The Universe: 1879-1949

A Voice from the Cambrian

As Assistant Secretary, Walcott nonetheless retained his USGS position. Although officially a separate government entity within the Department of the Interior, the USGS kept its ties to the Smithsonian -- an unusual, productive, and enduring tradition. The much smaller Biological Survey, established in 1885 under mammologist and ornithologist C. Hart Merriam to gather information on North American fauna, was merged with the Bureau of Fisheries to become the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It also would maintain a permanent liaison with the Smithsonian.

Walcott had immediately set about organizing the chaos of the Natural History collections and their curatorial staff. (At the time he took over, only 26 of the 63 employees were paid a salary.) He established three departments- Anthropology, Biology, and Geology-and a clear chain of command whose effects are still felt today.

Upon Langley's death in 1906, Walcott had not been the Regents' first choice to succeed him. That honor was offered to Henry Fairfield Osborn, of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York. He declined, and only then did the Regents turn to Walcott-over the objections of President Theodore Roosevelt. Walcott had helped defeat a bill seeking to exploit the national-forest preserves, and the President wanted to keep him at the highly political USGS as an ally. The Regents exerted considerable pressure on Roosevelt to convince him that this commanding workhorse was indeed needed more at the Smithsonian than in the President's own conservation efforts.

Walcott's breadth of interest would now have to accommodate everything from 500-million-year-old fossils to nascent rocketry. One of his immediate and most pressing tasks was to oversee the National Museum's transition from the old to the new.

On the day Walcott was sworn in as fourth Secretary of the Smithsonian, January 31, 1907, the new National Museum building loomed on the north side of the Mall, its neoclassical outlines seemingly the answer to all the Smithsonian's space problems. Delays in the delivery of granite stalled for a time the museum's inevitable completion, but by the fall of 1908 enough was in place to allow it to host the Sixth International Tuberculosis Congress.

What a spectacle the new museum presented in comparison to the doughty old Castle and the old National Museum building south of the grassy expanse. In the new museum, three massive wings and a stately rotunda-at that point still without its Roman dome-took up almost 11 acres. A full five acres of exhibit space was supposed to satisfy the needs of all curators, present and future. The top floor, when added, along with the north wing, would accommodate all conceivable research. This was an edifice to impress, despite the fact that the huge statue of a winged Victory envisioned by the architect, J.D. Hornblower, had been nixed by Langley.

At a cost of $3.5 million, the new museum was to represent the best design and building in the nation, as had the Capitol and the Washington Monument in their time. Suddenly, in the eyes of many, it was the Smithsonian Institution.

The National Museum's move out of what came to be called the Arts and Industries Building began in the summer of 1909. It was supervised by the redoubtable Assistant Secretary, Richard C. Rathbun, who had to contend with everything in the new building, from threat of fire to acres of leaking roof. The collection of mollusks crossed the Mall first, and found a home on the third floor, although the division's curator, William Healey Dall, had pronounced the proposed floor plan "a hopeless muddle." By the end of the year, renowned scientists in many fields had unpacked their books and specimens, and were at work in offices throughout the heroic structure.

On March 17, 1910, the museum's great doors were opened, and members of the public entered the north hall, where, according to paleontologist Ellis Yochelson in his book, The National Museum of Natural History, "the sawing of mahogany and pine wafted a pleasant smell."

By 1912, the three Smithsonian buildings held 2,724 exhibition cases, almost 5,000 steel specimen drawers, and about 33,000 of wood. To the ethnology exhibits were added zoology and paleontology specimens, the specialty of the current Secretary. Stately wooden cases marched the length of high-ceilinged rooms where both the committed and the merely curious could browse-even on Sundays.

Among the viewing possibilities were a temporary display of selected Freer art objects, six buffalo originally mounted by William T. Hornaday in 1888, plants, stuffed birds, and archaeological specimens from sites ranging from the top of the world to the Antarctic. Knowing these things were significant, visitors enjoyed gazing upon assembled objects of scientific and cultural interest; they were satisfied by the mere proximity of the arcane and exotic, with written explanations offered by recognized experts.

