“They are Hauling off Bits of Texas”: James E. Pearce and the Effort to Establish a State Museum

Abstract

“They are Hauling off Bits of Texas”:James E. Pearce and the Effort to Establish a State Museum Lynn Denton (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution James EPearce, the first director of the Texas Memorial Museum. UT Texas Memorial Museum Photograph Collection, di_10413, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin. [End Page 146] An undated newspaper clipping glued in a scrapbook in the files of the Texas Memorial Museum captures the driving purpose and sense of urgency of University of Texas at Austin (UT) faculty member and anthropologist James Edwin Pearce to establish a state museum. For more than seventeen years, between 1919 and 1936, in hundreds of speeches, newspaper interviews, articles, pamphlets, and letters, Pearce advocated the essential instructional and educational function of museums in society. He called on individual citizens, educators, organizations, and elected officials to keep historic, scientific, and private collections within the state. As he observed researchers from “the East and the West” hauling bits of Texas away to universities and museums elsewhere, “Dr. Pearce [thought] something ought to be done.”1 Pearce almost saw success in the 40th and 41st Texas Legislatures, of 1927 and 1929 respectively, but his vision for a UT-based state museum was not realized until 1936 amid the Texas Centennial preparations. The groundbreaking for that institution, the Texas Memorial Museum, occurred on June 11, 1936, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt triggered a remote controlled detonation from his railroad car at East Avenue and Fourth Street in Austin.2 A little more than two years later, and [End Page 147] only two weeks before the public opening, James E. Pearce, the museum’s director, died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack.3 Pearce is now almost completely forgotten. Commemorative newspaper coverage and public remarks for the temporary opening held the November after his death marked the beginning of a shift in public remembrance of the museum’s origins, reporting that: “Mr. Pearce was assisted by the American Legion centennial committee which was a vital force in getting the movement started for the Texas Memorial Museum.”4 This wording echoed Gov. James V. Allred’s museum cornerstone dedication the previous December, when he emphasized and heightened the role of the American Legion. Pearce was not mentioned once in Allred’s speech.5 When the UT Law School outgrew its original law building, it was remodeled and renamed Pearce Hall in 1954, but demolished twenty years later for the construction of the Graduate School of Business. The Texas Memorial Museum’s scientific monograph series that partially carried his name, the Pearce-Sellards Series, ceased publication in the mid-1980s. The junior high school named in his honor, opening to architectural design accolades in 1959, became one of Austin’s most beleaguered schools at the end of the twentieth century and now has a new name as the Young Women’s Leadership Academy. Eighty years after the Texas Centennial, the museum he finally saw completed is struggling to remain open.6 Research, analysis, and discussions of forgotten histories often center on oppression, gender, class and race struggle, and the displaced or dispossessed. That is not James E. Pearce’s story, and yet this particular erasure of history, this forgetting, is a reminder of other histories that are elided in the reshaping of public memory and spaces. The trajectory of his museum project takes place in the early days of the professionalization of the museum field and within the context of the early years of anthropology and history at the University of Texas, among now iconic faculty members and presidents—J. Frank Dobie, Roy Bedichek, H. Y. Benedict, Charles W. Ramsdell, and W. J. Battle. James Edwin Pearce, described as both stoic and extremely sociable, was “as much at home kidding in a cow-lot as he was at ease in the Town and [End Page 148] Gown Club or the university classroom.”7 Born in 1868 in Person County, North Carolina, he was the third son in a farming family that relocated to Hunt County, Texas, in 1871. After completing high school in Campbell (east of Greenville), he remained there as a teacher for...