O Say Can You See?

Donor Spotlight: Doug Morton and Marilyn Brown

I decided to intern at the National Museum of American History because I love history and sharing that interest with others. I always get excited when I meet individuals who are passionate about our nation’s past. So it was a real treat to speak with Doug Morton and Marilyn Brown, the fiftieth members to join the newly established Smithsonian Council for American History.

Doug and Marilyn’s personal historic interests lie in the infancy of our nation and the founding fathers. Doug graduated from The College of William and Mary with a degree in History, and his love of history has only grown from there. The College of William and Mary is at the end of the Duke of Gloucester Street in Colonial Williamsburg, where visitors are transported back to the 18th century. “That area of the country is such an important part of early America,” Doug explained. “Being so connected to those places led to our interest in the colonial period.”

In addition to supporting these organizations and other historical societies, Doug and Marilyn are new members of the Smithsonian Council for American History. Established in 2010, the Council is a membership group for dedicated supporters who contribute annual gifts of $1,000 or more to the National Museum of American History. Support from the Council allows the museum to continue telling the stories of all Americans, both those of our national heroes and those to which we all can relate.

The Morton and Brown family histories include both types of stories. Doug’s father Dudley “Mush” Morton was one of the most successful submarine commanders during WWII. So successful, in fact, that Cary Grant’s character in the 1943 film Destination Tokyo is most likely loosely based on his exploits in the Pacific. As commander of the USS Wahoo, Mush was responsible for sinking nineteen enemy submarines, which helped turn the course of the war in the Pacific. Mush’s daring nature and willingness to take risks allowed him to lead his men and the Wahoo into incredibly dangerous waters. During 1943, Mush led five patrols in the Sea of Japan. Sadly, during his last patrol in October 1943, the Wahoo was lost with all hands while coming through La Perouse Strait.

After the loss of her husband, Doug’s mother moved to Eastchester, New York, and married Robert Bradford, a descendant of Governor Bradford who was on the Mayflower. The family then moved to Pelham, New York, where Doug spent his formative years.

Like so many of us, Marilyn’s family were immigrants—shipbuilders who immigrated to Quebec from La Rochelle, France, and later moved to Massachusetts where they worked the land. Her maternal grandfather was a talented violinist who performed at Carnegie Hall before moving west to Colorado. Her paternal family came through the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression and also settled in Colorado, opening the first flower shop and taxi company in Englewood, Colorado.

My talk with Doug and Marilyn reminded me that American history celebrates both the big and the small moments in our shared past. Their gift to the Council helps ensure that both types of stories will continue to be told here at the museum. You too can support the museum by joining the Council or making a special one-time gift at any level.

Jennifer Marquess is an intern in the Office of External Affairs at the National Museum of American History.

Seeing history through Battlestar Galactica glasses

Editor’s Note: Don’t miss this video of museum technician Drew Robarge examining a mysterious pair of eyeglasses for clues about their origins. This history mystery is presented in American Sign Language (ASL).

When an inventory specialist working in the museum’s medicine collection announced that she had discovered a pair of Battlestar Galactica glasses, I—a huge science fiction fan who often likes to imagine that he defends the human race against the Cylons—quickly commandeered the glasses for a closer look.

The museum’s Medicine and Science collections hold approximately 1,000 historical eyeglasses that range widely in shape, size, color, and style, representing the vast diversity of methods of vision correction developed over the centuries. These objects allow historians to study not only the development of vision correction and its many forms, but also the cultural significance of the eyewear used. We’ve got everything from your standard nose-propped eyeglasses and lorgnettes(that is, spectacles with handles), to artificial eyes and modern-day contact lenses. But never did I think that we had Battlestar Galactica glasses.

At first glance, the brown glasses appeared rather uninteresting, but its intriguing elements began to shine in the little details. On the outside of each of the temples near the hinges, there lies a small rectangular, metal Battlestar Galactica logo plate. The words “Battlestar Galactica Universal Studios” are printed in white on the inside of the left temple. The lenses are non-prescription, and the glasses come with a red plastic case with a cloth-lined interior.

