John Cotton Dana, the director of the Newark Museum in the early part of the twentieth century, refined it, and Theodore L. Low perfected it. In 1942, while still a graduate student, Low was commissioned by the Committee on Education ofthe American Association of Museums to define the ideal educational mission of the museum in America, and to measure how well that ideal was being met in practice. Low produced The Museum as a Social Instrument , a blunt critique of contemporary museum practice. He sketched a grim picture of curators so obsessed with collecting that they shamelessly ignored their educational responsibilities. In the course of criticizing the museum world of 1942, Low made some unsupported assumptions regarding American museum history . Museum staffs had so closely imitated elitist European models , he asserted, "that museums soon became little more than isolated segments ofEuropean culture set in a hostile environment. "2 The democratic criticism, then, holds that the pre-187° museums developed from an alien, antiegalitarian background antithetical to the egalitarian culture of America, that is to say, that museums are, and always have been, run by the elite for the elite. These two contradictory criticisms have exerted a great influence over the small corpus of historiography of American museums , as is discussed in detail in the Epilogue. These views of the museum as sideshow and the museum as elitist enclave have filtered down to the general public, coloring the popular conception of the pre-187° museums. The two views share a contempt for the first century ofmuseum history in America, for they assert that the early institutions were backward and primitive. Both apptoaches also share a glaring methodological error: They are based on hearsay and assumption rather than fact. The authors who invented and perpetuated these criticisms scarcely consulted any secondary sources and certainly did not search for primary evidence . The originators made unproven sweeping assumptions and Prologue 3 their successors repeated and elaborated upon them. Both criticisms , therefore, are essentially wrong. This work aims to show that the museums founded in America from 1740 to 1870 were not predominantly sideshows or elitist enclaves, but rather were direct products of the American democratic culture and developed in synchronization with the evolution of the wider cultural climate. A study of a sample of these institutions will show that, while a small proportion of these museums did degenerate into sideshows or elitist enclaves, the great majority had serious and egalitarian aspirations. It will also show that the community ofmuseum proprietors was so small and the interconnections among them so common, that it is useful to say that there was a loosely knit informal museum movement abroad in the land. There was, obviously, no formal museum movement before 1870; no professional organization was formed, no official journal was published, and no one person was recognized as the premier spokesman...