USA > New York > A short history of New York State > Part 67
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Following World War I, interest in the conserving of things artistic grew apace. The Metropolitan Museum of Art now extends for four blocks along Fifth Avenue and welcomes some two million visitors a year. Its Egyptian collection, begun in 1906, is the largest and most representative of its kind in the United States. It also displays extensive Greek and Roman, Near Eastern, and Far Eastern collections. It has a section of decorative arts, of arms and armor, and an American Wing -all this in addition to its main attraction, the superb picture galleries.
The 1940's witnessed a series of collaborative movements, under the leadership of the Metropolitan, of more than passing importance. In 1943 the Whitney Museum of American Art, established in 1931, entered into an agreement with the Metropolitan providing for the eventual housing of the Whitney in the Metropolitan and the enlargement of its modern American collections. This means that the whole history of
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art in America will be represented in one place. In 1947 the Metropolitan entered into an agreement with the Museum of Modern Art, founded in 1929, by which paintings owned by the latter will be sold to the Metropolitan. Finally, in 1947, the Costume Institute moved into the Metropolitan, the latter having acquired it for the purpose of making available to students, designers, and manufacturers their combined resources.
Perhaps best known of New York City's newer museums is the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan. Made possible through the generosity of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., it houses the medieval collection of George Grey Barnard, the sculptor. Some of the city's historic dwellings are also preserved as museums or shrines. Among these are the Lefferts homestead in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, the Edwin Markham home on Staten Island, the Van Cortlandt House in the Bronx, and the Edgar Allan Poe cottage in Fordham. The Jewish Museum, first of its kind in the United States, is located in the former home of Felix Warburg. Opened in 1947, it shows representative works of Jewish life and culture, past and present, illustrating the history and continuity of the Jewish tradition.
One of the most fascinating museums in New York City is the Museum of the City of New York. Here miniature groups depict scenes in the city's history. Art collections of considerable value are owned by the New-York Historical Society, founded in 1804 and enlarged in the late 1930's, by the National Academy of Design, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Portraits of prominent American citizens are assembled in the City Hall of New York, the Borough Hall of Brooklyn, the New-York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York, the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, and the Long Island Historical Society.
There are also important museums and galleries in other parts of the state. Unique among these is the Farmers' Museum at Cooperstown, one of the few genuine folk museums in the western world, one which seeks to re-create the culture, labors, and way of life of the pioneers and their children in upstate New York. Others are the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, the first in this country to organize educational work between the museum and the city's schools; the New York State Historical Association's Fenimore House at Cooperstown; the Albany Institute of History and Art; Binghamton Society of Fine Arts; Arnot Art Gallery of Elmira; the Art Gallery of the James Prendergast Free Library of Jamestown; Fine Arts Building, Heckscher Park, Huntington; Parrish Memorial Art Museum, Southampton; Thomas Moran Memorial Gallery, Guild Hall, East Hampton; Tailor Hart Art Gallery at Vassar College; and Remington Art Memorial, Ogdensburg.
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Like those interested in the preservation of art, those concerned with science and its accomplishments formed societies and established museums and other institutions for the promotion of their interest. In New York City the Botanical Gardens in Bronx Park and in Brooklyn's Prospect Park are not only places of beauty but centers for scientific study. Similarly, the Zoological Gardens in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island afford pleasure and instruction for thousands annually. Oldest, largest, and most important of all the state's scientific institutions is the American Museum of Natural History (1867) facing Central Park West in New York City. Covering twenty-three acres, it is at once a museum, a laboratory, a school, a publishing house, and headquarters for exploring expeditions to every part of the world. The museum is the energizing center of the New York Academy of Sciences, a federation of scientific societies. Scientists plan the expeditions, conduct them, bring back their findings, analyze, classify, and relate their discoveries to other knowledge; publish and disseminate the results of their in- vestigations; and prepare exhibits for display. The miniature wax groups picturing animal life in its appropriate environment-a technique de- veloped by the late Dr. Roy W. Miner-has been extremely useful educationally and has been copied elsewhere. Its collection of dinosaurs and birds are the finest in the world. Close at hand is the museum's Hayden Planetarium opened in 1935. Ultimately, the museum will have a hall of comparative anatomy, a hall of physiological foundations of human and animal behavior, a hall showing the origins and spread of material culture, and other halls which will depict the nature and development of civilization in specific areas. In other words, the museum aims to give man a "conception of the Cosmos and his place in it."
