While it’s sometimes called “the nation’s attic” for its eclectic holdings of 154 million items, the Smithsonian Institution, the subject of today’s #stampoftheday, also finds itself in the middle of today’s most heated issues.
The stamp itself, was issued on August 10, 1946 to commemorates the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Smithsonian Institution, which consists of 19 museums, 21 libraries, nine research centers, and a zoo. Oddly, the Smithsonian owed its creation to James Smithson, a wealthy English scientist who never set foot in the United States. Smithson died in 1829; when his first beneficiary died without heirs in 1835, Smithson’s will called for the estate to be passed to the United States of America, which was to use the money to found an entity, to be called the Smithsonian Institution, that would be “an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men.”
In 1836, Congress officially accepted the legacy and in 1838 American diplomat Richard Rush returned from England with 105 sacks containing 104,960 gold sovereigns, worth approximately $500,000 at the time (about $14 million today). Not surprisingly, Congress took 8 years to decide how to interpret Smithson’s rather vague mandate. Also not surprisingly, the US Treasury invested money in bonds issued by the state of Arkansas, which soon defaulted on that debate. Somewhat more surprisingly, is that in 1846, after heated debate, former president John Quincy Adams, who had once again become a Congressman, persuaded his colleagues to restore the lost funds with interest. Moreover, despite designs on the money for other purposes, Adams convinced his colleagues to preserve it for an institution devoted to science and learning.
While the early Smithsonian conducted some scientific research, it quickly became the depository for various items collected by both government expeditions and leading indviduals. These, for example, included thousands of animal specimens, an herbarium of 50,000 plant specimens, and diverse shells and minerals, tropical birds, jars of seawater, and ethnographic artifacts from the South Pacific Ocean collected by a navy expedition that sailed around the world between 1838 and 1842.
The institution’s iconic building, called The Castle, opened in 1855. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Smithsonian expanded to include a building devoted to Arts and Industries and one to Natural History as well as zoo and an art gallery. There was a long period of quiescence until 1964 when the Museum of History and Technology (now the Museum of American History) opened. This is a place where I can and have spent many happy hours exploring some piece of arcane Americana. I have particularly fond memories of a visit sometime in the 1970s when I spent hours immersed in an exhibition about Rube Goldberg that included at least one life-size, working model of one his many fanciful drawings showing how complicated gadgets could perform simple tasks in an indirect, amusing, and convoluted ways.
The decades since have seen the Smithsonian add a variety of other museums, most notably the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016. I haven’t been there (yet) but I know it is designed to evoke a visceral sense of the passage from slavery to freedom and, in doing so, to demand that we confront some our country’s less than noble roots. When President Trump visited the museum, he supposedly didn’t want to see any of these “difficult” parts. That didn’t really surprise Lonnie Bunch, an historian who was the museum’s founding director (and now heads the entire Smithsonian) .”Americans in some ways want to romanticize history,” he told The New York Times in early July. “As the great John Hope Franklin used to say, you need to use African-American history as a corrective, to help people understand the fullness, the complexity, the nuance of their history. I know that’s hard. I remember receiving a letter once that said, ‘Don’t you understand that America’s greatest strength is its ability to forget?’ And there’s something powerful about that. But people are now thirsty to understand history.”
In fact, he added later in the interview with the Times, “I believe very strongly that museums have a social justice role to play, that museums have an opportunity…to help the community grapple with the challenges they face.”
He went on to explain: “I’m not expecting museums to engage in partisan politics. What I’m expecting museums to be is driven by scholarship and the community. I want museums to be a place that gives the public not just what it wants, but what it needs. And if that means that museums have to take a little more risk, if museums have to recognize that they’ve got to do a better job of explaining to government officials, funders, why they do the work they do, then so be it. I would rather the museum be a place that takes a little risk to make the country better than a place where history and science go to die.”
Not surprisingly, this stance has not been universally hailed. In fact, in mid-July a variety of conservative critics, including Donald Trump, Jr. and U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, attacked the African-American museum for posting a graphic on “aspects and assumptions about white culture” as part of a website on “Talking About Race” that it launched in late May. The museum subsequently removed the graphic (which came from a book published in 1978) but the overall website is still live.
Hopefully, that storm will pass and the Smithsonian, and other museums, will actively work to “help people understand the fullness, the complexity, the nuance of their history.” And hopefully, there will come a time when more of us will feel comfortable enough to go back to museum and to engage with their exhibitions and with others doing so as well. I’m certainly hoping to see the African American history museum.
Until then, be safe, stay well, fight for justice, work for peace, and “take a little risk to make the country better.”