A cynical observer might have spotted in all this a certain
appropriateness to the latest round of Hamilton veneration,
rooted in some unacknowledged parallels between the 1790s
and 1990s - with recent tax cuts for the wealthy standing
in for Hamilton's handout to the rich, and his stock-propping
rescue of 1792 finding echo in latter-day bailouts, at great
public expense, of the savings & loan industry and giant
hedge funds like Long Term Capital Management. Indeed, Kevin
Phillips has argued that we live in an era of "financial
mercantilism," presided over by an interlocking directorate
of Treasury bureaucrats, central bankers, securities firms
and hedge fund operators, which the exhibit might have claimed
to be a Hamiltonian legacy, if doing so would not have raised
embarrassing questions about "free market" commitments
on either end of the time continuum.13
Instead the promoters seem to have settled for burnishing
Hamilton's image, the better to shine by reflected glory.
They've even (whimsically?) inserted themselves into the historical
narrative, rather as patrons once had themselves depicted
in devout attendance at the Crucifixion, as if to underscore
a spiritual kinship with (and descent from) their favorite
founder. Over at the FREE PRESS video screen, you can spot
one exception to the all-Murdoch-all-the-time promotional
imagery - a lengthy close-up of a man in a yellow t-shirt
blazoned with the "Illuminating Your World" logo
of the New York Sun, hawking copies of that conservative paper,
among whose principal founding financial fathers can be found
one Richard Gilder.
-8-
Well, so what? Why should anyone care if these guys raised
and spent a small fortune on this? The N-YHS is a private
institution; its board can do as it likes with it; as Reagan
said, it's their microphone, they're paying for it. On the
other hand, the Society has a public dimension, being something
of an ancient institution in this town, dating to the administration
of (N-YHS member) Thomas Jefferson. The citizenry, I would
argue, has the right to remind current board members that
they are stewards of a collective cultural heritage. More
to the point, when the Society had a near death experience
a few years back it wasn't the trustees who rescued it, but
the wider public, which intervened precisely because the mission
of the N-YHS was to tell our collective history.
The Society was wobbling badly by the 1980s - many things
had brought it to this financial pass - and the '87 crash
set it on the road to extinction.14
At the end of 1992 the Museum shut down. In February 1993
the Library followed suit, all public programs were cancelled,
and 41 staff members were fired, leaving only a skeleton crew
behind to handle disposition of the collections.
At this point a mass protest by New Yorkers who loved the
city's history was launched to get the great bronze doors
reopened, and to save the library and collections from being
scattered. Historians, archivists, librarians, and teachers
teamed up with publishers, advertisers, architects, and financiers
to circulate a petition and picket the building. CNN covered
the story. So did the major papers, the Times calling editorially
for "Saving the City's Memory". Governor Cuomo called
it a "vital part of the cultural heritage of New York
State" and in April 1993 the State appropriated $6.3
million in emergency funding. The City matched this. With
the State Attorney General's office observing developments
closely - its Charities Bureau has oversight over museums
- the trustees formally rewrote the Society's mission statement,
and pledged to dedicate their efforts to telling the history
of city and state.
In doing so, they were merely ratifying a transformation that
had long since taken hold. Back in 1804, when John Pintard
- Duer's partner having returned to town once the coast was
clear - established the N-YHS, they set out "to discover,
procure, and preserve whatever may relate to the natural,
civil, literary, and ecclesiastical history of the United
States in general, and of this State in particular."
This capacious purview was understandable as they were virtually
the only such collecting institution in town - no Metropolitan
Museum, no Museum of Natural History, no New York Public Library
- and they joyfully accepted anything and everything given
them: books, manuscripts, artworks, artifacts, and natural
history specimens. The country, indeed the world, became their
oyster. They piled up European oils and Egyptian mummies,
records of the California gold rush and the settlement of
early Florida, American Indian captivity narratives and accounts
of the Spanish American War, until they were drowning in their
largely uncatalogued accumulation.
When professionally organized museums and libraries arrived
later in the 19th century, the N-YHS remained an amateur operation.
Linking its fortunes to patriotic and genealogical societies
(early Founding Fatherologists), it maintained a wide-angled
focus. By the First World War many considered it moribund.
In 1917 the feisty Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer - blasting
it as an "old man's club" ("dead" "uninteresting"
and "dull") - led a breakaway movement. In 1923,
another rival group formed the competing Museum of the City
of New York. The N-YHS limped along as a private club, refusing
to ask for municipal assistance, but was rescued during the
depression by a massive infusion of cash - over $4.5 million
(more than 62 million in current dollars, setting a standard
against which we can measure the relative beneficence of contemporary
donors) - from the children of David Thompson, former president
of New York Life. It also began to whittle back its holdings
(the Egyptian collection went to the Brooklyn Museum in 1937)
and to circumscribe its catchment (in the '40s it began rethinking
its European holdings), concentrating more and more on metropolitan
area materials as the century wore on. Although in moments
of prosperity, it rebroadened its ambitions, increasing long-term
strain.
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