Bright Lamps, Bold Adventure: 1846-1878

A GIFT

This "citizen of mankind" was James Smithson, a product of upper-class England, but one who was bereft of social standing, an amateur in the true sense of the word and a somewhat sad, shadowy figure as well. Smithson was addressing the naturalist Georges Cuvier, who was known as the founder of comparative anatomy, and, after his signature, Smithson wrote, tellingly, "English Lord."

He was nothing of the sort. A bastard whose ambitious and, by today's standards, licentious father had married into aristocracy, Smithson had inherited his money through the family of his mother, a widow and reputedly a direct descendant of Henry VII. But no recognition from either side had accrued to her illegitimate son, who keenly felt this rejection.

A Time Line of James Smithson Life

In his early forties at the time he wrote to Cuvier, Smithson had financed his scientific career with his inheritance. His view of his own origins and obligations was just one ambiguity in a life alternately dedicated and frivolous ( Smithson became a compulsive gambler in later life), aristocratic and egalitarian, narrow and of enormous consequence to the world.

Today the search for the man is less than satisfying, always interesting. Although he spent many years on the European continent, the wellspring of the Enlightenment, it was England that shaped him. His father's family was rooted in north Yorkshire; the ancestral home is gone, but the little church at Stanwick, rebuilt often since the seventh century, contains the vault, illuminated by light filtering through Tudor windows, where James Smithson's great-grandfather was buried. Ancient sandstone effigies on the broad sills have eroded with time, but the sounds of wind whistling past the stone battlements, like the sight of sheep in the meadow, can't differ much from the scene in 1740.

That year, Hugh Smithson, who was to become James Smithson's father, married the daughter of the Earl of Northumberland, and, after the earl's death, acquired considerable wealth and property, including the elemental but beautiful Alnwick Castle in Northumberland and Northumberland House, in London, the residence painted by Canaletto in 1752. Hugh Smithson established himself as a man of taste, with political abilities and at least a curiosity for science: Syon House, another of his inherited estates, up the Thames from London, became a noted botanical garden like those nearby at Kew.

In the summers, Hugh Smithson conducted experiments at Alnwick, where old retorts were later found in what was known informally as "the Chemistry Tower." His portrait in the main hall, like the one of him by Gainsborough at Syon, depicts the imperious attitude of a man of the world, in silver cloak and red sash. Periodically left alone by his wife, one of the queen's attendants, and suffering from gout, Hugh often took the mineral cures at Bath, where society people were thrown together. There, in 1764, Hugh Smithson impregnated Elizabeth Hungerford Keate Macie, who was directly descended from the Hungerfords of Studley.

Mrs. Macie was the great-grandniece of Charles, Duke of Somerset, and a cousin of Hugh's wife. In 1765, she gave birth to James Smithson in Paris, where women of means in similar circumstances often retired. Her son was only one of several illegitimate children of the prolific Hugh Smithson, who, after ingratiating himself to King George III, was awarded by Parliament the name of Percy and the first dukedom of Northumberland, neither of which would benefit his illegitimate son.

James Smithson was naturalized at age nine, but, because he was born under the bar sinister, he was precluded from entering the army, the church, the civil service, or politics. There is no indication that young James Lewis Macie, as Smithson was known in his youth, ever saw the Duke of Northumberland or gained entrance to Northumberland House, Syon, or Alnwick Castle. Instead, he became the beneficiary of money inherited by his mother from the Studleys.

The young man attended Pembroke College, Oxford, where he studied chemistry and mineralogy, and, at the age of 19, traveled to Scotland on a geological expedition with French scientist M. Faujas de St. Fond. Dressed in mortarboard and gown in an anonymous portrait painted in 1786, his final year at Pembroke, Smithson appears a frail young man; today, near window boxes of flowering lobelia, his profile graces a plaque in the college's front quad, installed on the Smithsonian's 50th anniversary. Smithson joined The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in 1787. Its youngest member, he was championed by Henry Cavendish, the definer of the chemical makeup of air and water. Three years later, he presented his first scientific paper, on the subject of tabasheer, a substance found in bamboo; the paper was one of some 200 he would write, at least 27 of which were published.

