Editors’ Note: Ian McShane introduces his new book, The Museum Movement: Carnegie Cultural Philanthropy and Museum Development in the Anglosphere, 1920-1940 (Routledge, 2024).

The focus of Andrew Carnegie, and the foundation he established, on public libraries as agencies of personal development and civic uplift is well known. The Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY), though, also provided significant support for museum reform and development in the inter-war years of the twentieth century. In The Museum Movement: Carnegie Cultural Philanthropy and Museum Development in the Anglosphere, 1920-1940 (Routledge, 2024), I shine a critical light on the neglected history of Carnegie support for museums, galleries and historic sites, tracing the breadth of that support, its ideological and pedagogical underpinnings, and its achievements.

As the book argues, the museum movement, encouraged by CCNY funding, was particularly active in the Anglosphere: the United States, the United Kingdom, and the dominions and colonies of the British Empire.

However, contrasting with a late-nineteenth century phase of major metropolitan museum and gallery development, the museum movement was more concerned with local museums, especially those in small communities or rural areas, as the sector most in need of professionalisation and modernisation, but also central to consolidating white settlement in a period when established racial hierarchies were under challenge. Thus, Carnegie support for museum reform in this period resonated with other CCNY interests in racial and social dynamics in the U.S. and South Africa, notably explored by HistPhil co-editor Maribel Morey, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, and others.

The actors discussed in the book, mostly located in the U.K. and the U.S, frequently used the term movement to signal their collective identity and trans-Atlantic connections, a broadly coherent philosophy, and agreement over the necessity for system-level intervention in the museum field, breaking with an earlier pattern of institution-level funding.

‘Movement’ was also a term much favoured by Frederick P. Keppel, appointed CCNY president in 1923. The term had a wider application in political and social thought that fused museum modernisation and progressivism, applying progressivism’s ethos of social governance through expert-led change and civic participation. However, while the concept recognised the transformative role of expert bodies, professionals, and the new philanthropic agencies such as CCNY that supported them, it connoted deep suspicion of political activism that might interfere with desired forms of social and economic change. I argue that the involvement of CCNY in the museum movement also entailed forms of Americanisation or cultural imperialism, and CCNY was sufficiently alert to the political sensitivity of this issue to engage local advisers in Anglosphere countries and have one of its New York staff monitor anti-American sentiment.

Why were museums seen as centres of informal or social learning, and how was CCNY support for development of the sector organised? U.S. philosopher John Dewey’s constructivist theory – which grounded learning in experience – was influential. It surfaced questions like: Was learning optimised through instructional or contextual approaches? Was visual and hands-on learning more beneficial than book learning for some? At the same time, the development of psychology as a new field of knowledge, and anxieties over social efficiency and national competitiveness brought into view new demographics of adolescents and adult learners requiring guidance in post-school or non-formal education settings. Museums, their boosters asserted, were ideal locations for such endeavours.

When Frederick Keppel joined CCNY he set about reorganising its governance and finances. By the late 1920’s this endeavour had released sufficient funding to extend the foundation’s activities in cultural and educational fields to encompass museums, libraries, music, arts and adult education. Pursuing a strategy that Keppel and others referred to as scientific philanthropy, CCNY’s methodology was to commission field surveys to guide grant-making. Investigations of the museum sector in the U.S., the U.K, and the dominions and colonies of the British Empire painted a depressing picture. A quote from the 1933 survey of museums and galleries in Australia summarises wider findings. Smaller towns, and even some major cities, the report argued, “have over-crowded, badly selected and uncurated collections that fortunately do not attract the public…[t]he lack of competent and frequent curatorial work in many of these museums is a severe handicap to the progress of the museum movement in the country districts.”

As the survey work extended across the British Empire, it became clear that this was not simply an audit or review, but an opportunity to clarify the role of museums in settler countries. Questions of race underpinned discussion of collections and exhibits, museum management, and museum visitors. Local museums feature in the British Empire survey reports not only as focal points of non-formal education, recreation, and civic life, but also indicators of cultural uplift and civilisation, the latter term frequently standing in for whiteness.

These ideas are crystallised in a sample exhibition template for small museums included in the 1932 report on museums in Canada. The authors, two U.K. Museum Association officials, set out “an ideal sequence” of displays for a local museum:

The land, the vegetable products, the fauna, the effect of these three factors on the history of the area (e.g., Indian or Esquimaux civilization, early pioneer developments and more recent economic features); the cultural characteristics of the area (art, education, government).

Indigenous people, then, are identified and located as historical subjects; pioneering is foundational to economic and cultural development. In addition, the report’s criticism of a lack of agricultural, folk and open-air museums in Canada reinforced a normative vision of an agrarian nation of small towns and yeoman farmers, an idealisation that Nicole Hahn Rafter sees as a basis of socio-biological thought in North America in the early twentieth century.

The CCNY surveys of museums in the U.S., undertaken by officials of the (CCNY-funded) American Association of Museums (AAM), had a wider focus, addressing corporate management and new, emblematically progressive concerns with efficiency and value. In 1932, Paul Marshall Rea, former director of the Charleston (SC) Museum and AAM president, produced an elaborate analysis of U.S art, science and history museums, supported by a series of regression tables that, he argued, indicated that small and medium sized museums and galleries provided better “public service value” to their communities than large ones.

