ALLISON MARSH
W I T H L I Z Z I E WA D E
Inside the Smithsonian’s Curatorial Crisis
Federal budget cutting is undermining the value of the museums’ invaluable collections by reducing
funds for maintenance, cataloging,
acquisition, and access.
A
s the hands on my watch hit 11 o’clock, I
was still fighting with the stubborn dust
clinging to my chocolate-colored pants.
The dust was winning. I knew it was unlikely the senator would actually show
up for the tour, but I wanted to look presentable, just in case: for months, I had
been writing my speech in my head. Now, maybe I would
get to say some of it out loud to someone who might be in a
position to help.
Standing in the doorway of the reference room of the Division of Work and Industry, beyond the reach of the general
public, on the top floor of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., I mentally rehearsed my
pitch. As my watch clicked past 11:05, my welcoming smile
started to fade. By 11:10, it was gone completely. Noticing
my mounting frustration at the missed opportunity, Ailyn, a
Smithsonian behind-the-scenes volunteer, looked up from
her paperwork, stretched, and ran a hand through her cin-
namon hair. She flashed me a sympathetic look. “I hate VIPs,”
she said with her crisp Cuban accent. “They never show up
on time.”
Five minutes later, I finally heard high heels clicking down
the linoleum hallway. I plastered my smile back into place
as the museum director’s assistant ushered our guests through
the door. I tried to hide my disappointment when I realized
that Martin Heinrich, the junior senator from New Mexico
and the VIP I had been waiting for, would not be joining us
after all. In a whirlwind of handshakes, I tried to catch names
and identifying reference points. I already knew that the gentleman was an architect who had the ear of the museum’s director, but who were the two older women? I didn’t know
and would never find out, but they seemed curious and eager nonetheless, so I started my tour.
In preparation for the VIPs’ visit, I’d removed some of my
favorite objects from their crowded storage cases in the locked
area adjacent to the more welcoming and slightly less cluttered
reference room. I’d carefully arranged the artifacts on two
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government-issued 1960s green metal tables for inspection,
but before I could don my purple nitrile gloves and make
my introductions, the architect made a beeline for a set of
blueprints in a soft leather binding. He smiled as he recognized the Empire State Building. Floor by floor, the names of
the business tenants—some of them still familiar, but many
more long forgotten—revealed themselves as he flipped
through the pages. I had playfully left the book open to the
forty-ninth floor, where the Allison Manufacturing Company had occupied the northeast corner of the building.
Maybe it would help him remember my name.
“Do you know who did these drawings?” he asked me.
“Morris Jacks, a consulting engineer,” I offered. “He made
them in 1968 as part of a tax assessment. He calculated the
building’s steel to have a lifetime of sixty years.”
All three visitors quickly turned to me with worried looks.
The Empire State Building was built in the 1930s. Was it going to collapse?
“Don’t worry. The steel itself is fine!” I assured them. “The
Empire State Building isn’t going to fall down. Jacks was actually estimating the building’s social lifespan. He thought
that after sixty years, New York City would need to replace
it with something more useful.” As the visitors laughed in
disbelief, I sensed an opening to start my pitch, to make the
argument I’d been waiting six months to make. “Engineering
drives change in America, and history can show the social implications of those technological choices. Museums have the
power to—”
“Wait. What’s this?” One of the women was pointing to a
patent model occupying the center of the table. She bent
down to get a closer look at the three brass fans mounted in
a row on a block of rich brown mahogany. They were miniature windmills, only six inches tall. Their blades were so
chunky that it was hard to see the spaces where the wind
would have threaded through them—a far cry from the sleek,
razor-thin arms whipping around by the hundreds on today’s wind farms. But follow the wires jutting out of their
backs, and you could see what made this patent model special: a battery pack. Inventor and entrepreneur Moses G.
Farmer was proposing a method to store power generated
by the wind. If the model were full-sized, that battery could
power your house.