At a time when chemistry and mineralogy were new-blown and geology barely existed, Smithson's contributions to science involved a natural curiosity. He was the first to make the distinction between the native carbonate and silicate of zinc in what was then classified as one mineral, "calamine." The carbonate is now known as smithsonite.

Apparently uninterested in theory, Smithson experimented painstakingly with a broad range of natural substances and with plant species ranging from daisies to artichokes, often using a portable laboratory. His method was modern in the sense that he understood the law of definite proportions-that compounds always contain proportionately the same elements-before the atomic theory had been proposed.

Smithson once captured for analysis a tear running down a woman's cheek. Unfortunately, the particulars of that tantalizing event are unknown. He opposed monarchy on principle, and wrote from Paris, in 1792, three years after the fall of the Bastille and the rise of egalitarianism in France: "Men of every rank are joining in the chorus. Stupidity and guilt have had a long reign, and it begins, indeed, to be time for justice and common sense to have their turn.... May other nations, at the time of their reforms, be wise enough to cast off, at first, the contemptible encumbrance"- meaning, in this last reference, kingship.

Traveling in Europe in 1807, his name now changed to reflect his patrimony, Smithson was detained in Denmark. An outspoken critic of Napoleon Bonaparte, the military leader who had become emperor of France, he ended up in prison, possibly as a suspected spy. Smithson wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, that "The dampness and unwholesomeness of that place, which is situated in the middle of the fens, & the vigorous manner in which the English were treated, & which occasioned the death of several, threw me into a state of dangerous illness & brought on a spitting of blood."

Smithson finally was released after five years, but the experience stayed with him. He seems to have continued to oppose social inequity, but also resented the limitations imposed upon him by the circumstances of his birth. He once wrote, in a document subsequently destroyed by fire: "The best blood of England flows in my veins. On my father's side I am a Northumberland, on my mother's I am related to kings, but this avails me not. My name shall live in the memory of man when the titles of the Northumberlands and the Percys are extinct and forgotten...."-words suggesting that he had a plan.

Smithson lived most of his adult life on the Continent, in the company of such scientific enthusiasts as Andre-Marie Ampere and Jons Jakob Berzelius. But his interests were not exclusively scientific. French astronomer and physicist Dominique Francois Arago sought to direct Smithson's attentions more to science and less to the gaming tables that had captured the Englishman's attention. Even if Smithson's gambling was excessive, it apparently made no serious inroads into his inheritance.

By 1826, Smithson was back in London, on Bentinck Street, in the Marylebone district. There he stipulated in his will that, should his nephew and only heir, Henry James Hungerford, die childless, the bulk of Smithson's fortune-worth about $500,000, an enormous sum at the time-should go "to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name to [sic] the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men."

The Royal Society reportedly had declined to publish Smithson's later papers, although the reasons for this-a perceived lack of originality or insight, perhaps- aren't known. The society may well have been left out of his will for what Smithson considered a slight. His death three years later, in Genoa, set off speculation that continues today: Why did Smithson choose a country he had never visited as his ultimate beneficiary? What exactly did he mean by "the increase & diffusion of knowledge"?

Early on in the Revolutionary War, Smithson's half-brother, Earl Hugh Percy, the second Duke of Northumberland, had fought for the British at the battle of Concord and other engagements, but even so the Percys had advocated peace and commerce with the new United States of America. James Smithson himself had been moved by the spirit of the Enlightenment and the ideals of philosophers like John Locke, David Hume, and Voltaire, and of Americans like the revolutionary writer Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, statesman, inventor, and scientist.

Smithson's contemporary, Joseph Priestly, also a chemist, had been forced to leave England because of his political beliefs, and had found asylum in America. Priestly had predicted that greater scientific discoveries would be made on the American side of the Atlantic than on the British, and Smithson must have known of this, as well as of American poet and patriot Joel Barlow, who had spoken of the capital city of Washington as an "Athens of the future rising on the banks of the Potomac."

Oddly, Smithson's library contained only a published paper and two books about America, one of which was written by the secretary of the Royal Society, Isaac Weld. In Travels Through North America, Weld speculated about Washington, D.C., "If the affairs of the United States go on as rapidly as they have done, it will become the grand emporium of the West, and rival in magnitude and splendor the cities of the whole world."

