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This post includes a riff on a Nautilus article by Lee Alan Dugatkin in November 2020.
The first US museum, founded by Charles Willson Peale, focused on truth and reason. Peale, the son of a schoolteacher, born in Maryland in 1741, apprenticed to a saddler at 13, but spent almost as much time tinkering with mechanical devices, painting and sketching as he did saddling.
Peale became the Maryland Colony’s most famous portrait painter.
In 1771, he convinced Martha Washington that Colonel Washington should sit for him—the first of 25 portraits, miniatures, mezzotints, or sculptures he would create for Washington. Peale also painted portraits of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton. He named most of his 17 children after famous painters, including Rembrandt, Rubens, and Titian.
A true autodidact, Peale saw himself as a naturalist and scientist.
Robert Patterson, professor of mathematics at the University of the State of Pennsylvania, gave Peale his first specimen for a museum: a paddle fish caught in the Allegheny River. Ben Franklin sent Peale the body of an angora cat that Madame Helvetius had given him when he departed Paris, and Washington sent the body of a just-deceased golden pheasant from the aviary of Louis XVI that the general had received as a gift from the Marquis de Lafayette.
Other specimens soon came flooding in for Peale’s nascent museum.
In a letter to Jefferson, Peale explained that his goal for the museum was to bring together:
…a variety of interesting subjects of Nature ... collected in one view as would enlighten the minds of my countrymen, and, demonstrate the importance of diffusing a knowledge of the wonderful and various beauties of Nature, more powerful to humanize the mind, promote harmony, and aid virtue than any ... yet imagined.
Peale didn’t create his museum to cater only to “particular classes of society only, or open at such turns or at such portions of time, as effectually to debar the mass of society, from participating in the improvement, and the pleasure resulting from a careful visitation,” he wrote. His museum would be open to all.
Peale saw his museum as a national good.
Because he knew that a family-friendly venue would attract more visitors, he tried to bring women and children into his museum. Women were not only encouraged to visit the museum, Peale wanted them to contribute to the enterprise, sending in samples and sharing ideas. Society, he believed, raised roadblocks to women:
…which allow no time for them to devote in the arduous pursuits of science…when females have devoted themselves to these pursuits they have given every demonstration of the intensity and depth of their intellectual powers.
He wanted to tap into those powers to better the museum and the plight of women.
From the time Peale’s Museum opened its doors in 1786, annual attendance had averaged over 10,000 people. Born both of science and art, it was the first true museum in the US and the first must-see attraction not only for Philadelphians, but for visitors from around the country and the world. The “very sinews of government are made strong by a diffused knowledge of this science,” he wrote. The museum embodied the age of Enlightenment in the new world.
Comte de Volney proclaimed Peale’s museum housed “nothing but truth and reason.”
Reverend Manasseh Cutler, a respected naturalist, was an early visitor to Peale’s Museum in 1787. Cutler found the exhibits “arranged in a most romantic and amusing manner.” He describes two dioramas—a mound with trees and an artificial pond, each the result of Peale having spent many a morning “dressing the museum in moss.” The museum stocked the pond with fish, geese, ducks, cranes, and herons, “all having the appearance of life, for their skins were admirably preserved.” On the beach around the pond, Cutler was dazzled by an assortment of “shells of different kinds, turtles, frogs, toads, lizards, water snakes, etc.” Cutler’s diary ends: “Mr. Peale’s animals reminded me of Noah’s Ark, into which was received every kind of beast and creeping thing in which there was life. But I can hardly conceive that even Noah could have boasted of a better collection.”
Peale retired as director of the museum in 1810.
He had his hand in museum affairs until he died at age 85. His Philadelphia Museum lived on, managed by his sons and a nephew. One son, Rembrandt, opened a spinoff Peale museum—the first building in the United States designed as a museum—in Baltimore in 1814, and Rubens followed with another spinoff in New York City in 1825, the day New York celebrated the completion of the Erie Canal.
And then the circus came to town.
