The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way

Reviewed by Steven H. Jaffe

One of the privileges of growing up in New York City, or of visiting the city at a young age, is the opportunity to be exposed to the magic of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Long before e-games, the internet, or even radio and television, the museum’s treasures brought to life the creatures and peoples of the world and the wonders of the universe. Admittedly, recent confrontations with activists protesting the racial politics of the museum’s Theodore Roosevelt Memorial statue on Central Park West and the outdated portrayal of Native Americans in its galleries, as well as critical assessments by scholars, point up just how profoundly AMNH and other museums founded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nurtured some of our most toxic assumptions. The museum’s past trustees, directors, curators, and designers played pivotal roles in bringing to public life a referential framework that classified all non-European peoples as “other” and in some sense “primitive.” (Evidently, non-Europeans, no matter how complex or dynamic their cultures, fell under the rubric of “Natural History,” just like orangutans, jellyfish, or dinosaurs—a fate avoided by European societies and their offshoots, and a categorization that still burdens museums in this century.)

Like all larger-than-life New York City institutions, however, the museum’s legacies have been multifaceted. And in the end, like all museums, AMNH is interpreted by its visitors, who bring their own agendas and learn their own lessons, beyond the control of official narratives. After the museum opened its Hall of African Peoples in 1968, I watched a dashiki- and dhuku-clad African-American mother guide her young son through the gallery. “What is this, mommy?” the boy asked in front of a diorama depicting a freeze-frame moment in the life of a culture. “This is Africa before the white man came and messed everything up,” she replied.

Like me, New Yorker Colin Davey was seduced by the museum’s magic at an early age. Indeed, his book is an unabashed celebration of AMNH, and it has a semi-authorized feel: Its chapters on the Hayden Planetarium and its successor, the Rose Center for Earth and Space, were co-written with Thomas A. Lesser, an emeritus employee, and Davey acknowledges various other museum staff members past and present for their help. In an adroitly written and researched narrative, he traces the museum’s genesis as the pet project of mid- and late-nineteenth-century patrician New Yorkers, wealthy Protestants who found themselves having to cultivate such unlikely characters as Boss Tweed and state senator George W. (“I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em”) Plunkitt to secure crucial authorizations and disbursements from the Albany statehouse. Davey pays much attention to the expansion of the museum’s physical plant over the decades, a stop-and-start process reliant, as all else in American museums, on the exigencies of shifting financial fortune, unpredictable political changes, and the quirks of individual donors.

Along the way, as befitted the nation’s emerging capital city of culture, funding from wealthy Manhattanites and help from state and city politicians enabled AMNH to acquire superlative collections, including the world’s greatest assemblage of dinosaur bones, and hundreds of animal specimens destined for the “habitat dioramas” crafted by taxidermist Carl Akeley, the genre’s pioneer, and his students. The 1872 ambition of museum designers Calvert Vaux and Jacob W. Mould to fill four massive Upper West Side blocks came close enough to realization to make the mid-twentieth-century museum feel like a city unto itself, a place where the brain might become fatigued (but enriched) while the body lost calories over the course of a multi-hour and multi-mile stroll. Today, in a city of some 8.5 million residents, AMNH receives about 5 million visitors annually.

Davey documents the tenures and agendas of the museum’s movers and shakers, including park commissioner Andrew Haswell Green, who during the 1860s supported plans for a “Paleozoic Museum” to display life-size models of dinosaurs; naturalist Albert Bickmore, who lobbied tirelessly for the creation of the museum and is considered AMNH’s most crucial founding father; banker Morris K. Jesup, the museum’s president from 1881 to 1908, who fostered its Golden Age of collection-building and scientific expeditions; paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, who built grandly on Jesup’s achievements but also yoked the museum to what Davey rightly calls “racialist theories that have long since been discredited”; and former Barnard College president Ellen Futter, AMNH’s first female president, who has overseen the modernization of the institution since 1993.

