We're very delighted to have
Lukas Rieppel with us tonight.
He's at Brown University.
He's going to present
his new book called
Assembling the Dinosaur
published by Harvard University
Press.
And copies of the book will
be available after this talk
for signing just around
the corner there--
I mean purchasing and signing
just around the corner there.
And Lukas is known to
a number of us working
at a very interesting
intersection
between the history of biology,
the history of capitalism,
economic history, and
focuses especially
on the Life Sciences in 19th
and 20th century America.
He is currently the David and
Michelle Ebersman Assistant
Professor of History
at Brown University.
And he especially interested
in evolution and development
as well as geology and
paleontology in addition
to the history of
museums and, of course,
the "Development of the
Business Corporation"
that he actually
teachers at the moment.
You might like to
know that he was
educated at McGill University
and then here at Harvard.
He spent time in Organismic
and Evolutionary Biology,
working on butterfly genomics
in Naomi Pierce's lab.
At the same time as pursuing a
PhD in the history of science
over the way in
the science center.
So he has a master's
degree from OEB, Organismic
and Evolutionary
Biology as well as
a PhD in the history of science.
And showing that a
Canadian can do anything,
he's transitioned into
economic history, which he
teachers at Brown University.
He's been there for a
couple of years now.
Quite a large part
of his new book
involves the effect of
the dinosaur discoveries
on the funding of
museums and the responses
from the wealthy business people
who lived in the Gilded Age
in American history,
which is principally 1870s
through to 1900 or so.
And much of this
story is in the book.
I do recommend it.
I had the privilege
of reading it
a while back when it
was in manuscript.
And I hope you'll have a
wonderful time listening
to him tonight.
So could we please
welcome Lukas Rieppel.
[APPLAUSE]
It's a real pleasure to
be back here at Harvard.
As Janet mentioned,
I did my PhD here.
In fact, Janet Brown was
my doctoral supervisor.
And I also worked, as Janet
mentioned, in the Pierce Lab
just a couple of doors down
in the Museum of Comparative
Zoology.
So this very much feels
like a kind of homecoming.
And I'm delighted to be back
at Harvard to present a book
that I just finished a
couple of months ago,
Assembling the Dinosaur.
Just to give you a
sense, here is the table
of contents for that book.
I'm not going to go
through and describe
each chapter in detail for you.
But I did want to
just throw it up there
in case any of the titles of the
chapters pique your interest.
I invite you to ask me
about those during the Q&A.
Instead of going
through each chapter one
at a time, what I thought
I would do instead
is to begin with this fellow
here, Tyrannosaurus Rex,
which is perhaps the most
famous, most well-known,
and arguably the most popular
dinosaur from the United States
that has ever been found.
So T-Rex was discovered
in 1902 in Montana
by this paleontologist here.
This is a photograph of Barnum
Brown, who worked for the New
York Natural History Museum.
And some of you are
laughing at this picture,
which shows why I'm so fond
of this photograph as well.
It shows Barnum Brown
dinosaur hunting
in his Sunday best wearing
a fur coat, patent leather
shoes, and a felt hat.
Barnum Brown was famous
for going fossil collecting
and this kind of getup.
He is also famous for having
discovered perhaps more
dinosaurs than anyone else
before or since, including,
as I mentioned, T-Rex, which
he found in Montana in 1902.
The reason I wanted
to start with T-Rex
is that it illustrates
something which
is true for dinosaurs
quite generally,
namely that dinosaurs
were consistently
described, depicted as
especially ferocious predators,
especially kind of fearsome
tyrants of the prehistoric.
Indeed, even the name of this
creature, Tyrannosaurus Rex,
translates to
"tyrant lizard king."
This is true from the moment
that it was first unveiled
to the public in 1905, when the
New York Natural History Museum
exhibited a partial skeleton.
So initially, Barnum
Brown found only some
of the fossil remains
of this creature
when the New York
Natural History
Museum unveiled a
partial skeleton
for public consumption.
The New York Times
wrote up this display.
And in their article, they
quoted Barnum Brown saying that
quote, "T-Rex was so
formidable a fighting machine,
that he easily preyed upon
herbivorous neighbors twice his
own size, making this newly
discovered monster the absolute
warlord of the
Earth in his day."
The same theme is
true for the way
that T-Rex was
exhibited as well.
So subsequent to this display
going up at the museum in 1905,
Barnum Brown went back to
Montana several times, in fact,
and found additional,
more complete specimens,
which gave the New
York Natural History
Museum the idea of mounting an
elaborate and very ambitious
paleontological
group display that
would feature two separate
T-Rex specimens interacting
with one another.
To facilitate that process,
paleontologists from the museum
had technicians assemble
a pair of scale models
that they could
pose in various ways
and experiment with different
kinds of exhibition techniques.