“It’s a way to keep the lights on even when the wind isn’t
blowing,” I explained, hoping she might be in a position to report back to Senator Heinrich, who I knew served on the
Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. As the
only engineer in the Senate, he would understand the technical difficulties of an intermittent power supply—a major
hurdle in the clean energy industry. When I told the woman
48 ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Engineering is just one of
these collections. Formally
established in 1931, the
collection predates the
1964 founding of the
National Museum of
History and Technology
(the precursor to today’s
NMAH). But today, its
objects are routinely
overlooked when the
remaining curators plan
exhibits.
M U S E U M C U R AT I O N
that Farmer was the first person to submit a patent application trying to solve the problem—in 1880—her jaw dropped.
One of the guests spotted our intern, Addie, quietly working at another desk tucked in a corner of the reference room,
having been temporarily displaced by the impromptu tour.
The group gathered around her cramped desk, marveling at
her minute penmanship as she diligently numbered the delicate edges of mid-twentieth-century teacups arranged in
neat rows on white foam board. No one had difficulty imagining well-dressed ladies sipping from them aboard a Cunard Line cruise across the Atlantic.
In our remaining time, my tour group barely let me get a
word in edgewise—a few details about any object started
them chattering excitedly to each other. Before I could lead
the party into the back storerooms, where the real treasures
were kept, the museum director himself arrived, commandeered the group, and swept them out the door with a practiced authority and a mandate to keep them on schedule. My
half-hour tour of NMAH’s mechanical and civil engineering collection had been slashed to fifteen minutes. Their
voices drifted as they walked down the hall. “What an amazingly intelligent staff you have,” one of the guests remarked.
The compliment was bittersweet, at best. None of us was
actually on staff at NMAH. Ailyn was a volunteer who gave
her time in retirement to help the Division of Work and Industry keep its records in order. Addie had only two more
weeks left in her unpaid internship; she had recently graduated with an undergraduate history degree and was looking
for a permanent job. I was a research fellow on a temporary
leave from my faculty position in the history department at
the University of South Carolina, a job to which I’d be returning in another month. That was what I had been dying
to tell them: the NMAH engineering collection doesn’t have
a curator, and it won’t be able to get one without help from
powerful supporters, like a senator who could speak up for
engineers. My guests had been so engaged with what they
were seeing that I didn’t even have a chance to tell them that
they were catching a rare glimpse into a collection at risk.
S
ince its founding in 1846, the Smithsonian Institution has served as the United States’ premier
showplace of wonder. Each year, more than 30
million visitors pass through its twenty-nine outposts, delighting at Dorothy’s ruby slippers, marveling at the lunar command module, and paying their respects to the original star-spangled banner. Another 140 million people visited the Smithsonian on the Web last year
alone (and not just for the National Zoo’s panda cam). Collectively, the Smithsonian preserves more than 137 million
objects, specimens, and pieces of art. It’s the largest museum
and research complex in the world.
But behind the brilliant display cases, the infrastructure is
starting to crack. The kind of harm being done to the Smithsonian’s collections is not the quick devastation of a natural
disaster, nor the malicious injury of intentional abandonment. Rather, it’s a gradual decay resulting from decades of
incremental decisions by directors, curators, and collections
managers, each almost imperceptibly compounding the last.
Over time, shifting priorities, stretched budgets, and debates
about the purpose of the museum have resulted in fewer curators and neglected collections.
In 1992, NMAH employed forty-six curators. Twenty
years later, it has only twenty-one. Frustrated, overworked,
and tasked with the management of objects that fall far beyond their areas of considerable expertise, the remaining curators can keep their heads above water only by ignoring the
collections they don’t know much about. These collections become orphans, pushed deeper into back rooms and storage
spaces. Cut off from public view and neglected by the otherwise occupied staff, these orphaned collections go into a state
of suspended animation, frozen in time the day they were
forgotten. With no one to advocate for them, their institutional voices fade away.