The American Indian collection at this great museum has long been famous but for many years has been rivaled by the Museum of the American Indian at Broadway and 155th Street.
Science museums outside New York City continued to grow and to serve their respective communities. Among the more important of these are the State Museum at Albany, the Buffalo Museum of the Natural Sciences, and the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences. Not only in the last half century but also over a longer span, scientific interest and accomplishment within the state have enormously affected our material life and our culture. The hold of science upon our imagination has not lessened; if anything, it has increased.
In the last half century many Americans believed that natural science provided mankind with the possibility of unlimited material progress. The scientist was an inventor who discovered new products and devised new machines that made life easier for all; and everywhere they looked, New Yorkers could see the beneficent results of the scientists' labors,
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such as plastics, improved means of communication and transportation, "wonder drugs," and energy-giving vitamins. Although many New Yorkers, particularly in the Depression years, attributed unemployment to the increasing application of science to industry, and with the spread of automation in the 1950's many are again haunted by the fear of un- employment, few were or are prepared to reject science's practical achievements. The popular view of the role of science was re-enforced by newspapers and magazines that publicized applied rather than pure science, by industrial firms that spent millions annually on research programs, and by universities that spent larger sums on scientific re- search than on other forms of scholarly activity.
In subsidizing industrial research, New York concerns were in the forefront: the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, the East- man Kodak Company, the Bausch and Lomb Company, the Corning Glass Works, and the General Electric Company among them. The laboratories of the last-named, for example-developed under Charles P. Steinmetz, carried forward under the direction of Dr. Willis R. Whitney, and supporting the work of Dr. Irving Langmuir and scores of others-became one of the world's significant centers of physical research.
The almost universal respect accorded science and scientists by the people of the state had little apparent effect on church membership, which between the world wars increased at practically the same rate as the population. Although the Depression seriously impaired church finances and cut down on the rate of growth in membership, there was a marked revival of church strength and influence during the war years. The statistics of church membership in Table 22 are taken from the United States religions censuses of 1926 and 1936.
Despite the growth in church membership, the influence of organized religion declined precipitously in the years that followed World War I. Many Protestants were no longer concerned with the strict observance of the Sabbath; Sunday movies, despite the opposition of some church groups, had become commonplace; and ministers repeatedly complained from their pulpits that the automobile and the golf course provided Sunday diversions more attractive to many parishioners than church. Since the battle between religion and science had been settled to the satisfaction of the vast majority, religious controversies occurred less frequently and were conducted with less vehemence than in former years. Agnosticism was common enough, especially in the larger centers of population, to go unnoticed, while even those who attended church regularly seemed to lack much of the enthusiasm and intensity that had once been considered an essential ingredient of religious experience.
In an effort to check the declining influence of the churches, many
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Table 22. Church memberships in 1926 and 1936.
