Coming of Age in Chicago: The 1893 World's Fair and the Coalescence of American Anthropology

ISBN-13: 9781496236852

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Nebraska

Publication Date: 11-01-2023

Pages: 624

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Curtis M. Hinsley is Regents’ Professor Emeritus of History and Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University. He is the coauthor (with David R. Wilcox) of The Lost Itinerary of Frank Hamilton Cushing and The Southwest in the American Imagination: The Writings of Sylvester Baxter, 1881–1889. David R. Wilcox is the former head of the anthropology department at the Museum of Northern Arizona and continues to be an adjunct professor at Northern Arizona University. He is the coeditor of Zuni Origins: Toward a New Synthesis of Southwestern Archaeology.

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Coming of Age in Chicago

The 1893 World's Fair and the Coalescence of American Anthropology

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Essay 1

Anthropology as Education and Entertainment

Frederic Ward Putnam at the World's Fair

Curtis M. Hinsley

Until the close of the Fair Chicago will be the centre of the United States, the only place at present where brains can be turned into money. — Kate Field to Phoebe Hearst, August 27, 1893

In 1909 Franz Boas identified three men as the "fathers" of American anthropology — Major John W. Powell, Daniel G. Brinton, and Frederic W. Putnam. At the opening of the Chicago World's Fair, though, only Putnam stood in a position of professional strength and vigor. By 1893 Powell was approaching a decade marked by physical decline, loss of political and scientific influence, and intellectual sclerosis; he would soon lose control of the U. S. Geological Survey and enter a final, long period of drift in his sinecure at the Bureau of American Ethnology, to his death in 1902. After shepherding the major around the Chicago fairgrounds for four days, William Henry Holmes wrote to his wife: "He is quite weak and I had to take great care not to let him get tired out" (Fernlund 2000, 149). Brinton was the eldest of the three and already in poor health by the time of the Fair, but he still held the esteem and consideration of his contemporaries: he delivered the presidential address to the International Congress of Anthropology in late August at the Fair. However, while he stalwartly upheld the tradition of the nineteenth-century independent scholar, as Regna Darnell has observed, Brinton had already moved toward popular audiences, was wedded (like Powell) to an increasingly outdated evolutionism, and could not in any case call upon the institutional power of museum, university, or government agency to bolster or amplify his positions (Darnell 1998, 105–7, 114, 246–48).

By contrast, Putnam came to Chicago with a growing sense of confidence and position based upon years of museum and field experience. Just over fifty years old, he was veteran curator of the Peabody Museum and recently appointed (1887) professor of anthropology at Harvard when he was named chief of the Department of Ethnology in 1891 for the projected World's Fair. Putnam had every reason to anticipate respect and success in Chicago — his entire career seemed to point to this moment of personal and professional prominence.

Salem, north of Boston in Essex County, Massachusetts, was the pre–Civil War home of Fred Putnam, as it had been home to his family since John Putnam arrived in America in 1640. Three generations of male Putnam forebears had graduated from Harvard, but Fred grew up first under the scientific tutelage of Henry Wheatland, curator of the Essex Institute (now part of the Peabody Museum of Salem), and Putnam always considered Wheatland his first "father in science": "I joined in all his schemes with the enthusiasm and hope of youth," he recalled many years later (Putnam 1893a). The boy's initial work in natural science involved birds and fishes, and his first publication, for the Essex Institute when he was sixteen, was a catalog of the fishes of Essex County. That year he chanced to show Louis Agassiz the institute's collections, after which the nation's most prominent naturalist invited the young man to serve as his assistant at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. For the next eight years Putnam studied with Agassiz, Asa Gray, and Jeffries Wyman. He always treasured the experience: "I had a perfect and thorough training under Agassiz, Wyman, and Gray, and it has been my pride in manhood to be able to say that I was their student. ... The thorough methods of research that I learned during those eight years have given me power in my later undertakings; and it is such methods that I have endeavored to teach to others" (Putnam 1898; cf. Lurie 1960, Dexter 1965a and 1966a).

Putnam's early education deeply impacted his subsequent career at Harvard, Chicago, and elsewhere. First, at the suggestion of Agassiz he attended the Lawrence Scientific School rather than undertaking the standard Harvard curriculum; second, he played a major role in the 1863 student revolt against Agassiz, which sent him back to Salem and Henry Wheatland for ten years; and consequently, Putnam never received an academic degree. He came to regret some of his decisions: as he later explained to Harvard President Charles W. Eliot, regarding the lack of a degree, it was "simply one of those cases where one omits to do in youth what would have proved advantageous later" (Putnam 1898). The suspicion that Putnam possessed an insufficiently broad formal education shadowed him throughout his life, instilling insecurity and caution at critical moments in his professional relationships (Salisbury 1875).