Engineering is just one of these collections. Formally established in 1931, the collection predates the 1964 founding
of the National Museum of History and Technology (the precursor to today’s NMAH). But today, its objects are routinely
overlooked when the remaining curators plan exhibits. If
you wanted to tour the collection, you’d have to be a senatorlevel VIP or have friends on the inside. Even established
scholars have trouble making research-related appointments.
There’s simply no one available to escort them into the collections. What’s more, no one is actively adding to the collection, leaving vast swaths of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries—inarguably, an essential time for engineering and technology—unrepresented in the United States’
foremost museum of history.
It is difficult to trace the curatorial crisis back to a single
origin. The Smithsonian’s budget is labyrinthine: federal
money funds much of the institution’s infrastructure and
permanent staff positions, while private donations finance
new exhibitions and special projects. A central fund is spread
across the museums for pan-institutional initiatives, but each
individual museum also has its own fundraising goals. As
with any cultural institution, federal support fluctuates according to the political whim of Congress, and charitable donations are dependent on the overall health of the nation’s economy, the interests of wealthy donors, and the public relations
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49
goals of (and tax incentives for) corporations. Museum directors have to juggle different and sometimes conflicting priorities—including long-term care of the collections, public
outreach, new research, and new exhibits—each fighting for
a piece of a shrinking budgetary pie. In fiscal year 2013 alone,
sequestration cut $42 million, or 5 percent, of the Smithsonian’s federal funding, forcing the institution to make painful
choices. Without money, the Smithsonian can’t hire people.
Without people, the Smithsonian can’t do its job.
For my part, I was one of about a dozen temporary fellows brought in to NMAH last year thanks to funding from
Goldman Sachs. Spread out across the museum’s many departments, we were supposed to help “broaden and diversify the museum’s perspective and extend its capabilities far
beyond those of its current resources.” For six months, I
would take on the work of a full-time curator and try, however briefly, to stem the tide of collective forgetting.
W
hen I arrived at NMAH in January of
2013, I felt as if I were reuniting with old
friends. I had spent significant time in
the engineering collection as a graduate
student while researching my dissertation on the history of factory tours. Now, many years later, I
spend much of my time in the classroom, lecturing to uninterested undergrads on the history of technology or pushing graduate students to think more broadly about the purpose of museums. I was looking forward to the chance to
get my hands dirty, inspecting artifacts and doing real museum work.
I had underestimated the actual level of dirt. Despite the
collections manager’s best efforts, construction dust from a
building improvement project had seeped through the protective barriers and coated archival boxes filled with reference
materials. As I pulled items off the shelves, puffs of it wafted
up to my nose. My eyes watered and my nose itched as I
wiped away the new dust that had silently settled upon the old.
The strata of grime made the exercise nearly archaeological.
My allergist would have been horrified.
On red letter days, I rediscovered national treasures that
had spent years buried under the dust: the Empire State
Building blueprints, for example, or the original plans for
Grand Central Terminal. But I spent most days sifting
through an onslaught of the mundane—the national rebar
collection, engine indicators, or twenty years’ worth of one
engineer’s daily planners. I began to better appreciate why
no one had been eager to take on the task of sorting through
all these shelves full of obsolete ideas. One typical spring
morning, I slid open the glass doors of a storage case and
50 ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
pulled out sixteen patent models of boiler valves.
Trying to understand why, exactly, the museum had gone
to the trouble of collecting so many boiler valves, I thumbed
through Bulletin 173 of the United States National Museum,
a catalog of the mechanical collections compiled back in
1939 to document the work done by the Division of Engineering’s founding curators. It appeared they were trying to
document the progress in standardizing safety laws. The
nineteenth century was the Age of Steam, giving rise to the
locomotives and factories of the Industrial Revolution. Steam
boilers generated a tremendous amount of power, but they
were also notoriously treacherous. Frequent explosions often
killed workers, but no legal codes existed to regulate construction and operation of pressure vessels until 1915, over
one hundred years after they came into widespread use. In the
rows upon rows of boiler valves on the shelves in front of
me, I began to glimpse years of work by countless engineers
desperately trying—with varying degrees of success—to devise a technological fix to a serious problem.