1926
1936
Denomination
Churches
Members
Churches
Members
Adventists, Seventh Day
81
5,271
76
5,620
Baptist
857
161,142
694
181,918
Baptist, Negro
111
46,823
165
86,187
Baptist, Seventh-Day
21
2,076
18
1,524
Roman Catholic
1,783
3,115,424
1,757
3,075,428
Christian
62
4,577
59
3,656
Congregational
280
69,187
302
70,164
Disciples
59
12,479
52
10,583
Evangelical
62
7,762
54
7,555
Evangelical Synod
66
23,592
90
34,333
Friends
47
4,868
99
4,999
Lutherans (all bodies )
567
240,672
569
326,393
Methodist Episcopal
1,930
345,307
1,505
301,458
Methodist Protestant
62
3,804
48
3,213
Methodist Wesleyan
81
2,360
58
2,201
Methodist Free
108
3,227
88
3,315
Methodist Negro
142
31,975
14
40,945
Presbyterian
813
243,845
766
233,961
United Presbyterian
63
11,498
70
13,819
Protestant Episcopal
882
354,700
875
349,528
Reformed (Dutch)
294
62,855
277
66,812
Reformed (German)
25
7,105
31
7,644
Unitarian
26
5,144
21
5,788
Universalists
68
8,099
45
6,994
Jewish
1,228
1,899,597
1,560
2,197,418
Church of Christ, Scientist
141
1,530
157
15,875
TOTAL
6,799,146
7,150,501
religious leaders in the state made special efforts to appeal to the more mundane tastes of church members. Practically all urban as well as many rural churches had ambitious social and recreational programs that covered almost every range of activity. Some churches provided their members with psychiatric assistance, others conducted classes in subjects that ranged from dancing to manual training, still others conducted extensive athletic programs. Some established settlement houses, orphanages, clinics, and schools. An exhaustive study of the church and society carried on from 1920 to 1934 by the Institute of Social and Religious Research repeatedly stressed the trend away from orthodoxy toward a ministry of human welfare. Similarly, American Catholics paid less attention to expounding a gospel of hell-fire and damnation and made new efforts in response to the principles of social
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justice emphasized by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Quadrigesimo Anno (1931). The following year the Central Conference of American Rabbis drafted its Program of Social Justice, and the Federal Council of Churches reaffirmed its stand on collective bargaining and social security.
The liberalizing tendency in religion during the last half century was clearly evident in the work of some of the state's great religious leaders. S. Parkes Cadman made the Central Congregational Church of Brooklyn famous through his dynamic radio sermons and his work as a founder and president of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. Riverside Church on Morningside Heights in Man- hattan, opened in 1929, won immediate repute, through the leadership of Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, for its community and interdenominational activities. As pastor of Corpus Christi Church, also in the Morningside area, Father George B. Ford demonstrated the abundant benefits for both the individual and the community which result from putting into prac- tice the principles of social justice expounded by Pope Pius XI. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise's Free Synagogue was the center of many thousands who believed in child labor reform, international peace, improvement of labor laws, and other forms of social legislation. Indeed, throughout the state, social and economic themes became increasingly popular as sermon topics. Prayer meetings often took the form of groups for the discussion of "problems of human relationships."
Outside the old denominations there was also evidence of the growth of the social gospel. The Society of Ethical Culture founded in 1876 by Felix Adler, the Salvation Army, and, more recently, Georgia-born George Baker, who was called Father Divine, won numerous adherents in New York's Harlem and in Negro sections of other cities on a gospel combining religion, morality, and low-cost food and housing.
Although the church seemed less important to New Yorkers than it once had, there was still widespread interest in religious matters. Throughout the 1920's, books on religious subjects enjoyed considerable popularity. Lewis Browne's This Believing World and Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows and The Book Nobody Knows were best- sellers, while in the next decade Lloyd Douglas' Magnificent Obsession and Green Light and Henry S. Link's The Return to Religion attracted numbers of readers. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's first volume of The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941) also emphasized the neces- sity for religious faith.
As they grew more cosmopolitan and worldly, New Yorkers began to give up some of their more earnest and self-conscious efforts at self-improvement. Starting about the year 1874, culture-conscious New Yorkers used to congregate during the summer months along the shores
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of Chautauqua Lake in western New York, where they sipped orange phosphates and were harangued by distinguished ladies and gentlemen on various moral issues. The Chautauqua soon became an institution quite independent of any particular locality; Chautauquas dotted the countryside, and Chautauqua speakers trained for the "circuit" as rigorously as six-day bicycle racers. Ever since the first New England meetinghouse played host to its first visiting preacher, Americans have had a passion for being "edified." The direct ancestor of the Chautauqua was the village Lyceum, where such men as Emerson and Thoreau did not scorn to be heard; and the Chautauqua itself flourished mightily in the days of gaslight and the bustle.