My encounter with the object brought to mind the peculiarity of owning a pair of glasses inscribed with something so specific. The glasses people wear are typically not accessories customized to show support for, say, a sports team, an organization, or a favorite television series. Glasses vary enough that they can reflect the wearer’s identity, but rarely do we view glasses as arenas for declaring one’s specific interests.

After closely examining the glasses, I hoped to gain more insight from the pair’s provenance (essentially the life history of an object, including its historical, social, and economic contexts). Using the catalog number marked on top of the bridge, I located the file that was created when the object was donated to the museum. According to the documents in the file, the object came to the museum as part of a 1982 donation from Dr. J. William Rosenthal that included 36 eyeglasses and 26 lenses considered modern at the time. The files had no details regarding the object’s original owner, or how Rosenthal—who had donated about 20 times to the museum’s medicine collection—had obtained the glasses in the first place.

I know for certain that the glasses have been in existence since 1982, but what is the earliest possible date at which the glasses could have been made? The world of Battlestar Galactica first premiered on television in 1978, and the American science fiction show documented the travails of an extraterrestrial human civilization warring with a cybernetic race. After one season, Battlestar Galactica was cancelled, a move loudly protested by loyal viewers. The show remained popular, and that same year, the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park in Los Angeles debuted a staged event for its studio tour entitled “Battle of Galactica,” which took visitors on a tram ride through a Cylon base as the crew of the Galactica fought against the evil Cylons. In 1980, Battlestar Galactica returned with six new episodes, and the show was reimagined with a different storyline from 2003 to 2009, attracting a new cadre of fans (including me). Given the year of the donation, the owner’s interest in Battlestar Galactica most likely concentrated on the earlier series.

A search for the glasses on eBay and other merchandise websites revealed no similar objects, which could mean that the glasses are rare. I thought that perhaps the glasses were a limited edition promotional item or merchandise purchased from the Universal Studios gift shop, but the latter hypothesis became harder to verify when Universal Studios Hollywood informed me that it does not have a comprehensive list of merchandise on sale during the time “Battle for Galactica” was in operation.

There are more questions than answers about this object, and I hope that with further research, I’ll be able to piece together its unique story. Do you own an unusual pair of glasses? Tell us your story below!

Drew P. Robarge is Museum Technician in the Division of Medicine and Science at the National Museum of American History.

September 11: Photographers and their stories

On September 10, 2001, I flew non-stop from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, to attend a photography seminar at the Getty Museum. It never happened. I woke early on September 11 to prepare for a full day’s schedule. With the three hour time difference, it was just after 9:00AM on the East Coast. I turned on the television to see the news of the burning towers of the World Trade Center. Photography—still and video, film and digital—allowed us all to be witness to the tragic events of September 11.

Photography by Christophe Agou of dust covered lobby of Merrill Lynch office located a 2 World Financial Center, New York, September 2001

Both professional and amateur photographers documented September 11 and its aftermath in the three sites—New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania—and the response to the terrorist attacks in communities around the nation and throughout the world. I worked for the next year and a half to collect examples of these professional and amateur photographs, cameras, and equipment, for the Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History. More than 2000 images and several cameras were collected for the Smithsonian from 25 photographers. Each of the photographers had a unique story to convey with their donation to the collection.

Professional photographer Christophe Agou worked daily documenting life in New York City. An art photographer, Agou took the subway to downtown Manhattan as soon as he saw the news of the planes hitting the Twin Towers. He later admitted “seeing is not believing” when it came to his processing the chaos and destruction of the day. But he kept clicking his camera shutter capturing the paper and debris, the firefighters, and the loss. Agou donated ten of his September 11 photographs to the museum, and his own story.

Photography by Doug Potoksky, September 11 memorial at Union Square, New York City, September 2001

Amateur photographer Doug Potoksky traveled to New York City ten days after September 11, to volunteer his services as a professional cook. He never found that volunteer position, but connected with the firefighters on 8th Avenue, Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9 documenting their makeshift memorials to fallen comrades. Potoksky then continued to photograph the memorials in New York, especially at Union Square. He donated more than twenty of his photographs to the Smithsonian, and now works to make photography his full-time career.