As the Smithsonian's fourth Secretary, Walcott enlivened the Annual Report, and tried to make the public more aware of what the Institution was up to. He represented Baird's legacy in the natural sciences, but, like President Roosevelt, he was also an outdoorsman and a demonstrably" vigorous" administrator. During the summer that thousands of specimens crossed the sunbaked Mall to the new museum, Walcott was recovering fossils in British Columbia. Leading a pack train along a trail near Burgess Pass in the Canadian Rockies, he picked up a piece of shale, split it open, and found inside the carbonized bodies of trilobites and other small animals in what became the foundation for studies of the Cambrian Period in Western North America.

It was this small yet significant discovery that led Walcott to a larger quarry farther up the mountain.

The following summer, that of 1910, and for many years thereafter, Walcott, dressed in knee-high boots and often with dynamite in hand, immersed himself in his work there, and produced examples of more than 70 genera and 130 fossilized species. He collected approximately 65,000 specimens, a trove that represents one of the treasures of the Smithsonian. Yochelson has written that "were it not for the hard, physical labor of quarrying performed by a man in his sixties, the unique Burgess shale fauna would never have been made available for study by biologists and paleontologists."

The Secretary's approach to his science was teleological: He believed in an orderly progression from the pre-Cambrian to the more modern, "higher" forms of life. Those scientists belonging to the "spontaneous- generation" school challenged this approach, but no one doubted the potential value of Walcott's discovery.

Ironically, Walcott himself undervalued the importance of follow-up research on the Burgess shale, incorrectly classifying many specimens and failing to address their broader biological ramifications. He simply did not have the time, given his administrative duties. It was said that he "defined the Cambrian," but the significance of the Burgess shale material was realized only later, after others had studied it more thoroughly.

The relationship between the Smithsonian and the 26th President, Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt, proved mutually beneficial. As Vice President under Willim McKinley, Roosevelt had served as a Smithsonian Regent, and, in his first message to Congress as President, he publicly endorsed the Institution's objectives-the increase and diffusion of knowledge-and attested to the worth of all its related projects.

"There should be no halt in the work of theInstitution...," Roosevelt said, "for the preservation of the vanishing races of great North American animals in the National Zoological Park. The urgent needs of the National Museum are recommended to the favorable consideration of the Congress."

Roosevelt's practical assistance to the Smithsonian began before the Freer gift. In 1904, he ordered an American ship, the U.S.S. Dolphin, to transport the remains of James Smithson from New York-where they had been shipped from Genoa, Italy-to the Washington Navy Yard. Representatives of the U.S. and Italian governments had agreed that the Institution's founder should be interred at the Smithsonian. And, in 1905, he instructed his Attorney General "to back the Smithsonian up" in its interpretation of Harriet Lane Johnston's will, which stipulated that her art be given to the National Gallery.

Then, in 1908, Roosevelt wrote to Walcott of his plans to travel to East Africa after his Presidency. "Now it seems to me that this opens the best chance for the National Museum to get a fine collection not only of the big game beasts, but of the smaller animals and birds of Africa; and looking at it dispassionately I believe that the chance ought not to be neglected." And so did Walcott and the Regents. In addition to Baird's two boxcars of natural specimens, the museum also had received the 1,200 mammal and bird specimens that had been sent from Borneo and Polynesia by William Louis Abbott. There were innumerable other contributions as well, but the new, spacious museum was about to see a hefty increase. Roosevelt pointed out that his expenses and those of his son Kermit would be covered in part by his publisher. But he also wanted on the expedition "one or two professional field naturalists" to prepare the specimens for return to Washington. These expenses, as well as considerable logistic and material costs, would be covered by the Institution.

Three naturalists from the National Museum were chosen to make the trip with Roosevelt: Edgar A. Mearns, ornithologist, and the mammologists J. Alden Loring, a specialist in small mammals, and Edmund Heller, a specialist in large ones. Meanwhile, Roosevelt read an average of five books on African wildlife weekly, some provided by a friend at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York. An amateur taxidermist and ornithologist, Roosevelt wrote to a friend during these preparations, "I am much more pleased at making the trip a scientific one with a real object than merely a holiday after big game.