Davey is especially good at what one might call the Indiana Jones Era of curatorship, which lasted from the 1880s until the 1930s, corresponding roughly to the presidencies of Jesup and Osborn. An array of gun-toting, self-dramatizing, hypermasculine cultural imperialists populate this section of the book, men on the model of their revered contemporary Theodore Roosevelt (son of one of the museum’s principal founders, and himself an enthusiastic contributor to AMNH collections). They include the grandiloquent Arctic explorer Robert Peary, who shipped back the 34-ton Ahnighito meteorite after a series of harrowing and masochistic expeditions across Greenland, eleven years before leading the expedition that allegedly first reached the North Pole; Carl Akeley, who when charged by a furious African elephant “grabbed both tusks and swung himself on them like a pair of parallel bars”; and the paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, who discovered the first dinosaur eggs in Mongolia, and who boasted, “I have seen my whole camp swept from the face of the desert like a dry leaf by a whirling sandstorm. I have fought with Chinese bandits. But these things are all a part of the day’s work.” (Andrews may have been topped in the macho department by Akeley’s protégé James Clark, who on his own Mongolian expedition was "detained and tortured by bandits” and lived to tell the tale.)

Some of these men were accompanied by equally steely women. Wives Josephine Diebitsch Peary and the two Mrs. Akeleys (Delia Akeley followed by Mary Jobe Akeley) proved as adept as their husbands at enduring the hardships of the wild and orchestrating good publicity back in Manhattan. For all their Rooseveltian bravado, however, the legacies of these men and women to modern science and conservation cannot be denied. Recognizing the vulnerability of the Congo’s mountain gorillas while hunting specimens for AMNH, Akeley persuaded the Belgian government to found Parc National Albert, and the second Mrs. Akeley later worked to get its protected territory expanded tenfold; Akeley died and is buried there, in the preserve later made famous by primatologist Dian Fossey. Andrews’s dinosaur finds advanced scientific knowledge in a process that continues today; as Davey notes, the museum’s paleontologists have repeatedly had to update their displays as new discoveries have reshaped our understanding of dinosaurs. (“It’s the scientific method,” a young father with toddler daughter in tow proclaimed to me when I visited AMNH recently, “Don’t be afraid to change your mind!”)

The book’s final section, co-authored with Lesser, focuses on the ups and downs of the Hayden Planetarium and the steadier trajectory of the Rose Center for Earth and Space that replaced the planetarium in 1998. Built with a major assist from city construction czar Robert Moses (who created a Planetarium Authority, much like his Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, to borrow needed funds), the Hayden Planetarium became both a beneficiary and victim of changing fashions, trustee politics, and fickle revenue streams. Annoyed that financier Charles Hayden got his name on the edifice without paying for the whole project, and disgruntled that his own role was being overlooked, Moses congratulated Hayden with blunt sarcasm at the opening party in 1935: “Charlie, never in the history of philanthropy has anyone earned immortality so cheaply.” Over the decades the planetarium developed some of the world’s most innovative educational programs on astronomy and helped foster a nationwide planetarium fever. But in a stagnant period between the 1970s and early 1990s, programming turned to “psychedelic rock-music laser shows” and Star Trek-themed exhibitions, gimmicks that did little to lift low attendance figures.

In the 1950s and 1960s, though, the Hayden Planetarium was at the cutting edge of an unfolding Space Age, and one of the book’s most eye-opening contributions is its narrative of the pivotal role AMNH scientists and administrators played in kick-starting the Cold War space race. Beginning with a 1946 reunion in Queens between AMNH astronomer Willy Ley, who had left Nazi Germany in disgust at Hitler’s policies, and the ex-Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the planetarium became a base for conferences, exhibitions, and publicity campaigns devoted to convincing the American public (and the politicians they elected) that space travel could be a viable reality. Having won over associate editor Cornelius Ryan of Collier’s magazine— with a weekly circulation of 3.1 million, and editorial offices a mere taxi ride away-- Ley and his allies leveraged their enthusiasm into a nationwide fascination, a triumph reflected in the planetarium’s swelling attendance figures, which reached 618,000 annually in 1957 and 655,000 in 1969. Fixtures of the military-industrial complex such as the Martin Corporation (maker of the Viking 10 rocket) and IBM obliged by sponsoring lavish (and self-promoting) displays at the planetarium. Davey and Lesser persuade the reader that the road to space—and to beating the Soviets to the moon— started on Central Park West just as surely as in Washington, Edwards Air Force Base, Houston, or Cape Canaveral.

