Bringing it to the People/Depression
Marjorie Schwarzer is professor and chair, John F. Kennedy University Department of Museum Studies, Berkeley, Calif. She is author of Riches, Rivals and Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America (AAM, 2006).
Above: Mabel Wing founded the Duluth Children’s Musum in 1930—despite the bleak economic landscape.
Left: Migratory farm workers photographed by Dorothea Lange in California.
As she traveled south from her hometown of Duluth, Minn., Mabel Wing passed farm after farm, town after town ravaged by the Great Depression. The year was 1933. Twenty-five percent of the nation’s workforce was unemployed. Three-fifths of banks had failed, resulting in the loss of millions of middle-class savings accounts and family businesses. Stock portfolios hovered at 10 percent of their prior value. Libraries were boarded up, playgrounds closed. Nowhere was the situation more desperate than in manufacturing cities like Wing’s destination, the great metropolis of Chicago. There, half of the African American population was unemployed. Public school teachers were owed eight and a half months of back pay; the city’s emergency relief fund was depleted.
Despite this bleak landscape, the 34-year-old art teacher arrived in Chicago filled with optimism. She had come to attend the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums and present a paper about her expanding enterprise: the museum she had founded in 1930, only months after the 1929 stock market crash. She told attendees how she persuaded the city’s board of education to let her experiment in an empty classroom in a public school basement. She arranged a few modest personal collections of peasant dolls and travel souvenirs on three salvaged tables. Wooden cigar boxes and orange crates served as makeshift pedestals. A bit of enamel paint here and a few swatches of fabric there and the Duluth Children’s Museum was born.
In 1931, as children flocked to the space and teachers began to borrow objects and ideas, more items were scrounged from attics and defunct businesses. Despite its diminished budget, the school board donated another room and funded a salary for Wing to continue her work. The local women’s club held a tea party to raise more money. By 1932, the Duluth Children’s Museum was thriving and growing. “Much money and a number of influential backers are not so essential as had been supposed when starting a museum,” Wing explained at the 1933 AAM Annual Meeting in Chicago. “Determination and ingenuity are the main assets required.”
The Duluth Children’s Museum’s Great Depression roots testify to the power museums have to bring hope to their communities. “Duluth was rather isolated geographically,” says Rich Jaworski, the museum’s current director of operations, collections and exhibitions. “Creating the museum along with its diverse collection was the way in which Mabel was able to expose the people and children of the area to the diversity of cultures around the world. She was very progressive in her approach to education.”
The Duluth story is not unique. Even before the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) of 1935, which shepherded a flowering of museum culture, museum enthusiasts like Mabel Wing were taking advantage of the economic crisis to proffer a progressive idea of how museums could structure themselves to place the needs of their communities first. This led to expanded in-house educational programs, external outreach via new media technologies like the radio and the first field-wide research on museum visitor behavior. Philanthropists stepped up to the plate, more rigorous systems of financial management were adopted and innovative ways to retain and earn income were created.
Given today’s faltering economy, a look at what the field accomplished during the dark years between 1930 and 1935 is illuminating. Museum professionals had no road map to follow and were completely unprepared for the economic downturn. We have the benefit of their oral histories and archives.
Buy. Build. Brighten the world. Such was the museum mantra during the roaring 1920s. The post-World War I industrial boom fueled an era of acquisition. Collecting was the rage. To house their artistic and scientific treasures, America’s wealthy collectors financed lavish museum palaces throughout the nation, often on donated public land. Municipalities allocated tax dollars for staffing, maintenance and other operational expenses. Realizing they had to offer communities something in return, most museums charged no admission fee. They offered educational programs, but education was marginal to their overall missions of showcasing collections.
