The Smithsonian Institution: The Strange Origin of America’s Greatest Museum

Podcast Transcript

In 1829, a British scientist who had never visited the United States left his fortune to a foreign country across the ocean.

His instructions were simple, vague, and enormously ambitious: create an institution for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.

From that bequest grew the Smithsonian, a collection of museums, research centers, priceless artifacts, scientific discoveries, and national memories unlike anything else in the world.

Learn more about the Smithsonian and its remarkable history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The Smithsonian Institution, not the Smithsonian Institute, can be traced back to Paris in 1765 and the scandalous birth of James Smithson.

His mother, Elizabeth Hungerford, a wealthy widow, had an affair with Hugh Smithson. Hugh Smithson had married the wealthy noblewoman, and his cousin, Elizabeth Seymour, in 1740. Seymour’s marriage granted Hugh Smithson the title of the 2nd Earl of Northumberland.

Elizabeth Hungerford snuck away to France to bear James Smithson in secret away from the prying eyes of the British nobility.

Despite growing up in wealth, James Smithson remained invisible in British society. As an illegitimate child, he was considered “the son of nobody.” In fact, James Smithson could not take his father’s name until after his father died in 1786.

Due to his illegitimate status and his invisible social standing, Smithson chose a path in which his birth would not hinder his advancement: the world of science.

Smithson dedicated himself to chemistry while at Oxford, and his hard work paid off as he became a member of the Royal Society at the age of 22. By comparison, Isaac Newton didn’t secure membership until he was 29.

His social status deeply motivated him, especially as his father’s legitimate children climbed the ranks of British high society.

The chip on the shoulder of Smithson was expressed in one of the key passages written into his will, where he noted: The best blood of England flows in my veins; on my father’s side I am a Percy, on my mother’s I am related to kings, but this avails me not. My name shall live in the memory of man when the titles of the Northumberlands and the Percys are extinct and forgotten.

Smithson actually intended to donate his sizeable estate, valued at more than £100,000, or over $11 million today, to his nephew, Henry Hungerford.

The money would go to his nephew, but only for the duration of his lifetime. When Henry died in 1839 without any children, the secondary clause of the will kicked in: In the case of the death of my said Nephew without leaving a child or children, or of the death of the child or children he may have had under the age of twenty-one years or intestate, I then bequeath the whole of my property… to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.

With that, a illegitimate British chemist had just donated a sum of money equal to nearly two percent of the entire United States federal budget at that time, giving a massive fortune to a government he had never once worked with, in a country he had never even seen.

Historians have debated what prompted Smithson to make such a donation ever since the gift was gratned in 1835.

There is, of course, the obvious interpretation: he simply wanted to increase humanity’s knowledge, a noble, high-minded Enlightenment gesture. As a scientist in Post-Newtonian England, Smithson was undoubtedly motivated by the high ideals of the Enlightenment.

But why in the United States? He had never been there. From all accounts, he didn’t personally know any Americans.

Our best guess takes us back to Smithson’s upbringing as James Hungerford, the illegitimate son of an uninterested father, growing up in a rigid social system that gave him no legitimate place. The very fact that the United States didn’t have an aristocracy and archaic social traditions likely inspired him.

The social universe of the United States was far closer to the ideal he had lived by. A world where he had fought his way to the top of his field and earned a seat in the Royal Society purely based on his brain and his merit, rather than his bloodline. In the United States, people like Benjamin Franklin had risen to the top of the social hierarchy as true self-made men.

In July 1835, the news of the endowment reached the United States Government. America’s top diplomat in London received a surprise letter from a British law firm informing him of the bequeathment.

The letter basically said, ‘A wealthy man you’ve never heard of just died, his chosen heir has died, and as a last resort, he has left your entire country a vast fortune.

When President Andrew Jackson found out, he was surprised as well. At the most basic level, there was confusion as to how the government would accept such an endowment.

Surprisingly, Jackson, often criticized by his political enemies for behaving more like a king than a president, readily acknowledged that he simply lacked the constitutional authority to accept the funds.

Ever distrustful of banks and wary of federal overreach, Jackson wanted nothing to do with handling the money. He quickly dumped the entire affair into the lap of Congress in December of 1835.

The moment it arrived in Congress, it immediately caused political divisions. Former president and now representative, John Quincy Adams thought it was great, applauding the gift as being consistent with “The spirit of the age.”

Ever the curmudgeon, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina vigorously disagreed, proclaiming it, Beneath the dignity of the United States to receive gifts of this kind from anyone.

The battle lines were drawn, but before Congress could do anything, the nation had to get the money. By all accounts, this was going to be a great challenge, as the notorious British Court of Chancery now held the fortune captive.

To secure the funds, Jackson sent Pennsylvania lawyer Richard Rush, the son of the American founding father Benjamin Rush. Rush had been an ambassador to Britain and understood their court system as well as any American.

