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20 AttheAmericanMuseum  M useums in the United States were still experiencing an uncertain childhood. Were their primary purposes to provide academic settings for elites? Education for the public? Entertainment? Or were they simply “repositories” of curiosities, as Dr. Johnson defined them in his 1755 dictionary? The first small American museum was founded in Charleston, South Carolina in 1773, followed by a variety of societies and academies interested in promoting the development of knowledge , all with varying levels of capability and finances. Public funds or private donations for institutions arrived haphazardly and rarely. For the next century, museums continued in this state of flux, with respected institutions like Boston’s Gallery of Fine Arts promoting an exhibition in 1818 of engravings by Hogarth, and a year later featuring a pair of dwarfs called “The Lilliputian songsters.”1 This was further complicated by the attitude of a public which attended museums primarily for entertainment and not enlightenment. Talking, running, and behaving badly was the norm in all museums for over a century, while owners and newspapers fought a long attrition against these “plebian” attitudes. Charles Willson Peale was forced to post a sign at his ornithological exhibits that read “Do not touch the birds as they are covered with arsenic Poison.”2 And as late as 1891, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its doors on Sunday afternoons , they had to collect canes and umbrellas at the door to ensure that none would be used to “prod a hole through a valuable painting, or to knock off any portion of a cast.”3 Funding, audience, and presentation have always been challenges for museums all over theworld, but these issues were particularlyacute in the rapidly changing society of early America. Most museums of the time depended solely on an increasingly urban, middle-­ class population to support them through admission fees. In 1784 portrait artist Charles Willson Peale opened a “museum” in his large home in Phila- 21 A t t h e A m e r i c a n M u s e u m delphia, using only his own limited resources. Nevertheless, this business grew rapidly in what at the time was America’s largest city, becoming the most important early American museum. Two years later The Peale Museum had taken up residence near Independence Hall, and was packed with paintings, taxidermy, and collections of dinosaur bones. Peale tried to walk a fine line between “rational amusement” and enlightenment for his middle-­ class patrons, using magic mirrors, speaking tubes, and other gadgets to keep people’s interest. Founded in 1814, his son Rembrandt’s Baltimore establishment at first provided a “serious” art museum for patrons, but when his brother Rubens took over, he switched to a “side-­ show” style of museum, containing various illusions, automatons, and wax figures. He did the same with his father’s Philadelphia museum, and expanded the franchise to New York in 1825.4 Another museum that followed this model was Scudder’s American Museum, which had its small beginnings in Manhattan as early as 1795, and in 1830 had relocated to a five-­ story building at Ann Street and Broadway, across from St. Paul’s Chapel. Less than two years before he met Charles, an optimistic P. T. Barnum had purchased Scudder ’s. By this time competition from Peale’s, exacerbated by financial panics and fires, had driven Scudder’s to near worthlessness. The current owners asked a mere $15,000 for the extensive collections. In a move of contract legerdemain, Barnum played Peale’s Museum proprietors for fools to the tune of $3,000 by agreeing to manage the American Museum for them if they purchased their rival. At the same time he signed a contract with the owners of Scudder’s American Museum to purchase it if Peale’s defaulted. When it did, Barnum promptly bought it out from under them at $12,000, keeping their management fee as well. Inside, the museum was an astonishing mixture of natural wonders , wax figures, paintings, inventions, and curiosities, and the enterprise expanded rapidly under Barnum’s management, with his constant eye for the “draw.” To the “legitimate” collections of such things as ancient coins and rare minerals, he added objects as strange as a preserved hand and arm of a pirate and a large hairball taken from the stomach of a pig. He also brought in numerous live exhibits and acts, which were showcased in galleries or dioramas, or performed in the [18.119.104...

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