Shuttered Presidential Libraries and Blinkered Museum Trustees

Update on the Wadsworth Atheneum, and federal museums and libraries beset by COVID hysteria and woke poison

L ast week, I wrote about the Baltimore Museum of Art’s new racial initiative, which axes its mission as an art museum, and the Met’s newest work of art, a For Sale sign slapped on its vaults. With $4 billion in the bank and an army of fundraisers, you see, it thinks it needs to sell art from its collection to balance its budget.

These aren’t the only places in the country making good museum practices an ugly burlesque.

If there were a class called “Serving the Public 101,” federal museums and America’s presidential museums and libraries would flunk with flying red, white, and blue. Federal government museums — the Smithsonian — were the very last to reopen after a year-and-a-half COVID holiday from the public that, by the way, does the heavy lifting tax-wise. Fat paychecks and fat pension schemes for the D.C. lucky duckies went untouched. With no public and with compromised access to collections, files, and libraries, not much work was possible.

See more

The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more. (via @RpwWilliams)https://t.co/k9X3u4Suas pic.twitter.com/gWYOeEh4vu

— Byron York (@ByronYork) July 15, 2020

Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, though. In the middle of the COVID lockdowns, the National Museum of African American History and Culture developed a race-based educational microsite called, and I quote, “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness.” “Independence and autonomy,” “objective, rational, linear thinking,” “hard work,” “holidays based on Christian religion,” even politeness, and “the King’s English,” meaning grammar, are tokens of “white culture.”

Nice. Or it’s bad to be nice. It’s good to be rude. Plus, Christmas is canceled. And “emphasis on scientific method,” you know, things such as “cause and effect” and “quantitative evidence,” are racially tinged, too. So much for “follow the science.” The page soon was extracted, with a bland, amorphous apology but no consequences for the racist staff that composed it.

Are people there stupid? Do they live in a bubble? “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness” is pure poison. Someone needs to call 1-800-REALITY and ask for an emergency intervention. Or, now that the museum is open, pick a dozen visitors from all races and show them this stuff. They’ll think it’s crazy. And this came from a leading American museum?

Most of our presidential libraries, operated by the National Archives and Records Administration, are still closed. The Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, Carter, Ford, and Bush No. 1 and Bush No. 2 museums and libraries are still closed. The Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton museums and libraries are partly open, or at least their exhibition spaces are open.

There’s been some programming, but clearly lots of government employees are getting paid for doing next to nothing. Dr. Swampy gave an online lecture on COVID for the LBJ library yesterday. How fitting. Fauci, cheerleader and starring player in the biggest case of government malfeasance and duplicity since the Vietnam War, speaks at the library honoring the mastermind of . . . the Vietnam War! I’d call it poetic, but that would constitute a grisly assault on rhyme. And how fitting. Dr. Geezer started working for the federal government in 1968, just as LBJ and his crew of Vietnam truth deniers were about to get outta Dodge.

Aside from an online talk or two, these museums and libraries, keepers of our history, have gone dark while the staff has gone to the beach.

The Clinton library is run by the Clinton Foundation, though most of its operations benefit from federal largess. During COVID, its money laundromat, influence-peddling shop, and hack employment office never closed. Only joking! Well, maybe not. For the Clintons, making money is a 24/7 operation. Theirs is a greed not even the bubonic plague could disrupt.

Personally, I think these institutions have wandered from their original role as archive repositories and little museums and become, instead, temples to big egos.

When Harry Truman left office in 1953, he took the train back to Independence, Mo., and his modest home. He lived off his Social Security check and Army pension until Congress passed a law giving former presidents their own pension system.

Barack Obama? He is nearly a billionaire and owns mansions in Washington, Honolulu, and Martha’s Vineyard. His pyramid in Chicago, the Barack Obama Presidential Center, will cost $830 million, up from an initial cost of $500 million, that is, when it wasn’t shovel-ready. It’s trashing historic and lovely Jackson Park, too. Its famous Women’s Garden and May McAdams Garden, dating to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, were both destroyed, and hundreds of mature trees got the chain-saw treatment to make way for the Obama complex.

Since these presidential libraries and museums have been closed for so long, it’s a good time to take a fiscal whack at what has become Nero-scale toots and parking lots for cronies. They’re meant to promote original, objective research. They’ve become image-massage parlors. I was a trustee of the Coolidge Foundation for years. Working with the State of Vermont, it runs the Coolidge homestead in Plymouth and stewards a big part of Coolidge’s archives. I can assure you that its expenditures over the past ten years add up to 1/100th of what the Basilica of St. Barry costs. That’s Coolidge frugality in action.

