The Living Museum: 1950-1996

Stirrings

At mid-century, the Smithsonian remained focused on research, predominantly in the natural sciences. The Regents, however, were growing increasingly concerned that, despite his official acceptance of the Wright brothers' Flyer and the Air Force's Glamorous Glennis, Alexander Wetmore remained resistant to activities that did not further scientific inquiry. A traditional Secretary, he was dedicated to the details of his particular discipline-that of ornithology-and determined to restore the Institution's reputation as a global leader in research.

As he had for many years, Wetmore continued to find great delight in fieldwork, and his adventures were legendary. He was frequently accompanied on collecting expeditions by the National Museum's taxidermist, Watson Perrygo, who later acknowledged that his boss suffered stress on the job in Washington, but that "After he was there [in Panama] a while, it would all clear up, and he would be fine...." These trips, noted Perrygo, were for Wetmore the equivalent of a vacation, "therapy...you go out in the hills."

The Secretary did the cooking, and insisted upon a balanced diet, whereas Assistant Secretary A. Remington Kellogg, who also loved field-work, would have been happy with potatoes. Despite his lack of pretension, Wetmore always wore a khaki shirt and pants with a khaki tie, and requested that others do the same. He kept his equipment spotless, even in the field, and paid close attention to details. "The table we were going to skin birds on had to be in line with the tent," Perrygo reported, "and in line with the other chairs, and what have you, always."

Perrygo, a freer spirit, may have found these strictures a bit excessive. Once, at Petite Gonave Island, Haiti, he laced bananas with rum to intoxicate the rhinoceros iguanas and make them easier to capture.

In Washington, the aura of the cash-strapped Institution had not changed appreciably in two decades. Perrygo earlier had described the Smithsonian as a "typical old-time museum with a bunch of old- fashioned people running around with long whiskers and stooped shoulders, who lived in a world of their own, and didn't know when it was time to go home."

This was especially true of Wetmore, who, in addition to performing his official duties, pursued his bird studies on his own time. He spent the early morning hours working in his lab at the National Museum, and then crossed the Mall to begin official business in his office in the Castle. When his day there was done, he would often go back across the Mall and roam the museum at night to see what other scientists were accomplishing.

Wetmore's fellow ornithologist, Herbert Friedmann, who also served as the museum's head curator, feared that Wetmore would not help raise funds for the museum. However, the Secretary identified the need to reform the Institution's administrative and budgetary practices, and, with the help of John Keddy, a specialist in federal budgetary procedures, and Assistant Secretary John E. Graf, he was successful in bringing more professional management to the Institution. Wetmore also approved plans to study ways for improving exhibits, which, because of decreased funding during World War II, had changed very slowly. Friedmann participated in the Exhibits Modernization Program, which had been created by Frank Taylor, chief of the Department of Engineering and Industry, to review exhibits throughout the Institution. Others involved with the program included Paul Gardner, a curator with the National Collection of Fine Arts, and ethnologist John C. Ewers, who, in 1946, had been hired in part to help improve the exhibits. Meanwhile, collections continued to flow to the museum, compounding the problems arising from the lack of both space and personnel.

In 1951 Clifford Evans joined the Department of Anthropology. Intrigued by the idea of possible early human contact between Japan and South America, he and his wife, Betty Meggers, collaborated on an exhibit of maps and objects, the first new anthropological exhibit in almost 40 years. They also undertook a major revision of the South American Indian exhibits on the museum's second floor. To the dismay of Assistant Secretary Kellogg, who was as traditional as Wetmore, the pair painted the inside of one display case red-something no one else had ever dared to do. But change was in the air, as well as the rumor of a new Secretary who might be more amenable to it. Catching the attention of visitors passing meekly through the Smithsonian's endless hallways was about to become a virtue.

In 1952 Wetmore, who believed there came a time in everyone's career when he or she should relinquish his or her position to someone with a fresher perspective, decided to step down. As Paul Oehser wrote in the quarterly journal of ornithology called The Auk, Wetmore had, since assuming the position of Secretary in 1945, "in his quiet way, following more or less the traditional patterns of his predecessors, fostered the Institution's laboratory and field researches in natural history, anthropology, and industrial arts...(and) laid the foundations of expanding the exhibits, buildings, and programs that came to fruition in later administrations." His was an impressive list of achievements, and Wetmore would continue his research at the Smithsonian for another quarter century.

The man who in early 1953 succeeded Wetmore as Secretary could not have differed more from his predecessor in temperament, learning, or ambition. As president of Tufts University, Leonard Carmichael was not just a university man, as Langley had been, but a psychologist rather than a pure scientist. According to precedent, Wetmore's successor should have been a physicist. Instead, the Regents chose this academic from a relatively "soft" field of inquiry, a man with no formal training in physics, history, or art, and relatively little in natural science, but who was unquestionably sophisticated and charming.