On April 21, 1909, the Roosevelt entourage set out from Mombasa, armed and ready for preserving specimens with no less than four tons of salt and portable skinning tables. Roosevelt's interest in science was genuine. Heller wrote that Roosevelt "had at his command the entire published literature concerning the game mammals and birds of the world, a feat of memory that few naturalists possess. I constantly felt while with him that I was in the presence of the foremost field naturalist of our time...."

Eight months later, the expedition ended its journey in Khartoum. Soon the National Museum received its bonanza: 5,013 mammals, 4,453 birds, 2,322 reptiles and amphibians, and similarly large numbers of fishes, invertebrates, shells, and plants. "No longer was there any need to apologize to the London or Berlin museums," RR. Cutright wrote in Theodore Roosevelt, The Naturalist, referring to the largest collection ever brought out of Africa by a single party. "The series of skins of such animals as the white rhino, giant eland, eticulated giraffe, northern sable antelope, and Vaughn's kob were unrivaled in any other museum."

And yet the Roosevelt donation was just a fraction of the 100,000 zoological and botanical specimens the National Museum received in 1910 alone.

Like his predecessors, Secretary Walcott had duties that extended beyond his chosen field, paleontology, and the Smithsonian. He was one of the founders of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., and served the National Academy of Sciences both as president and as a discreet lobbyist for changes in the academy's constitution, which had to be approved by Congress.

He managed all his enterprises well, and established crucial connections among those who kept Washington functioning. He oversaw the reopening of Langley's aerodynamic laboratory, and helped set up a corporation to administer grants for governmental and private research; eventually he headed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. All the while he endured extraordinary personal loss: his wife, Helena, was killed in a train wreck in 1911; his oldest son Charles died of consumption two years later; and, in 1917, another son, Benjamin, was killed in the war.

Walcott worked his way through these losses. As he later wrote to President Woodrow Wilson, "Steady, systematic work is one's salvation." In 1914, he married artist Mary Vaux, who accompanied him to British Columbia in the summers and whose voluminous illustrations of wildflowers were published by the Smithsonian. The marriage was a boon for the tall, athletic Secretary, who strode through the Smithsonian's buildings with an authoritative and patrician bearing. Unlike Langley, Walcott left no impression of condescension or impatience, but no one questioned who ran the Institution during his tenure.

There was an unspoken rule that the Secretary was not to be disturbed between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, during which time he worked in a small room on the third floor of the Castle pursuing his passion through layers of Burgess shale. Walcott produced weighty manuscripts that would prove his most enduring contribution to science. One, Cambrian Brachiopoda, published in 1912 by the USGS, contained 872 pages and 104 plates, and remains a primary reference in the field.

Walcott's efforts on behalf of the Institution were often behind the scenes, unknown to the majority of the staff. He raised at least $40,000 from outside sources to cover the costs of Roosevelt's African expedition, financed his own efforts in the Burgess shale, and, with his new wife, established a research fund.

He was also instrumental in persuading Freer to move his collection to Washington before his death, traveling to Detroit with William Henry Holmes and displaying an appreciation of Freer's objects that Walcott's predecessors had failed to show. He further persuaded Freer to contribute $1 million to the building of his own museum.

"We had only to point out to Mr. Freer," Walcott told a friend, in a typical disclaimer, "... [that] it would be of immense value to us during the period of construction and installation. We would be able to draw upon his intimate knowledge of the history of the objects...and to have his advice as to the most effective method of their presentation to the public." It is difficult to imagine such deference on the part of Langley and his associates, who had been the first to deal with Freer.

The fourth Secretary staunchly defended his predecessor's aeronautical experiments. In 1914, to determine whether it had been capable of sustained flight, he agreed to a reconstruction of Langley's 1903 Aerodrome by the aeronautical pioneer Glenn Hammond Curtiss. During tests, however, Curtiss made considerable alterations. In what was one of Walcott's few lapses in judgment, when the experiments proved successful the Smithsonian published a statement describing the Aerodrome as "the first aircraft in history capable of flight with a pilot and several hundred pounds of useful load."

When the "restored" Aerodrome was put on exhibit in the National Museum in 1918, the label identified it as "The Original, Full-size Langley Flying Machine, 1903." Another label-"The first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight"-was soon substituted, and later modified with the qualification: "in the opinion of many competent to judge."

