"A very special relationship": SHOT and the Smithsonian's museum of history and technology

Technology and Culture

Volumn 42, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 401-434

  Post, Robert C ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 23044526636     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (130)

1. My thanks to Molly Berger for photocopying the microfilm of the Plain Dealer for that fateful day.
2. John Hrones was Case's vice president in charge of academic affairs ("our administrative setup is more like that of a business corporation than an academic institution," Kranzberg told Henry Guerlac) and Morrell "Bo" Heald was a business historian who became chairman of Case's Department of Humanities and Social Studies in 1959. My thanks to Bo and his wife Barbara for sharing their memories with me when I visited Cleveland in 2000.
3. White to Kranzberg, 14 November 1956, Record Group 400, Records of the Society for the History of Technology, Box 1, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C. (hereinafter RG 400, NMAH).
4. SHOT Newsletter, summer 1958. Kranzberg to White, 14 February 1958, Record Group 266, Melvin Kranzberg Papers, Box 217, Archives Center, National Museum of American History (hereinafter RG 266, NMAH). Kuhn to Kranzberg, 17 March and 14 April 1958; Kranzberg to Kuhn, 31 March and 24 April 1958; Kranzberg to Carl Condit, 25 April 1958, RG 400, NMAH, Box 1. In the second session, Condit and Edward Lurie presented papers and Alfred Chandler was commentator.
5. Lynn White to Condit, 14 April 1958, RG 400, NMAH, Box 1. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and White's Medieval Technology and Social Change were both published in 1962.
6. Kranzberg to Robert M. Vogel, 27 March 1968, RG 266, NMAH, Box 148.
7. On the Hagley Conference, see Robert C. Post, "Technology in Early America: A View From the 1990s," in Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850, ed. Judith A. McGaw (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 16-39. Kranzberg and Hindle first met in the early 1960s, but Kranzberg never tired of telling how Boorstin "was a councillor of mine at a camp in Colorado when I was a young kid"; Kranzberg to Joseph Gray Jackson, 11 February 1969, RG 266, NMAH, Box 65. More recently, these two had discussed a volume for Boorstin's Chicago History of American Civilization series, and in 1973 Kranzberg provided Boorstin with a six-page critique of the type-script for The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York, 1973), for which Boorstin won both a Pulitzer Prize and SHOT's Dexter Prize; Kranzberg to Boorstin, 2 January and 25 October 1973, and Boorstin to Kranzberg, 18 October 1973, RG 266, NMAH, Box 65.
8. Technology and Culture's editorial office was adjacent to the office where Multhauf had edited Isis from 1964 to 1978. Adams's ambitious theme was "the growth of technology in the Western world from antiquity to the present day"; Tim Ingold, review of Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology,
9. by Robert McC. Adams, Technology and Culture 40 (1999): 130. At his invocation in 1984 Adams quoted from a T&C article about James Smithson, and, though rarely engaged directly with SHOT, he did deliver the closing address to the society's 1991 annual meeting, held jointly with the History of Science Society, in Madison, Wisconsin. He also exerted a firm influence on personnel matters - in favor of David Noble, for example, who served a brief and turbulent curatorial stint after leaving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983; Hindle to Kranzberg, 19 November 1984, RG 266, NMAH, Box 119.
10. Kranzberg to James King, 23 October 1958, RG 266, NMAH, Box 135.
11. The quote is from Multhauf's contribution to "In Memoriam: Melvin Kranzberg (1917-1995)," Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 403-28. He recalled incorrectly that he and Kranzberg were both "disadvantaged" (out of work) in 1953.
12. Kranzberg to Crane Brinton, 8 May 1952; Oscar Handlin to Kranzberg, 15 May 1952, RG 266, NMAH, Box 137. Kranzberg to Marie Boas, 21 May 1958, RG 400, NMAH, Box 1. At Harvard Kranzberg had audited A. P. Usher's course in economic history, and another economic historian, Charles Cole, had introduced him to Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization while he was still an undergraduate at Amherst. It was Cole who, as Amherst's president, recommended Kranzberg for the job at Case; see Robert C. Post, "Missionary: An Interview With Melvin Kranzberg," Invention and Technology, winter 1989, 34-39.
13. Classicist Ludwig Edelstein and thirty other professors at Berkeley and UCLA were fired for refusing to sign a Regents' loyalty oath on the grounds that it was a violation of academic freedom. For a measured account by a UCLA historian who was discharged, see John W. Caughey, "A University in Jeopardy," Harper's Magazine, November 1950. Those discharged were rehired following a ruling of the Supreme Court, but the episode was still fresh in Caughey's mind when we met in 1959.
