The Storm at the Smithsonian

Tempers were aflame in 1861 as the nation’s capital prepared for war. So officials gave the secretary of the Smithsonian guns and 240 rounds of ammunition “for the protection of the Institute, against lawless attacks.”

The current secretary of the Smithsonian must sometimes wish for a similar arsenal, even if the weaponry dates back more than 100 years.

Brought in 21/2 years ago to improve the bottom line and the buzz at the Smithsonian’s 16 museums and galleries, eight research centers and one National Zoo, Lawrence Small--a banker by profession and a collector by avocation--has instead provoked his own civil war.

Since Small’s arrival, markers of an institution in turmoil have popped up almost monthly: Directors of six museums submitted their resignations. Congress had to step in to save pioneering scientific research. A benefactor withdrew $38 million after her ideas were ridiculed by staffers. And more than 200 academics protested the “commercialization” of the Smithsonian--even faulting its decision to award the cafeteria contract at the National Air and Space Museum to McDonald’s.

“It’s a turbulent time,” said Paula DePriest, a scientist at the National Museum of Natural History who is chairwoman of the Smithsonian Congress of Scholars Council. “It’s unlike anything in our history.”

Small--who declined a request to be interviewed for this story--is the only secretary in the Smithsonian’s history who is neither a scientist nor an academic. Formerly president of Fannie Mae, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, and before that a vice chairman at Citibank in New York, Small, 60, said in a speech shortly after his arrival that “modernization and money” were his twin goals.

“In a nutshell, I want to modernize everything of consequence at the Smithsonian,” he told the 6,300 Smithsonian staff members via videotape. Few would deny that the 156-year-old institution needs a facelift and funds, but Small’s business strategies and his brusque demeanor jarred many on the staff.

“His mistake was not building a coalition,” said one former museum director, who asked not to be identified. “Maybe imposing decisions from the top works in a corporate setting, but not in academia. The Smithsonian is like a university. You have to work with the faculty.”

A Natural History Museum scientist says research isn’t Small’s priority. “The message we got was that he cared about bricks and mortar and shiny buildings and lines around the block,” said the scientist, who asked not to be identified.

Discontent at the museums is now so great that his critics talk with their doors open. “Dump Small” bumper stickers have been spotted on the Mall, outside the Smithsonian’s “Castle” headquarters. Staffers gleefully log on to commercialalert.org, a Ralph Nader production with a link to track the debate over Small’s tenure.

In the end, the combatants argue, the battle for the heart, soul and budget of the Smithsonian is all about mission. Does the Smithsonian exist to educate or to entertain? Should it make discoveries or profits?

Or, perhaps, can it do it all?

From the beginning, James Smithson’s $508,318.46 bequest was a headache. The illegitimate son of a British duke, Smithson never forgave his class-conscious country for its treatment of children born out of wedlock. A scientist, he left his fortune to the people of the United States, which he never actually visited, to fund “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”

The first thing Congress did with the money was lose it. It invested Smithson’s bequest in bonds issued by the new states of Michigan and Arkansas, which promptly defaulted. President Andrew Jackson was inclined to write off the misfortune but Congressman John Quincy Adams lobbied to make good the appropriation with taxpayer funds. In 1846, the Smithsonian was born.

The institution grew based on personal interests of the men at the top--and major contributions. So many live animals were donated that a zoo was started. A Detroit industrialist donated his American and Oriental art, and presto, the Smithsonian had the Freer Gallery of Art.

Over the years, the only theme at the institution seems to have been the marvel of eclectic discovery--its holdings add up to 142 million items and counting. It contains, for example, the world’s largest collection of primary source documents on the visual arts in America. It owns Dolly Madison’s dance slippers, the “cursed” Hope diamond (which arrived by regular mail), and the Woolworth’s lunch counter where civil rights protesters demanded to be served in the 1960s. Among its science centers is the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, including 12 miles of undeveloped shoreline on the Chesapeake Bay and a Tropical Research Center in Panama staffed by 30 scientists. All of which demonstrates that the question of mission has long been thorny.

