‘A Most Complete Whaling Museum’: Profiting from the Past on Nantucket Island

Abstract

The Nantucket Historical Association found itself by 1930 suddenly transformed from a grass-roots collective to a modern nonprofit organization host to the ambitious new Nantucket Whaling Museum. The change owed largely to president William F. Macy, who promoted the museum as entrée into the nation's rising heritage tourism industry. And yet, by merit of its concern with a seafaring past inextricably bound with maritime labor and global economies, the museum unwittingly complicated the romantic portrayals of ships and their captains favored by local tourism boosters. Its core collection, for instance, a vast assemblage of industrial whaling tools donated by Progressive reformer Edward Sanderson, showcased the hard lives of workaday sailors. This article examines Macy's vision for Nantucket's past and how he sought to ensure that it would remain profitable, history notwithstanding. We discover how moments of institutional change can redistribute historical authority in ways that have considerable long-term impacts on museums and their publics.