History books identify the tipping point for the Great Depression as the Oct. 29, 1929, stock market crash. Yet, its ripples must not have been apparent to readers of Museum News, AAM’s biweekly newsletter at that time and this magazine’s predecessor. In the months and years that followed the epochal crash, Museum News headlined glossy photos of stately new buildings and reports of collecting milestones around the nation. Its pages brimmed with good tidings—a new museum in Memphis’s Pink Palace; expanded quarters for the New Jersey State Museum; large museum bequests for New Orleans, West Texas, Doylestown, Pa. We wrote of packed lecture halls, flowing coffers and crowded galleries. Visitation at the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences was up by 9 percent. The Essex Institute’s expansion fund was growing rapidly. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which opened to fanfare just days before the crash, was so crowded that it was compelled to “institute a 50 cent fee” during peak hours. Summarizing the pre-WPA 1930s in his seminal three-volume study, The Museum in America (1939), AAM Director Laurence Vail Coleman reported that while daily newspapers struck a “panicky note” of economic catastrophe, museum attendance rose and institutions continued to expand.
Wealthy collectors and visionary philanthropists played a large role in keeping museums on a steady course. Despite flattened stock portfolios, the feverish pace of collecting continued. For example, Andrew Mellon set a world record price in 1931 for a single painting, purchasing Raphael’s Alba Madonna for $1.2 million. Five years later he bequeathed the precious canvas to Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, which he helped to found. In 1932, Museum of Modern Art co-founder Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s growing collection of American-made handicrafts was the basis for the trend-setting exhibition “American Folk Art: the Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900,” which propelled the collecting of Americana. In 1933, collections of technological marvels gained visibility at Chicago’s freshly minted Museum of Science and Industry. Its founder, shopping catalogue magnate Julius Rosenwald, hoped it would “pulsate with life” and demonstrate that American machines were drivers of abundance, “cheap goods” and economic progress. Museums themselves could be engines for economic progress, some philanthropists decided. In 1933, Florence Libbey sacrificed her stake of her late husband’s glass manufacturing fortune to jumpstart construction for two wings at the Toledo Museum of Art, providing much-needed employment for 2,500 construction workers.
Museum educators also found deep-pocketed champions. The most influential was Frederick Keppel, who had served as a government official in Washington, D.C., and a dean at Columbia University. Keppel believed that museums had the potential to educate citizens and inspire them to participate in American democracy. This progressive educational philosophy was no doubt influenced by Columbia University professor John Dewey, with whom Keppel was acquainted. In 1922, Keppel became president of the philanthropic Carnegie Corp., a post he held for 20 years. With his finger on this fortune all through the Depression, Keppel steered large grants to museum education departments coast to coast, from the Portland Art Museum in Oregon to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. To undergird educational theory with hard data, the foundation also financed the field’s first studies of museum visitor behavior. In 1930, the foundation contracted with Yale University’s psychology department and AAM to research who was visiting museums, what they were doing during visits and how effective various “educational procedures” really were. At three test sites—the Buffalo Museum of Science, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Cleveland Art Museum—10,000 visitors were observed and surveyed.
A concurrent Carnegie research project sought to determine how museum buildings could more effectively serve communities. Paul Rea, former director of the Charleston Museum, gathered data from more than 100 museums on attendance, square footage, population densities and hours of operation. Using elaborate logarithmic calculations, he determined which municipalities were best served and which needed more activity. The Carnegie studies were widely disseminated to the museum field and prompted many actions. To accommodate peak demand, some museums extended their hours, operating well into the evenings up to seven nights a week. To make the viewing of objects more comfortable, they rearranged exhibits, adjusting the eye-level of paintings and cases. The Brooklyn Museum took extreme action in 1934, responding to visitors’ desire for a less exhausting way to enter buildings. While its architects were attending a meeting out of the country, the museum demolished its monumental Beaux Arts staircase. Acknowledging that the Carnegie studies were experimental, inconclusive and could definitely be improved upon, Yale professor Edward S. Robinson recommended what he considered to be the most logical step of all: Museums should hire “full-time staff psychologists” to assess visitors’ behaviors, opinions and needs around the clock.
Museums wouldn’t be expanding payrolls just yet. There was a downside to the inventiveness and loyalty of their well-endowed cheerleaders and check-writers. In 1932, museums began to incur drastic budget cuts from a key funding source: municipalities. Facing low revenues and defaults on property taxes, city councils were more concerned with immediate community needs that collectors and Carnegies were not as keen to support. Another dip in income worsened the situation. In the 1920s, museums had formed “friends groups”—middle-class citizens who paid membership dues in order to attend special lectures, luncheons and the like; around 1932, membership rolls declined by as much as 25 percent, and a few members even defaulted on pledges.
Museums needed to recoup the lost income. But what could they do? An examination of various annual reports and financial statements of the time (such as they were) found no instance of a museum raising membership dues, a prudent decision during a time of deflation. Raising general entry fees was also not an option in hard times. Nevertheless, there were many examples of museums that figured out how to recover from municipal losses quickly. Some hired professional accountants to audit their books and develop sounder management practices; around 1934, consistent financial statements and balance sheets begin to appear in annual reports. Beyond bean counting, others launched ambitious public relations campaigns. On Dec. 1, 1932, Museum News headlined a story about the abrupt resignation of nationally prominent director Arthur Parker from what is now the Rochester Museum and Science Center. He was protesting “disastrous reductions of city funds” for his museum. The self-sacrifice and subsequent outcry paid off; by Feb. 1 the city council had not only restored all funds but approved additional ones. Parker resumed his post. In 1934, the Birmingham Museum in Alabama employed a similar headline-grabbing tactic, resulting in the quick formation of a private citizens group to rescue and reinvigorate it.
New income streams also floated balance sheets. The California Historical Society rented space to a local university for extension classes and increased the quality and number of its publications, which sold rapidly and at a profit. The Newark Museum sold services to other museums, including fabricating inexpensive mannequins. In 1930, the American Federation of Arts began to tour exhibitions, which brought income to museums through special admissions fees. The decade saw a marked increase in traveling shows—ranging from Van Gogh canvases to Chinese vases.
Some institutions—notably the Smithsonian—could not recoup lost funding. They experienced deep cuts that resulted in curtailed hours, delayed building maintenance, closed-off galleries and furloughed workers. Other museums were forced to temporarily cut salaries, in one case by a whopping 25 percent. Nonetheless, activities went on as planned. The Detroit Institute of Arts pointedly reported in mid-1932 that “while [our] budget is somewhat smaller than in previous years, we will maintain essential services … so popular with the Detroit public.”
The pre-WPA years prompted economic and political resourcefulness, coupled with a new sense of financial responsibility. But there is an even larger story here: For the first time, museums put education and public service front and center. Before the 1930s, museums were inward-looking institutions run by cliques of curators and collectors. Desperate community needs, coupled with the Carnegie investment in museum education, changed that dynamic. “During the early 1930s, the battle between curators [and] popularizers of scholarly information who were fighting very hard for recognition as part of the museum hierarchy [was] won. … Education departments began to enjoy a certain amount of prestige,” recalled Grace McCann Morley, founding director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in an oral history.
Using their newfound power, educators focused museums’ existing strengths and resources into addressing local needs. In 1932, the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts announced free courses in lettering and design for the unemployed. The spots filled immediately. Around the country, museums offered job training in industrial art and merchandising, as well as workshops for housewives on how to reduce household costs. To soften the blow from shortened school days, museum educators arranged science clubs, art lessons and story hours for children. Games were popular educational tools at the time, especially those that children created themselves in response to what they had experienced in galleries. Keppel later reflected on the profound overall transformation of the era: “American museums everywhere were shifting in emphasis from taking care of collections to educating the nation’s people, who were turning more and more to museums.”