Curators are custodians of the past, but they must also
collect the present in anticipation of the future. They grab
hold of ideas, like the increasing importance of workplace
safety at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution, and attempt to illustrate them with physical objects, like the boiler
valves. Curators can’t always predict which new technologies or interests will guide future research, but they can nevertheless preserve the potential of a latent information and
make it available to its future interpreters. Long after such
artifacts have been rendered obsolete in the world outside
the museum, the curators at NMAH hold them in trust for
the American public.
I lined up all of the boiler valves in a row on a table in the
reference room. At one point, they had told a story—a story
those founding curators had hoped to share with audiences
reaching far into the future—and my job now was to make
sure that story could be rescued and retold by the curators and
visitors whom I hoped would come after me. With minimal
written information about the valves’ importance and provenance, I sat down to do what I was trained to do: read the
objects.
Some looked like water faucets; others like Rube Goldberg contraptions. I picked up a bronze model that, with its
cylindrical air chamber and protruding nozzles, vaguely resembled a toy water gun. The 1939 catalog indicated that
this valve was patented in 1858 by a man named Frick. He had
designed it to be an all-in-one machine, combining a valve
with nozzles to relieve dangerous levels of pressure inside
the boiler, an alarm to warn of any failure to do so, and water jets to extinguish the resulting fires. I updated the data-
M U S E U M C U R AT I O N
Curators are custodians of
the past, but they must
also collect the present in
anticipation of the future.
They grab hold of ideas,
like the increasing
importance of workplace
safety at the tail end of the
Industrial Revolution, and
attempt to illustrate them
with physical objects, like
the boiler valves. Curators
can’t always predict which
new technologies or
interests will guide future
research, but they can
nevertheless preserve the
potential of latent
information and make it
available to its future
interpreters.
base with this information, wondering what type of inventor
Frick was. I wondered if he felt the weight of his failure every
time he read about another deadly boiler explosion in the
newspaper. Maybe he smiled and patted himself on the back
each day he didn’t. Finally, I clicked save and pushed the entry into the queue for legal review so that it could be put in
the Smithsonian’s online collection database. Then I moved
onto the next mute artifact waiting for me to give it a voice.
Hours later, I stepped back from my notes. I now had object-level descriptions for each one of the models. Thanks
to an inventory team working under temporary contracts,
they all had been recently photographed as well. With a photo
and a description, the valves could be put online, their digital records available to anyone with an Internet connection.
Still, online patrons won’t be able to feel the weight of these
artifacts in their hands, nor will they be viscerally overwhelmed by their numbers, as I was. They will have no physical sense of the abundance of artifacts, the piles of stuff that
tell the stories of countless engineers working together and
on their own to solve the problems of their times.
I sighed, collected my notes, and put the valves back in
storage.
H
ow will future historians—or even just curious museum visitors—see our current technological moment represented at NMAH? If
the Smithsonian’s resource crunch continues
down its current path, chances are they won’t
see it at all. Without a curator, a collection cannot grow and
evolve. Future visitors to the engineering collection will learn
about coal mining in the nineteenth century, but there will
be no objects helping them understand hydraulic fracking
in the twenty-first. Researchers will be able to examine building plans of every station, bridge, and tunnel on every route
once covered by the Pennsylvania Railroad, but they won’t see
an example of a cable-stayed bridge, a design that has dominated in recent decades. They will be able to see designs for
the 1885 Milwaukee municipal water supply system, but they
won’t see the much more recent inventions that keep our
drinking water safe today.
What’s more, NMAH is fast approaching a generational
cliff. Sixty-eight percent of the staff is eligible to retire today,
but the younger guard feels like the Baby Boomers will never
leave. Some Boomers haven’t been able to save enough to retire, but many more are simply dedicated to the job and are
unwilling to see their lives’ work be mothballed. They can’t
imagine leaving without passing the torch to a replacement—
replacements they know the museum can’t afford to hire.
