Extinct Monsters to Deep Time

Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian's Fossil Halls

Diana E. Marsh

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789201239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Museumswissenschaft

Via the Smithsonian Institution, an exploration of the growing friction between the research and outreach functions of museums in the 21st century.

Describing participant observation and historical research at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History as it prepared for its largest-ever exhibit renovation, Deep Time, the author provides a grounded perspective on the inner-workings of the world's largest natural history museum and the social processes of communicating science to the public.

From the introduction:

In exhibit projects, the tension plays out between curatorial staff—academic, research, or scientific staff charged with content—and exhibitions, public engagement, or educational staff—which I broadly group together as "audience advocates" charged with translating content for a broader public. I have heard Kirk Johnson, Sant Director of the NMNH, say many times that if you look at dinosaur halls at different museums across the country, you can see whether the curators or the exhibits staff has "won." At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it was the curators. The hall is stark white and organized by phylogeny—or the evolutionary relationships of species—with simple, albeit long, text panels. At the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Johnson will tell you, it was the "exhibits people." The hall is story driven and chronologically organized, full of big graphic prints, bold fonts, immersive and interactive spaces, and touchscreens. At the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where Johnson had previously been vice president and chief curator, "we actually fought to a draw." That, he says, is the best outcome; a win on either side skews the final product too extremely in one direction or the other. This creative tension, when based on mutual respect, is often what makes good exhibitions.

Chapter 1

INCREASE AND DIFFUSION

Early Fossil Exhibits and a History of Institutional Culture

FROM THE INSTITUTION’S VERY BEGINNINGS, THE SMITHSONIAN WAS charged with the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.” This phrase, included in the will of James Smithson, was adopted as the primary mission of the Smithsonian at its founding, and it has become ubiquitous in institutional speeches, reports, publications, public media, and everyday conversation. It is the institution’s, and its staff’s, raison d’être. My mentor, Michael Mason, like so many others I worked with, often commented that he could think of few better ways to spend his life than pursuing this goal.

Within this phrase are embedded two equal but fundamentally distinct goals of the institution. The first, increase, involves research and knowledge production. Within the mission of “increasing knowledge” is included researching, describing, identifying, and comparing things in the world, and exchanging this information with other scholars or experts. Within the mission of “diffusing knowledge” is included sharing that increasing knowledge with wider audiences—publishing, communicating, and exhibiting research for the wider world. It is in this second realm that the Smithsonian has changed most noticeably since its founding. While many elements of research culture have remained the same over the last 150 years, notions of the public and technologies for communication have undergone fundamental changes.

This dual institution-wide mission is also reflected in the museum’s three historical functions. These goals, initiated by G. Brown Goode in the 1890s, are often referred to as the limbs of a three-legged stool: collections, research, and outreach (to my mind: increase and diffusion, plus objects, which contain or generate knowledge). Remington Kellogg, director of the USNM, recalled in the institution’s 1951 annual report:

As a museum of record—in which was to be housed the national treasures, scientific and historic; as a museum of research—in which a staff of specialists and scientists were to study, classify, and document these materials; and as a museum of education—to which the public could turn for self-improvement and study.¹

In the museum’s early years, curators and their staff, working together in a single department, were held responsible for all of these functions. Besides publications, exhibitions served as the primary mode of diffusion for the general public. Exhibits embodied elements of the institution’s mission by aspiring to educate the public (diffusion) through the most encyclopedic and up-to-date (increase) scientific ideas and objects (knowledge). However, notions of both the public and of education, while expanding throughout the period, were limited. Making exhibits necessarily involved varied expertise (carpenters, blacksmiths, glassworkers, sculptors, artists); however, experts in these areas were often hired temporarily. Moreover these areas were not yet standalone museum disciplines.

At the time, there was a clear distinction between the institution’s mission of “increase” and “diffusion,” but it was a much narrower one. At the 1927 Conference on the Future of the Smithsonian, regent Fredrick Delano summed up the institution’s activities, citing the Smithsonian’s first secretary, Joseph Henry: Henry, he remarked, “interpreted the phrase ‘increase of knowledge’ as implying study, investigation, research, into the realms of the unknown.’ The phrase ‘diffusion of knowledge’ he interpreted as the freest possible distribution of the knowledge to the waiting world.”² At that same conference, Assistant Secretary Charles G. Abbot concisely put (and ordered) the mission thus: “1. Research, 2. Diffusion of Knowledge.”³ When Abbot went on to talk about what he meant by “diffusion,” he made it clear that he was primarily referring to publications:

The increase of knowledge is only half of the Smithsonian’s purpose. The diffusion of it is of equal importance, and has been a main source of the Smithsonian’s greatness…. Smithsonian publications are now standard works of reference throughout the world, and scientific men everywhere look to it to publish those indispensable monographs which cannot be undertaken by private publishing firms …⁴

To increase was thus to build collections and knowledge (to conduct research through scientific collection); to diffuse was to publish or lecture on one’s findings. In an 1866 guide to the Smithsonian, these distinct elements were not to be “confounded”:

It will be observed that the object of the bequest is twofold—first, to increase, and, second, to diffuse, knowledge among men. These two objects are entirely separate and distinct, and to view the case understandingly the one must not be confounded with the other. The first is to enlarge the existing stock of knowledge by the addition of new truths, and the second, to disseminate knowledge thus enlarged among men.⁵