Smithson's inspiration was probably more general, and idealistic. The intellectual fires still burning at the outset of the 18th century in Europe were stoked with individualism, opposition to accepted authority, and cultural examination--traits the young America seemed to embody--as well as with the empirical method in scientific inquiry. The Enlightenment had produced optimism and a fervor for knowledge that approached the religious, absolutes that James Smithson no doubt valued "beyond a mere and fruitless admiration."

Smithson died on June 26, 1829. Six years later, his nephew died, leaving no heirs. A long, unpredictable, unprecedented, and quite fascinating process was set in motion, one that would transcend national boundaries and politics.

In July 1835, the American Charge d'Affaires in London received a copy of a will making his country the beneficiary of a sensational bequest--£100,000 for the creation of a theoretical "institution" in the United States. The puzzled charge sent the will to John Forsyth, U.S. Secretary of State, along with a letter suggesting that the benefactor may have been insane. President Andrew Jackson, reporting the existence of the bequest to Congress on December 17,1835, was less than enthusiastic. Jackson, the avowed common man, claimed he had no authority to accept it. Fortunately, in the House of Representatives, in the aging John Quincy Adams, former President and now a Representative from Massachusetts, the bequest found an energetic advocate, unashamed of the pursuit of knowledge. Adams took up the cause of the Smithson bequest, a cause he would champion for a decade.

The arguments for and against the creation of a Smithsonian Institution revealed contradictory aspects of the American character. As chairman of the Select Committee on the Smithson Bequest, Adams wrote: "To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is therefore the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind.... If, then, the Smithsonian Institution ...should contribute essentially to the increase and diffusion of knowledge.... to what higher or nobler object could this generous and splendid donation have been devoted?"

Adams, perfect defender of the inchoate Institution, was himself a scientist, and only two years younger than Smithson would have been, had he lived. Adams had spent years in Europe, and had been touched by the Enlightenment. But his eloquence and depth of feeling were lost on some of his fellow statesmen, whose antipathy toward the gift and its implications prefigured a struggle that would outlast them all.

Some Congressmen viewed the bequest as an attempt by a foreigner to acquire immortality, overlooking the obvious benefits to America. William C. Preston, a Representative from South Carolina, thought the gift "too cheap a way." If Congress accepted it, he said--illogically--"every whippersnapper vagabond...might think it proper to have his name distinguished in the same way."

Preston's fellow South Carolinian in the United States Senate, John C. Calhoun, said it was "beneath the dignity of the United States to receive presents of this kind from anyone," an indication that the young nation harbored some insecurity, as well as an indifference to intellectual pursuits--hardly New World versions of the Greek philosopher-statesman.

But others did speak in favor of the bequest, including Senator James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, later to become America's 15th President. Both houses of Congress eventually agreed to accept Smithson's extraordinary gift, and passed a bill that President Jackson signed on July 1, 1836. Included in the legislation was the provision of $10,000 to cover the expenses of shepherding the bequest through the English courts. Richard Rush, son of the famous physician and himself a former Secretary of State under James Monroe, was enlisted to travel to London on Congress's behalf. Again the still abstract "Smithsonian" was fortunate in its advocate. U.S. Minister to Great Britain from 1817 to 1825, Rush had proven an adept operator in the Court of St. James. Now he was able to advance consideration of James Smithson's bequest ahead of some eight hundred other petitioners to the Court of Chancery, and, in July 1838, he supervised the loading of eleven boxes of gold sovereigns onboard the U.S.S. Mediator, and sailed with the treasure chest to New York. From there the gold was shipped to Philadelphia, melted down, and re-coined as native specie worth precisely $508,318.46.

The Smithsonian's problems of definition and finance were just beginning. Martin Van Buren, Jackson's successor in the White House, announced at the end of the year that the money was in hand, and reminded Congress of its obligation "to fulfill the object of the bequest." But the United States was suffering from an economic depression, and the Congress-like those to follow it-sought solutions wherever it glimpsed them.

