"A Vision of the Future": The New Museum Idea and Display Reform, 1890–1915

After young Russian immigrant Mary Antin visited the museum of the Boston Society of Natural History in the 1890s, she could not bring herself to return. The specimens in the museum's dim cases "failed to stir my imagination," she recalled, "and the slimy things that floated in glass vessels were too horrid for a second glance." "The exhibits were so dingy, so overcrowded and so revolting [that] recalcitrant children ... were dragged in and walked through the Natural History rooms to strike terror in their hearts," remembered zoologist Thomas Barbour. The halls of late nineteenth-century American natural history museums routinely elicited similar reactions, for they were "neither a delight to the eye of the unprofessional visitor nor a satisfaction to the specialist," wrote National Museum curator Robert Ridgway. At the museum of the Davenport Academy of Sciences, for instance, Iowans found the thousands of insects, pressed plants, arrowheads and copper axes, and animal skulls so "fearfully dull" that its galleries were almost entirely deserted, volunteer curator William Pratt confided to a friend in 1890. New York City's public schoolteachers considered the exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History so incomprehensible in the 1890s that they refused to take their students to visit, believing the trip wasn't worth the effort.

Between the 1890s and the 1910s, a young generation of reformers inspired by a transnational movement known as the New Museum Idea came to believe that natural history museums could no longer ignore these audiences. Museums should, they argued, reach and teach all citizens, and display seemed the most expedient way to do so. Displays could bring a museum visitor "into direct contact with Nature, show him her infinite resources and establish between him and the outdoor world an intimacy through which he will derive not only pleasure, but also physical, mental, and spiritual strength," explained curator and museum reformer Frank Chapman in 1899. Convinced that displays could and should become powerful pedagogical tools, reformers persuaded their colleagues to reconsider the contents of museums' shelves and the configuration of their halls.

An infectiously enthusiastic faction of reformers, known in the museum world as "museum men," worked to realize exhibits' educational potential in these decades, encouraging fellow staff members to join them as they experimented with new approaches. At museums new and old, staff members rooted through collections, steadily sorting, labeling, and tossing aside specimens to compile collections that could spark interest in scientists and schoolchildren. They worked to build displays that would, in the words of the National Museum's George Brown Goode, transform museums from "a cemetery of bric-a-brac into a nursery of living thoughts." In this way, museum men succeeded in imposing new order on the nation's miscellany of natural history museums, establishing an institutional template that reformers eventually embraced, reproduced, and improved on while still hewing to a unified vision of the museum as a major force in popular education. By 1907, Brooklyn Museum curator Frederic A. Lucas could confidently declare that "the character of museums has changed so greatly ... those who know these institutions only as they exist today may not realize how widely they differ from what they were even twenty-five years ago."

This transformation was not realized without struggle. Ideals, practices, and people clashed as reformers reorganized displays and the institutions that housed them. Attempts to make room in museum halls for museumgoers' tastes, needs, and interests collided with efforts to discipline unruly collections and displays. Staff members bickered over the shape and extent of display reform, some bucking against the notion that public education merited such attention, others insisting that curators should prioritize display making over their other duties. By the mid-1910s, reformers had persuaded most staff members to rally behind their vision. The museum was not merely a place dedicated to the preservation of specimens and the production of scientific knowledge, wrote ichthyologist and director of the California Academy of Sciences Barton W. Evermann in the Popular Science Monthly in 1918. "The museum has come to regard itself, and to be regarded by the public, as an educational institution," he pronounced.

Progressive Era museum reformers' interpretation of the New Museum Idea as a mandate for public education through display would undergird professional and public ideas about the institutional role of natural history and science museums for the next hundred years. The vision they articulated would spark decades of animated arguments about display practices, pedagogical principles, and the proper place of exhibits in museums. It would not only unsettle museums' institutional cultures but would also ensure that museum displays became battlegrounds for contentious cultural debates over American science and science education in the twentieth century.

The New Museum Idea and the Museum Men

To most Americans, the Smithsonian's U.S. National Museum stood first among the dozens of natural history museums scattered across the United States in the 1870s and 1880s. It was still a young institution and it was small compared to the museums that sprawled across Europe's capitals. But its size and scope awed Washington tourists and its scientific ambition staggered the nation's naturalists. Smithsonian curators hoped to assemble specimen collections that would present American scientists with a complete picture of the historical development of the globe's variegated life forms and rich natural resources. So they purchased vast compendia of natural objects from well-known European collectors and persuaded American naturalists—professional scientists, avid amateurs, and young hobbyists—to flesh out the museum's holdings with their finds. They also worked closely with federal surveyors, who sent back railroad cars of specimens as they combed the country west of the Mississippi, and dispatched professional collectors to gather the nature of other nations. Curators systematically separated and analyzed the resulting mountains of specimens, categorizing animals, plants, and minerals into groups distinguished by similar physical features or functions. Over the...