A Letter From America #28
Gilder-Lehrman and the
New-York Historical Society
From
the Rare Book Review
For the last twenty years the New-York Historical
Society (they are very insistent on that hyphen) has been the sick man of
American historical institutions. The long record of misjudgment and poor
administration which led up to its first major crisis in 1993 is too intricate
to tell here; if you want to know how to destroy a great institution, read Kevin
M. Guthrie, The New-York Historical Society; Lessons from One Nonprofit’s
Long Struggle for Survival (San Francisco, 1996). This Mellon Foundation
funded report pulls no punches on the story to 1995. Since then the situation
has improved considerably; substantial (but still inadequate) endowment has been
raised, the physical plant restored, and the institution brought back from the
brink.
In fact, things in general are looking up for New-York
Historical on various fronts. Most importantly for the institution, two of the
leaders of Americana collecting, Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, have decided
to move the collections of their joint foundation from the Morgan Library, where
it has been on deposit, to NYHS (also on deposit). For more than a decade Gilder
and Lehrman have been the largest buyers of American historical manuscripts, and
their extraordinary holdings would be a major enhancement to any institution. At
the same time these gentlemen have joined the board, and are urging NYHS to
become more "national" in focus. With their wallets open, there is
little doubt that NYHS will respond; a show on that great Federalist, Alexander
Hamilton, is currently trumpeted by a giant, symbolic, ten dollar bill hanging
from the façade of the building. (I was once in a cab in New York, and got in a
conversation with a Pakistani cabbie about American history. He thought that
Alexander Hamilton was the greatest man in American history. "You know why
he’s on the ten dollar bill, don’t you?" he asked me. "No,
why?" "Because he founded the New York Post!")
This being New York, no good deeds can go
unquestioned. Various parties, and several articles in the New York Times (the
Post doesn’t cover stuff like this without Hamilton there to write the
articles) have questioned the motives of Gilder-Lehrman on two scores; their
supposed conservative bent and its potential influence on the message of the
NYHS, and the perceived shift in focus from an emphasis on the history of New
York to a broader perspective. They argued NYHS was abandoning its
"mission" of covering local history.
The first of these charges is easily refuted by the
record. The Gilder-Lehrman Foundation has funded numerous programs in American
history ranging from institutes at major universities to programs in secondary
education to large book prizes for outstanding works in American history (some
academics, accustomed to being treated like paupers, find it suspicious that
anyone would actually give a $50,000 prize for a good book). In all of these
programs Gilder-Lehrman has been scrupulous in keeping a firewall between their
personal opinions and academic freedom of thought. Nothing happening at NYHS is
likely to change that.
More important, to my mind, is the blindness of the
negative commentators to the real history of the NYHS. From its founding in
1801, the NYHS strove to be exactly what Gilder-Lehrman would like it to be, a national
historical society. It accumulated material relating to every phase of the
history of colonial North America and the United States. If we look at the
buyers at the greatest Americana sale of the 19th century, the
Brinley Sale of 1879-86, we find that the institution casting the widest net was
NYHS. In the mid-20th century, with the great bibliographer R.W.G.
Vail as director, there was no question of the national vision of its
collections and leadership. Take, for example, Gold Fever, Vail’s 1949
exhibition for the centenary of the California Gold Rush. The far-ranging show
demonstrated the reach of the Society’s collections in books, printed
ephemera, prints, newspapers, manuscripts, paintings and photographs- even gold
samples. This is just a single example which could be repeated in virtually
every area and every phase of American history. No researchers and librarians of
that era would have ever doubted what is self-evident from the collections; this
is one of the most important libraries for American history in the United
States.
The narrow, New York City and State focus of NYHS in
the last several decades is the result of its fiscal crises more than a rational
use of its collections. Mr. Gilder and Mr. Lehrman should be applauded, not
attacked, for trying to restore this great resource to its proper scope and
stature.
– William S. Reese