This choice suggested a plan. Carmichael was known as an effective manager and an activist, qualifications that were unusual in most of the previous Secretaries but that would be crucial to the Institution at a timewhen it sat in the doldrums, understaffed, burdened with conflicting mandates and aging real estate, and entrusted with the safekeeping of between 34 million and 37 million cataloged items. Carmichael was to promote change, but the question remained: How?

The new Secretary had wide-ranging interests, but, more importantly, he was socially and politically adept, and was eager to procure expanded facilities and to pursue a broader role for the Smithsonian. He gave a major boost to exhibits development, overseeing the hiring of a talented group of people whose task it would be to create engaging, informative exhibits. In fact, the Smithsonian would see the opening of at least one new exhibit hall each year of Carmichael's administration.

Carmichael's first Annual Report, lively and full of goals for the future, conveyed a tone of assurance and foregone accomplishment. He took up plans originally proposed by Secretary Abbot for two new buildings, one for a history museum and one for a museum of engineering and industry that was the dream of the chief curator of the Smithsonian's technological collections, Carl Mitman. Carmichael personally appealed to Congress for money to undertake these new ventures.

Up until this time, the idea of creating a Museum of History and Technology, spearheaded by Mitman's protégé, curator Frank A. Taylor, had lacked a champion. It had one now in Carmichael, who also asked Congress to transfer to the Smithsonian the Old Patent Office Building, near the Mall, as a home for the National Collection of Fine Arts. This historic edifice, which had housed the original collections from the 1838 42 United States Exploring Expedition, led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, and which had been scheduled for demolition in the 1950s to make way for a parking lot, was now preserved for posterity.

Carmichael also sought money for the National Zoo, the National Air Museum, and the expansion of the Museum of Natural History, which, beginning in 1957, occupied the Smithsonian's National Museum building. And his efforts were not limited to high-visibility projects in the nation's capital. The Canal Zone Biological Area (CZBA), in Panama, originally established in 1923 as the Institute for Research in Tropical America, had experienced difficult financial times from the beginning. In 1946 it was placed under Smithsonian administration; in the early 1950s, when the Department of Agriculture terminated its research activities in Panama, the Institution assumed full responsibility for the expenses and salaries of James Zetek, CZBA's entomologist and resident manager, and other scientists at the facility. Carmichael convened a conference of interested parties in an ongoing attempt to save this unique scientific effort.

By 1954 what could be characterized as "the Carmichael style" had evolved fully. The Secretary selected, as he described them, "a pink, a warm yellow, a sky blue, and a wondrous green" as the colors for the interior of the old Arts and Industries Building, unpainted since its opening 76 years earlier.

On another level, Carmichael's limited knowledge of the natural sciences was sometimes apparent. According to ornithologist Herbert Friedmann, curator of birds at the Natural History Museum, the Secretary "didn't really understand what the museum was about...he told me, 'This is a museum of dead animals.' I said, 'But there's a lot you can learn from dead animals....' "

Carmichael was never particularly sympathetic to that view, nor to the plight of the Smithsonian libraries: He had to be convinced that the Library of Congress was not the best place for housing early scientific descriptions and reports that were needed in ongoing research. He had no qualms about using the exhibits program to showcase his administration, but he was quick to compliment administrative Assistant John I(eddy on his success in using the General Services Administration to negotiate contracts.

A natural and astute politician, Carmichael, according to Friedmann, "could meet congressmen and senators without feeling bashful...and could take Keddy's rather brusque demands and put them into polite language." Such skills had become essential for a Smithsonian Secretary.

The son of a Philadelphia physician and a scholar who had done her research in logic and psychology that in the future there would be two equal entities, the Museum of Natural History, which would occupy the National Museum building, and the Museum of History and Technology, each with its own director.

At Natural History, the Secretary was so pleased with the progress of the expanded exhibits program that he held a dinner for the Regents there. The following summer saw the opening of the Hall of Gems and Minerals, organized by George Switzer and Paul E. Desautels, and, in November 1958, the Hope diamond, which had been donated by the world-famous New York jeweler Harry Winston and which carried a reputedly infamous provenance, found its unique final setting at the Smithsonian in a specially constructed, transparent safe that allowed the famous gem to be closely viewed by an overwhelmingly appreciative public.

Leonard Carmichael's energy and vision had won him allies in Congress and among the Regents and the Institution's staff, but there were those who found the Secretary to be somewhat stuffy and overly concerned with publicity. Both of these traits manifested themselves in the affair of the Fenykovi elephant, a huge bull shot near the Cuito River in Angola, where it was skinned and the entire two-ton pelt treated with a truckload of salt before being sent to Washington, along with the tusks, leg bones, and 1,800-pound skull. Most everyone agreed that the Fenykovi elephant was the perfect occupant for the magnificently empty rotunda of the Natural History Museum.

