Smithson’s great legacy spreads
Founded by an illegitimate Brit who never saw America, the world’s greatest museum collection is heading to London, writes Ben Macintyre.
JAMES SMITHSON, the eccentric British scientist whose fortune and name created the Smithsonian Institution, was himself an international artefact: an Englishman born in France, he was imprisoned in Germany, died in Italy and then left 150 sacks of gold sovereigns to the United States, a country he had never seen.
Smithson himself was proof that ideas and objects transcend national boundaries. He left instruction that the institution in his name, now custodian of the world’s greatest collection of museums, should be dedicated to the ‘‘increase and diffusion of knowledge among men’’ – all men and women, that is, not just those of a particular nation or an educated elite.
The decision to open a branch of the Smithsonian in London is an inspired continuation of that idea, reflecting a philosophy in which important objects are seen not as national possessions but as a shared good within a pooled global inheritance.
Increasingly, the world’s greatest museums do not simply preserve and hoard but borrow and lend their holdings. China’s mighty terracotta warriors were displayed in London; one of the Elgin Marbles has been lent to Russia’s Hermitage Museum; and now important cultural and scientific exhibits from the Smithsonian’s 137 million items will cross the Atlantic for the first time.
There remains a vigorous opposition to this approach – best illustrated by Greece’s demand for the return of the Elgin Marbles – in which ancient objects are seen as ‘‘cultural property’’ to be jealously guarded and angrily ‘‘reclaimed’’ when held by other countries.
The Greek Government is blunt: ‘‘Whatever is Greek, wherever in the world, we want back.’’ That is a narrow, nationalist view of what a museum should be and the opposite of what James Smithson thought and the way he lived his extraordinary life.
The illegitimate son of the Duke of Northumberland and a wealthy French widow, he was born in Paris in 1765. A true child of the Enlightenment, Smithson travelled endlessly, studied voraciously and published widely his findings in geology, chemistry, mineralogy and mechanics. He researched the wings of windmills, the workings of the blowpipe and lamp construction.
He explored the use of calamine in brass manufacture and found the zinc-carbonate mineral that would be named smithsonite.
He wrote papers on the chemical composition of coffee, snake venom, human tears and tabasheer, a substance found in the nodal joints of bamboo and used in Indian medicine. He vigorously promoted ‘‘new science’’ throughout Europe and coined the term ‘‘silicates’’.
A restless wanderer, Smithson was in Paris during the revolution, imprisoned by the French during the Napoleonic Wars as a suspected spy and then died quietly in Genoa in 1829, childless and unmarried, leaving behind 27 scholarly articles, a cabinet of curiosities including 10,000 mineral specimens and great deal of money.
Without explanation, his will left the lot to America should his nephew die childless; which, generously, the nephew duly did.
Not only had Smithson never been to America, there is no evidence he ever met an American. But he seems to have selected the fledgling republic, an experiment in democracy, as the place most likely to ‘‘increase and diffuse knowledge’’. And he was right.
America was initially uncertain how to honour Smithson’s vaguely worded mandate. Should the money – which amounted to a 60th of the nation’s entire annual budget – found a university, a library, an observatory or a publisher?
Congress eventually settled on creating the largest possible museum, to collect and display everything: art, science, literature, history, music, poetry and engineering. Thus was built the ‘‘nation’s attic’’, a spectacular collection of collections now incorporating 19 museums, a national zoo and numerous research facilities.
Some have argued that Smithson’s legacy was a posthumous rebellion against British intellectual elitism and the aristocratic father who never acknowledged him (and probably never saw him).
‘‘My life will live on in the memory of men when the titles of the Northumberlands are extinct or forgotten,’’ Smithson predicted. His legacy was partly a rebuke to the Royal Society, which had declined to publish some of his later, wackier papers.
What is certain is that Smithson intended the institution in his name to expand throughout this young nation because that was the most fertile soil in which to harvest and spread knowledge to the largest number of people.
Smithson gathered knowledge everywhere and wanted it diffused everywhere. He knew that ideas and the objects that encapsulate them do not belong to the individuals who made them, let alone the countries where those people happened to live: the great inspiration of the Age of Reason, still preserved in places such as the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution, is that they belong to all.
The Smithsonian started in the inquisitive, borderless mind of an intellectually nomadic Briton; and now it is coming home.
AMERICANS are obsessed with Islamic State. Ninetyone per cent see the terrorist group as a threat to the vital interests of the United States, according to a September poll.
That same month, President Barack Obama called IS one of the greatest terrorist threats facing the country.
‘‘These are barbarians,’’ House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said later that month. ‘‘They intend to kill us. And if we don’t destroy them first, we’re going to pay the price.’’
Yet the African Islamists of Boko Haram are just as deadly as their Middle Eastern counterparts.
And few Americans are paying attention.
News outlets chronicle IS’s every bloody move. Between January 1 and 28, America’s 24 most popular news websites published 3293 articles that mentioned the group, according to an analysis for The Washington Post run by Whitney Erin Boesel of Media Cloud, a joint project of Harvard and MIT.
During that period – which included the Baga massacre, in which Boko Haram killed as many as 2000 Nigerian villagers – just 544 stories mentioned Boko Haram.
By membership, Boko Haram is about one-third the size of IS. But it has displaced 1.5 million Nigerian citizens, nearly as many as the 1.8 million Iraqis displaced by IS.
The numbers for Syria are difficult to tally, but as many as 200,000 people fled Kobani in the four days after IS began attacking that city.
The Nigerian terror force has killed 10,500 to 18,500 people since 2011, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Concrete numbers for IS are hard to come by, but experts say IS has killed at least 6000 people in Iraq and Syria since its offensive began last year – only a slightly higher rate, achieved with a much bigger corps.
True, the groups and their conflicts have many dissimilarities. IS is determined to make headlines. Its ranks are full of Western fighters with a penchant for flashy violence and a native knowledge of what Western journalists cover. It also boasts a slick social media presence, uploading gruesome YouTube videos of slaughters and mass graves.
The group has beheaded at least three Americans, and it operates in the same theatre where many US soldiers lost their lives fighting for Iraqi stability.
By contrast, the Nigerian extremists intentionally float beneath the radar.
They’ve destroyed at least 24 base receiver stations in the country’s northeast, hindering cellphone calls and the transmission of photos and videos.
Fewer Western reporters work in the region, and the group hasn’t directly threatened the US.
Even many Nigerian officials have been silent on Boko Haram, intent on hiding reports of homegrown terrorism.
Without local media, it’s even harder to expose the ugly truth of Boko Haram.
Still, the discrepancy in coverage reflects a certain hypocrisy.
‘‘Even when America’s core interests are not directly threatened, we stand ready to do our part to prevent mass atrocities and protect basic human rights,’’ Obama said in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 2013.
But in reality, we – journalists, politicians, most Westerners – worry primarily about our own national priorities and national security. That comes at a cost. ‘‘Boko Haram is one of the most lethal terrorist groups in the world . . . [and] the lack of coverage has disincentivised an international response,’’ terrorism expert Max Abrahms said.
‘‘If Boko Haram were frontpage news regularly, it would be harder for the international community to ignore that crisis.’’
Charlotte Lytton is a journalist based in London.