But the alternative isn’t any better; eventually, these aging
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51
curators will die without anyone to take their places. Their collections will join the dozens of orphans the Smithsonian already struggles to care for.
The new director and deputy director of NMAH understand the challenges they have inherited and are working toward stemming the tide. Their 2013 strategic plan lists “revitalizing and increasing the staff” as one of the four main priorities for the museum. Doubting that any more public funds
will be forthcoming in the near future, NMAH—reflecting
a trend at the Smithsonian more generally—is staking its future on private fortunes, courting billionaires to endow curatorial positions tied to blockbuster future exhibits. That
leads to a backward hiring process, in which new curators
are hired only after the exhibits they are tasked with planning are underway. And because already curator-less collections, like engineering, do not currently have the institutional voice required to push for and plan the kind of blockbuster exhibits that attract these endowed positions, they are
left out of both exhibit halls and development plans. They
are orphaned twice over.
Almost daily during my six months at NMAH, I was pulled
into informal conversations about the future of the museum.
Over lunch or in the hallway, I talked with curators and collections managers about where we might get a grant to extend
the contracts of the inventory team. Sometimes we dreamed
bigger, wishing for a new floor plan for the storage areas.
Imagine if we could knock down the walls and open up the
rooms, put in moveable shelving, and reunite collections that
had been dispersed across the museum!
On days of extraordinary frustration—when everyone
just felt overworked, underpaid, and overwhelmed by the
challenges the museum faces—we all secretly harbored a desire to leak insider stories to The Washington Post or the
General Accounting Office. But we almost always held back.
Everyone who works for the Smithsonian loves the ideals
the institution aspires to. They fundamentally believe in the
founding mission: “For the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” We want to be able to have frank discussions about
the needs of the museum, but we worry that if we speak too
loudly, we might unjustly diminish its institutional authority. Even with its faults, the Smithsonian remains a seriously
amazing place. But without public advocacy—which depends
on public awareness—the Smithsonian’s curatorial crisis has
no hope of being solved.
In March of 2013, about halfway into my Smithsonian
residency, I gave a deliberately provocative presentation at
the weekly colloquium where curators and visiting researchers
give talks based on their current work. Although the colloquia are open to the public and occasionally attract graduate
52 ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
The Smithsonian is
not where we store the
remnants of what we
have forgotten. It’s where
we go when we want
to remember. Its curators
help us access and
interpret our country’s
collective memory.
M U S E U M C U R AT I O N
students and professors from local universities, they are
mostly insider affairs. I titled my talk “Because Engineers
Rule the World” and had NMAH’s social media coordinator live-tweet it to the museum’s thousands of Twitter followers. I showcased some of my favorite objects, gave a brief
history of the engineering collection, and then outlined some
suggestions for what its curatorial future might look like. It’s
not hard to imagine two diverging possibilities. Down one
dark path, the engineering collection becomes so neglected
that it cannot be resurrected. No one knows how the collected technologies once worked or why future generations
should study them. The objects become pieces of Steampunk
art, beautiful, perhaps, but irrelevant to working engineers.
A brighter future, on the other hand, might feature additional curatorial staff, perhaps funded by engineering professional societies or major companies. I had already tried to
tip the scales in favor of engineering by offering NMAH’s
development officer a list of Global 100 companies, highlighting objects of theirs that we had in the collection. We
were preserving their history. The least they could do, it
seemed, was help us pay for it.
Robert Vogel, one of the last curators of engineering, now
retired, sat staunchly in the audience listening to my talk.
During the Q&A, he reminisced about the glorious engineering exhibits of the past, and I realized almost all of them
had been dismantled and shipped to off-site storage over the
past two decades. The last remaining public homage to engineering, the Hall of Power Machinery, sits forlornly in a
dimly lit, uninviting back corner of the first floor’s east wing.
