Problems in Exhibiting Labor in Museums and a Technological Fix

Abstract

Museum Commentary PROBLEMS IN EXHIBITING LABOR IN MUSEUMS AND A TECHNOLOGICAL FIX LAURENCE F. GROSS In the United States, few museum exhibits address labor or labor history, a situation that persists for at least two practical reasons. First, while people—laborers—are certainly tangible and visible, much of what is meant by the verb “to labor” is neither. The act of laboring cannot be contained in a glass case or framed on a wall. Film and video can capture only a small part of this experience. Furthermore, since most people are familiar with only a few types of labor, the nature and significance of this complex activity cannot be properly understood in the absence of a comprehensive treatment that consid­ ers it in the broadest technological context. In an exhibit, themes related to labor may be addressed by means of “flat” artifacts such as picket signs and printed work rules and by means of audio and visual media, but labor as a set of actions remains absent. Second, the nature of labor represents the essence of the workers’ experience and their place in society. The act of labor itself, the relative degree to which it is independent or controlled, its rewards and status—all these are indicative of its definition and evaluation by society. Museums where one might expect labor to be treated with due depth and sensitivity are those devoted to the history of technology and industry. Generally, however, this has meant the history of the implements of technology and industry. In the United States, such museums grew out of the same impulses that were behind the establishment of other museums: museums, as Mark Lilia puts it, “would provide the moral uplift needed to raise the common man [read: the urban worker and immigrant] to a level of culture at which he could be expected to act like a citizen.”1 Technological museums came into existence when industrialists perceived that a type of Dr. Gross was chief curator at the Museum of American Textile History in North Andover, Massachusetts. 'Mark Lilia, “The Great Museum Muddle,” New Republic, April 8, 1985, p. 29.© 1993 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/93/3402-0006$01.00 392 Problems in Exhibiting Labor in Museums 393 enterprise associated with an earlier era had passed, or was passing, from the scene. The Henry Ford Museum, Slater Mill Historic Site, the Hagley Museum, and the Merrimack Valley Textile Museum (now the Museum of American Textile History) all followed this pattern. Similarly, the colonial revival had earlier spawned places such as Colonial Williamsburg and Old Sturbridge Village when a romanti­ cized view of a vanished preindustrial era appeared to be a valuable means of “Americanizing” newcomers. Ironically, the industries depicted at such places as Henry Ford and Slater Mill were a product of both capitalist enterprise and an inde­ pendent, highly skilled workforce—a workforce whose independence and skills capitalists in the new age had sought to eradicate. Machinists, powdermakers, and woolen workers were in command of the knowl­ edge of process and regulated—even contracted for—production. In­ terest in memorializing this stage of American industrialization fol­ lowed in the wake of Taylorist successes in concentrating technical knowledge and production in the hands of management. Presumably this transformation in power relationships gave modern industrialists the luxury of celebrating an industrial past they had displaced. In the years since museums first became interested in industrial artifacts, their purposes seem to have changed little. Like late-19thcentury art museums, their aims center on imparting suitable mes­ sages among what the director of a German museum recently called “the great vulgar masses” and a British counterpart described as “the wretched visitor.” Technological museums were designed to foster the perpetuation of the industrial system that had brought them into being by portraying it in eulogistic terms. Explanations of processes within an unexamined celebration of progress predominated and still predominate. The ultimate effect of such exhibitions is far from celebratory, however; rather, it demeans the true significance of technology and condescends to the museum audience. The presen­ tations neglect that key facet without which any technology is incomplete—the people who relate to...