Panoramic view, overnight clearing of the site at Ground Zero, September 22, 2001, by Stephen Delroy

I was also contacted by Smithsonian staff who took photographs on September 11 in Washington, D.C., and New York, offering donations for the collection. Stephen Delroy, was the building manager at the Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian, housed in the U.S. Customs House in Lower Manhattan. He assisted the National Guard in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks with access to the building as needed. Delroy’s request to photograph the rescue and recovery efforts at Ground Zero was granted on the evening of September 22, 2001. With his Hasselblad X-Pan panoramic camera Delroy made 60 images documenting the diligent efforts of crews to work through the night, excavating the site.

Collecting for September 11 was a most challenging and emotional professional experience, but an effort I consider among the most important of my career. I am still in contact with many of the professional and amateur photographers who freely shared their stories and images for the national collection.

Michelle Delaney is the Director of the Smithsonian’s Consortium for Understanding the American Experience, and former curator of photography at the National Museum of American History. 

Martin Luther King, Jr., through the Scurlock lens

The Scurlock Studio was a photographic business operated by an African American family in Washington, D.C., from 1911 to 1994. Founded by Addison N. Scurlock, the small company also employed his wife Mamie, and later their sons, Robert and George. Addison died in 1964, and George retired from the business by about 1980, leaving Robert to maintain the studio until his death in 1994. Although the primary activity was portraiture, the Scurlocks also did photojournalism and founded one of Washington’s first professional color processing facilities. Among the Scurlocks’ portrait subjects were many African American notables, including entertainers such as Duke Ellington, Marian Anderson, and Lena Horne; intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois; and civil rights leaders, including Mary Church Terrell and—certainly the most famous of all—the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., at Howard University in 1956

The Scurlocks maintained a long business relationship with Howard University as its official photographers. They photographed commencements and sports, made graduates’ individual portraits, documented student life, and photographed noteworthy visitors to the campus. Thanks to its relationship with the federal government, Howard University could count on visits from U.S. presidents and their families, so the Scurlock Studio photographic archive, now in the museum’s Archives Center, contains photographs of Presidents Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and on through Bill Clinton. Frequently presidents were shown giving commencement speeches, and Eleanor Roosevelt was captured in repartee with Howard’s longtime president Mordecai Johnson during her visit to the art gallery.

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking in the 1960s.

For all these reasons, it is not surprising to find photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Scurlock photographic archive. Although there does not seem to be a formal studio portrait of this great civil rights leader in the collection, his visits to the Howard University campus were preserved on film. Of particular note is a photograph showing the baseball icon Jackie Robinson, standing shoulder to shoulder with Dr. King in their academic gowns, taken on June 7, 1957, when they each received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the university. Robinson, who had just retired from professional baseball earlier that year, was beginning to show his age in this image, while the youthful King—less than thirty years old—looks self-confident and serene.

Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King at Howard University in 1957

Other photographs of Dr. King on the Howard campus capture visits in November of the same year, as well as others in 1956, 1960, and so on. We do not yet know the stories behind these other visits, but hope that research at Howard University, which naturally owns prints from Scurlock photographs, will provide documentation and additional description for the Archives Center’s holdings. We cannot even be certain, based on the negatives and prints in the Archives Center, who made the photographs of King, especially the image of the young clergyman with the legendary baseball player. It seems likely, however, that George Scurlock was the photographer. Addison was the primary Howard photographer up through the 1930s, but we know that during the years of World War II, while Robert was in Italy with the Tuskegee Airmen, George was kept extremely busy photographing on the Howard campus, because he complained in a letter about the workload.

I interviewed George Scurlock several times before his death a few years ago, and while I managed to collect a number of stories about his experiences, I know that there had to have been countless remarkable recollections and reminiscences about the subjects of Scurlock photographs. I certainly wish I had asked about the Robinson-King photograph in particular: did he take the picture, and what did he remember about those historic moments?