14. Robert P. Multhauf Interviews, 29 May and 23 July 1974, Record Unit 9502, Smithsonian Institution Archives, 4 (hereinafter Multhauf Interviews, SIA); Multhauf, remarks on receiving the Leonardo da Vinci Medal of the Society for the History of Technology, Technology and Culture 29 (1988): 646.
15. Kranzberg to Alex Roland and Carroll Pursell, 12 May 1987, RG 266, NMAH, Box 155. Although there were four head curators, Multhauf was distinct in his attitude toward staff publication - "quite adamant," was how one veteran remembered it; see Robert C. Post, "A Life With Trains: An Interview with John H. White, Jr.," Invention and Technology, fall 1990, 38.
16. See Robert C. Post and Arthur P. Molella, "The Call of Stories at the Smithsonian Institution: History of Technology and Science in Crisis," ICON 3 (1997): 44-82. This article closed on a tentatively optimistic note, which does not seem to have been warranted.
17. Lynn White to Kranzberg, 14 November 1956, RG 400, NMAH, Box 1.
18. Melvin Kranzberg, "A Tribute to Carl W. Condit," Technology and Culture 30 (1989): 256.
19. Brooke Hindle, foreword to Technology's Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric, by John M. Staudenmaier (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), ix.
20. SHOT Newsletter, December 1958. Condit to Kranzberg, 18 April 1958; Kranzberg to Condit and Multhauf, 23 December 1958; Case Institute Press Release, 28 December 1958; Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Council, 29 December 1958, RG 400, NMAH, Box 1. Minutes of the Annual Business Meeting, 29 December 1958, RG 400, NMAH, Box 2.
21. William F. Ogburn to Kranzberg, 23 February 1959; Kranzberg to Ogburn, 9 March 1959, RG 266, NMAH, Box 166. Kranzberg to Lynn White, 30 August 1960, RG 266, NMAH, Box 217. "Prof. William F. Ogburn Dead; Sociologist Wrote on Technology," New York Times, 28 April 1959.
22. Dictionary of American Biography, suppl. 6 (1980), s.v. "Steinman, David Barnard."
23. On 10 December 1963, Bedini wrote to Kranzberg that he had made "two converts," his colleagues Robert Vogel and Bernard Finn (RG 266, NMAH, Box 63), and there is ample evidence for his efforts on behalf of T&C.
24. Kranzberg to Carmichael, 12 January 1959; also 2 April 1958, 25 September 1959, 5 January 1962; Carmichael to Kranzberg, 31 March 1958, 22 September 1959, RG 266, NMAH, Box 73.
25. A secretary like none of his predecessors, Small had previously headed the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae, a lending agency that buys mortgages and resells them as securities) and before that had run the institutional and corporate business at Citibank. In 2000, announcing that land developer Kenneth Behring had donated eighty million dollars to the museum, now to be called "Behring Center," Small foretold a "complete transformation" and made it clear that scholarship would no longer be a significant part of its mission. Linda St. Thomas, "Philanthropist Kenneth Behring Increases SI Gift to $100 million," The [Smithsoman] Torch, 10 October 2000; see also "Lawrence M. Small Begins Tenure as Secretary," Smithsoman Today 1 (winter/spring 2000): 1, and, on Small's tenure at Citibank, Philip L. Zweig, Wriston: Walter Wriston, Citibank, and the Rise of American Financial Supremacy (New York, 1995).
26. Hindle to Roger Kennedy, 10 December 1979, copy in Record Unit 7467, Robert P. Multhauf Papers, 1957-1987, Box 5, Smithsonian Institution Archives (hereinafter RU 7467, SIA). The Lynn White quote is from a letter to Kranzberg, 2 November 1983, RG 266, NMAH, Box 187. White, John Rae, and Cyril Stanley Smith made up an ad hoc committee of former SHOT presidents charged with determining where Kranzberg's papers should be deposited.
27. Melvin Kranzberg, "Memorial: T. Keith Glennan (1905-1995)," Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 659-62. Kranzberg tells of running into Glennan "at a supermarket checkout counter" and asking, "wouldn't it be nice if the agency had a history program?" Over the years, members of NASA's History Advisory Committee included Kranzberg, Multhauf, John Rae, Carroll Pursell, Thomas Hughes, I. B. Holley, Nathan Rosenberg, and Walter Vincenti, and of course it supported work by Alex Roland, Bart Hacker, Ed and Linda Ezell, James Hansen, Roger Bilstein, Sylvia Fries, and many others.
