Dinosaurs in the Attic (5 page)

On June 2, 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant laid the cornerstone for the new building. He was attended by a flock of important officials, including three cabinet members, the governor, and the mayor (as well as a group of curious squatters who had remained throughout the construction.) The ceremony opened with a rousing prayer by a Reverend Tyng, followed by an address by the president of the commissioners of Central Park, who alluded rather apologetically to the forbidding landscape:

To the stranger who comes here to-day these rugged foundation walls and these rough surroundings are not well calculated to make a pleasant impression; but to us who have watched the rapid growth northward of this city, and who were familiar with the barren and rocky ground upon which Central Park has been created, it requires but little strain of the imagination to conceive of the speedy occupation of all these vacant lots by substantial dwellings, and to picture to ourselves the spot upon which we now stand, known as Manhattan Square, as covered by the proposed Museum of Natural History, costing, ere its final completion, not less than $6,000,000, and embracing a collection of objects of scientific interest second to none other in the world.

All was silent as Grant troweled the cornerstone and time capsule into place. The trowel, a little silver affair supplied by Tiffany's, was stolen moments later.
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The first building was opened to the public on December 22, 1877, with President Rutherford B. Hayes presiding. It was an austere Victorian structure that looked out upon a landscape of rubble, undrained ponds, and piles of rock. An early photograph of the Museum, taken from the roof of the Dakota Building,
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shows the Museum standing in this wasteland, with a number of shanties, gardens, and various animals still inhabiting the fringes of Manhattan Square.

Grand hopes were sounded in a series of opening speeches, and Bickmore looked forward to the coming weeks, when the Museum would be thronged with crowds of excited visitors. But the following day, Bickmore opened the doors of the Museum to a paltry crowd, and in the following months Bickmore found himself wandering unhappily through virtually deserted exhibition halls. Unexpectedly, so soon after its jubilant opening, the Museum was plunged into a period of crisis that threatened to shut its doors permanently.

MISERY ON MANHATTAN SQUARE

Between the opening of the first building and 1880, the Museum got into serious trouble.

During the first heady years of its life, the Museum had purchased a number of expensive collections. In 1874, for example, it paid $65,000 for the fossil invertebrate collection of Professor James Hall. This was undoubtedly an important purchase, and it kept this significant collection from being sold to a hungry German museum. (Louis Agassiz had once said that "whoever gets this collection gets the geological museum of America.") During a lifetime of meticulous collecting, Hall had amassed tens of thousands of fossils representing over 7,000 species; indeed, the collection was so important that the nomenclature of the geological structure of North America had been based on Hall's fossils. But it was also a very expensive acquisition—one that the thinly stretched Museum budget could ill afford.

The Museum hoped to pay for the Hall collection with a public subscription. Unfortunately, the public proved to be quite uninterested in an aggregation of gray invertebrate fossils. Very little money came forth. The trustees found themselves in the uncomfortable position of making up the shortfall—not an inconsiderable amount for the time. The Hall collection and other enthusiastic purchases of a similar nature put the Museum seriously in debt.

The location of the new Museum aggravated the cash-flow problem. The exhibition halls were virtually empty; more people visited the "rump" collection of natural history junk left behind in the Arsenal Building than came to the new Museum. The first two Presidents of the Museum, John David Wolfe and Robert L. Stuart, lacked the energy and time to put the Museum on a sound footing. Most of the other trustees were losing interest; fewer and fewer were coming to trustee meetings because the trip uptown was so inconvenient. In an effort to attract public attention, Bickmore would again and again persuade the trustees to advance funds for a new purchase, and again and again he would stage a grand unveiling. But each time, the flurry of visitors would soon drop off, leaving the Museum once again deserted.

Some of the trustees began seriously to question the value of the Museum itself. One wrote that "no matter how fine the exhibits are, if no one saw them what good are they?" By 1880, the Museum was on the brink of extinction. The trustees had by and large clamped down on purchases, public interest was at a critically low level, and Museum President Robert L. Stuart had said that when he retired, he would recommend closing the Museum if no one could be found to take his place.

The trustees decided that a report on the future needs and direction of the Museum was necessary. They gave the task to Morris K. Jesup, a Museum founder and wealthy railroad magnate and banker. They directed Jesup to devise a plan that would scale down the Museum's aims and goals, reduce expenses, and—most important—curtail the extravagant purchases of Bickmore and several other sympathetic trustees.

Jesup was not particularly interested in or sympathetic to the science of natural history, and his sixth-grade education certainly didn't prepare him for understanding the complexities of the institution. But after spending time with Bickmore, wandering about the halls gazing at the fossils and stuffed animals, and chatting with the two curators taking care of the collections, he underwent a conversion. Rather than winding the place down, he told the trustees that the Museum should be vigorously expanded and provided with an endowment. He shrewdly noted that the exhibitions should cease to focus on boring fossil invertebrates, but instead look to "lions" and other big mammals to arouse the public interest. He argued passionately that the Museum could be "a power of great good" for the people of New York City. The trustees were impressed by his report, and when Robert L. Stuart resigned, they made Jesup the third President of the Museum.

Jesup's presidency lasted more than a quarter-century, and during that time he completely transformed the Museum. In 1881, when he arrived, there were some 54,000 square feet of exhibits; twenty-five years later, there were close to 600,000. In 1881, the Museum employed twelve people; by 1906 the number had grown to 185. In 1881, the endowment was zero; in 1906, it stood at well over a million dollars. Much of this was due to Jesup.

Jesup was one of the nineteenth century's quintessential self-made men. He was a man of great self-control, with an uncompromisingly moralistic view of the world. He was born in 1830 into a strictly religious and quite wealthy family. Theatergoing, cardplaying, and dancing were forbidden as the Devil's amusements. Morris was the fifth of eight brothers and sisters. He was devoted to his mother, to Christian duty and the Presbyterian Church, to charity and honor. His many charities included the New York City Mission and Tract Society (which published Christian tracts and distributed them with zeal to the poorer classes), the Five Points House of Industry (a rehabilitation center for wayward boys), the American Sunday School Union, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and the Society for the Relief of Half-Orphan and Destitute Children, among others.

His life was uneventful until 1837, when the serious financial panic of that year completely wiped out the family fortune. Almost immediately afterward, the seven-year-old Jesup's father died, leaving Mrs. Jesup a destitute widow with eight children to support Gesup would later see all his siblings but one die of tuberculosis). His family's financial condition continued to grow worse until, at the age of twelve, Jesup was forced to drop out of school to help support his mother. He landed a job as a messenger boy at the Wall Street firm of Rogers, Ketchum & Grosvenor, run by one of his father's old friends and Jesup's namesake, Morris Ketchum. Rogers, Ketchum & Grosvenor manufactured locomotives and cotton mill machinery, and Jesup began learning the business.

From this pathetic, Horatio Alger–like beginning, Jesup amassed and then gave away one of the great fortunes of the nineteenth century. In 1852, at age twenty-two, Jesup left the firm, and with a bookkeeper named Charles Clark set up Clark & Jesup. This firm did a commission business, buying railroad supplies from manufacturers and reselling them to the railroads. It was a financial success, and several years later Jesup formed a new concern, M.K. Jesup & Company, which in time branched out into the investment banking business, eventually buying entire railroads. Jesup's specialty was to buy a controlling interest in a failing railroad, reorganize it, and sell it at a spectacular profit. When he became one of the original Museum incorporators in 1869, he had only been in business seventeen years and had already built a vast fortune.

Jesup was fifty-one when he was elected to the presidency of the Museum, and at fifty-four he retired from business to devote himself to it full-time. His sixth-grade education never hindered his understanding of science, and may in fact have been an asset. One scientist wrote, "He began his duties untrammelled by tradition. He was the advocate of no established school or method.... His oft-repeated remark, 'I am a plain, unscientific man; I want the exhibits to be labelled so I can understand them, and then I shall feel sure that others can understand,' summed up his prime desire."

Perhaps most importantly for the Museum, Jesup recognized that the foundation for good exhibitions was good research and
active collecting.
He launched the Museum into a golden age of exploration—the fifty-year period from 1880 to 1930, when the Museum sent over a thousand expeditions into the field, many to the remotest corners of the earth. By 1930 the Museum had been involved with expeditions that discovered the North Pole; that penetrated unmapped areas of Siberia; that traversed Outer Mongolia and the great Gobi Desert; that penetrated the deepest jungles of the Congo—expeditions that, in fact, were to bring Museum representatives to every continent on the globe.

THREE

The First Grand Expedition

It was a golden age for natural science. The world stood poised on the edge of the twentieth century, but an explorer could still come face to face with Stone Age peoples who were entirely unaware of the existence of an outside world. Exploration and collection were still a dangerous business, in which the loss of life was not uncommon. On the other hand, science had matured to the point where people realized that the earth's resources were not infinite. The new science of anthropology, for example, suddenly made people aware that cultures were dying out all over the world, and that an effort had to be made to save what was left. Technology had recently provided the tools to do so—including the camera and the wax-cylinder phonograph.

On the other hand, zoologists and biologists saw an entire globe virtually unexplored scientifically, and accessible in a way that it never had been before. New discoveries in many branches of natural science were following thick and fast: dinosaurs were discovered in the American West, remarkable new species of animals were found in the African jungles, new lands discovered in the Arctic. More than anything, natural scientists of the late nineteenth century believed deeply in the value of
collections.
To them, collections were
facts.
They held secrets about the world; secrets that could be extracted through careful study. Collections would reveal the relationships among all life on the planet, including human beings. They would be a resource for scientists centuries into the future, long after such things no longer existed in the wild. And on a more human level, spectacular collections and brilliant discoveries brought glory and fame to collectors, their institutions, and the benefactors who provided them with funds.

In 1895, President Jesup hired a young man, Franz Boas, to be the assistant curator m the Department of Ethnology. An austere man with a forceful personality, Boas was a meticulous, careful researcher who had unconventional—even radical—ideas about cultural anthropology. Before Boas, anthropologists had ranked human societies on a kind of evolutionary ladder; some races, they believed, were obviously better than others. The best and most advanced of all, of course, was the white Protestant culture of Western Europe and America.

Boas disagreed. He believed that all cultures were intrinsically equal—a view called cultural relativism. If this was so, Boas figured, one could learn as much about humanity by studying a small tribe in British Columbia as by studying a great civilization. But Boas saw many of the small cultures he wanted to study dying out, and he believed that with their death, priceless information would be lost forever. Time was running out, and he felt the urgent need to collect and save everything possible from these cultures for the benefit of future generations. In particular, Boas saw the fragile aboriginal cultures of the North Pacific rim of North America poised at the edge of extinction, and he realized that his might well be the last opportunity anyone would have to study these cultures. In earlier trips to the Northwest Coast, he had already begun to see the beginnings of a decline, stemming from the desire of the Indians to possess Western technology, and from the growing suppression of Northwest Coast culture by the provincial government of British Columbia. In Asia he saw disease and starvation decimating the native populations whenever they came in contact with the West. What was happening in Siberia was a mirror image of what was going on in the Western United States—and Boas knew perfectly well what the final result would be. His overriding desire was to save every possible thing related to these societies for future study and ultimately for the common heritage of humanity.