S. Dillon Ripley, an ornithologist who served as secretary from 1964 to 1984, did more than any other to give the institution its identity as a public attraction rather than an academic enclave. He opened five new museums (including the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Air and Space Museum), put a carousel on the Mall and opened the Smithsonian’s doors to the public for free.

To scientists and historians who had hitched their careers to the Smithsonian’s reputation for research, the trend was ominous.

“Ripley’s movement away from museums as repositories and toward institutions of public education reduced support for the research that makes possible the diffusion of knowledge,” said Bill Fitzhugh, a curator at the Natural History Museum and head of the Smithsonian’s Senate of Scientists.

It also cost money. Since Ripley’s tenure, the Smithsonian has been searching for outside funds. For 2002, Congress will pay more than 70% of the institution’s $700-million-plus budget; the rest is from interest on its endowment, profit from its restaurants, bookstores and the like, and private and corporate donations and deals.

Well before Small’s tenure, the trend toward commercialization kicked in. In 1991, to up the corporate ante at the institution, companies underwriting exhibits got their logos on brochures and text panels. In 1992, for a gift of $500,000 from Orkin Pest Control, the National Museum of Natural History named a permanent exhibit the O. Orkin Insect Zoo.

While such practices have become more and more common at museums (not to mention ballparks), they earned special notice applied to the Smithsonian. A group called the Center for the Study of Commercialism protested: “With exhibits plugging products, parents ought to be warned that the Smithsonian is looking more like Disney World.”

Still, in 1997, the Smithsonian announced it was curtailing the schedule of its popular 150th anniversary touring show because of a lack of funds. That very public embarrassment convinced the Smithsonian’s 17-member Board of Regents--headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, and made up of senators, congressmen, the vice president and several private citizens--that they needed a businessman at the helm. They found Small.

An amateur player of flamenco guitar and a collector of South American tribal artifacts, as well as a high-level player in financial institutions in Wall Street and Washington, Small wowed the regents.

“It’s quite amazing how strongly the search committee recommended him,” recalled Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), a member of the board. “He was so sure this was a job he could do, and he could explain why. It was very impressive.”

Within his first year at the Smithsonian, Small was aware that his new colleagues weren’t exactly thrilled with his goals.

“People are not getting it,” he lamented to one staffer. For Small, said this source, “it was all a failure of communications. That’s his frame of mind.”

Small told associates he would just have to change the place without them. He started with pandas. Hsing Hsing, the second of the pair that China gave to President Nixon, had recently died, in November 1999. Small said that everywhere he went, people asked him when the zoo was going to get new pandas. To Small, spending money on such a popular attraction was a no-brainer.

But zoo director Mike Robinson thought it a dreadful waste to spend millions on pandas instead of providing better facilities for the animals already there.

So Robinson, according to a source, told Small, “Over my dead body.” Small reportedly told associates, “We’ll wait.”

Robinson retired in May 2000, telling associates he disagreed with Small’s priorities. At that point, the Smithsonian raised $13 million--mostly from Fuji Film--to pay the Chinese for new pandas. In return, Fuji got a lot of positive publicity--plus the right to sell film at Smithsonian shops. Attendance and purchases at the zoo’s restaurants and shops increased, according to zoo officials.

Within the cluster of Smithsonian museums on the Mall, Small’s efforts to modernize were not unappreciated. “We know the roofs leaked,” one staffer said. Accounting and computer systems are antiquated, and almost everyone agrees that static exhibits--objects in glass cases, some unchanged in 40 years--are hardly the way to attract today’s audiences.

Small quickly commissioned a report that found the Smithsonian’s 400 buildings needed $1.5 billion in repairs. He also pressed for a $40-million investment to update the management of the books. In both cases, Congress told him to find the money elsewhere. That’s when he started looking for places to cut.

He made a few that lasted: 200 people were fired from various offices. He disbanded the Smithsonian film unit and its in-house duplicating center, saying it would be cheaper to hire outside printers.

But he also went after research projects that he decided duplicated efforts elsewhere. When he proposed closing the institution’s animal biodiversity facility, biologists and environmentalists howled until Congress intervened, setting up a panel of scientists to decide the issue. It is expected to complete its report by year’s end.

Small also proposed cutting a unit in Suitland, Md., that helps keep curators current on the latest research into preservation methods for the collections. That talk stopped after Sept. 11, when Wall Street firms called the unit to ask how to repair artwork damaged at ground zero.