28. Bruce E. Seely, "SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education," Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 739-72. To say that the creation story includes an element of myth is not to deny that what Rachel Laudan calls the subsumption thesis - the construction of technology as "the Other" - lives on.
29. To verify, one only needs to read Pamela Henson's "'Objects of Curious Research': The History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian," in Catching Up With the Vision, suppl. to Isis 90 (1999): S249-S269, which claims that "by the end of Multhauf's era, the MHT staff were primarily academically trained historians of science." Actually, that was the case with less than 20 percent of the forty-odd curators, and many of the most productive had never even been to graduate school.
30. Arthur P. Molella, "The First Generation: Usher, Mumford, and Giedion," in In Context: History and the History of Technology - Essays in Honor of Melvin Kranzberg, ed. Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post (Bethlehem, Pa., 1989), 88-105, quote on 93.
31. Arthur P. Molella, "The Museum That Might Have Been: The Smithsonian's National Museum of Engineering and Industry," Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 237-63. Thanks to Reggie Blaszczyk for calling my attention to documents pertinent to this initiative in the Commerce Department files, Box 432f, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.
32. Robert P. Multhauf, "The Museum of History and Technology: An Analysis," typescript, RU 7467, SIA, 2. From 1974 to 1982 Taylor provided the Smithsonian Institution Archives with a remarkable series of interviews (RU 9512), whose transcripts run to 439 pages.
33. On MHT's origins, see Marilyn Sara Cohen, "American Civilization in Three Dimensions: The Evolution of the Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution" (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1980).
34. A New Museum of National History and Technology for the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C., 1953), 5. Cohen expertly assesses this "slick, informative, positive, and patriotic document" (133), a copy of which is deposited with Record Unit 334, Office of the Director, National Museum of American History, 1945-1987, Box 155, Smithsonian Institution Archives (hereinafter RU 334, SIA). The museum was officially authorized under the name Museum of History and Technology; in 1969 it became the National Museum of History and Technology.
35. A New Museum of National History, 3.
36. A Bill to Provide for the Preparation of Plans and Specifications for a Museum Building for the Smithsonian Institution, 83rd Cong., 2nd sess., H.R. 9500.
37. A New Museum of National History, 11. It is worth noting that a building depicted as "a low-cost product of the low ebb of Victorian architectural taste" in the 1950s could be reassessed in the 1970s as "masterful.
38. " James M. Goode, "The Arts and Industries Building," in 1876: A Centennial Exhibition, ed. Robert C. Post (Washington, D.C., 1976), 209.
39. House Committee on Public Works, Subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds, Hearings on H.R. 416 and H.R. 2114, 84th Cong., 1st sess., 1955.
40. George A. Dondero, "Communist Conspiracy in Art Threatens American Museums," Congressional Record, 82nd Cong., 2 sess., 17 March 1952, 2423-27.
41. Dondero's papers in the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, are a trove of cold war diatribe ("Communism has infiltrated our Government, schools, labor organizations, churches, business, politics, veterans organizations and nearly every phase of American life," he told a gathering in Roanoke, Virginia, on 26 June 1947), but disappointingly shy on information about the inception of MHT. Frances Stonor Saunders makes some discerning remarks about Dondero's politics in The Cultural Cold War (New York, 1999), 253-54.
42. Alex Roland, "Celebration or Education? The Goals of the U.S. National Air and Space Museum," History and Technology 10 (1993): 77-89.
43. Frank Taylor, "Brief History of the Museum of History and Technology," typescript, 8 February 1963; Taylor to Leonard Carmichael, 12 November 1957; James Bradley to R. L. Plavnick, National Capital Planning Commission, n.d.;
44. Silvio A. Bedini, "A Look Behind the Scenes at the National Museum of History and Technology," draft typescript, 22 May 1977; "MHT Building Dimensions," RU 334, SIA, Box 114. Once boasting "the largest practice in the world"
45. (Leland M. Roth, McKim, Mead and White, Architects [New York, 1983], xix), the firm was often termed "rusty" by the 1950s, and MHT's design was seriously flawed.
46. Multhauf Interviews, SIA, 28.
47. The idea of prototyping exhibits in A&I never worked out, and eventually they were stockpiled at the "Exhibit Laboratory" on 24th Street NW; Frank Taylor to Multhauf, 27 April 1959, Record Unit 375, Department of the History of Science and Technology, National Museum of American History, C1925-1937, 1954-1985, Box 5, Smithsonian Institution Archives (hereinafter RU 375, SIA). Lawless and Multhauf, artist and scholar, developed great regard for one another, though Lawless recalled an inauspicious meeting: On his first day, Multhauf "wandered into the design office . . . and right up to my desk, where he managed to spill an entire bottle of India ink on my nearly finished drawing. 'That shouldn't be too hard to clean up,' he said without a blink"; Lawless to Post, 28 September 2000, author's files. On Lawless, a powerful influence on the tenor of MHT exhibits, see Peggy Thompson, Museum People: Collectors and Keepers at the Smithsonian (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1977), 265-71.
48. On the rise of the professional exhibit designer, see Gary Kulik, "Designing the Past: History-Museum Exhibitions from Peale to the Present," History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, ed. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (Urbana, Ill., 1989), 3-37.
49. Leonard Carmichael to John B. Rae, 6 June 1956; Frank Taylor to Multhauf, 12 December 1956; Taylor to Remington Kellogg, 24 January 1957; "Candidates Considered for MHT," 24 January 1957, RU 334, SIA. Multhauf Interviews, SIA, 75.
50. Multhauf Interviews, SIA, 80. Chapelle's dozen books included The Baltimore Clipper (1930),
51. The History of American Sailing Ships (1935), and
52. The Search for Speed Under Sail (1968). Daniel Boorstin had a similar regard for Chapelle, enthusiastically backing his promotion to a "supergrade," the first for a MHT curator (Boorstin to Chapelle, 17 March 1970, RU 334, SIA, Box 109). Thanks to Jack White for taping his personal recollections of Chapelle.
53. Multhauf, remarks on receiving the Leonardo da Vinci Medal (n. 13 above), 651; Edwin A. Battison, "Eli Whitney and the Milling Machine," Smithsonian Journal of History 1 (summer 1966): 9-34,
54. and "A New Look at the 'Whitney' Milling Machine," Technology and Culture 14 (1973): 592-98.
55. The lead in overturning Whitney mythology had been taken by Robert Woodbury, who also worked for Multhauf at the Smithsonian in the 1950s, though he spent most of a forty-year career at MIT. Woodbury's "The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts," Technology and Culture 1 (1960): 235-53, was the premiere recipient of the Usher Prize in 1961 (Usher presented it personally), and his History of the Lathe to 1850 debuted the SHOT Monograph Series.
56. For Smith's appreciation of Battison, see Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), 7, 242.
57. "The Life and Times of Robert M. Vogel, Ret.," SIA Newsletter, fall 1988, 4-8;
58. Vogel, "Assembling a New Hall of Civil Engineering," Technology and Culture 6 (1965): 59-73;
59. Eugene S. Ferguson, "Hall of Power Machinery, Museum of History and Technology," Technology and Culture 9 (1968): 75-85. One of the few times Kranzberg wrote to Frank Taylor was to congratulate him for having a man of "Mr. Vogel's stature on your staff"; 15 January 1963, RU 266, NMAH, Box 204.
60. John Hoxland White Jr., "Why Write History?" Railroad History 152 (spring 1985): 6-12;
61. Post, "A Life With Trains" (n. 14 above). David Hounshell's generous Dexter Prize citation for The American Railroad Freight Car (Baltimore, 1993)
62. appears in Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 655-56.
63. Ferguson to Brooke Hindle, 27 October 1977, RU 334, SIA, Box 6. I am obliged to Bedini for countless favors over the years, not least for providing me with a copy of his very first article, "The Clock of Death," Bulletin, The National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, October 1953.
64. It should be noted that there were three departments besides Multhauf's - Civil History, Armed Forces History, and Arts and Manufactures - and that his curators had a handful of counterparts in those departments, notably Arts and Manufactures: Philip Bishop (the chair of the department), Edward Kendall, Eugene Ostroff, and Grace Rogers and Rita Adrosko, specialists in iron and steel, agriculture and forest products, photography, and textiles, respectively. Curators beyond Multhauf's orbit were rarely engaged with SHOT, though Rogers (who came up with the name of the museum) did write a T&C essay on the way textiles and textile machinery were treated in the Oxford History of Technology, and Adrosko penned a perceptive review of Sidney Edelstein and Hector Borghetty's translation of The Plictho of Gioanventura Rosetti, a treatise still noted on the inside front cover of every issue of the journal.
65. I have based my comparisons on the simple expedient of measuring column inches in Hacker's annotated index. In the dissertation upon which Technology's Storytellers is based, John Staudenmaier used a weighted points system that assigned Carl Condit the most points and the next highest totals to Cyril Stanley Smith, Ferguson, Carroll Pursell, Thomas Hughes, Multhauf, and Bedini but excluded such prolific contributors as Jack White and Hindle because the portal was publication of a full-scale article.
