When You Criticize Farmers, Don't Talk With Your Mouth Full

By John M. Blades

This article was published in Museum, May/June issue of 2008.

As a kid growing up in California, I could not have missed the fact that California was the largest agricultural state in the Union (as it remains). I used to ride my horse through miles of orange groves in Southern California. By my teen years, however, the competition for water, the state’s most precious resource, was so intense that the booming population of residents strongly resented the agriculture industry for using about 80 percent of the water supply. In response, the agriculture industry produced a bumper sticker that I have always thought was pure marketing genius. The bumper sticker simply said, “When you criticize farmers, don’t talk with your mouth full.”

No doubt it’s just human nature, and perhaps even a God-given right, that we Americans ignore the irony that most of our criticism of our leaders is possible precisely because our leaders have brought us an embarrassment of riches. Even with our metaphorical mouths so full, we still manage to criticize those who made it all possible.

In the museum world, this irony is richly illustrated by the fact that most of the great museums in America are the products of the Gilded Age and the Titans of American business whose fortunes and vision founded them. Yet invariably, the directors and curators who make up the professional staff of these institutions are products of an academic tradition that, since the 1930s, has promoted Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s point of view that the Gilded Age was “in large measure a history of a group of financial Titans . . . mere builder[s] . . . creator[s] of more railroad systems . . . organizer[s] of more corporations . . . as likely to be a danger as a help.” And that “The day of the great promoter or financial Titan, to whom we granted everything if only he would build or develop, is over.”

Indeed, the Gilded Age ended with the 1929 stock market crash, which resulted in the kind of resentment espoused by FDR and Matthew Josephson in the latter’s landmark 1934 book, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901. As a result, throughout the remainder of the 20th century many of America’s museum founders were cast as Robber Barons rather than benefactors—or benefactors only by virtue of the one or two good things they did, which surely were attempts to burnish their reputations late in life and nothing more—but Robber Barons nonetheless.

If we could collectively stop consuming our good fortune long enough to sit up and take in the bigger picture before us, we could see that the whole Robber Baron concept just isn’t supported by the facts. Perhaps the reason we’ve not been able to do this before is that the picture is so big that it cannot be appreciated except from the distance of time. Or perhaps the picture is just so big that regardless of perspective it is too overwhelming to seem possible or credible. But the fact is, the vision and generosity of America’s business Titans during America’s Gilded Age created a nonprofit corporate world, in parallel to the for-profit corporate world, the purpose of which was to do good. As businessman and philanthropist Peter Cooper said so well, “The purpose of business is to make money. The purpose of life is to do good.”

The nonprofit corporate world created and funded by these Titans has done an unprecedented amount of good. For more than a century, Americans have enjoyed a level of access to educational and cultural opportunities that no other nation in history has had. No government ever could, or ever has, come close to providing the benefits that the nonprofit world created by American businessmen has made possible. No American ever pays the real cost of getting a college education, going to a classical music concert, going to the ballet, going to the opera, using a library or visiting a museum. Amazingly, all of these educational and cultural opportunities are still heavily underwritten by the funds invested by America’s Gilded Age Titans in nonprofit corporations.

It seems to me that if we are to have any hope of perpetuating the great benefits and opportunities that we as Americans have taken for granted during the last century, we should all aspire to be “mere builders, creators, and organizers” like the Titans of the Gilded Age, rather than critics of those who were. And that we should all be engaged in the business of educating ourselves and our visitors about the amazing legacy that has made so many of our museums possible and all of our lives so much richer.