In 1907, they settled
on this gruesome scene
here, showing two
T-Rex specimens engaged
in any kind of struggle
to the death fighting
over the remains of a
plant-eating sauropod dinosaur,
Brontosaurus.
Audiences were invited to
imagine a kind of narrative
in which one of the
two T-Rex's had killed
this sauropod Brontosaurus
dinosaur, was busily
dismembering it when the second
T-Rex happened upon the first
and engaged it in a kind of
fight contesting its prey.
So this is just the scale
model of that exhibit.
Unfortunately, this display
was never completed.
The New York Natural
History Museum
simply didn't have enough
room in its dinosaur hall.
The dinosaur hall was chock
full of specimens by 1907.
And so they settled on this
somewhat more modest display,
showing a single T-Rex
skeleton in the background.
You can see-- excuse me
if I can-- yeah here,
in the background you
can see the kind of first
initial, partial display.
And then in the
foreground, you can
see a fully-articulated
individual T-Rex
in the classic
Godzilla pose, a pose
that modern paleontologists,
I hasten to add,
consider erroneous, but
standing fairly upright,
dragging its tail
along the ground
as a kind of tripod for added
support, its jaws torn wide
open to reveal a row
of razor sharp teeth,
and its diminutive
arms held out in front
as if grasping for prey.
As I said, this
feature of dinosaurs,
that they are so
consistently described
as kind of brutish
tyrants of the prehistoric
was not unique to T-Rex.
It's true for other
dinosaurs as well.
Indeed, if you look across
not just the New York Natural
History Museum, but
other natural history
museums at this
time, there's a kind
of consistent feature of the
way dinosaurs were depicted,
the way they were exhibited.
Dinosaurs were
almost always shown
either in isolation as
kind of solitary brutes
of the prehistoric, or if
they were shown interacting
with one another,
those interactions
revolved around
acts of predation.
So here's just
one other example.
This is an Allosaurus, another
meat-eating theropod dinosaur,
a close relative
of T-Rex that was
discovered in the
late 19th century
and acquired by the New
York Natural History Museum
during the 1890s.
Finally went on
display in 1907, again
showing a very
similar kind of scene
in which the Allosaurus,
the meat-eating dinosaur,
has been caught in the
act of dismembering
its prey, a section
of Brontosaurus tail.
The same theme is repeated
in some of the literature
that the museum
distributed to visitors.
So this is a
visitor's guide book
that was written by
the paleontologist WD
Matthew, William Diller Matthew
from the New York Natural
History Museum in 1915.
And in this guidebook,
visitors were
invited to imagine
the Allosaurus display
along the following lines.
They were told quote,
"the Allosaurus group
gives the imaginative
observer a most vivid picture
of a characteristic
scene in that bygone age
millions of years ago
when reptiles were
the lords of creation and
nature, red in tooth and claw,
had lost none of her
primitive savagery."
So again, right,
dinosaurs are consistently
portrayed as these
tyrants of prehistory.
For that reason,
people have often
interpreted these exhibits
and the way dinosaurs
were displayed in
natural history museums
as an example of the kind of
social Darwinist rhetoric that
was pervasive across the
United States during a period
that I'm calling the Long
Gilded Age, so roughly
from the 1870s, the late
1870s, through to the Great
Depression that started
in the early 1930s
with the stock
market crash in 1929.
This period, the
Long Gilded Age,
was a period of massive
social inequality,
labor unrest, class conflict.
There was a great deal
of kind of concern
about the economic
inequality that
American industrial
capitalism seemed to produce.
And the argument is that
many Gilded Age capitalists
drew on the Darwinian theory of
evolution by natural selection
to try to naturalize,
and therefore justify,
not just the competitive
ethos of American capitalism,
but also the concentration
of wealth that it
seemed to engender.
So the kind of argument is
that the immense inequality
of America's first
Gilded Age could
be justified, IE
naturalized, using
the Darwinian theory of
evolution by natural selection.
Because the fierce competition,
the proverbial survival
of the fittest was
a fact of nature
that long predated the
evolution of modern society.
So it was not a
contingent feature
of our political economy,
but rather a fact of nature
that already existed
during prehistory
during the Mesozoic period.
And as such, revolutionary
social movements
that sought to overthrow
American capitalism
were unlikely to get very far.
Moreover, the argument
continues if competition
drives evolutionary advancement
and promotes adaptation
in nature, then it must be
beneficial in human society
too, right?
So leveraging the Darwinian
theory of evolution
by natural selection, a
particular theory of evolution,
to try to naturalize and thereby
justify the competitive spirit
of American capitalism
and the social inequality
that it engendered during
the first Gilded Age,
during the Long Gilded Age.
