“Married to the Field: Gender, Authority, and Institutional Culture at the Field Museum during the ‘Heller Affair.’”

Matthew Laubacher

In 1925, the Field Museum instructed its Assistant Curator for Mammals, Edmund Heller, to lead an African expedition to observe and collect gorilla specimens. He requested, and attained, permission for his wife, Hilda Hempl Heller, a microbiologist and emerging naturalist, to accompany him on the expedition. Sending both Hellers was seemingly beneficial to the museum: Heller was an accomplished expeditionary naturalist with extensive collecting experience in Africa, and Hempl Heller’s expertise had been invaluable on previous expeditions. After a promising start, the expedition ended in explosive allegations: she accused him of having a psychotic break, needing time in a sanitarium, and threatening her life. Alarmed, the Field Museum demoted Heller and gave her command of the expedition only to reverse course once Heller protested, accusing Hempl Heller of betrayal, mutiny, and referring to her as a “villainous snake.” Hempl Heller fled Africa for Chicago, where she met with Museum administration to discuss the situation. Shortly thereafter, Heller was abruptly recalled and summarily forced to resign – officially due to sloppy accounting on the expedition, but unofficially due to the Museum administration’s embarrassment about the affair and the surrounding negative publicity. Later correspondence reveals that Heller’s inclusion of Hempl Heller on expeditions was due as much to his possessive and paternalistic mindset as it was for her scientific expertise.

The “Heller affair” sheds light on contemporary attitudes of gender vis-à-vis patriarchal, scientific, and institutional authority, and demonstrates how the Field Museum enabled – and later, exacerbated – a toxic situation half a world away.

“‘A Perfect Birthday Present from the American People to Themselves’: Shaping the National Air and Space Museum, 1969–1972”

Jieun Shin (University of Minnesota)

Planning the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) of the Smithsonian Institution from 1946 to 1976 reflected the shifting balance between displaying aeronautics and space science as commemoration and education. While the earliest attempt to build the National Air Museum in 1946 and consequent exhibit plans in the 1950s sought to memorialize American technological prowess, growing public antagonism to military-related technology during the 1960s pushed advocates to emphasize public education. Despite having an impressive collection of aeronautical memorabilia, the museum took more than twenty years to gain Congressional authorization due to limited staffing, competition with other Smithsonian projects, and budgetary limitations due to the Vietnam War. In 1969, in the wake of the successful Moon landing, the media, military, and Congress pushed the Smithsonian into action. To respond to the public and political pressure, the Smithsonian integrated the two missions of the museum, commemoration and education, to promote an appropriation bill to build the NASM in 1972. First, the Smithsonian linked the opening of the NASM in July 1976, which represented America’s great technological achievements from the Wright Brothers to Apollo, to the bicentennial celebration on the National Mall. In addition, the Smithsonian highlighted NASM’s new role in public education in the Space Age by including a planetarium as “a powerful teaching tool to explain the relationship of man to his universe.” Thus, the final plan for the NASM reflected how technology could be used not only to celebrate but also to educate about America’s air and space heritage.

“North American World's Fairs and the Re-Invention of the Science Museum in the 1960s”

Arne Schirrmacher (Humboldt University, Berlin)

Focusing on the United States and Canada the question is addressed to which extent world’s fairs contributed to new ways of display in science museums of the 1960s. With the 1967 Canadian Centennial not only Expo 67 in Montreal showcased science and technology but also Ottawa’s new Science and Technology Museum as well as the Ontario Science Center, which opened two years late in 1969 and which was one of the first of its kind. At the same time San Francisco’s Exploratorium was hailed as a novel kind of a Museum of Science and Art, with a strong focus on perception, and became the model of what today has spread worldwide as science centers. While for Canada the simultaneity of world’s fair and new museum conceptions is apparent, I will show that also in the US new institutions like the Exploratorium, the Pacific Science Center and even the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology of 1964 (now National Museum of American History) have strong connections to the 1960s North American world’s fairs which took place in Seattle 1962, New York 1964 and Montreal 1967. Ultimately, it was the reaction to the Sputnik shock and, at least for the US, a failed exhibiting strategy at the first postwar Expo at Brussels in 1958, which reinvigorated science display techniques at the 1960s North American fairs and in museums, including interactive and participatory science centers.