His education was intensely personal and tutorial. As Ed Lurie pointed out some years ago (Lurie 1974), mid-nineteenth-century American natural science education was a hands-on, largely observational and descriptive experience, with little formal classroom instruction and much concentrated, one-on-one field and laboratory demonstration. Robert Bruce further suggested that for such men, "learning on the job under a senior scientist might be called a sort of graduate education" (Bruce 1987, 90). Putnam certainly thought so, and he carried forward the tradition in which he was trained. Joan Mark noted Alfred Kroeber's observation that Putnam was always a natural historian, more comfortable with specimens than with books; she also rightly remarked that Putnam stood "at the end of the natural history tradition in nineteenth-century American anthropology, at the turning point between nineteenth-century archaeology and natural history and the twentieth-century sciences of man" (Mark 1980, 15, 54).

As Margaret Rossiter and others have pointed out, an education like Putnam's was typically male, both paternally and fraternally — a matter of fathers, sons, and brothers (Rossiter 1982). Indeed, "for a woman to aspire to serious scientific work was deemed especially grotesque, unseemly, hopeless, and impermissible" (Bruce 1987, 76). Even a cursory reading of the National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs of the period suggests that this educational process served to create alternative fatherhoods and brotherhoods — male professional lineages — that complemented or supplanted biological relations. Men of science adopted other men, and they became mutually integral to identities and careers: Adolph Bandelier referred frequently to his "father [Lewis Henry] Morgan"; late into his life Putnam viewed Wheatland as his father in science, writing to him at one happy point as "the boy you took under your wing," and was deeply affected at his death just a few months before the Chicago Fair opened in 1893; at a particularly painful and dependent period of his immediate post-Chicago career, Boas signed himself as Putnam's "orphan boy." Putnam's relations with younger (and some older) students were strongly paternal and personal, especially for those without formal training. "Putnam," Douglas Cole observed, "was as concerned with the personal welfare of his protégés as with their scientific work" (Cole 1999, 176), so much so that he loaned emergency funds — to Boas, among others — even when his own finances were uncertain. Dependence sometimes bred expectation, disappointment, thin skin, and strong reactions, as seen in the revolt of Agassiz' young students in 1863 (Lurie 1974) or, several decades later, Putnam's explosive relations with fieldworker Charles C. Abbott (Meltzer 2003; cf. Hinsley 1985, 62–69). In a world of close dependence, sometimes the line between opportunity and exploitation was hard to draw.

To his credit, Putnam largely outgrew the limiting gender bias of his own upbringing, personally encouraging and promoting women in anthropology over the years. From Cornelia Studley (1855–87), whom he eulogized at her early death as "our gentle and gifted associate" (Putnam 1887), to Alice Fletcher (1838–1923), Putnam became "one of the few late nineteenth-century men who facilitated the careers of female investigators" (Rohde 2004, 271; Mark 1988). By 1893 Putnam was pleased to report that "several of my best students are women, who have become widely known by their thorough and important works and publications; and this I consider as high an honor as could be accorded to me" (Dexter 1978, 5). David Browman has demonstrated that the list of Putnam's female students and co-workers was impressively long (Browman 2013 and 2002a, 222–35; cf. Rossiter 1982).

With his appointment as curator of the Peabody Museum in Cambridge in 1874, Putnam began to develop the fieldwork practices that would establish his reputation as a demanding field archaeologist. The first half of the 1880s was the crucial and probably the most enjoyable phase of Putnam's career in field archaeology. In 1880 he was forty-one. His wife, Adelaide, had died the previous year, ending fifteen years of marriage and leaving him with three young children: daughters Alice and Ethel and son Eben. That summer Putnam joined Charles L. Metz, a physician in Madisonville, Ohio, and Metz's co-worker Charles F. Low, at prehistoric Madisonville Cemetery, which Metz had discovered in 1878 (Dexter 1977). Over the next five summers Putnam deepened and extended his collaboration with Metz and Low to include Fort Ancient, the Turner Group, and other sites in the valley of the Little Miami River. He worked incessantly, too, to have both Fort Ancient and the Serpent Mound permanently protected by the state of Ohio, since "all students of American archaeology know [them] to be as important to the history of America as the pyramids of the Nile Valley are to that of Egypt." They became the first two Ohio State Memorials, in 1891 and 1900 (Dexter 1982, 27).