To give you just a
single example of this,
this is a quote from a book
by WJ Thomas Mitchell called
The Last Dinosaur Book,
in which Mitchell writes
that "the American Gilded
Age, so often portrayed
as the era of Social
Darwinism, economic survival
of the fittest, and
ruthless competition
is aptly summarized
by the Darwinian icon
of giant reptiles in
a fight to the death."
So that's an argument
that Mitchell
shares with many,
many other historians.
And it's, in some ways, a fairly
kind of obvious interpretation
and fairly obvious way of
interpreting these museum
displays.
But there's also a
fairly obvious problem
with this interpretation, namely
dinosaurs famously suffered
a mass extinction event at the
end of the Cretaceous period.
So as creatures that
famously went extinct,
they did not offer a
very durable symbol
for a political
economy that aspired
to considerable
longevity, right?
Dinosaurs could not
serve as a good way
to celebrate the achievement
of American capitalism
because they went extinct at the
end of the Cretaceous period.
So what I want to do,
instead of offering you
that kind of
interpretation, is give you
a different story
about the relationship
between the history of
dinosaur paleontology
and the development of
American capitalism, one
that argues that those two
institutions are intimately
entwined with one another, but
in a more subtle and hopefully
somewhat more interesting
way than this kind
of interpretation of Social
Darwinism would suggest.
And the story can be
divided into three parts.
So I'll start by
talking a little bit
about the early
discovery of dinosaurs,
focusing especially on their
discovery in the American West
during the 1870s,
'80s, and '90s.
I move on to talk a little
bit about the construction
of large,
philanthropically-funded
museums of Natural History, such
as the New York Natural History
Museum which brought these
creatures, dinosaurs,
from the American West to
the attention of a much
larger, more popular,
and in some cases,
working class
audience, so not just
the members of the
scientific community,
but also a much larger and
more socially diverse audience.
And then finally, I'll end by
looking a little more closely
at the way that these
dinosaurs were exhibited
in these philanthropic
museums of Natural History,
in particular, comparing
the exhibition of dinosaurs
to the exhibition of other
kinds of prehistoric creatures,
including fossil mammals
and early hominids.
OK, so far I've been talking
about the way dinosaurs
were displayed and
discovered in the American
West during the late 19th
and early 20th century.
But as I'm sure many of you
know, dinosaurs, in fact,
were not initially discovered
in the United States,
but rather were discovered about
50 years earlier in the 1820s
and '30s in the UK.
So there's two British
naturalists, Gideon Mantell
and William Buckland who,
between them, described
several new species of
terrestrial reptiles
in the 1820s and '30s.
Most famously, Iguanodon,
Megalosaurus, and Hylaeosaurus.
It was in the 1820s
and '30s that a series
of terrestrial
reptiles were described
in the scientific literature
by two British naturalists,
Mantell and Buckland.
It was about 20 years
later in the early 1840s
that another very notable
British comparative anatomist
Richard Owen decided that these
three specimens, these three
terrestrial reptiles had enough
in common with one another
and were sufficiently
distinct from other kinds
of Mesozoic vertebrate
fossils, things
like, for example, the
marine vertebrate fossils,
like Theosaurs and
Plesiosaurs, to warrant
the creation of a new biological
category, a new taxonomic unit
which Owen called dinosauria.
So the first dinosaurs were
discovered in the 1820s
and '30s and described in
the scientific literature
by naturalists like
Mantell and Buckland.
And they acquired the name
dinosauria in the 1840s.
Here's just a
picture to give you
a sense of how people
in the mid 19th century
imagined these creatures.
This is a series
of sculptures that
were created by the British
artist Benjamin Waterhouse
Hawkings for a kind of
commercial amusement park based
on the World's
Fair that happened
in London in the early 1850s,
a kind of permanent version
of the World's Fair that was
constructed in a suburb just
south of London called
Sydenham in 1854.
So Benjamin Waterhouse
Hawkings was
hired to sculpt a number
of prehistoric animals, not
only dinosaurs, but
including dinosaurs.
And he worked very, very closely
with the anatomist Richard Owen
in executing these sculptures.
So they closely resemble the
way that Richard Owen himself
imagined these creatures
to have looked.
I show them to you now
because, well, one reason
is that they still exist today.
So these are
photographs that I took
when I made a pilgrimage to
Sydenham a few years ago.
And I encourage
you to do the same.
It's a wonderful place
to go visit if you're
interested in dinosaurs.
But also just to
illustrate how differently
people in the mid 19th
century, including naturalist
like Richard Owen, imagined
these creatures from the way
that we do today.
So when I say the word
dinosaur, I imagine all of you
think of something that's
quite different from the way
these creatures look.