66. "Remarks of Daniel J. Boorstin upon assuming the Directorship of the National Museum of History and Technology, September 30, 1969," author's files.
67. "Statement by Roger G. Kennedy, Director, National Museum of American History (formerly History and Technology)," author's files.
68. Steven O. Lubar and Katherine M. Kendrick, "American Legacies: Imagining the Nation at the National Museum of American History" (typescript slated for publication by the Smithsonian Institution Press in 2001 as Legacies: Collecting America's History at the Smithsonian), 25, 28.
69. This is not to deny that it is more useful to think of a clock or typewriter in cultural terms than as a "small machine," as curators of the 1950s and 1960s typically did (I had not considered the matter in just that way until reading Carlene Stephens's fine essay, "From Little Machines to Big Themes: Thinking about Clocks, Watches and Time at the National Museum of American History," Material History Review 52 [2000]: 44-58), but only to question visions of progressive enlightenment. Compelling concerns about exhibits driven primarily by "themes" are raised by Harold Skramstad, who apprenticed with Robert Vogel and Ben Lawless at MHT before moving on to the Chicago Historical Society and then the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village.
70. See, for example, his reviews of Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian,
71. ed. Amy Henderson and Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Technology and Culture 41 (2000): 353-55,
72. and History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment,
73. ed. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 651-53, in which he inveighs against the assumption that the role of the history museum is to spotlight "an individual scholar's directly revealed truths" (652).
74. Multhauf, "The Museum of History and Technology: An Analysis" (n. 29 above), 6. Even though Multhauf revered Howard Chapelle's scholarship, he also believed that his exhibit philosophy - get lots of models and "stick 'em out there, as many as you could get" - was utterly wasteful of educational opportunity.
75. Frank Taylor, "Curatorial Functions in the Science and Technology Sections of the Smithsonian's Museum of History and Technology" (address presented to the annual meeting of the Association of American Museums, St. Louis, 29 May 1964), RU 334, SIA, Box 59, 2.
76. "Address by the President of the United States," in Dedication of the Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution, January 22, 1964 (Washington, D.C., 1964), 20.
77. Ferguson to Kranzberg, 5 October 1969; Kranzberg to Ferguson, 17 October 1969, RU 266, NMAH, Box 99. Hindle, "Historians of Technology and the Context of History," in Cutcliffe and Post (n. 27 above), 235.
78. The assumption seems warranted that Boorstin had "never been able to escape fully the legacy of his HUAC testimony"; Jon Weiner, "The Odyssey of Daniel Boorstin," The Nation, 26 September 1987, 307.
79. In 1953, when called by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a former Communist, he testified against his college roommates and his Harvard advisor. See Eric Bentley, ed., Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968 (New York, 1971), 575-612.
80. Arthur P. Molella, "The Research Agenda," in Clio in Museum Garb: The National Museum of American History, the Science Museum and the History of Technology (Science Museum Papers in the History of Technology 4 [1966]), 40, 39. I appreciate Art's address to the MHT/SHOT synergism in a session we organized along with Robert Bud for the 1996 SHOT meeting in London. Ripley died on 12 March 2001. Amid liberal and deserved praise by his memorialists was a provocative remark by the Washington Post's Ken Ringle ("S. Dillon Ripley: The Muse in the Museum," 13 March 2001): "He joined the Office of Strategic Services in 1942 and . . . in later years the aroma of secret-gathering would follow him to the Smithsonian, among whose appropriations and personnel the Central Intelligence Agency was rumored to hide some of its Cold War activities."
81. Though it would prove to be short-lived, the journal got off to a strong start with a very distinguished advisory board, including Samuel Eliot Morison, Julian Boyd, and Louis B. Wright, as well as Lynn White and Hunter Dupree, both of whom were approached in 1965 about applying for the directorship of the museum; Frank Taylor to P. K. Lundeberg, 24 January 1966, RU 334, SIA, Box 144. In extending a welcome to Cannon, Kranzberg suggested that "authors are not always aware of just which journal their articles are best suited for" and proposed sharing information about submissions. Cannon responded generously, noting that his cover design had been inspired "by the cuts you have recently had on your cover." Kranzberg to Cannon, 21 June and 6 July 1965; Cannon to Kranzberg, 30 June 1965, RU 266, NMAH, Box 195. On Cannon's vision for the journal, see "History at the Smithsonian," Smithsonian Journal of History 1 (spring 1966): 65-71. During its three years of publication, Bedini, Battison, and Jack White were regular contributors, with important articles also appearing by Dupree, Carroll Pursell, and George Rogers Taylor, some of which would have readily suited T&C.