Rush used his connections in the British government to resolve the case in favor of the United States, and, surprisingly, it took only two years. According to Smithsonian Magazine, Rush conquered the next challenge: how to physically get that much money across the Atlantic.

Rush promptly converted the proceeds of the estate into 104,960 new British gold sovereigns on behalf of the U.S. Government. That July, Rush set out for New York City with 11 boxes of gold sovereigns aboard the USS Mediator. Because British currency was not legal tender in the United States, the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia was ordered to melt down the sovereigns and remint them as Goddess of Liberty ten-dollar gold coins. The recoining of the bequest was worth precisely $508,318.46 at that time.

Now that Rush had secured the funds, Congress could resume their debate on how to spend them in a way that reflected Smithson’s mission of increasing and diffusing knowledge.

The two-party system at the time consisted of the Whigs and the Democrats. The Whigs believed in the power of a strong central government, and their vision called for funding institutions to support the national government.

The Democratic Party was divided. On one hand, you had the Jacksonian faction, which feared a strong central government. The Southern faction held that if Congress was allowed to suddenly take foreign money and to build a museum, they would have the power to abolish slavery.

The debate lasted an astonishing 8 years after Rush landed with the money. When they weren’t debating about the legitimacy of the funds and constitutional authority, there were deeply held convictions on how to spend the money to fulfill Smithson’s vision.

The first proposal called for establishing a national university that would rival Oxford. While this was a popular idea, it disintegrated into confusion about what type of university it would be. Should it be a scientific institution? A theological? One specializing in law or medicine? Should it be a school to train teachers for higher-level schools across the country?

There were calls to build a massive national library to gather the republic’s history. John Quincy Adams made a compelling case for building a great observatory to study the skies, a technology that America lacked compared to the great nations of Europe.

Building a public museum garnered the most support in Congress. Joseph Henry, one of America’s leading scientists, believed that America needed a research institution.

Henry lobbied Congress on the exact language of the will, emphasizing the need to increase and diffuse knowledge. Henry believed that to increase and spread knowledge, you had to produce it, which only a research institution could do.

Henry also reminded anyone who would listen that simply building a museum in Washington, D.C. did not diffuse knowledge across the country, or the world; only research could do that.

After 8 years of contentious debate, Congress reached a compromise in 1846 under James K. Polk, the third president to deal with fulfilling the terms of Smithson’s will.

Congress finally realized that it didn’t have to choose just one of the options. They chose all of the above. They decided that the Smithsonian Institution needed to be a great library, museum, and research facility. The research facility made John Quincy Adams very happy as it finally contained his observatory.

On August 10, 1846, President James K. Polk signed the Smithsonian Institution Act into law.

The statute signed by Polk captures the complicated structure of trying to do everything that Congress was arguing about, The board of regents… shall cause to be erected a suitable building, of sufficient size, and with suitable rooms or halls, for the reception and arrangement, upon a liberal scale, of objects of natural history, including a geological and mineralogical cabinet; also a chemical laboratory, a library, a gallery of art, and the necessary lecture rooms.

The monumentally difficult task fell to none other than Joseph Henry, whom the Board of Regents appointed as the Smithsonian’s very first Secretary. Henry reluctantly oversaw the completion of the institution’s first building: the medieval red-sandstone Castle on the National Mall, which has since become its global symbol.

Though Henry personally disliked the building as an expensive distraction from pure science, it became the static anchor for an ever-changing campus.

The Smithsonian’s mission evovled shifted away from Henry’s dream of an elite research lab toward the sprawling public museum system we know today.

In the wake of the Civil War and the country’s rapid westward expansion, the Smithsonian acquired an incredible storehouse of new oddities, curiosities, and treasures.

The nation’s rail lines began transporting an array of exhibits back to the Smithsonian, including fossilized dinosaur bones, rare mineral samples, and taxidermied wildlife never seen in the East.

While Henry was interested in cultivating research, his assistant, Spencer Baird, knew that this massive influx of new material was in the public interest and could be used to secure the institution’s future. With that vision in mind, Baird set out to catalog America.

Eventually, there was so much stuff that they had to build another building and another, and they just kept on building. Today, there are 19 museums, 2 in development, and the national zoo, which are all run by the Smithsonian.

Over almost 200 years, the vision of Henry Smithson has became reality. The Smithsonian became one of the world’s foremost institutions for human knowledge.

The Smithsonian includes among its achievements breakthroughs in meteorology, advances in rocketry, pioneering work on black holes, and mapping the ocean floor.

The Smithsonian began with a mystery, a fortune left by a man who never set foot in the United States, and a phrase so broad enough that people have argued about it for generations: the increase and diffusion of knowledge.

From that unusual beginning grew an institution that collects fossils, spacecraft, portraits, postage stamps, and even Fonzie’s leather Jacket.

That is why it has earned its nickname, America’s attic.