Richard Owen modeled
his dinosaurs
on pachyderms, creatures like
the elephant, hippopotamus,
rhinoceros, and so on, for
interesting and complicated
reasons that I can get into in
the Q&A if you're interested,
but resulting in a very
different kind of creature
than the one that we
usually imagine today
when we hear the word dinosaur.
That changed dramatically at the
very end of the 1970s, largely
as a result of some
spectacular discoveries that
were made in the--
excuse me, 1870s and 1880s
in the American West.
So in the course of just a
few years, there were many,
many new quarries that were
found in the American West that
yielded literally tons
of new fossil specimens,
leading to the creation and
naming of dozens and dozens
of new species, including some
of the most iconic dinosaurs
of all time, creatures like
Brontosaurus excelsus which is
sometimes but not always
synonymous with Apatosaurus,
Stegosaurus-- the very
famous dinosaur shown here
on your right--
and Allosaurus, which I talked
about a little bit earlier.
These American dinosaurs
quickly kind of took
the scientific
community by storm,
making American
paleontology, kind
of creating the
United States, sort
of cementing the place
of the United States
as a world center for the study
of vertebrate paleontology.
In particular, there were
two American paleontologists
that became quite well-known
through their study
of dinosaurs in the
late 19th century.
Edward Drinker Cope, who
worked in Philadelphia
at the Philadelphia Academy
of Natural Sciences,
as well as Othniel
Charles Marsh who
worked at the Peabody
Museum of Natural History
at Yale University.
Interestingly though, most
of the fossil discoveries
that caused the United States to
become such an important place
for the study of
vertebrate paleontology
were not themselves made
by trained paleontologists
like Cope and Marsh.
Rather for the most
part, these discoveries
were made by independent
fossil hunters who
had a financial interest
in dinosaur bones, people
like Arthur Lakes,
who discovered
an important dinosaur quarry
in Morrison, Colorado.
Arthur Lakes was a mining
engineer and clergyman.
Or Oramel Lucas who discovered
another dinosaur quarry
in Canyon City, Colorado--
Lucas was a schoolteacher.
Or William Harlow Reed, who
worked for the Union Pacific
Railroad and found one of the
richest and most productive
dinosaur quarries that's
ever been found at a place
called Como Bluff, Wyoming.
Reed, as I mentioned, worked
for the Union Pacific Railroad.
All of these people did not
have a strong background
in paleontology.
Of the three, Arthur
Lakes was the best
educated having studied
some natural history as part
of this kind of clerical
education in the UK, in fact.
Rather all of them
were more interested
in the financial value
of these dinosaurs.
So they collected
dinosaur fossils
and brought them to the
attention of scientists
such as Edward Drinker Cope
and Othniel Charles Marsh
as a kind of
financial transaction.
So they sold these dinosaurs
to paleontologists.
This was part of
a larger movement
that was going on in
the American interior
in the mid 19th century.
So the second half
of the 19th century
was a period of intense
westward expansion
in which white
settlers colonized
the interior of
the United States,
displacing Native
American tribes as they
went along the way, largely
in search of material wealth.
So the interior of
the United States
was undergoing an economic boom.
There was a kind of extractive
economy that was growing very,
very quickly.
In the Rocky Mountain
region, in particular,
a kind of mineral industry
was developing very quickly.
So people like these
dinosaur hunters
were moving to the
interior of the country
moving to the
Rocky Mountain West
largely in search of
material mineral wealth,
so looking at the
land as a place
where one could make
money by finding
valuable scarce natural
resources like gold, silver,
coal, copper, tin, and
so on and so forth.
And some of them along the
way found dinosaur bones
which they treated
in much the same way
as they would treat
any other sort
of scarce natural
resource, selling them
to the highest bidder.
Only in this case,
it was members
of the scientific community.
OK, so I want to move on now.
I've been talking a
little bit about the way
that early discoveries
of dinosaurs
in the late 19th
century were connected
to the growth of an
extractive economy
in the American interior.
And I want to continue
that conversation
and look a little bit at
how this eventually led also
to the construction of
philanthropic museums
of Natural History in urban
centers like New York.
And it was in these
kinds of institutions
that dinosaurs came
to the attention,
not only of learned
naturalists, but also
to the attention of a much
broader and more popular
audience.
So the growth of this
extractive economy
in the American interior was
part of a much larger trend
in 19th century America,
kind of economic explosion
that took place across
the United States
during the 19th century
due to a kind of larger
process of industrialization.
So this is just a chart
to kind of give you
a sense of the explosive
economic growth that took place
throughout the 19th
century, but in particular
in the second half of the
19th century in the years
after the Civil War.
You can see that economic
expansion nearly approximated
exponential growth.
So there was an absolutely
staggering amount
of economic growth
in the second half,
last third especially,
of the 19th century.