For those who couldn’t afford travel to the museum, the museum came to them. In 1931, with Carnegie support, the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened the nation’s first branch museum. Set in a storefront about eight miles west of the mothership, with window displays opening to the street, the branch produced 17 exhibits in its first 12 months. To reach people who couldn’t leave their homes, museums took to the radio airwaves, broadcasting weekly lectures and discussions.
The Buffalo Museum of Science in 1932 conceived a radical new program: roto-radio, which was then adopted across the nation. On roto-radio day, the local daily newspaper published a photo spread from the local museum. That same evening, the museum broadcast a talk by a curator that was linked to the pictures. As families huddled around their radio, they learned about many strange and wonderful things: mastodons, natural gas, Australian topography. Laurence Coleman, in his assessment of museum activities of the 1930s, admits that most roto-radio programs were pretty bad, since curators were not professional broadcasters. But the roto-radio multimedia experiment represents museums’ very early attempt to deliver educational objectives via a new communications technology. Besides, one science museum roto-radio program couldn’t have been all that bad: Its title was “Falling in Love Intelligently: why are some people good looking and others mentally brilliant?”
Museum directors surely rejoiced when they read the Dec. 15, 1933, headline in Museum News. “Federal Funds available to museums in new ways,” it announced, reporting on the passage of the Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA) and formation of the Civil Works Administration (CWA). Although museums were initially excluded from the bill “through a misunderstanding,” soon the famous alphabet soup of job creation programs opened up to them. The 1935 WPA and Federal Artists Project (FAP) let loose an avalanche of dollars and skilled artisans and artists into museums. The museum labor force grew by 25 percent, unleashing an unprecedented era of artistic creativity, historic renovation, scientific investigation and museum culture that reverberates today.
The WPA was a spectacular success for museums; its positive impact has been well documented. But what can be learned from the actions taken before federal relief arrived? Three lessons stand out. First, museums must not be afraid to innovate when crisis strikes. Second, they do their best work when they embrace public service as a core mission. And third, they have the potential to do even better when they think beyond the current crisis at hand and into the future. In the 1930s, museums succeeded in demonstrating that they could innovate and serve. In the 2000s, they will likely succeed in doing this once again. Where Depression-era museums fell short was in the third lesson: going beyond the current crisis and thinking into the future. Perhaps we can do better this time around.
The solutions museums undertook to recoup funding cuts and develop new kinds of educational programs were innovative for their time. Today’s museums are far more complex institutions than those of the 1930s, and thus demand even bolder strategies for economic viability. Yet at their core, the managerial actions of the Depression years—whether they involved creating a new kind of income source or recalibrating hours of operation—show us that museums knew better than to just sit back and watch their institutions shrink and sputter. Innovating is better than doing nothing. Challenging times are opportunities for us to stretch and go beyond the tried-and-true.
We can also be inspired by museums’ embrace of public service in the 1930s. The economic crisis prompted them to look at their communities’ needs more closely, inform themselves by collecting data about the impact of their work and look outside their walls to new technologies (the radio) and educational techniques (child-created games). While they didn’t set up soup kitchens for the hungry or health clinics for the sick, they did design programs that used their core resources—new buildings, extensive collections and staff expertise—in ways that would uplift, energize and benefit children and adults in both spiritual and practical ways.
In 1933 Harold Madison, director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, discussed in a feature article in Museum News the true cause of the Depression: greed and complacency. “Subconsciously we believed we had the world so well in hand that we could do with it what we pleased. We had it all wired and had become button-pushers and dial twisters with the controls set for permanent prosperity. And then the world began to change!” These words resonate today. When the funds began to flow again, museums quickly forgot the shock of the Depression as well as their moments of innovation on behalf of the public. They slipped back into the old patterns of massive acquisition and building, sloppy financial management and marginalizing the role of educators. An opportunity to be societal role models for the wisest possible use of resources and talent was lost. Booms and busts come and go. When we recover from the current hard times, let us always remember where we came from and how we got there.
