SEASONS OF CHANGE: THE SMITHSONIAN IN 1861 AND 1961

The Smithsonian in 1861

In 1861, some 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln had just been

inaugurated as President of the United States, Hannibal Hamlin was

Vice President, Roger Taney was Chief Justice, and Joseph Henry was

the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

Secretary Joseph Henry had set the Institution on its course—or so he

thought.  In the Institution’s first 15 years, the Smithsonian Castle had

been completed, although Henry despised the building designed by the

Regents and hoped to sell it to the government or perhaps the Catholic

Church.  Basic programs had been established and were running well.  

The Smithsonian’s publication program, notably the series Smithsonian

Contributions to Knowledge, was already one of the premier vehicles

for publishing research in the United States.   

The Meteorological Project, which had been established in 1855, used volunteer observers

from across the country to compile daily weather observations.  (Henry later transferred the

program to the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where it eventually became the National Weather

Service.)  Weather patterns were beginning to be recognized, such as the frequent storms that

traveled from west to east, following what we now know to be the jet stream.  Henry’s weather

map in the Castle was a popular spot to visit in the city, and a massive amount of

meteorological data was being acquired.  Through an agreement with the U.S. Patent Office,  

Chief Justice Taney

View of Washington, D.C., including the Smithsonian Castle, in 1860
2

Henry used monies appropriated to that agency to fund the reduction of the data.  This

agreement, however, had strings attached.   

Although Henry had strong reservations about accepting federal funds with their attendant

political influence, in 1858 he accepted responsibility for the national collections then stored at

the Patent Office Building—on the condition that the

government provide funding to care for them.  The

collections were transferred in 1858, but federal funding

for their care was soon placed in jeopardy by the war.  For

the next 20 years, Henry sought to have the National

Museum spun off as an independent government bureau.  

Despite Henry’s concerns, quiet efforts to build both the

museum and federal funding were conducted by Assistant

Secretary Spencer Fullerton Baird, a naturalist hired and

supported by the Regents in 1850.  (In the 1860s, young

explorer/naturalists dubbed the “Megatherium Club”

lived in the towers of the Castle during the winters and,

after meetings enhanced with beer, serenaded the Henry

daughters who lived in the East Wing.)  The National

Museum would not be on firm footing until Baird was

appointed the second Secretary in 1878.   

In 1860, Henry also was working to get rid of the National

Library, which was provided for in the Institution’s

enabling act.  He had fired Librarian Charles Coffin Jewett

in 1855 and survived a national controversy and

congressional investigation of that event.  By 1865, after a

devastating fire in the Castle, he succeeded in having the

books transferred to the Library of Congress and having the copyright depository provision

removed from the Smithsonian’s enabling act.  The Smithsonian’s International Exchange

Service, which was established in 1849 to support the increase of knowledge through scientific

and literary publication exchanges, became the official distributor of U.S. government

publications to foreign countries in 1867.  With the Institution receiving 1,000 shipments of

publications and distributing 888 shipments, Henry noted that it was “now the principal

medium of literary and scientific communication between the American continent and foreign

countries.”  The Civil War would soon disrupt this communication.

Storm clouds were forming on the nation’s horizon in November 1860, when Abraham Lincoln

was elected President of a deeply divided country.  Henry believed the South should be allowed

to secede from the United States, rather than go to war.  Soon the nation would be torn

asunder and battles visible from the Castle towers.  With public buildings barricaded and

sandbagged, and volunteer militia on guard duty, the Secretary of War issued the following

order: “The Colonel of Ordnance will cause to be issued to Professor J. Henry of the

Smithsonian Institute twelve muskets and 240 rounds of ammunition, for the protection of the

Institute against lawless attacks.”  Secretary Henry made a controversial decision not to fly the

Union flag atop the Castle and was criticized for having some sympathy with the Southern

The Megatherium Club
3

cause.  When asked to use the Smithsonian Building to house Union soldiers, Henry said he

would do so, but did not view it as a proper use and noted his concern about possible damage

to the Institution’s property.  He suggested that, should the building be repurposed, the most

appropriate use would be as an infirmary.  The building was never actually requisitioned.   

When the war erupted in 1861, the Board of Regents experienced a major upheaval, as nine

members left the Board in one year.  Several members were expelled for their loyalty to the

Confederacy, including Jefferson

Davis, Lucius Jeremiah Gartrell, and

James Murray Mason.  Departing Vice

President John Cabell Breckinridge

also was loyal to the Confederacy and

was expelled from Congress that year.  

James Gabriel Berret, mayor of

Washington, D.C., and a Regent ex

officio, resigned after he refused to

take the loyalty oath.  Several other

Regents departed that year: Stephen

A. Douglas died; Gideon Hawley, a

citizen Regent from New York who

had served since 1846, chose not to

continue; and two members left the

Congress, Representatives Benjamin

Stanton of Ohio and William Hayden

English of Indiana.  Later, George E. Badger, a citizen Regent from North Carolina, was expelled

at a Regents’ meeting in February 1863 for “giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the

Government.”  Another Regent, Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky, was accused by the Senate

of treason in January 1864 but was not expelled from that chamber; he remained on the Board

of Regents until his death eight years later.

Despite his reservations about the war, Joseph Henry came to know and respect the new

President.  He soon served as Lincoln’s science advisor and, among other things, introduced the

President to Thaddeus Lowe and his experiments with balloons, after which a balloon

reconnaissance program was established for the Union Army.  Henry, however, was not entirely

satisfied with his contributions, little of which advanced scientific knowledge in support of the

war effort.  Instead, his energies were directed largely towards weeding out the hundreds of

bad proposals for government funding that were submitted to the War Department during the

turmoil.  After the war, Henry wrote former President Millard Fillmore that his work had saved

the “government from rushing into many schemes which, under the guise of patriotism, were

intended to advance individual interests.”

The Civil War also affected the Smithsonian's pocketbook.  The Institution had three main

sources of income.  The first was derived from the principal of Smithson's bequest, which was

deposited in the U.S. Treasury and yielded about $31,000 a year.  Henry worried as early as

January 1861 that the U.S. government might not pay interest on the bequest, although the

government did pay the interest during the war.  Payments, however, were sometimes late and

The Smithsonian Castle in 1860
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those made after January 1862 were in devaluated currency, which drastically reduced the

Smithsonian's purchasing power.  Henry’s response to the diminished funding was that “all

superfluous expenditures were to be lopped off, and the most rigid economy exercised.”   

The second source of income was from the interest the Smithson bequest had earned in the

eight years after the money arrived in the U.S. in 1838 and before Congress established the

Smithsonian in 1846.  Although some of the $242,000 had been spent on the construction of

the Castle, a remaining balance of $141,000 had been invested in state bonds for the District of

Columbia, Indiana, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia.  When the latter three states joined the

Confederacy, the Smithsonian lost the interest on those bonds, a loss of about $4,000 a year.   

The third source of funds was the $4,000 annual appropriation by Congress for the care of the

national collections transferred from the Patent Office Building in 1858.  These funds were the

first to be affected, even before the war started.  In December 1860, Henry wrote a friend that

the Smithsonian was unable to draw the semiannual sum of $2,000 as the government had

stopped payment.  In a statement that resonates to this day, Henry warned that if Congress

failed to appropriate money for the museum, “we shall be obliged to close the doors or charge

an admittance to visitors.”  Thankfully, the Institution survived the tumultuous 1860s.  As the

decade drew to a close, the Smithsonian was rebuilding programs and collections that support

“the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”  

The Smithsonian in 1961

Although the Great Depression and World War II brought decades

of stagnation to the Smithsonian, the Institution again began to

expand its programs, buildings, and new intellectual initiatives in

the 1950s.  Enjoying strong support from the Congress, the

Institution entered a decade of unprecedented growth beginning

in 1960.  Incoming President John F. Kennedy found Washington

to be a sleepy southern city and launched initiatives to make it a

cultural center worthy of the nation’s capital.  At the same time,

the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and growing unrest over

the military’s role in Vietnam hinted at the tremendous social

upheaval and change that the decade would see.   

The international space race was triggered by the International

Geophysical Year in 1957–58 and the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik in

1957.  At the same time, strong federal funding for Smithsonian science initiatives was

enhanced by Secretary Leonard Carmichael’s careful cultivation of good congressional relations.  

New research positions were secured, and new scholars were expected to meet higher research

standards.  Carmichael personally interviewed all candidates for research positions and rejected

those he found lacking, an experience many Smithsonian staff would later recall as equivalent

to that of taking their Ph.D. orals.  If selected, some of these bright young scholars found the

Smithsonian to be a refuge from the McCarthy‐era loyalty oath controversies on college

campuses.   

Secretary Carmichael
5

The 1955 move of the Smithsonian Astrophysical

Observatory (SAO) to Cambridge, Massachusetts,

led to the expansion of SAO programs and the

development of a new generation of astrophysicists

who would make significant contributions to our

knowledge of the universe.  By the time Sputnik

was launched, the SAO already had established a

network of cameras to track satellites.  As even the

military was incapable of spotting the satellite, SAO

was singular in its ability to track Sputnik, and it

quickly became the center for satellite tracking in

the U.S.  A citizen science satellite observation

program, Moonwatch, also was launched.  

In 1960, the construction of wings for the Natural History Building was approved to provide

significantly more space for research, ever‐expanding collections, and staff.  A capital campaign

was launched to improve facilities for the National Zoo after a lion killed a young girl there.  The

new Zoo director, Ted Reed, took seriously the Zoo’s mandate to conduct research and began

to hire a cadre of scientists.

The Smithsonian’s arts and history programs also benefitted from new initiatives around 1960.  

Congress approved funds for a new Museum of History and Technology in 1955, and

The National Mall in 1960

Filipino boy scouts participating in

Operation Moonwatch
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construction began on its Mall site in 1959.  In 1960, planning began for the recently legislated

National Portrait Gallery; soon it would open in the historic Patent Office Building alongside the

National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum).  By 1967, the

Institution’s museums had grown so large that the single entity, the United States National

Museum, was abolished.   

And the Institution was

attracting new audiences.  

Since the late 1940s, Congress

had provided a substantial

annual appropriation for the

“Exhibits Modernization

Program.”  Exciting new

displays in art, culture, history,

and science captivated growing

numbers of visitors to the

National Museum.    

Thus a solid platform had been

built for S. Dillon Ripley when

he was appointed the eighth

Secretary in 1964.  Over the

next decade he developed new

science programs, notably the

Conservation and Research Center, the Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce, the

Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, and the Museum Conservation Institute.  Staffing,

infrastructure, and programs were significantly expanded at the Smithsonian Tropical Research

Institute, the National Museum of Natural History, and SAO.  Internal grant programs were

created to encourage and support research.  A fellowship program began to attract young

scholars to work at the Institution.   

In the arts, Ripley attracted the Hirshhorn collection, secured the Renwick Museum, and

facilitated the acquisition of The Cooper Union’s museum.  He created a storefront museum in

Anacostia to reach out to the local African American community.  Ripley also focused on

outreach to the American public, creating the Smithsonian Associates and Smithsonian

magazine, establishing the annual Folklife Festival on the Mall, and forming units devoted to

television and radio programming, and K–12 education.   

During the 1960s, the Institution also responded slowly but steadily to the social upheaval in

the nation.  During the 1968 March on Washington, Ripley insisted that the museums stay

open, welcome the visitors, and demonstrate that the Smithsonian and its resources are free

and available to all.  New exhibits addressed social issues, diversity, environmental concerns,

and evolution.  In addition, the staff of the Institution would become more diverse with the

1967 appointment of the first African American museum director, John Kinard of the Anacostia  

Exhibits Modernization: The Hall of Health

in the Arts and Industries Building
7

Neighborhood Museum.  The Board of

Regents selected its first African

American member in 1972 when Leon A.

Higginbotham was appointed a citizen

member from Pennsylvania.  Two years

later, Julian Euell was appointed

Assistant Secretary for Public Service,

the first African American to serve the

Institution at that level.  Women also

began to assume more responsible

positions, with Lisa Taylor appointed

director of Cooper‐Hewitt, National

Design Museum in 1969.   

Despite the turmoil of the 1960s, it was

a decade of opportunity and creativity at

the Institution.  Secretary Ripley embraced social change, and the Smithsonian attracted new

audiences and supported new views of American society.  New facilities and outreach programs

were launched.  President Kennedy’s call for a new focus on science supported the

development of new research opportunities at the Smithsonian and, soon after the 1962

release of Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring, the Institution was at the forefront of

new ecological and environmental approaches to the study of the natural world.  Thus the

Institution of 1970 was substantially different in size, quality of research and outreach, and

diversity of its staff and programs, than the Smithsonian of the 1960s.

Anacostia Neighborhood Museum Director John Kinard,

welcoming the public to the new museum in 1987