However, wages did not have
the same kind of trajectory.
So while the economy was
growing extremely rapidly,
for most of the 19th century,
the wages of working people
remained stagnant.
And there's even some
moments where they entered
brief periods of decline.
It's really not until the
beginning of the 20th century,
and in particular after the
entry of the United States
into the First World
War, where there
was a labor shortage
in the United States
that wages really
started to increase.
As a result, the second
half of the 19th century
and the beginning
of the 20th century,
this period I'm calling
the long Gilded Age,
was a period of
increasing and indeed I
would say immense
economic inequality.
So this is a graph showing you
how much of the total wealth
of the United States
was concentrated
in the hands of the top
1% of US households.
So if you look at the
beginning of the graph--
let's see if I can get this
to work-- this part here,
sort of around the time of the
founding of the United States,
somewhere between about
15% or 20% of all US wealth
was concentrated in the top 1%.
Whereas, if you
look at the period
around here just before
the stock market crash
that caused the Great
Depression, nearly 50%
of all the wealth was controlled
by the top 1% of households.
So almost half of all the
wealth in the United States
was in the hands of the very,
very top of the economic elite.
This booming economic growth and
increasing economic inequality
led to the formation
and consolidation
of an elite social class.
So these are the captains
of industry or robber
barons that you've
all heard about,
the Andrew Carnegies, the
Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts,
the JP Morgans of the world,
and so on and so forth.
As these people consolidated
into an elite social class,
they often look to very
traditional markers
or trappings of
high social status
as a way of communicating their
elite status to themselves
and each other.
So adopting fashionable
styles of dress,
erudite modes of speech,
sending their children
to elite universities
such as this one,
building opulent mansions in
an ornate architectural style.
So this is a particularly famous
mansion built by the Vanderbilt
family in Newport, Rhode Island,
"The Breakers" built in 1895,
built in a kind of Renaissance
Italian architectural style,
filling those mansions with
kind of luxurious furniture,
crystal chandeliers, large
and lavish collections
of artworks, natural
history specimens,
building exquisite gardens on
the grounds of these palaces,
really, we should say, and
so on and so forth, right?
This is the kind of practice
that the early 20th century
social critic Thorstein
Veblen described
as "conspicuous consumption,"
so a kind of consumption that
was meant to be seen, right?
Consumption to show off one's
erudition, one's learning,
one's connoisseurship, one's
taste, and above all else,
one's wealth.
In addition, these
wealthy capitalists
also endowed public
institutions where
they could house some of the
collections of wonderful things
that they were amassing.
This included public
institutions like libraries,
universities, which I
mentioned, Music Halls,
symphonic orchestras,
art museums,
natural history museums,
and so on and so forth.
One of the earliest of these
is the New York Natural History
Museum founded in 1868.
And you can see here,
I've just shown you,
this is a picture of the facade
of the New York Natural History
Museum.
And then here is a page from the
first annual report showing you
the wealthy trustees, the kind
of people who had donated money
to the creation of this museum.
And I've highlighted
some of the more famous
American capitalists who donated
to this institution, people
like Theodore Roosevelt,
the future president's
father, William T. Blodgett,
JP Morgan, and many others
as well.
So by visibly and publicly
associating themselves
with institutions of
connoisseurship like art
museums, institutions
of learning,
institutions of taste,
institutions of science
like natural history museums,
these wealthy capitalists
were further kind of cementing
their reputations as people
of high-minded
ideals, people who
had a great deal
of wealth, people
who had a great deal
of social prestige.
In addition, however,
of course, they
were also showing off the fact
that they were generous people,
that they cared about
municipal generosity,
that they wanted to advertise
their Republican virtues.
This was especially
important because,
as I mentioned, right, the
second half of the 19th century
was a period of growing
economic inequality which
led to a great deal of kind
of social unrest, right?
Working people who saw their
wages stagnate and at times
even decline were facing
absolutely abhorrent working
conditions.
Life in the factories was hard.
Days were long.
It was dangerous work.
It was difficult
backbreaking work.
And it was not well
remunerated work.
This led to a formation, not
just of an elite social class,
right, as I've been
talking about, but also
a kind of coherent and
self-conscious working class.
Forming unions and other
kind of labor organizations,
often going on strike.
Here, this slide shows you
a series of illustrations
from Harper's Magazine showing
you the kind of violence that
broke out at the Homestead
works as a kind of steel mill
that was owned by the Carnegie
Steel Company in 1892.
Right, so strikes that could be
remarkably violent and bloody.
Just to give you a
couple statistics,
between 1881 and 1905, there
were over 36,000 strikes.
And between 1877 and 1903-- this
is in the United States alone,
between 1877 in 1903, the
US National Guard, so the US
military was mobilized
over 300 times
to take care of
so-called labor trouble.