For the intrepid visitors who wander into the space, the objects give a glimpse into the technological history of the Industrial Revolution. But since the exhibit cases are so old
that they do not meet current safety standards, they cannot
even be opened to change the long burnt-out light bulbs.
The week after my colloquium talk, I participated in the
Smithsonian’s (somewhat) annual April Fool’s Day Conference on Stuff. This year’s theme was “grease”; it seemed only
fitting that the engineering collection, which is filled with
big greasy things, should be represented. I gave a tongue-incheek presentation on the history of gun control—grease
guns, that is. In a seven-minute romp through the collections, I talked about jars of grease, bottles of grease, cans of
grease, cups of grease, tubes of grease, and even two pots of
grease that have been missing since the Congressionally mandated inventory of 1979 (they were in the vintage database,
but I never could track them down). From the grease gun
that came with the 1903 Winton convertible to the WWIIera M3 submachine gun, which earned the affectionate nickname “the greaser,” I drew attention to objects that had not
been out of storage in decades.
Taken together, these two public talks created a momentum that knocked me out of my host department and propelled me into conversations with curators in art, medicine,
education, programming, and others. My colleagues laughed
at the April Fool’s Day lecture but were also astonished by
the objects I’d uncovered and the latent connections that
were just waiting to be made across the museum. I’d made my
point: they could see what was being missed without a curator, what stories weren’t being told. More important, perhaps, my public acknowledgment that the engineering collections were orphaned unleashed a flood of response from
museum staff. A curator in the Division of Medicine and
Science stopped me in the hall to tell me, “Ten years without
a curator? That’s nothing. We have collections that haven’t
been curated in decades.”
W
ith only a few weeks left in my fellowship, I decided I had to make a move. I
drafted a two-line email, agonizing over
every single word. Finally, I took a deep
breath and hit send. Instant secondguessing. The Smithsonian is an institution with a deep hierarchical arrangement of authority, and I had just pole
vaulted over four levels of supervisors, directors, and undersecretaries to email Dr. Wayne Clough.
Clough, a civil engineer by training, was president of Georgia Tech before accepting his appointment as the twelfthever Secretary of the Smithsonian. If I was going to make a
case on behalf of the engineering collection, I figured now was
the time. I invited him for a tour; somewhat to my surprise,
he happily accepted. We emailed back and forth about possible dates before Grace, his scheduler, stepped in with a definitive time. May 30, 3 p.m.
My gamble had paid off, so I decided to roll the dice again
and emailed Senator Heinrich. Jackpot! Catherine, the Senator’s scheduler, said he would love to stop by, barring any
committee calls for votes.
I had about two minutes to daydream about the perfect
meeting—three engineers getting together to talk shop. I
imagined a conversation about how our engineering backgrounds prepared us for our current jobs, which were not
technical at all. I thought we could talk about who today’s
engineering rock stars are—people, companies, and ideas
that NMAH should be collecting. We could discuss STEM education initiatives and how a national engineering collection could be featured within a history museum.
Then a flood of emails rushing into my inbox knocked
me back to political reality. First came a message from the
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Smithsonian’s Office of Government Relations, then an
email from the administrative assistant for the Director of
Curatorial Affairs, then another from the scheduler for
NMAH’s director—all grabbing for control over my tour. My
frank conversation with fellow engineers was turning into
a three-ring circus of administrators. But when I complained to a curatorial friend from one of the off-the-Mall
Smithsonian museums, she shot back, “Are you kidding?
These government relations people are exactly the ones you
need to be talking to!” After all, she explained, they don’t get
to spend just fifteen minutes with a single senator—they
get to highlight institution-wide issues in reports that are
read by all of Congress. “Now that you’ve got their attention,”
my friend said, “you need to let them know engineering is
being forgotten. Then maybe they can get the gears working to hire a curator.”
A week before the scheduled tour, I opened my inbox to
heartbreak. “Dr. Clough will now be out of town next week,”
Grace wrote. “Could we reschedule for June 6?”