As his cutbacks met with protests, Small moved to beef up the profit side of the ledger--the Imax theaters, the gift shops, the restaurants and Smithsonian magazine--hiring new managers to run what’s called Smithsonian Business Ventures. So far, with attendance at all the Smithsonian’s attractions plummeting after Sept. 11, these ventures have made $16 million instead of the hoped-for $25 million in the last year.

Small has pushed further than any other secretary when it comes to courting private donors and corporate sponsors, raising nearly $400 million in his first two years. His biggest catch so far is Kenneth Behring. The Northern California real estate developer had already donated $20 million to the institution’s National Museum of Natural History when Small approached him late in 2000. Behring responded by giving $80 million more to renovate the museum that now bears his name--the National Museum of American History, Behring Center.

If Behring was the high point in Small’s fund-raising efforts, Catherine Reynolds marked the low. Reynolds is a Washington philanthropist whose foundation dispenses profits from a student loan business she sold in 2000. She offered Small $38 million for an exhibit at the American History Museum, a Hall of American Achievers devoted to “life stories of eminent Americans,” and she wanted to choose 10 of the 15 committee members who would select the stories to be celebrated. Pressed by a reporter to make some suggestions, she did--Rosa Parks, Oprah Winfrey, Sam Donaldson, Martha Stewart.

The history museum curators were outraged. Scholarship should drive exhibits, not contributors. In editorials, they accused Small of unethical relationships with large contributors. Scholars called for his dismissal. Critics said he should have steered Reynolds toward funding Smithsonian priorities or stipulated that her proposal would be referred to a panel of scholars for vetting.

Reynolds withdrew her offer. In a letter to Small, Reynolds--who has peaceably contributed to such institutions as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts--cast the clash in ideological terms. She wanted to honor “the power of the individual to make a difference,” while the museum’s staff believed that “only movements and institutions make a difference.” Small issued no response.

The latest flap over the quid pro quo of big money donations and tie-ins came in March. Steven F. Udar-Hazy, an L.A. airplane leasing executive, has already donated $65 million for a new annex for the Air and Space Museum that will bear his name. By all accounts, he is what curators call a dream donor, eager to contribute to the funding and planning, but happy to leave the decisions to the professionals. Still, the museum is $96 million short for the annex; if a donor comes forward, it has said, it is willing to change the name of the Albert Einstein Planetarium.

Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.) scolded Small in a budget hearing after the news broke. “You shouldn’t be selling,” Hinchey told him, “and certainly not so cheaply.”

Throughout the salvos at the Smithsonian, the Board of Regents has maintained steadfast support of Small.

“He’s been working hard to manage the institution--and it has so many disparate parts,” said Sen. Cochran, a board member. “Somebody has to be tough enough to do all these things and deal with the necessary controversies. The so-called scholars have all decided he needs to go. They are entitled to their opinion, but I expect he’s not gonna go.”

In fact, in their latest meeting, in early May, the board once again showed no sign of wavering in its commitment to “modernization and money.” But it did offer some comfort to Small’s critics.

The regents endorsed a yearlong blue-ribbon study on how to reorganize the American History Museum, prompted by Behring’s generosity. The report chided Small for allowing corporate and private donors to dictate content or brand the exhibits. “There are lines beyond which gifts said to be charitable in their motivation look more ... like promotion and advertising,” it said, urging the Smithsonian to resist this tendency, not just to preserve its credibility, but also to “increase the prestige value of sponsors’ discrete association with the museum.”

But the report also reminded the staff that “the museum does not have a monopoly on good ideas.” It called for more diversity in content and presentation, more coherence in its overall organization and an overhaul of the building’s design.

“The curators will prevail on content,” Cochran said, insisting the regents won’t let the Smithsonian to become Disney World--the carousel on the Mall, he said, “is as far as we’re going to go.”

The curators worry still. “In 20 years,” prophesies Barney Finn, one of 35 curators at the American History Museum, “they will place the curators with showmen. Some more jaundiced than I think it will be sooner than that.”

In other words, the war continues.

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Johanna Neuman is a Times staff writer.