The Smithsonian Institution, now the world’s largest museum complex, was founded 170 years ago this week — August 10, 1846, when President James Polk signed the necessary legislation. This was seventeen years after the British scientist James Smithson had died, leaving his fortune to his nephew. Smithson’s will stipulated that if his nephew died without children, then the fortune should go to America, “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men.”
The nephew died childless in 1836, but it took the American government a full decade to debate whether they could accept the windfall money and what they might do with it. Government officials wondered if the eccentric Smithson, who had never set foot in America, “labored under some degree of mental aberration.” In the Senate debate, some argued that the United States was no place “to raise foreigners to immortality,” else “every Whippersnapper vagabond that had been traducing our country might think proper to have his name distinguished in the same way.” But in the end, John Quincy Adams successfully argued that, as Smithson’s name was the only string attached, the foundation of the Smithsonian was “an event in which I see the finger of Providence, compassing great results by incomprehensible means.”
Affectionately known as “the Nation’s Attic,” the museum contains some 137 million items (this does not include the 19 million photographs and tens of millions of books, films, etc.). For The Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects, Richard Kurin and his colleagues at the Institution have selected items that “could act as signposts for larger ideas, achievements, and issues that have defined us.” Each item is explored as a reflection of the nation and of the museum itself, in that each is placed within a living, evolving display case: “Each of these objects has stories to tell not only about its place in history but also about how it came to the Smithsonian, and how it has been studied, displayed, and understood.”
Kurin says that some objects are included because unique (Neil Armstrong’s space suit), some because ubiquitous (a Plains buffalo). In the ubiquitous and exceptional category is a section of the Woolworth’s lunch counter where, in 1960, the Greensboro Four began their historic sit-in for meal service, one of the catalytic events of the Civil Rights Movement. Lonnie Bunch, one of the Smithsonian curators who went to Greensboro in 1993 to salvage and ship the Woolworth’s counter, is now director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opens in September. In his Introduction to Begin with the Past, the museum’s own account of its origins and its mission, Bunch describes his desire for “a building that said there has always been a dark presence in America that’s always been overlooked . . . an homage that so much of African-American and American history is hidden in plain sight.”
Early on it was decided that the Greensboro lunch counter and other such exhibits spread throughout the various Smithsonian museums would not move to the NMAAHC. Instead, the new building sought new material and either found or was given thousands of items from across the nation — a Historical Black Lives Matter initiative that inspired many to contribute. A descendant of a slave who escaped with Harriet Tubman inherited her hymnbook and other personal belongings: “For eight months I kept them with me in my bedroom, but they belong in this museum.”
Among the NMAAHC treasures is an extensive collection of photographs, ranging from pre−Civil War daguerreotypes to work by Gordon Parks, which they have begun to publish in their Double Exposure series. The first volume, Through the African American Lens, ranges across the entire NMAAHC collection, from a portrait of Sojourner Truth to a candid photo of Barack and Michelle Obama. Rhea Combs, curator of photography at the NMAAHC, says that the Double Exposure series title alludes to a comment in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk:
One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
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Sig Nordal 