The dynamic of his collaborations with Metz and Low demonstrated Putnam's idea of pursuing and teaching archaeology. Through summertime on-site fieldwork in person and wintertime letters of instruction and encouragement, Putnam taught Metz to clear a site; to "slice and trench" through a mound; to photograph and note relative positions of artifacts and skeletal remains in situ; to handle a working crew; to avoid competitors, curious locals, and especially journalists; to write up field and accession notes; and to pack and ship collections. The following excerpt from one letter to Metz in September 1882 provides a good sense of Putnam's instructional and exhortatory style. Ecstatic over Metz's discoveries in what they were calling the "Turner Group," Putnam advised strongly against collaboration or sharing with any other parties (especially the Smithsonian):

Don't take any partnership in the work. You know that I have always said that the contents of a mound must be kept as one lot. There are no such things as duplicates. Take away one bead even from a bushel & you have destroyed the fact or rather the evidence to pass down for all time that a bushel of beads was found. The dividing of the contents of a mound between two parties is like dividing a volume of Shakespeare. Each would have some of his plays, but would not know about the others. ... [A]s long as you stick to me stick close & tight and it will be better for science & for your credit as an archeologist & for this Museum. ... There are hundreds of mounds in Ohio & I have purposely kept out of the state for years so as to give local societies the first chance, but you know that they have not done much & that science has not been advanced by their work, except your own society at Madisonville, which has done more through you & Low, than all the rest of the west put together. Now the turn of the wheel has brought you to working in connection with this Museum & you know enough of me by this time to feel sure that what is done through the Museum is done for the one end of scientific advancement of American Archaeology. (Putnam 1882)

In April 1882 Putnam married Esther O. Clarke of Chicago; they honeymooned in southern Ohio, and for the next several years she and the children joined him in summers at the Ohio excavations (Dexter 1982, 24). While he never published a text on archaeological field methods, by 1885 Putnam felt that his Ohio fieldwork had shown the importance of "conducting explorations in a thorough and systematic manner" and "the great advance which had taken place during the last few years in American archaeology, which was at last being studied in a way due to its importance, by a few earnest workers pursuing the investigation with all the methods of science" (American Antiquarian Society 1887, 10) — or as Metz put it more colloquially: "Featherbed archaeologists ought to be squelched" (Metz 1884a). Putnam's phrases indicated the essentials of his new scientific approach: quietly serious workers rather than showy popularizers; purposeful exploration rather than serendipitous, backyard digging; and rigorous, defined contours of investigation devoid of preconceptions.

From this point onward Putnam argued that through his model and sponsorship of field exploration and collecting, the popular image of archaeology as a playground for men of "rashness" and "haste" in judgment was being replaced by a model of caution and moderation (American Antiquarian Society 1885, 22). Others recognized this and agreed: before his departure to Arizona on the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition in January, 1886, Frank Cushing wrote to Putnam's close friend Alpheus Hyatt:

I do not think the wonderful systems of research which [Putnam] has been the first to develop in mound exploration, can be too often commented upon. His work in the Ohio mounds must take rank as the first of its kind. ... No man ought to be allowed to push spade or pickaxe into a western mound or earth-work except as, at least, disciple to the system of research of Prof. F. W. Putnam. (Cushing 1886, cited in Hinsley 1999, 147)

On visiting the Ohio excavations in 1884, Metz reported, even Putnam's arch-competitor W. H. Holmes of the Smithsonian agreed, in somewhat milder terms, that Putnam's work was "very complete & it was done in the only way it should be done" (Metz 1884b; Dexter 1982). Browman has suggested that Putnam's "Peabody Museum method" of stratigraphy laid the groundwork for what later became known as the "Chicago method" of excavation, associated with Fay-Cooper Cole (Browman 2002b). At the same time, Putnam's enthusiastic support of networks of fieldworkers in Ohio and elsewhere was a major stimulus to activity: in 1897 Brinton marveled that "there are now in Ohio 310 persons interested in its archaeology! Can any other state equal this record?" (Brinton 1897, 763).

Putnam's concept of a new scientific practice extended beyond excavation techniques. In letters of instruction and advice to fieldworkers as well as in the detailed instructions he issued to his Chicago Fair field assistants (Johnson 1897–98, 2:320–23), he stressed careful notation, with photographs if possible, and complete retrieval of all elements of an assemblage in relative positions as found (Dexter 1982). Two years after the Fair, for instance, he wrote to Adolph Bandelier, who was exploring in the Andes for Putnam's anthropology department at the American Museum of Natural History, to remind him of the new standards for collecting and of his vision for an exhibit at AMNH. Putnam's close instructions to Bandelier differed little from his advisories to Metz fifteen years before; referring specifically to George Dorsey's Peruvian mummy materials that had been so popular at the Chicago Fair, Putnam was encouraging and respectful but clearly directive to the veteran Bandelier:

You know what we are after at the American Museum is a thoroughly scientific collection; and we are very anxious that you should make a very large collection from each burial place; it is only in this way that we can illustrate the whole subject. Specimens picked up here and there ... really give us little information of the life history of the people, whereas objects found in each grave when kept together tell a wonderfully interesting story, and if we thus have the contents of a large number of graves we can reconstruct the past life of the people in a way that never can be done with a heterogeneous collection.

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Excerpted from Coming of Age in Chicago by Curtis M. Hinsley, David R. Wilcox. Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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