So there was a real sense of
kind of revolutionary uprising
that was in the air.
And this created moral panic
among the social and financial
elite who worried that
there was a possibility
of a new civil war that
might be brewing over wage
rather than slave labor.
And they responded to these
events, to the social turmoil,
by becoming avid
philanthropists.
So Andrew Carnegie is perhaps
the most famous example
of this.
Carnegie was not just
an avid philanthropist,
but he was also a--
he wrote explicitly
and at great length
about his own motivations
for engaging in philanthropy.
The way he put it was that
philanthropy represents
quote "the true antidote for the
temporary, unequal distribution
of wealth, the reconciliation
of the rich and the poor,
a reign of harmony, another
ideal differing, indeed,
from that of the
communist in requiring
only the further evolution
of existing conditions,
not the total overthrow
of our civilization."
So faced with the prospect of
revolutionary labor movements
and incendiary labor
leaders, anarchist,
immigrants coming from
Europe who were threatening
to bring the industrial
economy to its knees,
wealthy capitalists like Andrew
Carnegie sought to kind of show
that through their
philanthropic bequests,
American capitalism could
produce genuine public goods
in addition to profits, that
capitalism through philanthropy
could be made to work for
the good of all in society,
not just the wealthy few.
So Carnegie adopted a kind
of evolutionary rhetoric
in which philanthropy
represented
the kind of evolutionary
apex of American capitalism,
no longer just
concentrating wealth
at the top of the
social hierarchy,
but making the kind of fruits
of American capitalism,
the achievements of
American civilization
accessible to all
parts of society.
As I said, this led
to a kind of boom
in the construction of
philanthropic institutions,
public institutions
of various kinds,
including natural history
museums, of which the three
most famous and important,
arguably, are a Natural History
Museum in Chicago called the
Field Museum of Natural History
because Marshall Field, the
department store magnate,
donated a million dollars
towards its construction
in the early 1890s.
The Carnegie museum
in Pittsburgh,
funded by Andrew
Carnegie, and as I
mentioned earlier, the New
York Natural History Museum,
The American Museum of
Natural History in New York,
which was funded among
other people by JP Morgan.
For this argument that these
wealthy philanthropists wanted
to make, for this
argument to be convincing,
it was important to bring
large and socially diverse
audiences into the institution's
exhibition halls, right?
So in order for
it to make sense,
for someone like Carnegie to
say that philanthropy showed
that American capitalism could
work for the benefit of all
in society, not just
the wealthy few,
the philanthropic
institutions, these museums
had to be made attractive and
accessible to working people,
not just to their
wealthy benefactors.
And it quickly emerged
that dinosaur paleontology
was the best way to do so.
So dinosaurs were not just
scientifically prestigious,
they were seen to be
distinctly American, right?
So if you remember the
pictures I showed you
earlier of European
dinosaurs, American dinosaurs
were widely seen to be larger,
more abundant, more imposing
than European dinosaurs.
So they kind of helped to
play up well-worn themes
of American exceptionalism.
And as you can see
here, this is a picture
of the New York Natural
History Museum's dinosaur hall.
They also made for clearly
spectacular museum displays,
right?
So audiences numbering in
the hundreds of thousands
streamed into these
natural history museums
to see these spectacular
objects on display.
OK, I want to end now
in the last 15 minutes
or so that I have left by
looking a little more closely
at the way that these
objects, these organisms,
these creatures
were put on display
in philanthropic museums of
Natural History such as the one
in New York.
So you've already
seen this picture.
This is the scale model of T-Rex
at the New York Natural History
Museum that was never completed,
but was contemplated in 1907.
There's many, many
other examples.
[INAUDIBLE] Knight's
dromaeosaurus.
Yeah, there is--
Exactly, that's right.
He knows.
There is many other
examples like this.
So this is a painting by the
celebrated dinosaur painter
Charles Knight,
executed in 1897.
These are another pair
of meat eating dinosaurs,
Dryptosaurus, at the time
they were called the Laelaps
Aquilunguis.
That was commissioned
by JP Morgan.
And it still hangs in the
New York Natural History
Museum today.
Here's another example.
This is slightly later,
again, by the same artist,
by Charles Knight, commissioned
for the Field Museum
of Natural History in Chicago.
It went on display in 1907.
One of the most iconic
depictions of dinosaurs
that still kind of
is famous today,
showing a kind of epic
standoff between two
titans of the prehistoric--
Triceratops vs.
Tyrannosaurus Rex, right?
So it's exhibits like these
that I mentioned earlier
which are often interpreted
through this lens of kind
of Social Darwinism.
The story I've
tried to tell today
is a little bit
different in the sense
that the wealthy capitalists,
the philanthropists, who
funded these
institutions, who paid
for the construction
of these exhibits,
it was JP Morgan himself who
commissioned this painting
from Charles Knight.
