America’s Treasure Chest

In July 1835, the United States charge d’affaires in London received a copy of a British will making his young country a highly unusual bequest: some 100,000 pounds for the creation in Washington of an “establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”

The donor had been a wealthy aristocrat, born out of wedlock, known for compulsive gambling and dabbling in natural science. He had never been to America and appeared to have no ties there. The puzzled diplomat forwarded the will to U.S. Secretary of State John Forsyth with the suggestion that the deceased might well have been mad.

Today the fruit of James Smithson’s madness, whimsy or genius--take your pick--has blossomed a thousandfold into the most extraordinary, most visited museum complex in the world.

The Smithsonian Institution encompasses insect sexologists in Panama and gamma ray astronomers in Arizona, reef biologists in Belize and wallpaper historians in New York. There are Smithsonian scientists in Massachusetts measuring the spin rates of laser-generated xenon atoms and Smithsonian ornithologists in Virginia promoting the captive breeding of the Hawaiian honeycreeper.

This is the Smithsonian’s 150th year since President James K. Polk signed into law the bill that gave it birth. It is a global conglomerate with a $496-million annual budget, where some 6,700 full-time employees and 5,000 volunteers study, classify, restore and care for more than 140 million artifacts--not to mention all the animals--at dozens of sites around the world.

But most of all, Smithson’s legacy enriches Washington, a city that during his lifetime was little more than a sheepwalk. Here it both husbands and showcases our national culture in 14 separate museums that in their variety and occasional tension both reflect and shape our ever-evolving image of ourselves and our arguments over what we want to be.

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Smithson, whose high-born illegitimacy embittered him and reinforced his notions of Enlightenment egalitarianism and intellectual meritocracy, would be dazzled (and on occasion probably appalled) at all the things his legacy has wrought.

But he would not be entirely surprised.

“The best blood of England flows in my veins,” he wrote once. “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.”

His hope was in the promise of America, though why he never came here no one knows.

His inheritance came from his mother, a descendant of Henry VII. He never saw his father and was barred not only from his father’s title but also from such accepted paths to professional distinction as the church, the military or politics. He turned to science because learned men “see a lot where others see nothing,” and as a member of the Royal Society published at least 27 papers on subjects in chemistry, mineralogy and botany.

But most of his life he spent traveling aimlessly around Europe. He never married, and before he died in 1829 stipulated that his fortune go to the United States should his only heir, a nephew, die childless--which happened six years later.

It is difficult now to appreciate the financial and political impact of Smithson’s gift on the new American republic and its fledgling capital. The gift of $508,318.46 came when the entire yearly budget of the United States was less than $34 million. But it also came from the suspect mother country, whose soldiers had burned Washington little more than 20 years before.

Moreover, news of it arrived in the wake of Andrew Jackson’s “Revolution of the Common Man,” when intellectual pursuits were not high on the national agenda. Frontier swagger was.

Even after Polk signed the Smithsonian Institution into law, no one could agree on just what “the establishment for increase and diffusion of knowledge” should be. Some wanted a library, others an agricultural college. John Quincy Adams, its greatest champion, wanted an astronomical observatory. Joel Poinsett, a prominent amateur naturalist, wanted a museum of natural history.

In the end it was defined as a national museum for government collections, a laboratory, an art gallery and a library.

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Driving the Smithsonian was the 19th century explosion in scientific knowledge and America’s hunger to know what lay to the west. Army expeditions, railway surveys, private adventures and geographical explorations all found the American West an immense laboratory filled with natural wonders.

Most were accompanied by Smithsonian naturalists who returned with crates of samples of every animal, vegetable or mineral they could find. Their reports inevitably helped fuel the demand for Western expansion. But as the century waned, they also drew attention to such costs of that expansion as the demise of the great buffalo herds and the vanishing riches of Native American culture.

Championing the politically unpopular cause of the Indian was John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran whose 99-day, 1,500-mile descent of the torrential Colorado River in wooden boats remains one of the great adventures of American history. In an era of “muscular scholarship,” when the concept of manhood embraced both action and intellect, Powell was a national hero and one of the towering figures of American science.

He was one of the first directors of the U.S. Geological Survey, established in 1879 to order the process of Western exploration. He was also a Smithsonian scientist and, as simultaneous head of the institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, set out to map the entire United States; in the process, he unleashed wide-ranging research initiatives in archeology, ethnology, linguistics and physical anthropology.

The linkage would become something of a model for the Smithsonian. It put science to work for the U.S. government while the quasi-independence of the institution and its strong-willed leaders served to insulate scholars and scientists from the political pressures of the day.

No aspect of the Smithsonian’s growth was more emblematic of the 20th century than the institution’s increasing interest in putting its science to work for the nation’s military.

During the Spanish-American War, Smithsonian Director Samuel Pierpont Langley, a physician and astronomer obsessed with solar radiation and the possibility of manned flight, sought funds from the Army for his aviation experiments by raising the prospect of a death-dealing flying machine.

By World War II, military concerns were driving the most significant areas of the nation’s science. Scientists under the Smithsonian War Committee labored at everything from rocketry to shark repellent.

In the postwar years of anti-communist vigilance, this quiet linkage between the Smithsonian’s questioning experts and a mushrooming defense establishment hungry for scientific data and intelligence could only grow.

Nothing embodied the triumphs and pitfalls of this partnership more than the National Air and Space Museum, which opened July 1, 1976, as part of the celebration of the nation’s bicentennial. Showcasing everything from the Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk flier to a Saturn V rocket engine, it was instantly thronged by the public and quickly became the most visited museum in the world.

Most recognized it as a celebration of the wonder of flight. But some in and out of the Smithsonian were also troubled by what they saw as its exaltation of the engines of war. Antiwar activists saw its rockets and missiles as disturbing symbols of the nuclear menace, and charged as well that it amounted to an institutionalized cheering section for the aerospace industry and the military it served.

Was the proper role of the Smithsonian to celebrate the achievements of American history and technology? Or was it--like Powell studying Native Americans--to document what those achievements cost?

The obvious answer is “both.” But the seesaw between those approaches in recent years has chafed the fabric of Washington’s cultural treasure house. A few adventures in historical cost-accounting--”The West as America” exhibit at the Museum of American Art in 1991, the original script for the Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum last year--have raised howls that the Smithsonian sees American history as nothing but a catalog of crimes.

On the other hand, the Museum of American History’s uncritical embrace of the more disposable aspects of contemporary popular culture (computers in the “Information Age” exhibit, Archie Bunker’s chair from TV’s “All in the Family”) have made others question whether the Smithsonian isn’t whoring after corporate sponsorship.

The “increase and diffusion of knowledge” can be a contentious business at a time of culture wars and cutbacks. But did anyone, including James Smithson, ever really expect--or want--it to be easy?