David Haberstich is Curator of Photography, Archives Center at the National Museum of American History.

 

A closer look at a Civil War watch

My colleague Diane Wendt’s excellent work on a Civil War nurse reminded me that the museum has a closely related object—a Civil War surgeon’s pocket watch. More than two decades ago, I had collected the watch to document a critical technical episode in the early history of the American watch industry. Recently I pulled the watch out of storage for a closer look. It was as though I was seeing the watch for the first time, with a heightened appreciation for its Civil War roots.

The inscription tells the story of the watch

The watch’s most distinguishing feature is an interior inscription. On the dust cap that covers the movement, the engraving reads: “White Hall USA Gen’l Hospital, Feb. 15, 1865 Presented to Dr. G. D. O’Farrell, USA, by the patients of Ward C as a token of regard & respect for his ability as a surgeon and unswerving integrity as a man.”

A little digging over the past few days (ok, a little web surfing) allowed me to sketch an outline of the life of the surgeon who received this gift. Gerald Dunne O’Farrell was born in Ireland in 1836 and had medical training at the University of Pennsylvania, class of ’62. From March of 1863 through the end of July 1865, he served as assistant surgeon with the 63rd and 215th Pennsylvania Regiments. He settled after the war in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, married Eliza M. Broffy—also from Ireland—in 1866, and together they had a son G. D. O’Farrell Jr., another Penn graduate, class of ’94. A physician to the end, the senior O’Farrell died on a house call on March 27, 1902.

The interior mechanics of the watch on display

The hospital named in the inscription—White Hall U.S. Army General Hospital—is a little harder to pin down. There were, it seems, two civil war hospitals in Pennsylvania called White Hall or Whitehall, one near Bristol and the other near Williamsport. Bristol’s White Hall, a grand Greek Revival building on the National Register of Historic Places, was once the home of Bristol College and served after the war as a school for the orphans of African American soldiers.

But none of these spare facts tells us what it was like to be a young surgeon, straight from school, thrust into the horrific fray of the American Civil War. Other wartime physicians have left their reminiscences, published or otherwise, but not O’Farrell. I can’t tell you what demonstrations of surgical skill his patients observed or what acts of “unswerving integrity” prompted their gift. I wonder what kind of man O’Farrell was. Who were his Ward C patients? What were their injuries? Their fates?

The watch offers no clues about any of these, but it does tell us other things. The silver watch case shows signs of wear, an indicator that Dr. O’Farrell wore it and consulted it, perhaps to measure a patient's pulse or catch a train on time. The watch movement—the part of the watch that ticks—is well cared for, a sign of a valued possession. The movement, marked “Wm. Ellery/Boston, Mass.” tells us that the watch is a product of the American Watch Company of Waltham, Massachusetts. And this relationship with Waltham is why I collected the watch in the first place.

The watch shows signs of wear

In the 1850s, watchmakers at what would become the American Watch Co.developed the world’s first machine-made watches. The firm’s early years were financially unsteady and success finally came from an unexpected quarter. During the Civil War, the Waltham factory designed and produced the low-cost William Ellery model, like the one Dr. O’Farrell got. Selling for an unbelievable $13, these watches became a fad with Union soldiers. Roving merchants sold thousands of cheap watches to eager customers in wartime encampments. By 1865, the year the war ended, William Ellery movements represented about 45% of Waltham’s unit sales.

To make something as tiny and complicated as a watch by machine had seemed impossible in 1850, but a decade later American watchmakers had an industry that produced quality watches in quantity, an industry that would come to symbolize the best of American know-how and organization on the world stage.

The Civil War placed the United States on the world stage in the 19th century. And these days, the international context of that war that has attracted a lot of fresh historical scholarship. Timed with this anniversary year of the war’s beginnings, new research is offering a closer look at a bigger picture than our watch affords. A great place to start my summer reading!

Carlene Stephens is a curator of the Division of Work and Industry at the National Museum of American History.