Science was still a murky concept. Institutions to further knowledge were in short supply. The city of Philadelphia, not Washington, was the intellectual center of the nation, with its American Philosophical Society, its Franklin Institute, and its Peale Museum. This last was founded by the indefatigable artist and collector Charles Willson Peale and was the country's first natural-history museum. Boston could claim the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and other large cities boasted of scientific associations. But despite the rising tide of scientific interest, many members of Congress were concerned more with material benefits.

As head of the nine-member committee overseeing the formation of the institution, John Quincy Adams sought to block self-serving suggestions. He wanted an enlightened electorate and he wanted Washington to be the country's intellectual center, and he treated opponents to those ideals with hyperbolic disdain: "Not so easy it will be to secure, as from a rattlesnake's fang, the fund and its income, forever, from being wasted and dilapidated in bounties to feed the hunger or fatten the leaden idleness of mountebank projectors, and shallow and worthless pretenders to science."

These "pretenders" included, in Adams's opinion, a retired college president who envisioned a post-graduate university specializing in mathematics, science, and agriculture (his "very breath is pestilential") and a Senator who wanted an institution "to provide...a course of education and discipline." Adams warned Congress against creating colleges or schools for specific studies. He had for years advocated a national observatory, and although he wasn't able to convince his colleagues of the wisdom of that course after the Naval Observatory was built in 1844, he did prevent them from squandering, as he put it, "a stranger's munificence to rear our children."

Others honestly attempted to conform to Smithson's wishes. Richard Rush advocated a grand lecture bureau that would promote scientific knowledge and also serve as a catchall for natural-science specimens, cultural objects, and information picked up around the world from representatives of the United States. The president of Columbia College proposed lectures and professorships covering all aspects of learning and life in America. When a Senator suggested creating an agricultural college that also taught house-building and navigation, Senator Rufus Choate, of Massachusetts, derided his "narrow utilitarianism." Choate proposed instead a national library as "durable as liberty, durable as the Union."

The greatest threat to an autonomous Smithsonian came from the Secretary of War, Joel Poinsett, an amateur naturalist after whom the poinsettia was named. He had already brought together in Washington some men who were interested in science, creating the National Institution for the Promotion of Science and the Useful Arts, and he also helped organize Lieutenant Charles Wilkes's expedition to the South Seas (1838-42), the first U.S. government-sponsored maritime exploration. Poinsett wanted funds for his institution for the creation of a museum of natural history, and had received authority to act as curator for the specimens Wilkes brought back.

Poinsett's organization was renamed the National Institute, and he was succeeded as its president by Levi Woodbury, the former Secretary of the Treasury. Woodbury had already threatened the viability of the Smithson bequest by investing the half-million dollars in state bonds, most of which were from Arkansas and almost all of which were in default. This prompted an outraged John Quincy Adams to demand that the government make up the losses from Woodbury's unwise investment and that it ensure the Smithsonian, whatever form it took, a rightful return on its original investment, plus interest. Meanwhile, the politically astute National Institute continued to seek access to any funds that might become available from the Smithsonian financial debacle.

Senator Benjamin Tappan, the Jacksonian Democrat from Ohio who vigorously opposed the National Institute, suggested in 1844 yet another shape the Smithsonian Institution might take, one that would combine a museum, a laboratory, and a library, and would emphasize practical information for the benefit of common people. During that debate, William Allen, of Ohio, derided the National Institute's "pompous title," and let some air out of its claims of deserving public money. Poinsett's organization, Allen said, had discovered "a Capitol here and a public Treasury...."

Senator Rufus Choate, the Whig from Massachusetts, took issue with Tappan's bill on grounds that it would create something akin to a national university, which he saw as a federal arrogation of local responsibility. However, both Choate and his ally in the House, George Perkins Marsh, of Vermont, wanted a great library. By now the idea of a national museum was lodged in the public consciousness. So were the notions of scandal associated with the financial aspects of the bequest, as a result of the defaulted state bonds and the ineptitude and bickering among politicians about the Smithsonian's ultimate makeup.

Robert Dale Owen, a Congressman from Indiana and the son of the famous English utopian, denounced libraries as "clouds of windy verbiage," and proposed, in another bill, a natural-history museum, agricultural plots, a school for training teachers, and a laboratory. To this, Representative Marsh, library proponent, responded contemptuously, "Sir, a laboratory is a charnel house." As for the provision for a teachers' school, Adams told his colleagues that, rather than sanction this, he would see "the whole money thrown into the Potomac." The acerbic Adams kept the government's feet to the fires of responsibility for restoring the money lost on the defaulted bonds, which Owen also favored.