These claims prolonged an ongoing patent controversy over the Wright brothers' flight designs, and seemed to align the Smithsonian with those challenging the Wrights both for the honor of being first in flight and the money deriving from that honor. They briefly cast the Smithsonian's probity in doubt, and soured relations between the institution and Orville Wright, one of America's greatest heroes, at a time when war again aroused interest in airplanes as strategic weapons. Meanwhile, Wright sent the Flyer to London's Science Museum, where many feared it would remain.

On April 26, 1916, Walcott and four other members of the National Academy of Sciences met with President Wilson, and offered to organize research in the interests of national security. The conflict in Europe had begun to draw American research and educational institutions into its orbit; war-related science of all kinds was quickly mobilized and implemented.

The weight of the Great War fell on the Smithsonian in 1917, when employees were summoned to the auditorium of the National Museum in June and strongly encouraged to buy Liberty Loan bonds for the war effort. Some employees also sponsored a Red Cross ambulance. Then Walcott's son Benjamin, a member of a French flying unit, was killed on patrol behind German lines.

Smithsonian geologists found themselves called upon to perform various experiments for the government that they thought to be related to the war. Scientists in physical anthropology and other departments were enlisted in such esoteric enterprises as providing information on the Balkan peoples. On the more practical side, the Astrophysical Observatory investigated wind pressure on projectiles, perfected the design of a recoilless gun, and experimented with searchlights for the Army.

In October 1917, President Wilson asked Walcott for space within the Smithsonian complex to accommodate the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, which handled the paperwork for all Americans under arms. The ground floor of the new National Museum was cleared, disrupting the division of mammals and the Biological Survey. Cases and whole collections, including corals from the Wilkes expedition and all invertebrates and domestic animals, were moved to the second floor.

A second White House request for space was also granted. Then, on July 16, 1918, in an unprecedented development, the Regents closed the museum to the public altogether, and turned it over to thousands of government clerks.

The museum reopened in the spring of 1919; the Bureau of War Risk Insurance had moved to its own quarters, leaving behind damaged plaster and exhibit halls badly in need of paint. In spite of this run-down appearance and the fact that many exhibits were still closed, attendance at the museum was heavy. The population of Washington had grown considerably during the war, and after it concluded the Smithsonian represented one of the few distractions for Washingtonians and visitors alike.

In the end, World War I provided the Institution with a huge collection of historical artifacts and memorabilia that included weapons, uniforms, insignia, decorations, captured enemy equipment, medical instruments, chemical-warfare paraphernalia, and ordnance. In the rotunda of the new museum-today the National Museum of Natural History-were displayed signaling devices and weapons. The six-inch naval gun that fired America's first shot of the war wouldn't fit into the building, and was thus set up in the east driveway.

The so-called War Collection was particularly popular with the public, but, as Ellis Yochelson points out in his book about the museum, "The staff had become deeply frustrated by the continued occupation of so much of their exhibit and storage space and the hindrance of their work "

The glorious future Baird, Langley, and Walcott had envisioned for the Smithsonian in the resplendent Natural History building had been stymied. Appropriations from Congress for scientific work had not risen in a decade, and remained hovering at about $300,000 even though three million new specimens had been added to the collections. Internally, the museum was growing and proliferating despite the shortage of funds; both a Division of Echinoderms and a Division of Mollusks were formed.

Art seemed to be the only prosperous enterprise. According to the Annual Report of 1921, an event "of great importance in the development of Washington as an art center was the organization...of the National Gallery of Art, previously a dependency of the United States National Museum, as a separate administrative unit under the Smithsonian Institution.... Art was placed on an equal footing with science...."

For William Henry Holmes, being tapped as the gallery's first director was a remarkable final appointment. He had undergone the complete transformation from young artist and man of action to scientist to aging artist and administrator. Holmes wrote, "The Smithsonian has harbored the dream of a gallery of art, but art has been in the shadow of the all-absorbing material interests of a rapidly developing nation."

Presumably the Institution, like the nation as a whole, was at last prepared for aesthetic appreciation, and Washington was poised on the edge of cultural and artistic significance, about to transcend its provincial ties to a merely expansionist federal government.