Along with supporting this new science of museum management, as Rea termed it, CCNY funded the professional development of museum staff, through new, university-level curatorial training courses. Indeed, Keppel considered the need for museum training so urgent that in 1924, prior to a study of the general field, he gave $1.8 million (in present day value) to Paul J. Sachs, director of Harvard University’s Fogg Museum of Art, for this purpose.

Keppel and Sachs were well acquainted. Both served with the American Red Cross in Paris during World War I, and Sachs, a Harvard graduate and partner in the Goldman Sachs investment firm prior to his appointment at Fogg, had acquired works from the art dealership of Frederick Keppel’s father. This is not to suggest anything more than Keppel’s prioritisation of art museums as a field of support, bolstered by his own familiarity with that field, but it also indicates the prevalence of male, WASP elite networks in U.S. philanthropic circles, a theme explored by many commentators.

The prospect of widespread participation in university-level training by museum staff, particularly those in small, mainly volunteer-run museums, though, was remote. In the period covered by the book, only 13% of the U.S. population had undertaken post-school studies, with the U.K. figure considerably lower. In addition, early university-level museum training in both the U.S. and the U.K., like the Harvard course, centred on art curatorship. Alternative strategies were required if the entire sector was to professionalise, and my book examines a new genre of museum curatorship and administration manuals. CCNY supported such publications and training curricula developed by the professional associations. Characteristically, training for work in museums expanded from a focus on object-centred curatorship to corporate management.

Museum reform, though, was not exclusively focussed on corporate and professional concerns. CCNY enthusiastically supported studies of visitor behaviour. Chiming with the foundation’s interest in adult education, new psychological research challenged an accepted view that learning capacities declined rapidly after adolescence. CCNY-funded research sought to shed new light on the relationship between exhibition design and cognition, endorsing the educational value of casual wandering and self-guiding, contesting the rigid ‘object lessons’ offered by taxonomic displays. “Cluttered cases denote cluttered ideas!”, decried one commentator.

By the 1920s, museums were competing in a cultural economy transformed by increased leisure, new communication technologies and personal mobility. The publicity and promotion of museums through film and radio, and the provision of museum-related content for these new outlets, were important responses, if contested by some museum traditionalists. Central to this interest was a contention that better understanding of the psychology of public opinion and emotion, seen as easily swayed by political and commercial propaganda (the title of an influential book by Edward Bernays), was not only vital to attracting museum visitors, but critical to securing museums as democratic and civic spaces.

Automobility, too, provided new opportunities for museum development and diversification, combining museum-going with other forms of recreation. Keppel enthused about “riding with a purpose”, as he termed it, and funded long-serving AAM secretary Laurence Vail Coleman’s 1933 study of how the “new leisure” connected with rising interest in historic houses and outdoor museums. However, Coleman’s analysis was largely oblivious to the cultural politics that lay behind the quest for authenticity and pioneer experience fuelled by a surge of nativism and patriotism across the Anglosphere. The diversification of museum typologies in this period may have reflected visitor desires for a more authentic and less mediated access to the past, but it also highlighted settler-colonial anxiety about the present.

One critic of the CCNY-funded British Empire museum surveys argued that, despite the scale of the enterprise, they achieved little beyond producing some delicious quotes. Similarly, commentators on my book, possibly guided by the wisdom of autocorrect, occasionally refer to the museum ‘moment.’ Was this indeed a fleeting interest in museum reform, fueled substantially by CCNY funds, or did it have more enduring value?

The museum survey reports (and other analysis, including visits to British dominions by Keppel) encouraged distribution of ‘middlebrow’ U.S. cultural materials (notably art and music sets) through the Anglosphere, and between 1921 and 1934 CCNY outlayed almost US$42 million (present value) for museum staff in the British dominions and colonies to travel for professional development, mostly to the United States. The outcome, wrote Keppel in 1942, was “abetter understanding of the best things in American life and in confidence of the disinterested and intelligent goodwill of the [Carnegie] Corporation in particular.” CCNY’s museum funding program continued until about 1960, although large museums and their staff were overwhelmingly its beneficiaries.

Stepping back from debates about U.S. hegemony, though, the book argues that CCNY’s support of the museum movement encouraged interest in the use of ‘new’ media, the reorientation of museum science to local environments and a break with taxonomic displays in favour of ideas-based ones, the development of visitor studies, active and experiential learning, and concerns with museum value. This suite of reforms has been seen as emblematic of a ‘new’ museology emerging in the 1970s, but I argue for a reconsideration of that view. On the other hand, indigenous self-determination, emerging broadly from mid-twentieth century decolonisation moves and supported by activist scholars and museum staff, is the most evident point of rupture, and invites harsh criticism of the museum movement’s racialised museology.  

The museum movement emerged within, and was shaped by, distinctive political, social and cultural settings. Locating the movement within the wider span of museum history is necessary to identify new thinking that emerged in this period, older ideas that were re-badged in a quest to assert CCNY authority in the museum field, and the movement’s normative, indeed oppressive views on race, class and gender. The span of the museum movement was broader and more diverse than CCNY’s network, although it is difficult to imagine the movement’s activity and reach without the force of CCNY sponsorship. However, the movement’s key participants and affiliates took museums and their collections seriously and attempted to meaningfully connect them with lived experience and the surrounding world and promote their value for informal learning and civic exchange.

-Ian McShane

Ian McShane is an honorary associate professor in the Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. His research interests focus on the informal and formal education sectors, including museums, libraries, and schools, and he has published widely on cultural, educational, and urban policy. Prior to academia, Ian worked as a museum curator, arts administrator, and education consultant.