The continuing debate over the "Smithsonian problem" now included Representative Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, destined to be the country's 17th President, who opposed the bill on the grounds that his constituents should not have to pay for faulty investments. Jefferson Davis, from neighboring Mississippi, favored making the federal government meet its moral obligation.

Adams prevailed, through political astuteness and inspired denunciation of what he considered the enemies of enlightenment. The 29th Congress finally passed a bill without most of the specific provisions for a Smithsonian Institution, except those for a national museum for government collections, a laboratory, an art gallery, and a library. On August 10, 1846, President James K. Polk signed the bill, restoring the original half-million dollars and the interest that should have accrued during the eight years of Congressional wrangling, $242,129.

The bill also set out the rules for governing an institution dedicated to "the increase & diffusion of knowledge." It established a Board of Regents made up of the Chief Justice of the United States, the Vice President, the mayor of Washington, D.C. (later abolished), all ex officio; as well as three Senators, three Representatives, and six private citizens, two of whom had to be Washingtonians. It further authorized a site for the Smithsonian Institution to be selected, and a building put up "of plain and durable materials and structure, without unnecessary ornament."

The new Institution, a trust to the public, would be presided over by a Secretary, like the various government cabinets, and supervised by the board. Of the interest on the Smithson fund, amounting to $30,000 a year, Choate and Marsh succeeded in providing that a sum "not exceeding an average of $25,000 a year" would go to the creation of the library. Otherwise, the Smithsonian's managers were to spend the income from the fund "as they deem best suited for the promotion of the purposes of James Smithson"-a victory for Adams and other advocates of an autonomous and somewhat high-minded institution that had been 10 years in the making.

The crucial stipulation-"as they deem best suited"-allowed the Smithsonian to grow without rigid Congressional oversight. John Quincy Adams, who would live for less than two more years after this legislative victory, said of the Smithsonian in one of his last speeches, "Of all the foundations of establishments for pious or charitable uses which ever signalized the spirit of the age, or the comprehensive beneficence of the founder, none can be named more deserving the approbation of mankind than this."

The argument over the Smithsonian's ultimate makeup, far from resolved, was set aside for a more pressing question: What sort of "plain and durable" structure would be built to house it, and who would design the building? Already, powerful voices among the Regents were being raised in support of various plans and architects. Two days before President Polk walked or the Mall that hot September morning in 1846, the others had gathered at the Post Office Building for the first Board of Regents meeting. There, Vice-President George M. Dallas was elected interim president, but the three most influential Regents would come to be Dallas's nephew, Alexander Dallas Bache; Robert Dale Owen, proponent of the teachers' school; and Rufus Choate, the library advocate.

Bache, the youngest Regent, was the great- grandson of Benjamin Franklin and the superintendent of the United States Coast Survey. He had influential relatives and friends in Washington, among them Senator Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, a proven friend of the Smithsonian. Bache also was acquainted with an architect in New York, James Renwick, Sr., whose son, James, Jr., sent in one of the thirteen plans eventually submitted. While a student at Columbia, Renwick, Jr., had exhibited, according to classmate George Templeton Strong, the "vanity and pretension" of an artist, but had proven businesslike and had acquired recognition as the designer of several Gothic and Romanesque churches in Manhattan. He would design St. Patrick's Cathedral and, in Washington, D.C., the original Corcoran Gallery of Art, but, for the moment, at age 28, his fame rested upon New York's Grace Church, known as "Renwick's tooth- pick" for its elegant, wooden steeple.

On November 30, 1846, Renwick's design for a Smithsonian building was chosen by the Regents over those of the competition. On paper lay the basics for a solid if somewhat whimsical structure. its towers and extensive crenelation constituting what might be considered excessive ornament. Renwick's plan was described as "Norman," but was really an amalgam-like the Smithsonian itself-of history and intellectual fashion. Once completed, a process that would take a decade, the building captured the attention of people of all ages, a highly wrought vision in an otherwise deserted field, a latter-day castle built of varied, contentious dreams.

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