Joel J. Orosz

In Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740 – 1870, Joel J. Orosz argues, “A small, loosely connected group of men constituted an informal museum movement in America from about 1740 to 1870. As they formed their pioneer museums, these men were guided not so much by European examples, but rather by the imperatives of the American democratic culture, including the Enlightenment, the simultaneous decline of the respectability and rise of the middle classes, the Age of Egalitarianism, and the advent of professionalism in the sciences” (pg. ix). Orosz defines the “American Compromise” as “popular education on the one hand and professionalism on the other,” a system he argues “has remained the basic model of museums in America down to the present” (pg. ix). Orosz works “to show that the museums in America from 1740 to 1870 were not predominately sideshows or elitist enclaves, but rather were direct products of the American democratic culture and developed in synchronization with the evolution of the wider cultural climate” (pg. 3). He specifically seeks to refute “Theodore Low’s vision of the pre-1870 American museum as merely a third-rate imitation of European models” (pg. 8-9).
Summarizing early American curio cabinets, Orosz writes, “These first efforts at museum-making, then, were essentially attempts to set up centers to satisfy the demand for scientific knowledge in an enlightened age. These were the impulses that lay behind the first serious attempts to form museums in America” (pg. 14). Examining the Moderate Enlightenment, Orosz writes, “Du Simitière, Peale, and Baker all expected to make a living from their institutions, so there was an admission charge; but the fee had to be kept reasonable, so as to attract a clientele. Nor would they offer mere mindless entertainment. Again and again in their writings, these men reiterated three goals of their museums: rational amusement, pleasurable instruction, and the promotion of piety” (pg. 28). He continues, “If there was one area in which the Americans could hope to compare with the Europeans it was science, especially natural history. Here, more than in any other branch of science, Americans were capable of making a significant contributions to knowledge” (pg. 52). Turning to the Didactic Enlightenment, Orosz writes, “The years from 1800 to 1820 marked in museum history the era of the Didactic Enlightenment. This period witnessed the decline of the authority and power of the respectability and the corresponding rise of the middle classes to political and social influence,” a rise museum proprietors sought to control (pg. 68). Using the example of Charles Wilson Peale, Orosz writes, “In the years following 1800, Peale slowly grasped the fact that a truly useful museum would have to accommodate both the serious and the casual visitor, both the scholar and the person who wished to be diverted. Peale was thus the first to grasp the essential form of the modern American museum: an institution that promotes scholarly research, provides popular education, and offers an acceptable form of entertainment” (pg. 83).
Moving forward, Orosz writes, “By 1835 it was a miserable village indeed which did not contain a lyceum or some reasonable facsimile. This system of mutual improvement at the grass-roots level was working admirably, with locals organizing their societies and lecturing each other. It was a pure example of the hunger for popular education abroad in the land” (pg. 111). Continuing into the 1840s, Orosz writes, “Professionalization would be the dominant ideal in American museums throughout the decade of the 1840s. It was strongest in those museums which catered to science, for scientists were ahead of historians or artists in professionalizing, but it affected every museum” (pg. 140). He continues, “By 1850, the pendulum was beginning to swing back toward a synthesis between the popular and the professional in the museum world” (pg. 140). In the meantime, Orosz rehabilitates P.T. Barnum’s reputation, writing, “Barnum’s critics were blind to his innovations and accomplishments in the museum world because, ironically, they had been humbugged by the great showman” (pg. 173).
Orosz concludes, “The synthesis of popular education and professionalism came about during this era for a complex series of reasons. Among them were a general retreat of the professions before the egalitarianism of American life, the scientists’ fear of alienating religious opinion, the increased emphasis on the importance of popular education as a result of the ‘free labor’ ideology, the desire to preserve the American past, the popularization of the museum idea stemming from the international expositions of the era, and the effects of the Civil War in mobilizing public opinion” (pg. 180). Finally, “The development of the great metropolitan museums fixed the American Compromise as the basis for future museum development in America. This basis has proved elastic; at certain times professionalism has predominated, at others, popular education” (pg. 236).… (meer)