By the 1840s, Americans were becoming less and less interested in the sort of entertainment offered at the Peale museums. Dime-store museums, with their magicians, musicians, actors, charlatans, freaks, ventriloquists, and animal acts, each claiming to be the most marvelous of them all, were on the rise. The country had entered a period of maturity and people now had more money for leisure. Large, crowded cities, filled with strangers, attracted many people to dime-store museums advertising escapism.
No one understood that better than P.T. Barnum.
In 1841, before the businessman and showman and master at promoting hoaxes founded his traveling circus, Barnum opened his American Museum in lower Manhattan near Rubens Peale’s museum, using it as a showcase for freak shows and melodramatic plays. Rubens couldn’t compete and soon closed his museum and sold the contents to Barnum. Barnum swooped in and bought out the Peale museum in Baltimore as well. In the spring of 1849, Barnum opened a branch museum of his own in Philadelphia, in the Swaime Building, a few blocks from Peale’s Philadelphia Museum.
Barnum wrote to his partner that he’d “kill the other shop in no time.”
The Philadelphia Museum’s last advertisement ran on Aug. 27, 1849, and soon after, the United States Bank held a public auction of all the items (aside from Peale’s paintings) in the museum. Barnum was there and bought it lock, stock, and barrel. At Barnum’s American Museum, alongside many of the exhibits and fossils from Peale’s museums, the Fiji mermaid, the head and torso of a monkey sewn to the back half of a fish, was on display. General Tom Thumb danced and sang in Revolutionary War regalia. The museum attracted 15,000 people a day. Or so Barnum claimed. Nobody checked. Confederate arsonists destroyed Barnum’s museum and Peale’s many artifacts in 1864.
Today, gift shops front museums of all kinds.
While there’s nothing wrong with capitalism, nor with Barnum’s snapping up the remnants of Peale’s early museums, the charlatanry often displayed in these attractions gets confused with the truth. Few modern audiences are going to buy the Fiji mermaid anymore, but there will be some obvious frauds, obfuscations, and outright lies in displays at any museum. Even the Smithsonian hasn’t been exempt from distorting reality. For decades, “America’s Attic” refused to even mention the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kill Devil Hill, insisting that Samuel P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian in 1903, was the first with his Aerodrome at least two years before sans evidence. It would be nearly a century before the Smithsonian changed its position.
Fraud by omission is far more common.
The Cahokia mounds in Illinois host an interesting indoor diorama attraction that leaves out the most obvious, and likely most numerous, builders of the mounds: slaves. The Smithsonian, again, once kept Enola Gay’s name off the famous B-29 for fear of offending Japanese visitors. Civil War battlefields (in)famously add a panel on slavery, not telling their audiences that most battlefields didn’t have a single slave anywhere near them.
Museums were once about facts; now, they’re about entertainment.
Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries
David Beer, book reviewer for Roads To The Great War, concluded his review of Steele’s Battalion with:
…I found Steele’s odyssey from the Mexican border to the end of the Great War a captivating and informative read full of fascinating characters and insights into the workings of a wartime American army machine gun company.
David Beer
And Finally...
On 16 August:
1918: The first contingent of Americans land Vladivostok, Primorye, Russia. Sent to perform three divergent, distinct missions—keep arms and ammunition out of Bolshevik hands, rescue the Czech Legion in Siberia, secure the railway across Russia—the Americans joined Japanese, Canadian and British troops in Siberia until 1920.
1977: A New York court allows Rene Richards (born Richard Raskind) to compete in the US Open Tennis Tournament without the required chromosomal testing for sex. While hailed as a legal victory for transsexual rights, Richards lost to Virginia Wade in the Open finals 6-1, 6-4. That semi-final was as good as Richards ever did in pro tournament play.
And today is NATIONAL AIRBORNE DAY, commemorating the formation of the US Army Parachute Test Platoon at Ft. Benning, Georgia on this day in 1940. In December 1973, because I was second-generation airborne, I had the honor of having my novice wings pinned to my chest by one of the last surviving members of the Test Platoon, alongside the first two women to be airborne-qualified in the US Army.