For me, June 6 was too late. By then, my fellowship would
be over. I’d have resumed my regular life as a professor, teaching a six-week summer course on comparative public history in England. In fact, the whole storeroom would be devoid of people. The contract for the collections inventory
team had not been renewed, so no one would be able to finish imaging the objects and creating database entries. The
engineering collections would return to hibernation.
But I wasn’t willing to let it go quite yet. I managed to
arrange a meeting for late July, when I would be returning to
D.C. for just a few days. I was determined to make one last
plea for the collections.
W
hen my plane landed at Dulles late on
the Saturday night before the rescheduled tour, I turned on my phone and
checked voicemail for the first time in
six weeks. I found numerous messages
from my Smithsonian supervisor, left in increasing levels of
panic. “You’d better come in a day early to set things up,” he
sighed when I finally got a hold of him the next day.
So that Wednesday, still a bit jet-lagged, I boarded the
Metro and made the familiar trip to NMAH. I had been
gone for less than two months, but my I.D. card had already expired, so my supervisor had to meet me in the lobby
and escort me up the elevator to the staff-only floors. “Better watch out,” he warned me. “You’ve upset quite a number of people.”
The NMAH’s top curators had already decided my tour
would not take place in engineering’s shabby storeroom.
54 ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Rather, our VIPs would be the first to see a newly renovated, state-of-the-art showroom down the hall. Intended
to house the agriculture and mining technologies collections (and completed before the funds could be poached
to keep the museum open during sequestration), the new
room was icy—not because they had managed appropriate climate control (a constant challenge for all museums),
but because the collections manager was downright hostile. My shenanigans had meant that she had to vacuum
away every speck of dust and generally eliminate any sign
that this was an active workplace.
Outside in the corridor, I overheard two staff members
talking about me: “Who does she think she is? Emailing the
Secretary! Inviting a senator!” The privileges I had enjoyed as
a pesky but eager Smithsonian insider were long gone. Now,
my former colleagues saw me as merely a graceless interloper, ignoring rules I didn’t like, calling attention to workers
who preferred to keep their heads down (and off the chopping
block), and creating extra work for them in the process.
Before the tour, the Director of Curatorial Affairs gave
me strict orders: under no circumstance was I allowed to
speak for the future of NMAH’s collections. I wasn’t allowed
to make any suggestions about what the museum should be
collecting or what its direction should be. I wasn’t allowed
to say anything that might prompt a question for which the
secretary didn’t have an answer. If the senator asked me what
he could do to help, I was not allowed to say. If asked directly, I should defer to someone with authority to speak to
those issues.
Humbled but still nervously excited, I reported to the staff
entrance the next day to meet my guests. John Gray, the director of NMAH, was already there, along with the personal
assistant to the museum’s director of curatorial affairs and
the Smithsonian Institution’s legislative affairs liaison. I was
pleased to see that Gray was beaming. “So you’re the one
who made this happen?” he asked, shaking my hand. I started
to apologize about overstepping, but he cut me off. “Nonsense. This is the kind of thing we need to do more often.
And why aren’t we showing them our old storerooms? They
need to see our challenges.”
Secretary Clough arrived right on time with his suit jacket
folded over his arm, a concession to D.C.’s brutal summer
heat. All of the men quickly slipped out of their own jackets
in show of deference to his authority. After quick introductions, we settled into a light-hearted banter. Twenty minutes
later, Senator Heinrich arrived with his assistant, apologetic
for his tardiness but still enthusiastic. “Have you ever been to
the National Museum of American History?” I asked. “No?
Well, you’re in for a special treat.”
M U S E U M C U R AT I O N
Sure enough, when we walked into the gleaming showroom, the senator was like a kid in a candy store. Objects
from the Panama Canal, a piece of the levee wall that collapsed during Hurricane Katrina, microcomputers—it was an
engineering treasure trove. Heinrich immediately started examining Farmer’s windmill-battery patent model, trying to
see how it worked.