This painting was
hung in the Field
Museum of Natural History.
These people did not want to
be seen as cold blooded, kind
of fearsome predators, right?
They wanted to be seen rather
as kind of generous benefactors
of science, as
people of high taste,
people who loved learning,
people who sought to kind
of create these august
institutions of art, learning,
and science to give back
to a broader community.
Moreover, this was
a time in which
wealthy capitalists like
Andrew Carnegie or JP Morgan
did not want to celebrate
the importance of competition
in the American
political economy.
So as I said before,
the late 19th century
was a period of growing
social inequality.
It was also a period of
market consolidation.
So just to give you a single
statistic, between 1895
and 1904, about 1,800
industrial enterprises
were consolidated into just 157
corporately organized firms,
nearly half of which enjoyed
more than 70% market share.
So this was a period in
which many, many kind
of small, independent,
sole proprietorships
and partnerships were gobbled
up by large corporate behemoths
that were consolidated
into to large corporations,
many of which had such great
market shares that they
essentially dominated
an entire sector
of the industrial economy.
This is monopoly capitalism, not
competitive capitalism, right?
As you can imagine, these
kind of monopolistic business
practices in which a single
corporation could dominate
an entire sector of the
industrial economy, Standard
Oil, I think, at the
height of its powers
had something like
85% market share.
These kinds of
business practices
were enormously
controversial, especially
among rural populations
who found themselves
on the receiving end of
the bureaucratic machine
and formed a political
movement, The People's Party,
or populist
movement, to stand up
to the financial power of
moneyed and corporate elites
in the industrial Northeast.
It also led the US
federal government
to begin enforcing the
Sherman Antitrust Act,
to begin enforcing
antitrust law in a more
kind of concerted
way, breaking up
some of these
corporate behemoths,
these corporate conglomerates.
Most famously, Standard Oil was
broken up through the Sherman
Antitrust Act.
And the US federal
government began
to hold public
congressional hearings
in which wealthy capitalists,
people like JP Morgan, Andrew
Carnegie, JD
Rockefeller and others
were publicly called
to account for
their collusive anti-competitive
monopolistic business
practices.
Wealthy capitalists and
their corporate managers
responded by framing
the transition
from competitive, free-market,
proprietary capitalism
to a more organized,
corporate capitalism, monopoly
capitalism, as an instance
of evolutionary progress,
claiming that this was the kind
of manifestation of a larger
evolutionary process.
Here is just one example.
This is George W.
Perkins who is often
described as JP
Morgan's right hand
man, a kind of corporate manager
in the JP Morgan investment
firm who also
became a politician.
So he ran for public office as
part of the Progressive Party.
And in a speech that he gave
in 1911 for public office
which was quoted in
The New York Times.
Perkins said that quote,
"competition is no longer
the life of trade."
He continued, he
said, "I do not think
Adam Smith would have put
the emphasis on the theory
that competition is
the life of trade
if he had foreseen the
inventions which we have
witnessed and which have made
changes in business necessary."
So the kind of argument
that Perkins is making
and other corporate managers
and corporate capitalist
like him made is that
the industrial economy
was evolving.
So the kind of
competitive theories
of political economy
offered by 18th century
political economists,
physiocrats, and others
like Adam Smith applied
to an earlier stage
in the evolution of capitalism,
a kind of agrarian stage
in the evolution of capitalism.
But with industrialization, new
kinds of business organizations
evolved that then
became necessary,
business organizations
that did not
seek to compete
with one another,
but rather that sought
to kind of manage
entire sectors of the industrial
economy from the top down.
Political economists at the
turn of the 20th century
often offered a similar
kind of narrative.
This is a photograph of the
political economist Richard T.
Eli who is one of the founding
members of the American
Economic Association
and in 1906 published
a book called The Evolution of
Industrial Society, which again
he relied on an
early 20th century
interpretation of
evolutionary theory
to explain the development
of industrial capitalism.
He said that
"competition persists
as one of the most fundamental
laws of animate existence,
but evolution carries it to
higher and ever higher planes.
Evolution is not
merely a struggle
of individuals as individuals,
but likewise a struggle
of group with group.
Among men, this form of struggle
becomes increasingly a struggle
of nation with nation."
So what Eli is
doing here is he's
echoing a kind of
theory of evolution
that was popular among
biologists, paleontologists,
geologists at the turn
of the 20th century
that saw a kind of teleological
progress in the history of life
on Earth in which
small, independent,
organisms increasingly
came together to form
functionally integrated wholes.
So think about kind of standard
narrative of the evolution
of life on Earth, right, you
have single-celled organisms
that eventually evolve a
kind of communal life history
where they form multicellular
metazoan organisms, right,
which the individual cells
are no longer competing
with one another.