The opening of the stunning Freer Gallery of Art in 1921 seemed to affirm this strengthened interest in art. The event brought an extra $12,650 from Congress, and the public was treated to a carefully choreographed exhibit of unique objects, including Whistler's "Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room" and Oriental artifacts in regal cases made of American black walnut. All was housed within the sumptuous, sky-lit Italian Renaissance building. Constraints on the Smithsonian's other structures-and on the work going on within them-were made even more apparent by the gallery's luxuriousness.

Also in 1921, a Department of History was carved out of the Department of Anthropology--a crucial distinction--and headquartered across the Mall in the original museum, now known as the Arts and Industries Building. And the sheet-metal hangar that the Army Signal Corps had erected behind the Castle for experimentation during the war was re-christened the Aircraft Building. Within that homely conglomeration of metal and wood lay the unlikely nucleus of what would become the National Air and Space Museum-the most popular museum on Earth.

For years, there had been an effort in tandem with the Smithsonian's "pure" research to steer the institution in the direction of the history of engineering and mechanics. Carl W. Mitman, a mining engineer who had joined the Smithsonian in 1911, dreamed of a national museum of engineering and industry independent of the National Museum and its ties to anthropology. As curator of the technical collections, Mitman had separated the "engineering" artifacts from Otis Mason's Indian handicrafts. As chief of the Department of Mechanical and Mineral Technology, he gradually assembled his own collection from various departments, inspired by museums of technology in other capital cities around the country and in Europe.

With the ending of World War I and the influx of military technology, Mitman got his chance. In 1920, he proposed to the Regents a Museum of Engineering and Industry modeled on the Deutches Museum, in Munich, Germany. Although the Regents did not agree to it, the proposal attracted attention elsewhere. In 1922, Mitman and a promoter named Holbrook Fitz-John Porter planned a museum complex consisting of, in the words of Smithsonian historian Arthur Molella, "a central historical museum in Washington, linked to a network of regional museums illustrating recent developments in local industries...with a system for exchanging artifacts, replicas, motion pictures, and other educational materials."

It was a curious variation on the objectives of Joseph Henry, but it failed to generate the needed funds. Mitman's dream would finally materialize some 30 years later, in different form, under the guidance of a man named Frank Taylor.

The annual report of 1923 admitted "difficulty in making both ends meet. ...It is only by rigid economy and the omission of many things that should be donr that the year ends without a deficit."

A burgeoning federal bureaucracy depersonalized much of the Smithsonian's business with Congress. The Bureau of the Budget reclassified museum positions in 1924, and raised salaries , making it at least theoretically easier to attract talent; but the bureau's influence further distanced Smithsonian agency heads from those voting for appropriations.

Even with old, warm relationships in the Senate, Walcott found his influence diminished. He had enjoyed easy access to the White House since the days of President Grover Cleveland, but that, too, changed with the advent of a new President, Warren G. Harding. The nation was more interested in recovery, material prosperity, and "practical" science, necessitating strategic battles for public money that would endure for the rest of the century.

The Secretary sadly reported that fiscal year 1926 "marks a crisis in the affairs of the Institution. For several years it has grown more and more difficult to stretch the income from its meager endowment sufficiently to cover the steadily increasing costs of even the limited amount of research...and the administration of the eight growing government bureaus."

The cost of the Institution's publishing, for instance, had more than doubled in a decade, and the nimber of publications had declined. Walcott spoke so often of "rigid economy" that the phrase became almost as emblematic of the Smithsonian's mandate as "the increase & diffusion of knowledge."

The Secretary's own bound work took up about three feet of bookshelf, and at the time of his death, represented some 70 percent of published information about the Cambrian and pre-Cambrian. His organizational and administrative talents equaled or surpassed those of any previous Secretary. But he and other members of the old guard, such as Holmes, William Healey Dall, and the geologist George Merrill, were fading, and the Smithsonian seemed to be losing its grip on the popular imagination.

Walcott sought to raise funds with the production of an encyclopedic network, written by National Museum staffers, called the Smithsonian Scientific Series, and attempted to increase the Institution's endowment by hiring consultants for the Smithsonian's first national fundraising drive. In early 1927, he suffered a stroke, and died. The fundraising drive failed in the face of the stock-market crash and the onset of the Depression.

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