Exactly six minutes into the tour, the senator’s assistant
interrupted us. “A vote has just been called. We need to leave.
Now.”
As Senator Heinrich started rushing down the hall, he
called out, “When can I come back with my kids?”
“Anytime!” I yelled after him, not mentioning that I wouldn’t be there to show them around.
I returned to the showroom, where the Secretary had been
talking to the Director and other assembled staff members.
He turned to me and asked, regarding a slightly ragged pile
of papers, “Why those?”
I confessed that even though it wasn’t very flashy, it was one
of my favorite objects. “In 1903, an engineer took a drafting
course by correspondence school. Those are his notes. I think
it offers insightful parallels to today’s debates over online education.”
Secretary Clough flipped through the exercises, reminiscing about his own drafting coursework. Like the student
from the past, he was always being reprimanded for his imprecise handwriting and varyingly thick lines. When he
leaned forward to take a closer look at the school’s name, a
smile slowly spread across his face. “International Correspondence School. ICS. That’s how my dad got his degree.
He worked on banana boats out of New Orleans. Back and
forth to South America, he decided to earn a certificate in
refrigeration and marine engine maintenance.”
He stepped back and looked directly at me. “What can I
do to help engineering?”
I smiled, biting my tongue. “You need to talk to the director of curatorial affairs about that, sir.”
B
arely a week after the tour, Gray forwarded an
email from Clough to NMAH’s entire staff. In
response to upheaval in the federal budget negotiations, the secretary instituted a hiring freeze
across all of the Smithsonian’s museums. It was
scheduled to last for ninety days, but everyone knew it would
likely drag on much longer. In September, Clough announced
he would retire in the fall of 2014, meaning the curatorial
crisis will have to be handled by the next Secretary.
By chance, I had the opportunity to talk to Secretary
Clough again. While attending a workshop sponsored by
the Museum Trustee Association last fall, I slipped out of a
less-than-stimulating session on institutional endowments.
As I wandered through the halls of Dumbarton House, an
eighteenth-century house in the heart of Georgetown, I
spotted Clough, who was scheduled to give the lunchtime
keynote address. He had recently announced his resignation
from the Smithsonian, so I asked him what the recruiting
firm was looking for in his replacement. He smiled and
said nonchalantly, “You know, the usual. Someone who
walks on water.”
It was October 4, 2013, and Clough began his address to
the group by noting that the Smithsonian is usually open
364 days a year. The government shutdown had already closed
the museum for four days, which ultimately stretched to over
two weeks. Clearly, there is no returning to a mythic Golden
Age when Congress could supply adequate funding for the
Smithsonian’s needs, and dreaming of such a thing would
be counterproductive. But, with a wry smile, Clough noted
that coming up with an innovative solution would now be a
job for his replacement.
The truth is, no matter how much Clough or his successor loves engineering (or any other collection in the Smithsonian’s nineteen museums, nine research centers, and one
zoo), there’s very little the secretary can do to save them. The
slow creep of the curatorial crisis is not something one person, no matter how powerful within the institution or the
government, can reverse quickly. Faced with shrinking budgets and a dwindling staff, the Smithsonian’s curators will almost certainly have to come up with new ways of doing their
jobs, but their fundamental tasks, no matter the budget constraints or the day-to-day challenges, will remain the same.
The Smithsonian is not where we store the remnants of what
we have forgotten. It’s where we go when we want to remember. Its curators help us access and interpret our country’s
collective memory, whether that means organizing exhibits
of physical objects, creating digital databases, or just dusting off overlooked artifacts and writing down what they see.
Curators are worth fighting for. They help us remember, and
they don’t let us forget.
Allison Marsh ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of history at the University of South Carolina, where she
oversees the museums and material culture track of the public history program. Lizzie Wade ([email protected])
is the Latin America correspondent for Science magazine. Her
writing has also appeared in Aeon, Wired, and Slate, among
other publications. She lives in Mexico City.
SUMMER 2014
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