Its place has not really been filled today. The New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 had some Chautauqua aspects, but it was in essence a bigger, noisier, gaudier project, set up to celebrate "A Century of Progress" and drawing on the different cultures of the entire world as well as the marvels of science and of the future. It attracted astronomical numbers of visitors to the site of Flushing Meadows; and it stimulated violently the already-excited imaginations of industrial designers and technological dreamcasters. But it did not have that earnest atmosphere of moral and cultural uplift which is the hallmark of the Chautauqua lecture.
If the New York World's Fair was inspired, in a thoroughly modern way, by nostalgia for the future, a less elaborate gathering, which takes place twice a year, is inspired by nostalgia for the past. The New York Folklore Society not only publishes a quarterly magazine, but foregathers in not-too-solemn conclave, to swap tall tales, sing Revolutionary War ballads, and re-enact Indian legends. For all that it is a highly industrialized state, New York has an immense stock of popular folk materials surviving from the distant past. In the remote corners of the Adirondacks or along the Erie Canal, rich popular legends are cherished. The Folklore Society, in conjunction with the New York State Historical Association, preserves for New Yorkers on records, in museums, and on the printed page, the memory of a cruder and lustier day-the day of Clinton's Big Ditch, of Deerslayer and Joseph Brant and even of Peter Stuyvesant and Henrik Hudson. The books of Walter D. Edmonds (Drums along the Mohawk), Carl Carmer (Listen for a Lonesome Drum, Dark Trees to the Wind), Harold W. Thompson (Body, Boots and Britches), and Samuel Hopkins Adams (Grandfather Tales) have also done much to recreate the flavor of New York's early days.
The WPA's Historical Records Survey, instituted in 1936, enabled relief workers in many counties and local communities of the state to take inventories of public records stored in city-hall cellars, courthouse
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garrets, and library lofts, to index old newspaper files, and to examine business archives and church records. As a consequence, historical material of inestimable value was preserved. In recent years, growing interest in local history has led to the beginning of a movement for the preparation of up-to-date county histories. No account of historical activity in the state during the last half century should omit the ac- complishments of the New York State Historical Association. Founded in 1899 by a group primarily interested in preserving the military history of the Champlain Valley, the Association in 1939 shifted its head- quarters from Ticonderoga to Cooperstown on beautiful Otsego Lake. Here it has increasingly broadened its program by emphasizing social, economic, and cultural aspects of the state's history as well as the military and political. Not only does it operate three museums but also it carries on a vigorous publications program. This includes publishing the well-known quarterly, New York History, sponsoring numerous volumes relating to the history of the state, and publishing The Yorker, a lively journal for the association's growing number of secondary- school members. The association's library is rich with material pertain- ing to the social and cultural history of the state.
The preservation of the past has seemed particularly urgent, because, like many other sections of the nation, New York State seems sometimes on the verge of being suburbanized completely. Both world wars have had as an aftermath building booms; and in both eras, a tawdry, in- efficient, ugly, and thoughtless manner of building has predominated. Suburban architecture, whether it takes the form of the Tudor cottage with flying buttresses, or the ranch-type, split-level, picture-window box with expansion attic and attached breeze-way, is rarely cheerful to contemplate. And even in the splendid office structures of New York City, one might feel that the architects, though technically dexterous, had allowed themselves to atrophy imaginatively and humanistically. The basic structure of a New York City building remained a framework of structural steel, on which were hung geometrical fabrics of brick, glass, and aluminum, which served to divide space. For sheer height, the Empire State Building, erected in 1931, stood unchallenged; but vertical masses of this sort proved uneconomical for most purposes. Newer buildings, like the main United Nations structure on East Forty- second Street or Lever House on Park Avenue, were more modest in size and more casual about proclaiming their defiance of the law of gravity. Dissolving the solidity of external walls, and relying more and more on the glittering insubstantialities of glass, they tended at their best to look at once cold and angular and brilliantly audacious. Much dreary, unambitious box work of course continued to be produced, in the city as well as outside of it; perhaps the old brownstone, with its
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dark interiors, gloomy front, and dank courtyard, was scarcely more melancholy than the huge square hives huddled together under the name of "Stuyvesant Town." And the new Coliseum at Columbus Circle seems to make no bones about being flatly, unashamedly ugly. New York State was once the scene of some splendidly imaginative building. But styles as distinctive as Hudson River Bracketed and experiments as courageous as the octagonal stone house have been allowed to languish.