Curators corresponded with other paleontologists and preparators across the United States, but also in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Brussels, and so on. Through the Smithsonian International Exchange Service, the U.S. National Museum was able to share publications with other institutions across the world.⁶ Webster True, chief of the Smithsonian Editorial Division in the mid-1940s, wrote in The First Hundred Years of the Smithsonian Institution,

In 1939, the last normal year before World War II, the Service handled 714,877 packages … this global exchange of literature, initiated by the Smithsonian Institution, has been a potent factor in the rapid growth of science through facilitating the international exchange of ideas.⁷

True and others throughout the early years reiterated, “The most obvious means of diffusing knowledge is by the printed word, and this is indeed the chief means employed by the Institution.”⁸ He went on to restate that scientific work was the heart of the institution:

To the visitor, the public exhibits seem to be the important part of a museum, but the members of the scientific staff know that the soul of the museum resides in the systematically arranged study collections, where fundamental discoveries of new knowledge are constantly being made.⁹

The Smithsonian’s emphasis was thus squarely on its scientific pursuits.¹⁰

This chapter provides historical context for the development of the fossil halls from their beginnings to World War II, when fossil displays were primarily designed pragmatically, with an emphasis on scientific discovery and systematic display.

The Birth of the Smithsonian’s Fossil Complex

Among the Smithsonian’s scientific pursuits, paleontology was a young field. It had only been around 1815 that Reverend William Buckland, a professor of mineralogy at Oxford, had discovered the “great lizard” Megalosaurus, and only in 1822 that Gideon Mantell, a physician in Sussex, England, found a tooth of what he called Iguanodon.¹¹ Richard Owen coined the term “Dinosauria” to describe these giant “fearfully great lizards” in 1842.¹²

There were a few reasons the discipline matured fairly quickly at the end of the nineteenth century, and that the Smithsonian was among many museums to expand its fossil exhibitions. First, there was more access to fossil sites. The mid-nineteenth century was a period of great expansion. The colonization of the North American territories opened new commodity flows and land claims, and the expansion of railroads enabled scientific exploration and museum collecting. Some have argued that the collecting of fossils in the American West was an element of the United States’ claims to legitimacy as a nation.¹³

Second, there were wider networks of scientific exchange. Beginning with the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, fairs and expositions exploded across Europe and the United States as the nineteenth century advanced.¹⁴ It was at world’s fairs that paleontological science was shared across the globe. In part as a result of these large-scale fairs and the subsequent establishment of museums in cities across the United States, Smithsonian fossil displays emerged among a wider network of newly formed institutions. And indeed, the modern museum, as a large, columned, encyclopedic and public institution, largely emerged out of such events. Although the institution had always had a museum, it was not until after the success of the 1876 Centennial Exposition (and under the influence of Secretary Joseph Henry’s successor, Spencer Fullerton Baird) that a more visible U.S. National Museum was promoted and supported by Congress.¹⁵

Third, dinosaurs and other fossils gained immense popularity. It was amid these events that some of the first dinosaurs were displayed to a broad public. Famously, the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace hosted Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s sculptures of dinosaurs, and an account of a raucous dinner party thrown by Hawkins inside the mold of Owen’s Iguanodon caused a great splash.¹⁶ Dinosaurs were public spectacle. Meanwhile, the 1870s marked the enormous acceleration of fossil discovery and naming amid the great “bone wars”—the race between the two early rival paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope to discover and name the most new species—which vastly increased public interest in extinct animals. Up until Cope’s death in 1897, the rivals named more than fifty dinosaur species as fossils poured in from excavation sites, first from the east coast and then the west.¹⁷

Importantly for the Smithsonian, Marsh had been appointed the first vertebrate paleontologist for the United States in 1882, after which he began collecting fossils for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).¹⁸ In 1887, he was appointed honorary head curator of the U.S. National Museum’s (USNM) Department of Vertebrate Fossils. Because the Organic Act of 1879 required the USGS to turn specimens no longer needed for research over to the Smithsonian, after 1886 freight car loads of fossils poured into the museum.¹⁹ When Marsh died in 1899, just two years after Cope, another eighty tons of vertebrate fossils were brought from Yale to the Smithsonian in five railcars.²⁰ Still today, the Mars...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Foreword
• Prologue. Fieldnotes from the Badlands
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Chronology A. Lists of Relevant Leadership
• Chronology B. Geologic Time Scale
• Chronology C. Fossil Exhibits Timeline
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Increase and Diffusion: Early Fossil Exhibits and a History of Institutional Culture
• Chapter 2. Group Dynamics: Exhibit Meetings and Expertise
• Chapter 3. Group Dynamics: The Roots of Team Frictions and Complementarities
• Chapter 4. Content Development: Debates about Interconnected Processes and Static Things
• Chapter 5. Content Development: The Roots of Interpretive Frictions and Complementarities
• Chapter 6. Diffusion and Increase: Shifts in Institutional Culture from Modernization to Now
• Chapter 7. Conclusion
• Chapter 8. Coda: The Nation’s T. rex
• Appendix A. Consent Form
• Appendix B. Interview Questionnaires
• Bibliography
• Index