The Stranger and the Statesman

by Burleigh, Nina

• ISBN13: 9780060002411
• ISBN10: 0060002417
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-09-11
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

<p>In her illuminating and dramatic biography <i>The Stranger and the Statesman</i>, Nina Burleigh reveals a little-known slice of social and intellectual history in the life and times of the man responsible for the creation of the United States' principal cultural institution, the Smithsonian.</p> <p>It was one of the nineteenth century's greatest philanthropic gifts -- and one of its most puzzling mysteries. In 1829, a wealthy English naturalist named James Smithson left his library, mineral collection, and entire fortune to the "United States of America, to found ... an establishment for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men" -- even though he had never visited the United States or known any Americans. In this fascinating book, Burleigh pieces together the reclusive benefactor's life, beginning with his origins in the splendidly dissipated eighteenth-century aristocracy as the Paris-born bastard son of the first Duke of Northumberland and a wild adventuress who preserved for her son a fortune through gall and determination.</p> <p>The book follows Smithson through his university years and his passionate study of minerals across the European continent during the chaos of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Detailed are his imprisonment -- simply for being an Englishman in the wrong place, his experiences in the gambling dens of France, and his lonely and painstaking scientific pursuits.</p> <p>After Smithson's death, nineteenth-century American politicians were given the task of securing his half-million dollars -- the equivalent today of fifty million -- and then trying to determine how to increase and diffuse knowledge from the muddy, brawling new city of Washington. Burleigh discloses how Smithson's bequest was nearly lost due to fierce battles among many clashing Americans -- Southern slavers, state's rights advocates, nation-builders, corrupt frontiersmen, and Anglophobes who argued over whether a gift from an Englishman should even be accepted. She also reveals the efforts of the unsung heroes, mainly former president John Quincy Adams, whose tireless efforts finally saw Smithson's curious notion realized in 1846, with a castle housing the United States' first and greatest cultural and scientific establishment.</p>

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
The Body Snatchers	p. 1
The Duke and the Widow	p. 19
Nobody's Child	p. 46
Choosing Science	p. 82
Discoveries and Revolutions	p. 117
The Gift	p. 151
105 Sacks of Gold	p. 181
"A Rattlesnake's Fang"	p. 206
For the Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge	p. 228
The Smithson Mystery	p. 252
Notes	p. 271
Bibliography	p. 289
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

The Stranger and the Statesman
James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America's Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian

Chapter One

The Body Snatchers

Alexander Graham Bell did not spend the Christmasseason of 1903 in the festive tradition. Instead the inventor of the telephone and his wife, Mabel, passed the holiday engagedin a ghoulish Italian adventure involving a graveyard, old bones, andthe opening of a moldy casket. They had traveled by steamship fromAmerica at their own expense and made their way down to the ItalianMediterranean by train. The entire route was gloomy, as befittheir mission. The feeble European winter sun dwindled at fouro'clock every afternoon and rain fell incessantly, but the Bells wereundeterred. There was little time. They were in Europe to disinterthe body of a minor English scientist who had died three-quarters ofa century before and bring it back to America.

The couple arrived at Genoa a few days before Christmas andchecked into the Eden Palace Hotel perched on the edge of themedieval port. The hotel was a pink, luxurious resort in summer, butin winter, drafty and exposed. The city itself spilled down the steephillsides to the edge of the sea, a shadowy warren of fifteenth-centurycathedrals and narrow, twisting alleys that had seen generations of plague, power, and intrigue. Once an international center of commerceand art, with palazzi and their fragrant gardens stretching tothe water's edge, Genoa in winter at the turn of the twentieth centurywas a grim place with a harbor full of black, coal-heaped barges.

A steady rain had been falling on France and Italy for days, inGenoa whipped almost vertical by the tramontane, icy winds thatblow down from the Alps into the Mediterranean in the winter.Mabel Bell had been hoping to alleviate the dolefulness of theduty by touring the city, but because of the weather she was unableto walk the alleys and visit the pre-Renaissance palazzi onceinhabited by Genoa's doges. She was forced to sit in the grandlobby of the Eden Palace Hotel, watching the palms beyond therattling panes get thrashed in the wind, and wait as her husbandsorted through the tangled bureaucracy involved in disinterring abody in Italy.

The Bells had come to Italy in haste because the remains ofJames Smithson -- minor eighteenth-century mineralogist, bastardson of the first Duke of Northumberland, and mysterious benefactorof the Smithsonian Institution -- were in peril. Seventy-sevenyears before, Smithson had, for unknown reasons, bequeathed hisfortune -- the equivalent of fifty million dollars in current money -- to the United States to fund at Washington, D.C., an institution, inhis words, "for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men."Now the bones of this strange and still little-understood man wereabout to be blasted into the oblivion of the Mediterranean Sea.Smithsonian officials had tried in early years to learn more aboutthe obscure Englishman, but their attempts were largely fruitlessand they abandoned the effort by 1903. To make matters worse,almost all of Smithson's personal effects and papers had beendestroyed in a fire at the Smithsonian in 1865. To lose his bones tothe sea would put an ignominious coda on the stranger's murky lifestory.

The old British cemetery where he was buried occupied apicturesque plot of ground on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean,but it was adjacent to a vast marble quarry. Blasting work toexpand the port had been under way for years. The surface of thegraveyard belonged to the British, but the hundreds of vertical feetof earth below extending to sea level belonged to the Italians. In1900 the owners of the marble quarry had informed the Britishconsulate that by the end of 1905 their blasting for marble wouldfinally demolish the cemetery. When the Bells arrived, some coffinshad already been dislodged from their graves, tipped over, andcrashed into the gaping void below. The Italians were soon to evictall of the English dead in similar fashion.

By 1903 Alexander Graham Bell was fifty-six years old and oneof America's foremost scientists, a genuine celebrity whose namecaused audiences to cheer and applaud. The telephone he'dinvented in his youth had changed the world radically in ways thathe and his contemporaries understood and the American peopleappreciated. He had become a wealthy man because of the phone,but he never stopped inventing. He was responsible for a variety of"firsts," including the first hydrofoil, the first respirator, the firstpractical phonograph, and the first metal detector (the lastdesigned in frantic haste to locate the assassin's bullet in PresidentJames Garfield), and he was involved with early experiments inflight. Bell was devoted to science as a kind of spiritual calling, andin his later years, his white beard and dignified bearing, coupledwith his sonorous voice, gave him a Mosaic air. When he realizedhis aerodrome, a watercraft on pontoons, was not airworthy, hewrote: "There are no unsuccessful experiments. Every experimentcontains a lesson. If we stop right here, it is the man that is unsuccessful,not the experiment."

Bell's interest in the fate of Smithson's remains was purelyaltruistic. He was already wealthy and regarded as an Americanhero, and he had nothing to gain in terms of stature by making thejourney himself. The old bones obviously held some scientific interestfor him, but forensic anatomy was not one of his known interests.Rather, Bell, as a man of science, felt a certain spiritual kinshipwith the little-known scientist who had squirreled away a fortuneto give to the United States. The idea of the benefactor's bonesbeing upended into the Mediterranean Sea had piqued him. Hewas the only member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents sufficientlymoved to do anything about it ...

The Stranger and the Statesman
James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America's Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian. Copyright © by Nina Burleigh. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

---

Excerpted from The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America's Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian by Nina Burleigh
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.