Individual cells in my body,
my heart cells, my liver cells,
my lung cells, they don't
compete with each other,
they're supposed to
cooperate with each other.
Eventually, these metazoan
multicellular organisms
come together to form
cooperative family groups,
to form tribes,
to form societies,
and eventually to form modern
nation states where competition
is constantly kind of being
pushed up to the next higher
level of social organization,
biological organization.
The claim that political
economists like Richard T.
Ely or corporate managers
like George Perkins made
is that the evolution
of corporate capitalism
should be understood
in the same way.
So as individual
sole proprietorships
and partnerships are coming
together, are being gobbled up,
or being integrated into these
vast multidimensional firms,
they are no longer
competing with one another.
So the different
divisions in a kind
of vertically
integrated corporation
are meant to cooperate
with one another.
They're meant to form a
functionally integrated whole.
And competition moves
to another higher level
of social organization.
So rather than individual
companies competing
with one another, you get
individual nation states
competing with one another.
Of course, this image of
evolutionary progress,
this kind of teleological
image of the evolution of life
on Earth was on full display in
philanthropic museums as well.
So this is just an
image to show you,
comparing the painting of T-Rex
and triceratops facing off,
right, so two solitary
titans of the prehistoric
engaged in a struggle
to the death.
Compare that with another
painting by Charles Knight,
the same artist, executed
around the same time,
early 20th century, showing
Pleistocene mammals, right?
A series of woolly
mammoths kind of rallying,
kind of working together,
rallying together
to protect one of
their offspring
from the threat of predation
off in the distance.
So there's a kind of young
mammoth in the center,
and then the adult mammoth
around it potentially ready
to protect it in need.
Here's another example showing
something very similar.
This is an exhibit that was made
in the New York Natural History
Museum.
I think it went on
display in 1907,
so very similar to the
time when the Allosaurus
and the T-Rex displays were
being produced, showing
a series of extinct giant
ground sloths, so Megatherium,
that are, again, working
together, working in unison,
working in concert to
procure a common food source.
So here you have a bunch of
these giant ground sloths kind
of cooperating with one
another to bring down a tree
so that they can reach
the succulent leaves
at the crown of the tree.
So in the back of the tree,
you have one individual
that's pushing on the
trunk of the tree.
In the front, you have
another individual
that's digging up the roots
making it easier for the tree
to be pushed down.
You have a third
individual who's
about to rear up
on his hind legs
to get ready to assist
pushing down the tree,
and then a fourth who is
coming around the front
to assist with the
digging operations.
A very similar kind
of strategy was used
to depict hominids as well.
This is a painting again by
Charles Knight, Cro-Magnon man,
kind of early modern humans
who are, again, cooperating
with one another, kind
of working in concert,
working as a team.
This time not just
for utilitarian ends,
not just to procure
a common food source,
but to create a kind
of artistic creation,
to engage in creative
enterprise together.
That story is reflected
in the exhibit guides
that I quoted from
earlier, as well.
So this is the way that
W Matthew describes
the evolution of dinosaurs
and their extinction
and replacement by mammals.
He tells visitors that dinosaurs
were quote, "The dominant land
animals of their time.
Their sway endured
for a long era,
but they became extinct through
a combination of causes,
including the great changes
in physical condition
at the end of the
Cretaceous period
and the development of mammals
and birds more intelligent,
more active, and better adapted
to the new conditions of life."
So the idea here is that it's
the extinction of dinosaurs
that opened the
ecological space that
allowed another higher more
advanced more cooperative group
of organisms to evolve,
eventually making way
for the evolution of human
beings such as ourselves.
And the idea is that exactly
the same kind of narrative,
the same sort of
structural narrative
was being applied to naturalize
the way that corporate managers
and corporate
capitalists wanted people
to understand the evolution of
American capitalism as well.
So just to summarize, the
idea is that at the museum,
dinosaurs were indeed
consistently depicted
as ferocious tyrants who
ruled over a world that
was red in tooth and claw.
But that did not make them
a straightforward or a
fitting symbol for
American capitalism.
After all, dinosaurs
not only went extinct,
but wealthy
philanthropists, the people
who funded the museums in
which these displays were
put on which these organisms
were put on display,
these wealthy
capitalists hardly sought
to compare themselves
to cold blooded tyrants
from the prehistoric.
Instead, rather
than using dinosaurs
to justify the competitive
ethos of capitalism,
museums instead inserted them
into a teleological narrative
of evolutionary progress of
the same sort that was also
used to explain the evolution
of America's political economy
from cutthroat individualism
to a more managed marketplace
dominated by large,
vertically-integrated corporate
firms.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