Davey doesn’t shy away from tackling some of the museum’s social and political controversies. Indeed, it would be hard to do so in a book devoted to AMNH’s history, since the fur started to fly as early as the 1880s in a protracted dispute over whether to open the museum to the public on Sundays. Conservative Presbyterian trustees eventually lost their battle to preserve the Sabbath’s sanctity to a coalition of politicians, newspaper editors, freethinkers, labor activists, immigrant groups, and others in 1892. AMNH remains a bastion in the culture wars, but now on the other side of the battlefield when it comes to certain conservative religious beliefs. As one of the t-shirts currently being hawked in the museum’s three-story mega-gift shop proclaims, “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it,” a Neil deGrasse Tyson quote which one might choose to interpret as an oblique dig at Darwin-denying creationists.

Yet the book is curiously reticent about AMNH’s long entanglement in the history of American anthropology as a field with momentous political and social consequences. Under the auspices of Margaret Mead, who used the museum as her base from 1926 until her death in 1978, AMNH became an engine for disseminating the cultural anthropology pioneered by her Columbia University mentor Franz Boas (himself an AMNH employee from 1896 to 1905), with its emphasis on the fundamental unity and equality of the human race, the insignificance of racial traits in differentiating peoples, and the lessons to be learned from different cultures. This cluster of ideas would become central to the modus operandi and political agendas of twentieth-century American liberalism.

The justice of Boas’s and Mead’s triumph is more than merely poetic, for they toiled to overturn and discredit the museum’s entrenched prior commitment to anthropology that was frankly and influentially racist in orientation. Under Osborn in the early twentieth century, the museum embraced a burgeoning eugenics movement that endorsed mandatory sterilization for various categories of “inferiors” while asserting that the influx of “low” immigrants through Ellis Island, particularly Jews and Italians, threatened the dominance and long-term survival of superior “Nordic” Anglo-Saxons. (Early on, even Boas had been susceptible to callous assumptions permitting him and other AMNH employees to appropriate and display the skeletons of Inuit individuals who had died in New York after being carried from Greenland by Peary.) Osborn promoted the racist publications of his close friend Madison Grant, long a member of the museum’s executive committee, who argued that the division of the European population into superior and inferior races was scientifically verifiable. Grant and fellow AMNH board member John B. Trevor used their museum bona fides to help convince Congress to severely limit eastern and southern European immigration in 1924, an anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic measure that endured for over forty years and prevented thousands of European Jews from crossing the Atlantic and escaping the Holocaust. Having accepted an honorary degree in 1934 from a German university busily purging its Jewish faculty, Osborn—still head of the AMNH—complained that American Jews were trying to hide “all that is good” about Nazism. While stormtroopers burned books by Boas in their bonfires, a German translation of Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race, lauding “Nordics” and excoriating racially “degenerate” Jews, adorned Adolf Hitler’s personal library till the day he killed himself.

Readers interested in this and related aspects of AMNH’s story will have to look elsewhere, to such books as Daniel Okrent’s The Guarded Gate, Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air, Kenn Harper’s Give Me My Father’s Body, and Jonathan Spiro’s Defending the Master Race. But given Colin Davey’s success in conveying the magic of the American Museum of Natural History, and in following many of the unexpected twists and turns in its trajectory, perhaps he will write a companion volume on how the museum’s Halls of Peoples got that way. If he does, it will be well worth reading, as this book is.

Steven H. Jaffe is a curator at the Museum of the City of New York, and author of Activist New York: A History of People, Protest, and Politics (New York University Press, 2018) and New York at War: Four Centuries of Combat, Fear, and Intrigue in Gotham (Basic Books, 2012).

Peter-Christian AignerOctober 29, 2019Comment