By Marc Vincent
Last month's paeans to Steve Jobs have reminded us that despite economic downturns, modern America could still foster life-altering innovations and astonishing entrepreneurship.
Claire Perry's hefty, coffee-table-size catalog "The Great American Hall of Wonders" explores 19th-century manifestations of that spirit. It accompanies an exposition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., that runs through Jan. 8.
Curator Perry limits her study to the period of 1826 to 1876, from the death of Thomas Jefferson to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. She focuses on six iconic subjects: three natural resources --the buffalo, giant sequoia and Niagara Falls -- and three technologies -- the clock, gun and railroad. Her goal is to describe "not science, art, or mechanical invention per se, but rather what Americans of the nineteenth century believed about those endeavors and how they deployed them to direct their lives and the nation."
The book is richly illustrated with high-quality images on almost every page, and Perry's essays address the broader issues of a young nation.
The Founders, she writes, imagined the new American Republic as a "Great Experiment" in liberty and democracy, to be nourished and sustained by "the inquiring spirit of each new generation." In the 19th century, many citizens continued to believe that broad knowledge was essential for the well-being of the republic.
Ordinary Americans devoted themselves to the studies of botany, meteorology and statistics, and hundreds of thousands submitted ideas for inventions to the patent office -- products upon which they had tinkered in their spare time. As a result, the United States became a great "hall of wonders," a showcase of both natural abundance and technical ingenuity.
The clock industry was one of the first to implement mass production. Many Americans, especially women, also submitted patents for time-saving devices in the home, such as dough makers or cake stirrers. Clocks could be found in the smallest wooden cabins in the hinterlands.
The same was true of guns. Americans were convinced of their superior marksmanship, and the notion of the resourceful frontiersman came to embody the American character. In both town and country, the Colt six-shooter joined the dog as man's best friend.
Manufactured in Hartford, Conn., in the largest and most advanced armory in the world, the Colt became an icon of American ingenuity. The end of the Civil War made millions of cheap weapons available, and hunting quickly became the national pastime, the hunter a new symbol of American masculinity and bravado. So many backyard animals and big game were slaughtered that a conservation movement arose to prevent their annihilation.
Sensitive to European disparagement, Americans looked for hallmarks of U.S. exceptionalism. Niagara Falls became a symbol of America's incomparable natural beauty, though artists struggled mightily to reproduce its grandeur on canvas. Perry also notes that America's vast network of publicly accessible waterways came to symbolize democracy and egalitarianism. After 1895, the massive turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Co. rivaled the falls themselves as a tourist attraction.
Progress, of course, exacted its prices. American Indians, buffalo and giant sequoia were all displaced by white expansion into the West, an advance facilitated by the railroad. As historian Richard Write documented this year in "Railroaded," corruption, bribery and land grabs ran alongside the tracks. The land itself was stripped for its lumber and eviscerated for its coal.
As Perry's narratives reveal, in our quests for speed, efficiency and resource independence, we Americans have a history of sacrificing ethics and environments. Her work challenges us to reverse this habit with "a great national brainstorm" similar in scope to the one that occurred at the start of the 19th century.Marc Vincent is a professor of art history at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio.