Organized in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, The Great American Hall of Wonders at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) celebrated the United States as an exceptional nation. Spanning the entire nineteenth century, but primarily the transcontinental, expansionist period of 1826–1876, the exhibition represented the nation’s citizens in possession of unparalleled democratic liberties and socio-economic opportunities, as they utilized their technological and scientific ingenuity to harness an abundance of natural resources.

Echoing Philadelphia’s diverse Centennial Exhibition of 1876, SAAM’s thematically arranged rooms, formerly home to the Patent Office, displayed portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings next to manufactured artifacts, patent models, scientific illustrations, documentary photographs, and engineering drawings. Ink sketches by painter-inventor Samuel F. B. Morse featured caricature heads intermingled with drawings of machinery gear and the design for a transatlantic telegraph cable. Morse’s wooden prototypes for telegraph transmitters and receivers appeared next to Philadelphia printmaker John Sartain’s Men of Progress (1863), a mezzotint reproduction of Christian Schussele’s group portrait honoring Morse and other distinguished American men of genius. Such images surely inspired the young Thomas Eakins, who was represented in the show by two mechanical drawings from the early 1860s.

Wood sculptor William Rush’s majestic, female personification of Philadelphia’s waterworks, The Schuylkill River Freed (1825), visually summarizes nineteenth-century American industrialism’s confident, neoclassical merger of natural, human, and machine forms and the era’s perceived harmony between fine and useful arts. This gleaming, white-painted cedar sculpture, situated near the end of the exhibition, complemented the monumental self-portrait by Charles Willson Peale, Artist in His Museum (1822), which theatrically opened the show. Peale’s linear perspective grid of animal cages and gold-framed portraits opposite a mastodon skeleton suggests the federalist motto of e pluribus unum or Americans’ ingenious mastery over continental diversity. A number of exhibition objects implicitly affirm the Enlightenment legacy of Philadelphia, its key role in advancing arts, sciences, and technology in tandem with that city’s special identity as historic birthplace of American democracy.

Oddly, however, little was said of this colonial-era, Enlightenment legacy either in the exhibition or in curator Claire Perry’s single-authored catalogue, which does not provide a complete representation of exhibition objects. Perry’s thematic essays link an American penchant for science and technology with nationalist zeal for political freedom and democratic liberties. She suggests that Peale himself was the energizing point of origin for Americans’ pursuit of science and technology: “the spark of interest that he [Peale] had fanned for so long combusted into an all-consuming American passion for science and mechanical invention” (9). Perry pits Peale against the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, who mistakenly envisioned America as an inhospitable, barren wilderness. Generalizing and broadening this opposition to European biases, Perry pointedly contrasts Peale’s egalitarian, democratic museum with the decadent, aristocratic “Old World’s Wunderkammern and ‘cabinets of curiosities,’ chambers where princes assembled fine paintings, unicorn horns, gem-studded automata, and other treasures” (4).

Perry briefly discusses Peale’s reliance upon the Linnaean system of botanical classification, but never fully identifies the Swedish natural philosopher Carl Linnaeus and does not credit the importance of European Enlightenment science for learned colonial and post-revolutionary Americans. She ignores the transatlantic impact of Britain’s Industrial Revolution and the institutionalization of Baconian-Newtonian science in London’s Royal Society, which communicated and collaborated with an international network of natural philosophers, inventors, and inquisitive virtuosi, including Americans who benefited from British arts, manufacturing, and science organizations before and after the Revolution. Taking inventory of the chemistry equipment represented in an 1839 anonymous portrait, Man of Science (fig. 3), Perry thus neglects to attribute a prominently placed, three-necked “Woulff bottle” (12) to the English chemist Peter Woulff (d. 1806), a Royal Society fellow.

In arbitrarily distancing Peale’s museum from Europe, Great Britain, and America’s colonial past, Perry fails to mention the American Philosophical Society, which evolved from Benjamin Franklin’s Junto, a scientific, philosophical society founded in 1727. The society’s Philosophical Hall had been home to Peale’s museum from 1794 to 1802, when the museum finally moved into the Pennsylvania State House or Philadelphia’s historic Independence Hall. Peale’s symbolically loaded move solidified his public identification with the Founding Fathers. Claiming Peale’s museum as a cultural point of origin for the young republic, Perry cites the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents to cast in quasi-scientific terms the United States as an imaginative invention, “a Great Experiment for promoting human happiness” (x).

While some display signs announced general categories devoted to zoology, botany, meteorology, geology, water power, and “American ingenuity,” Perry’s curatorial choices and catalogue essays primarily focused on six specific themes. By virtue of sheer scale or grandeur, three natural phenomena—buffalo herds, Niagara Falls, and giant sequoias—assert America’s uniqueness as a great “hall of wonders” (xi). Meanwhile, three mechanical, utilitarian devices—clocks, guns, and railroads—signify nineteenth-century Americans’ aggressive pursuit of happiness via an accelerated race to claim national space and resources no matter the unfortunate destructive consequences for whomever or whatever stood in the way.

The exhibition acknowledged but minimized these negative consequences by invoking the patriotic theme of American progress and ingenuity. Potentially disturbing for some, the exhibition’s buffalo room includes a well-worn buffalo hide upon which visitors were invited to sit while viewing pictures by George Catlin, John Mix Stanley, and other artists of the American West. Mid-nineteenth-century hunting images suggested the bountiful, “egalitarian availability of buffalo” (119). In 1887, with the near extinction of the great bison, British photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured the sequential motion of a lone galloping buffalo from Philadelphia’s Zoological Gardens (fig. 80). Perry aptly observes how Muybridge’s multiple shots of the buffalo-in-motion poignantly recreates the illusion of a restored herd, but she then blithely states that this “vivid record of soon-to-be-extinct animals” still manifests an “innovative technique,” which appealed to the “locomotive” character of Americans and furthered the “progress of the United States” (130). Ignoring Muybridge’s English nationality and his eventual return to England in 1900, Perry insists upon the photographer’s “American ingenuity” (128).

Beginning with her chapter on clocks and watches, Perry repeatedly proclaims the virtues of “Democratic Time,” which “dawned over the land” when American “citizens threw off their obligations to foreign masters and set about using their hours as they saw fit” (25). Of course, this temporal empowerment, purportedly “expanding social mobility and economic opportunity” (25), could at times seem despotic, as when Perry provides an 1851 timetable for the factory bells at Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills (fig.17), a telling document that was not displayed in the actual exhibition, or when she illustrates the humorous consequences of inhuman railroad schedules with A ‘Limited Express’: ‘Five Seconds for Refreshments’, a Currier and Ives lithographic satire showing passengers at a train stop chaotically running, pushing, and falling over one another for “Lunch on the American Plan” (fig.82).

“Democratic Time” euphemistically masks the remorseless production schedules and market demands of industrial capitalism. Perry’s refusal to use the word “capitalist” to name the nineteenth century’s socio-economic transformations enables an ideological evasion of class conflict. “Democratic Time” expands and diffuses moral blame for the accompanying social ills of American progress. As Perry states, “Naysayers didn’t stand a chance against the restive Americans who were calling out a resounding ‘yes!’ to the railroad companies” (137), as train speeds accelerated to potentially dangerous levels. From Perry’s democratic perspective, the American people as a whole must shoulder primary blame for any evils incurred by socio-economic progress, since corporate owners merely followed the imperious demands of the democratic majority. Only the “serene immobility” of California’s lofty, ancient sequoia trees, celebrated in Albert Bierstadt’s sublime views, “seemed to take a stand against the lickety-split schemes of Democratic Time” (167).

Patriotic, populist, corporate pandering mars the value of both the exhibition and its catalogue. The ample display of rifles and revolvers will surely appeal to gun enthusiasts. However, while Perry argues that Samuel Colt’s Connecticut gun factory was a “hall of wonders . . . filled with a vast and obedient army of jigging machines,” it is hard to see expressions of wonderment in the faces of Colt factory workers photographed operating the “magical” machinery (94, fig. 54). Twenty years ago, SAAM’s landmark The West as America exhibition critically deconstructed the ideology of westward expansion. Senior curator William H. Truettner’s trenchant exhibition interpreted both mythic paintings and Colt revolvers as instruments of imperial domination. In depressing contrast, typifying the organizing thesis of this show, Perry’s praise for Samuel Colt and “The Peacemaker” (77) defers to corporate capitalism, the ingenious servant of American democracy.