82. Multhauf, "The Museum of History and Technology: An Analysis" (n. 29 above), 6; S. Dillon Ripley to Heads of Organization Units, "Higher Education and the Smithsonian Institution," 22 July 1964, RU 334, SIA, Box 26.
83. Philip Bishop, a dissenter from the precept that curators were obliged to publish in order to establish their authority, used this phrase in an angry memo to Bedini, 23 May 1968, about the subordination of exhibits to a misguided conception of the Smithsonian "as an institution of 'higher learning'."
84. Ada Louise Huxtable, "The Museum of History and Technology of Smithsonian Opens Doors Today," New York Times, 23 January 1964.
85. Smithsonian Institution, news release, 23 January 1964, RU 375, SIA, Box 5. Silvio A. Bedini, "The National Museum of History and Technology: Chronology of Major Events, 1964-1976," typescript, 8 June 1978, author's files.
86. Carmichael to Frank Taylor, 9 October 1963, RU 334, SIA, Box 4.
87. Blitzer quoted in Bryce Nelson, "The Smithsonian: More Museums in Slums, More Slums in Museums?" Science, no. 154 (December 1966): 1153;
88. Philip Ritterbush, The Art of Organic Forms (Washington, D.C., 1968), iv. Ritterbush warned of the danger that "knowledge will accumulate in museums like fossilizing sediments on the sea floor, a stygian process of concern to only a few misshapen bottom-dwellers sifting through it for their private amusement," and, as might be expected, had few fans at MHT. Multhauf discusses "ideological disagreements" with Ripley in "The Triumph of the Flag, or a Requiem for the MHT," a paper he has kindly shared with me.
89. These were the work of L. C. Eichner, whose skills Multhauf celebrated in an elegant booklet: Laurits Christian Eichner, Craftsman, 1894-1967 (Washington, D.C., 1971).
90. Thanks to Joanne Gernstein London for calling my attention to these scripts in Record Unit 623, Director, National Museum of American History, Exhibit Records, 1948-1965, Box 3, Smithsonian Institution Archives. Joanne researched these records exhaustively for "A Modest Show of Arms: Exhibiting the Armed Forces at the Smithsonian Institution, 1945-1976" (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 2000).
91. M. A. Berkovitz, letter to the editor, Washington Post, 7 July 1965. Many people are familiar with the early controversy involving the Wright Flyer, but just as telling was a dispute involving the Smithsonian's pre-World War I telegraph exhibit and its "alleged effort to remove Alfred Vail from the artifactual record." Russell Douglass Jones recounts this story in "Engineering History: The Foundation of Industrial Museums in the United States" (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 2001).
92. Peter Welsh to Multhauf, 10 January 1967, RU 276, SIA, Box 29; Blitzer quoted in Nelson, 1153.
93. Rodney D. Briggs, letter to the editor, Washington Post, 15 January 1967.
94. A flood of letters to the Washington papers, as well as op-ed pieces such as William Hines's "The Preservation of 'Losersville'" (Washington Star, 12 January 1967), exactly prefigured the corrosive rhetoric of the 1990s. "Is there anything the taxpayer can do to get such people as Charles Blitzer . . . off the Federal Payroll?" asked a 19 January letter to the Star.
95. George J. Berklacy to S. Dillon Ripley, 11 January 1967, Record Unit 276, Director, National Museum of History and Technology, 1944-1975, Box 39, Smithsonian Institution Archives (hereinafter RU 276, SIA). Blitzer weathered the storm and later went on to the presidency of the National Humanities Center and the directorship of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which he had helped found while serving as Ripley's lieutenant; for details, see "Charles Blitzer Dies at Age 71," Washington Post, 21 February 1999. As an aside, T&C would not have come to MHT had it not been for Blitzer's timely intercession.
96. In December 1965, when Ripley received a letter from Rolph that enumerated three dozen alleged errors in the section on the Civil War alone, he quickly convened a review panel chaired by the chief curator of the National Park Service. "This hall will surely leave even the most sophisticated visitor with strong impressions of its accuracy, meticulous craftsmanship, and careful chronological arrangement," wrote Theodore Ropp of Duke University, who added that "it ranks with other such great museums as the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, the Peabody Institute, and the Australian War Memorial"; "Comments on the Hall of the Armed Forces of the United States," typescript, 20 January 1966, RU 276, SIA, Box 39. Another member of the committee, Forrest Pogue - who later headed the Eisenhower Institute at MHT - recounted its work in "Pass in Review," Museum News 45 (April 1967): 6, 56.