Chief taxidermist William L. Brown and others threw themselves into the complex and exhausting task of preparing and mounting what was then the largest elephant ever shot; 16 months later, they had produced what would become a symbol of the Institution's expertise and excitement for millions of visitors.

Working under plastic sheeting, with a constant flow of steam pumped in to maintain the proper humidity, the Smithsonian crew constructed a wooden armature slightly smaller than the elephant, and covered it with clay. Plaster of Paris, which would be removed later, then went over the hide covering the clay model. Massive supports were installed, along with a trap door in the elephant's stomach to allow access to the interior. The animal's stance, posed as if walking with its head and trunk erect, appeared very lifelike.

The final product was unveiled in the spring of 1959. The elephant was said to have stood 13 feet, 2 inches in life; when journalists checked it with a tape measure, however, they found it short a few inches, and threatened to embarrass Carmichael over his claims about the elephant's original height. It was duly explained to them that, had the elephant been reconstructed as if it were standing still, it would indeed have measured up.

This wasn't the only pettiness associated with the grand Fenykovi elephant. In the interests of delicacy, Carmichael reportedly ordered the elephant's anus sewn up, a move that angered Assistant Secretary Kellogg, who saw it as tampering with science in the interest of public relations, and considered it a dire precedent.

The 1950s were soon gone, and the Smithsonian was still in a state of flux. At Natural History, June of 1961 saw the opening of four new exhibits- Fossil Plants and Invertebrates, the Age of Mammals in North America, Fossil Reptiles and Amphibians, and the first of two on North American archaeology-and work began on the museum's new 260,000-square-foot east wing. Scientists also worked diligently on another ambitious new exhibit, Life in the Sea; when it opened, two years later, it would include a 92-foot model of a giant blue whale.

In the minds of many the heart of the Smithsonian might well have been the Museum of Natural History, but that perception was about to change. The laying of the cornerstone of the Museum of History and Technology, the first major construction in years, was a big step for the Institution in fulfilling the second of James Smithson's directives: the diffusion of knowledge, rather than simply its increase.

Among its other goals, the new museum would attempt to tell the story of America, and, in so doing, would display the country's most significant objects. As Carmichael wrote in an earlier Annual Report, "the strands that have been woven together in the making of our modern American civilization will be shown in a way that...will be unique and particularly appropriate to the special genius of our country."

Frank A. Taylor was named the first director of the Museum of History and Technology, which, considering that he had been advocating just such a museum for two decades, was fitting. Perhaps the best symbol of the new museum's mandate and physical ambitions was the arrival, on November 26, 1961, of the restored Southern Railway's Number 1401 locomotive, a Ps-4 Pacific type that was built in 1926 and that had weighed 280 tons while in service. Before it took up permanent, magisterial residence in the Transportation Hall, the locomotive was maneuvered into the still unfinished museum in an operation that took 11 days. (A soundtrack of a moving steam train, installed shortly after the exhibit opened in 1964, caused one startled visitor to jerk his son out of the imagined path of the locomotive.)

During Carmichael's administration, the Smithsonian's collections had grown to more than 58 million items. In 1968, the old Patent Office Building that Carmichael had secured five years earlier officially became the home of two distinct Smithsonian branches, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Collection of Fine Arts.

And things kept rolling. In 1958 Carmichael appointed Theodore Reed the new director of the burgeoning National Zoo. That same year, the Zoo began attracting additional public support through the Friends of the National Zoo, or FONZ, which was founded by two Washingtonians Mary Ellen Groan and Barbara Robinson. The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, created in the fall of 1952, transported Smithsonian treasures around the country. The new National Air Museum site was chosen, and the Smithsonian's central administration, not the old National Museum, had been established as the controlling entity for all the Institution's museums and galleries.

Equally impressive as all these achievements, the Smithsonian's endowment had grown from $10.5 million to $19 million, its annual appropriations from $2.5 million to more than $13 million. Carmichael's wooing of Congress and his mastery of "the Smithsonian letter" had paid off.

In 1963, the year Carmichael resigned as Secretary, some 10 million people visited the Institution, three times the number recorded for any year under Wetmore. Among his predecessors at the Smithsonian, Carmichael had most closely resembled George Brown Goode, in ambition if not in personality. Goode's prime concern had been education, and, while Carmichael did not neglect research, he had been the first Secretary to actively pursue and secure funds for the massive diffusion of the Institution's prime commodity-knowledge.

The installation of air conditioning at the Museum of Natural History the year before Carmichael retired received little attention. Fittingly, it was Frank Taylor, director of the Museum of History and Technology, who put this seminal event into perspective: "Visiting the Museum is now much more pleasant," he said; visitors "are induced to stay longer and absorb more of the instruction and inspiration that exhibits provide."

Inspiration was a pale word for what the Smithsonian was about to receive in the person of a new and, once again, utterly different type of leader.

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