A few months ago, I wrote a story exposing the tightfistedness, hubris, and yahooism of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s trustees. It’s one of the country’s greatest museums, with a glorious collection and, historically, a cutting-edge exhibition program. It’s got lineage as America’s oldest civic museum, but being located in once-rich, once-important Hartford, its finances have followed the city’s slide. I focused on the downfall of six directors who couldn’t fulfill the board’s pie-in-the-sky dreams, negotiate its mania for control, or pry their wallets open. In April this year, it lost yet another director, the very capable Thomas Loughman.

I’ve looked at the board’s giving. When the museum did its last renovation, it relied on largess from the Connecticut legislature to pay for it. Board members were conspicuously absent. Historically, the museum has relied on big corporate gifts and gifts from Hartford’s old Yankee aristocracy. Hartford’s insurance companies have mostly moved or been bought by companies in Des Moines, the new insurance capital of the world. Its rich WASPs have either died or moved to Florida.

Trustees over the years have developed a culture of expecting others to give. Once they were all giants. Now, they’re just not people of consequence.

The board is notorious for wanting cost-free control, and control by the petty nobles in Hartford’s western suburbs. Get some rich people from Fairfield County, they’ve told a succession of directors. Get a printing press. Drill for oil in Bushnell Park. No, they say, fossil fuels! Verboten! Build windmills! Anything but expect the board to give.

Years ago, George David, the head of United Technologies and chairman of the Atheneum board, brought a cadre of rich, ultra-connected New Yorkers like Aggie Gund and Gabriella De Ferrari to the board. The Atheneum, though in Hartford, is an attractive place for the national art elite. The locals rebelled. They liked the New York dough but not the New Yorkers’ input. After months of tension, the New York people and David, the one corporate titan left in Hartford, quit in a huff. Clodhopper rule restored, but don’t ask them for money.

Last spring, trustees, among them the chairman of the board, told the Hartford Courant, the region’s big newspaper, that the museum “feels like an old museum that hasn’t changed in decades.” Another trustee said the building looked unwelcoming, like a medieval castle with a moat. Another told the paper the museum was failing black and Hispanic audiences by not doing ethnic programming, as if that’s the only programming they want or can understand. How insulting. And don’t ask them for money.

Rule No. 1 for museum trustees: You never diss your museum to the press. Trustees air their grievances at board meetings or among themselves. The board, having just gotten bad publicity for losing yet another director, at least had the sense to be aghast. Out the door the dolt board chairman went.

The acting director now is a trustee, Jeffrey Brown, who has no museum or art-history experience. He works for Paul Newman’s food company. I worry about that. My dessert of choice is Fig Newmans, organic, low-calorie, tasty, and wholesome.

Brown must be busy, since he doesn’t know anything about museums. He’s got a steep learning curve. Last week, the village store in ye olde Arlington, Vt., ran out of Fig Newmans. So did Hannaford’s in Bennington, the big supermarket in our market town. Evidently, in Brown’s absence, no one is minding the cookie sheet.

My story on the Atheneum is unusual since I have so much insider information about this and many other museums. It’s a small world. I’m old, forget nothing, have a platform, and coddle neither the doings of fools nor the tricks of charlatans. The Atheneum’s board found itself in my unforgiving sights when it parted ways with Loughman because, the board chairman felt, he wasn’t pushing a race-obsessed agenda. Mostly limousine liberals — or used-Subaru liberals since they’re cheap — the board wanted the museum to be remade into a community center and a temple to virtue-signaling, and, by the way, don’t ask them for money.

Fig Newman shortages aside, I thought about the Atheneum this week when I read the museum’s ad for a development director. Wait a minute, I thought. The museum doesn’t have a director and, I presume, is looking for a proper one, say, an art historian, not someone in the business of making cookies, pizza, tomato sauce, and dog food. The board doesn’t have a museum director but, before it hires one, it’s hiring a development director whose essential job is working with the museum director before it has hired a new director? That’s brilliant trusteeship, if you want both hires to fail.

Nothing better says “you’ll have no power” than saddling a new director with a head fundraiser he or she hasn’t hired and might not like. If there’s a pair that essentially needs to work in tandem in a museum, it’s the director and the development director. Curators can wander off, needing the slap of firm directorial government now and then, but the museum director and development director need to be in sync, all the time.

Not for this gang of West Hartford hayseeds. I read the job description and requirements. Very standard language, which means very disingenuous. The board hired a search firm that probably isn’t in on the board’s “ask someone else, but don’t ask us” fundraising policy. The search firm as well as the candidates it attracts are about to get a good lesson in bait and switch. The board wants a miracle worker for a development director. It wants to keep control over fundraising. It wants to continue to enjoy the prestige of running one of New England’s premier art museums without paying the piper as trustees do at most museums.

And, once you’ve hired the poor chumps you’ve doomed to failure, do me a favor: Free Jeffrey Brown. He needs to get back to baking. Newman-O’s, Strawberry Newmans, and those disgusting crème-filled vanilla Newman cookies just aren’t doin’ it for a certain art critic in the Green Mountains.