97. Warren Danzenbaker to Silvio A. Bedini, memorandum, "History of the Bell Telephone Exhibit," 26 September 1973, RU 276, SIA, Box 45. King left the museum before publication of his three-part article on "The Development of Electrical Technology in the 19th Century"
98. (Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology, no. 28 [1962]: 231-406), in which he called Gray "one of the first inventors of a practical communications system using alternating currents of different frequencies" (315). But in a later contribution to the same series, "The Earliest Electromagnetic Instruments" (no. 38, 1964), Chipman thanked King "for many provocative discussions on this and related topics" (136). Multhauf refers wryly to the National Geographic Society as "the telephone company's Washington arm"; Multhauf to Post, 24 March 2000, author's files.
99. Joseph Marion Jones to Melville Bell Grosvenor, 27 January 1966; this and the following citations are all from RU 266, NMAH, Box 195.
100. Ibid.
101. Jones to Grosvenor, 23 June 1966. The Finn quotation is from a letter to Jones, 20 June 1966. Finn added that the comparison of Gray and Bell was "intriguing because of the differences between the two men - the one with a background in electricity, the other with a background in phonetics." This provided the theme for David Hounshell's "Elisha Gray and the Telephone: On the Disadvantages of Being an Expert," Technology and Culture 16 (1975): 133-61.
102. Lilian Grosvenor Jones to Robert P. Multhauf, 1 May 1967.
103. Multhauf to Joseph and Lilian Jones, 8 and 9 May 1967; Joseph Jones to Multhauf, 12 May 1967.
104. Kranzberg to Multhauf, 25 July 1967; Multhauf to Kranzberg, 5 September 1967.
105. Joseph Marion Jones to Multhauf, 25 September 1967; Kranzberg to Multhauf, 27 July 1967.
106. Kranzberg to Cyril Stanley Smith, 4 March 1968.
107. Joseph Marion Jones to Multhauf, 25 September 1967.
108. Cyril Stanley Smith to Elmer Belt, 21 August 1967. In later correspondence with Kranzberg (26 February 1968), Smith wrote, "I find myself reluctant to give Bell clear and unique priority for anything except the initiative and persistence to make a commercial instrument." To give him such priority "would be quite improper, indeed inexcusable in any museum of technology whose purpose was not nationalistic propaganda."
109. Kranzberg to Multhauf for distribution, 10 April 1968.
110. Joseph Marion Jones to Silvio A. Bedini, 8 July 1968; Kranzberg to Joseph Marion Jones, 16 July 1968. The disputed exhibit closed soon afterward, and not until 1976 was there a new telephone exhibit, this one focused on Bell's "experimental activity and his faith in the commercial and social value of the new communications medium"; Bernard S. Finn, "General Information," Person to Person (Washington, D.C., 1976), 3.
111. "I certainly highly applaud the report of the committee of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), chaired by Dr. Kranzberg"; S. Dillon Ripley to Melville Bell Grosvenor, 20 September 1973, RU 276, SIA, Box 45.
112. Multhauf Interviews, SIA, 100. Multhauf to Boorstin, 16 September 1969, RU 7467, SIA, Box 5. Multhauf told Kranzberg that Boorstin had shown an unexpected "thirst for action" that jibed with Blitzer's desire "to have his 'own man' as director"; 25 January 1970, RG 266, NMAH, Box 155. Kranzberg to Boorstin, 3 February 1971; Boorstin to Blitzer and Ripley, 16 March 1971; Kranzberg to Boorstin and Blitzer, 18 March 1971, RG 266, NMAH, Box 65. Though not the quintessentially disaffected academic that Boorstin was, Kranzberg had his reasons for being unhappy at Case after the merger with Western Reserve. In his contribution to "In Memoriam: Melvin Kranzberg" (n. 10 above), Carroll Pursell describes a situation wherein Kranzberg "was becoming something of a prophet without honor" (411). Kranzberg also pursued a provostship in California; Peter Drucker to Kranzberg, 29 July 1971, RG 266, NMAH, Box 89.
113. Blitzer to Kranzberg, 28 March 1973, RG 266, NMAH, Box 119. Kranzberg to Blitzer, 8 May 1978, RG 266, NMAH, Box 195. Hindle to Lawrence H. Leder, 5 January 1978, RU 334, SIA, Box 14.
114. Avi Decter to Kennedy, 29 December 1979; Hindle to Kennedy, 10 December 1979; Multhauf to Kennedy, 8 January 1980, RU 7467, SIA, Box 5.