For the fact is that, culturally, neither America nor New York State represented, during the first half of the twentieth century, any one trend or direction or set of values. If American architecture was banal and eclectic as a rule, one reason was that American taste as a whole was undecided among several possibilities. Should one be sternly ef- ficient and ruthlessly functional, or nostalgic and traditional? When one described a style as "traditional," what tradition was one referring to? The cultural atmosphere of New York and America grew steadily more complex and diffuse, but it had more and more the characteristics of a museum culture, it was less and less lightened by the spark of imagination and feeling. By the middle of the century, one could build a house, write a book, paint a picture, or compose a piece of music, in about any style one wanted, without fear of public disapproval. Tolerance was enormous, all but universal; discrimination and direction were other matters entirely.
Elsewhere, the relativism was less absolute. A Parisian public, for example, could still on rare occasions be shocked. By a display of provocative taste, it was not impossible to provoke riots and the throwing of elderly vegetables among the excitable Gauls. One had the sense that Americans, especially New Yorkers, would yield a polite patter of applause to anything which took itself seriously, but that they loved nothing and hated nothing. Overwhelmingly, the culture gave one an impression of uniformity and conservatism. Perhaps it was simply that by mid-century the big revolts and revolutions had blown themselves out; there was nothing more to revolt against. At all events, one could scarcely help contrasting the stormy, tempestuous 1920's with the con- servative, almost effete 1950's.
In literature, for example, the difference made itself felt at once. During the 1920's, New York City especially harbored, off and on, a remarkably promising group of young literary radicals. They were radical, not only politically but artistically. Novelists like Ernest Heming- way, Sinclair Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald conveyed a tremendous, exciting impression of having seen through something. Whatever they had discovered behind outworn conventions (and it was something fresh and unique in each case), they saw it with excitement and a sense
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of blinding immediacy. It was in this spirit of fresh discovery that Lewis fell upon mid-western Babbittry and Hemingway opened up a vein of heroic, stoical manhood. Ring Lardner and H. L. Mencken discovered American speech and rejoiced in its flat, repetitious rhythms; Fitzgerald discovered the fascinating society of the very rich and Mike Gold the equally fascinating society of the very poor. Edna St. Vincent Millay, fresh out of Vassar College and inspired with a lyric vein as rich if not quite as disciplined as that of Keats, sang mockingly and ironically of the trials and complexities of love. Hart Crane, unhappy in Ohio, came to New York and as he walked across Brooklyn Bridge saw in the strength and delicacy of its soaring lines a symbol of the American dream, a poignant and tantalizing vision. Huge and unhappy, Thomas Wolfe wandered the East-Side streets, remembering his home in Asheville, North Carolina, and composing long, tumultuous, rhapsodic novels out of his lonely, poetic memories. At different times and to very different effects, literary radicals like Max Eastman, John Reed (Ten Days That Shook the World), Lincoln Steffens ( The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens ), and John Dos Passos (U.S.A.) carried on a thriving trade in ideas both literary and political. After being ejected from more tender-minded schools around the country, tough old Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class) was giving his sardonic, analytic lectures at the New School for Social Research. Altogether, it was an age of ferment and direction-seeking. The authors mentioned were not all or exclusively New York writers, but there was not one of them who did not have intimate and congenial contacts with New York; and they contributed to the enormous sense of turmoil and search which typified the 1920's.
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