Tea with Brontosaurus

by Lukas Rieppel

Although dinosaur fossils were first found in England, a series of dramatic discoveries during the late 1800s turned North America into a world center for vertebrate paleontology. At the same time, the United States emerged as the world’s largest industrial economy, and creatures like Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Triceratops became emblems of American capitalism. Large, fierce, and spectacular, American dinosaurs dominated the popular imagination, making front-page headlines and appearing in feature films. In Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle, Lukas Rieppel follows dinosaur fossils from the field to the museum and into the commercial culture of North America’s Gilded Age. Here is a brief excerpt from the book looking at the first dinosaur halls and their impact on a more diverse audience.

On February 16, 1905, some five hundred New York notables gathered beneath the towering skeleton of Brontosaurus in the American Museum of Natural History. As the headline of one newspaper described it, this “mammoth” creature measured some sixty-seven feet in length, and it had a “stomach cavity as big as the kitchen of a Harlem flat” Everyone who was anyone seems to have attended the specimen’s unveiling, including George B. McClellan, the city’s mayor, and Morris K. Jesup, the museum’s president. The financier J. P. Morgan was in attendance as well, joined by representatives of the city’s chamber of commerce. New York’s wealthy and powerful mingled with the museum’s scientific and curatorial staff, feting the opening of its new dinosaur hall while the mayor’s wife and Corinne Roosevelt Robinson (President Theodore Roosevelt’s sister) served them all tea.

We are used to seeing the rich and powerful attend an exclusive soirée to commemorate a new wing of an art museum or the premiere of a symphony. But a similar gathering held under a dinosaur in a natural history museum? Far from being an incongruous one-off event, this party represents a triumphal moment of metropolitan self-fashioning several decades in the making. Its exclusive guest list also reveals the culmination of a strategic alliance between a new generation of wealthy capitalists and America’s learned naturalists, especially those who specialized in the excavation, study, and exhibition of vertebrate fossils. The story of exactly how and why that alliance was forged speaks to the precise ways in which the culture of capitalism and the history of paleontology continued to inform one another during the decades that followed Reed’s 1877 discovery, and it forms the topic of this chapter, bringing us from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century.

But it was not only wealthy elites who came into contact with Brontosaurus. Throngs of visitors numbering in the hundreds of thousands streamed through the museum’s newly opened dinosaur hall each year after it opened in 1905. While America’s largest and most spectacular dinosaurs hailed from remote parts of the country, it was in densely populated urban centers that vertebrate fossils were introduced to a more popular audience. For that reason, whereas the previous chapter examined the way that vertebrate paleontologists first learned about dinosaurs from the American West, this chapter asks how a much larger and less circumscribed group of people came into contact with these creatures. This too required putting American dinosaurs into circulation, albeit in a different way. Rather than moving specimens through physical space, it involved making them travel across social space. This boundary-crossing primarily took place at the museum, where dinosaur fossils were mounted into spectacular exhibitions capable of attracting a large and socially diverse group of visitors.

More so than anywhere else, it was at the museum that dinosaurs from the Rocky Mountain West were brought to the attention of a popular audience. But not all museums engaged in this process equally. In the nineteenth-century United States, a complex array of institutions exhibited natural history specimens. By far the most numerous were commercial “dime museums,” which ranged from small storefront operations to ambitious and well-publicized entertainment venues like the one run by P. T. Barnum in New York City. On the other end of the spectrum were research museums catering to the community of learned naturalists, which were often associated with universities or scientific societies. But as a rule, neither was in a position to mount a spectacular, free-standing dinosaur fossil. Whereas dime museums lacked access to specimens, most research museums were loath to pander to popular tastes by assembling the bones of creatures whose anatomy remained insufficiently well understood to mount a credible and authoritative exhibit. It was not until a new kind of museum emerged during the last third of the nineteenth century — one that combined a willingness to engage in popular spectacle with a large staff of trained scientists and an extensive collection of specimens — that exhibits such as the Brontosaurus display in New York began to proliferate.

Dinosaurs from the American West primarily entered more widespread circulation in the context of a new institutional framework: the philanthropically funded museum of natural history. One of the first and arguably the most influential of these was the American Museum of Natural History in New York. But there were others as well, most notably the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and the Field Museum in Chicago. Initially conceived as elaborate municipal gifts, they were much larger and more lavishly funded than research museums. They also differed from older institutions in that they were managed and run by a group of wealthy trustees instead of the curators themselves. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, because philanthropically funded museums were created to show of the civic liberality of their benefactors, it was crucial for them to attract a large audience. This led them to embrace a new conception of the museum’s institutional mission with particular gusto. Initially articulated in nineteenth-century England and often described as the New Museum Idea, it held that public museums ought to combine original scientific research with popular spectacle and education. The New Museum Idea therefore resembled dinosaurs themselves, in that it originated in England but took of in the United States, where it offered a model for how naturalists and philanthropists could forge a mutually beneficial relationship.

Going back to the Renaissance Cabinet of Curiosities, collections of the rare and the wonderful have long served as a means to demonstrate one’s elite social status, functioning as material evidence of wealth, power, and mastery. However, the long nineteenth century saw museums became increasingly open, accessible, and responsible to an emerging conception of the democratic citizen. This gave rise to a conflict between two very different conceptions of what museums ought to accomplish. Should they serve a forum in which a culture’s core values are debated, contested, and at times even overturned, or a temple for the veneration of sacrosanct objects, ideas, and persons? Because it articulated a hybrid mission that mediated between these competing visions, the New Museum Idea helped to quell this debate. It also refigured the museum into educational institution whose goal was to edify and uplift the public. This was especially so in the United States, where philanthropic museums proliferated during the Long Gilded Age. Perhaps even more so than in Europe, philanthropic museums in the United States sought to ex- pose working people to the awesome achievements of industrial capitalism, placing extraordinary faith in the power of material objects to turn unruly audiences into responsible citizens.

During the last third of the nineteenth century, American capitalists began to show of their civic munificence and republican virtues by making large collections of spectacular objects available for public consumption. To borrow vocabulary from the contemporary social critic Thorstein Veblen, such highly visible displays of lavish magnanimity can be described as acts of conspicuous generosity, for they were clearly designed to reflect the high-minded liberality of the urban elite. And what could possibly be more conspicuous than a massive new Brontosaurus display? But wealthy capitalists were interested in more than just mass public appeal. To impart these exhibits with an air of legitimacy, they enlisted the participation of respected naturalists. The trustees who ran philanthropic museums began hiring curators of vertebrate paleontology who could fill their public galleries with authoritative renderings of these towering creatures.8 As this happened, dinosaurs came to be valued for new reasons by a new group of people. During the 1870s and 1880s, fossil hunters like William Harlow Reed treated specimens as objects of economic exchange, whereas paleontologists such as Marsh saw them as material traces of the history of life on Earth. Now, at the turn of a new century, dinosaurs acquired a third meaning, becoming a preferred means for wealthy philanthropists to display their elite social standing while simultaneously demonstrating their civic liberality.