115. Kennedy to Kranzberg and Merritt Roe Smith, 8 January 1990, quoted in Arthur P. Molella, "Tilting at Windmills," Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 1004. One may assume that Kennedy had browsed in the correspondence concerning Isis and noted Frank Taylor's remark that Multhauf's editorship was "a great contribution to the development of a general awareness of Smithsonian activities in the history of science and technology"; Taylor to Multhauf, 21 September 1964, RU 334, SIA, Box 4.
116. David Challinor to Kranzberg, 22 July and 2 October 1982, RG 266, NMAH, Box 193. I. B. Holley to Kranzberg, 25 October 1982, RG 266, NMAH, Box 120. In 1970, Eugene Emme had gotten Kranzberg involved in lobbying to fund NASM.
117. Kranzberg to I. Michael Heyman, 27 June 1995, copy in author's files.
118. Kranzberg to John Hrones, 17 March 1958, RG 400, NMAH, Box 1. There is a rich file here pertinent to Kranzberg's proposal for a Center for the Study of Technology and Society at Case.
119. Hindle to Charles Frankel, 31 January 1978, RU 334, SIA, Box 6. Two research centers at the Smithsonian are also worth noting: the Eisenhower Institute, founded in 1974 but disbanded in the 1980s following the death of its director, Forrest Pogue, and the Lemelson Center, founded in 1995 under the directorship of Art Molella.
120. Multhauf to Kranzberg, 10 June 1957, RG 266, NMAH, Box 155.
121. Kranzberg to Peter Drucker, 18 May 1961, RG 266, NMAH, Box 89.
122. Kranzberg to Ferguson, 12 January 1959; Ferguson to Kranzberg, 20 January 1959, RG 266, NMAH, Box 99. Multhauf to Kranzberg, 23 May 1962, RG 266, NMAH, Box 155. Because such a title summons up the unfashionable image of internalism, it seems worth mentioning that the distinction between internal and contextual is less significant than the distinction between history with and without a "problematique." Plenty of contextual history merely "fills gaps," in Michael Kammen's expression, whereas the best history of any kind is "driven by anomalies, puzzles, discrepancies, [and] contradictory data or interpretations"; "An Americanist's Reprise: The Pervasive Role of Histoire Problème in Historical Scholarship Concerning the United States Since the 1960s," Reviews in American History 26 (1998): 6.
123. One can see this in Bedini puzzling over the appearance of a device in various countries at various times, "yet apparently with little or no relation between these appearances" ("The Compartmented Cylindrical Clepsydra," Technology and Culture 3 [1962]: 115-41, quote on 135), or Battison asking questions about the capabilities of the Whitney armory (n. 43 above), or Chapelle analyzing whether the USS Constellation is really a frigate of the 1790s or an essentially new vessel of the 1850s
124. (Chapelle and Leon D. Pollard, The Constellation Question [Washington, D.C., 1970]).
125. Kranzberg quoting Multhauf on "technological process," draft, March 1958, RG 400, NMAH, Box 1. There is nearly as much lore attendant on the naming of the journal as on the inception of the society. In the final of three votes on the matter, with six titles up for consideration, Technology and Culture tallied eighty-five, Journal of the History of Technology sixty-seven, and Vulcan twenty-four. After hearing numerous warnings about the dangers of Technology and Culture, John Kouwenhoven wanted to know "who said engineers are 'wary of the word culture'?" "Questionnaire on Name of Quarterly Journal for the Society for the History of Technology," RG 400, NMAH, Box 2. Kranzberg to William Fielding Ogburn and Robert Multhauf, 17 March 1959, RG 266, NMAH, Box 166.
126. Multhauf to Kranzberg, 12 January 1973, RU 7467, SIA, Box 5.
127. Mayr to Kranzberg, 17 December 1973; Kranzberg to Mayr, 21 December 1973, RG 400, NMAH, Box 12. Kranzberg to Robert Vogel, 27 March 1968, RG 266, NMAH, Box 148. Two subsequent events are noteworthy. In 1977, Kranzberg told John Staudenmaier that the problem had to do with his "acting too much like a clown" ("In Memoriam: Melvin Kranzberg" [n. 10 above]), but there is no evidence of this is the correspondence. Then, in 1992, Mayr elected to conclude his Leonardo da Vinci Medal acceptance by saying that "the older I get the more I recognize to what extent SHOT owes its best features to its first editor and secretary."
128. The two quotes are from Gus Giebelhaus's contribution to "In Memoriam: Melvin Kranzberg" (n. 10 above), 420, and Multhauf's, 406.
129. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (New York, 1970), 305.
130. Rosalind Williams, "Lewis Mumford as a Historian of Technology in Technics and Civilization," in Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual, ed. Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes (New York, 1990), 47.