Stuffing the Founding Fathers

Speaker 1: Major funding for Back Story is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Speaker 2: From Virginia Humanities, this is Back Story.

Brian: We’re gonna start today with an unjustly forgotten American showman and museum owner. Charles Willson Peale is best remembered today if he’s remembered at all for a single painting called “The Artist in his Museum”.
It’s a self portrait and in it the aged artist gazes intently at us as he pulls back a faded velvet curtain to reveal shelves of stuffed birds. On the top shelf there’s a stuffed American eagle. On the floor, an American turkey awaits the same fate. But it turns out that Charles Wilson Peale’s ambitions went well beyond iconic American birds.

Robert Peck: We know Charles Willson Peale through his famous portraits of George Washington and others involved with the American Revolution. But actually in his day was known almost as much as a proprietor of a major museum in Philadelphia.
It was housed in what is now known as Independence Hall which was no longer being used for government purposes. And it contained thousands, literally hundreds of thousands of natural history specimens that he had collected and with the help of others collected from all over the world.

Brian: That’s Robert McCracken Peck. Curator of art and artifacts at the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University.

Robert Peck: The natural history specimens were arranged in a kind of order of importance from the smallest things in sex and so on, up through birds and mammals and ended at the top of his gallery with portraits of the people he considered to be the most important affecting the United States and the rest of the world.
Great men and women were all preserved in his portraits, and I suppose it was not a far step for him to take since he was already preserving mammals as taxidermy specimens to think that maybe if he could preserve them in oil on canvas, it would be even better to preserve them in reality.

Nathan: Preserve them in reality, hold on a second. Is he saying?

Brian: I’m afraid so Nathan. Charles Willson Peale proposed stuffing the founding fathers.

Ed: I don’t think it’s so bad, it’s our Thanksgiving show.

Brian: And to kick it off he decided he would stuff Ben Franklin’s cat and a couple of golden pheasants that had belonged to George Washington.

Robert Peck: He made his money by selling portraits, but also through the admission of people at the gate, at the museum. And what better way to attract people in than to have a pheasant from George Washington or an angora cat from Benjamin Franklin. And so like P.T. Barnum who interestingly became the ultimate owner of Peale’s museum, Peale used the name of celebrities to help increase his attendance.

Brian: Well, in 1792 Peale wrote to a group of civic leaders that he invited to serve as a committee of visitors and directors for his museum. Now as boards go, it was pretty impressive. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton were there. But as many challenges as these men have faced, I bet the founding fathers had never seen a proposal like this one.

Robert Peck: There are other means than painting to preserve and hand down to succeeding generations, the relics of such great men who’s labors have been crowned with success in the most distinguished benefits to mankind. The mode I mean is the preserving their bodies from corruption and being the food of the worms. This is by the use of powerful antiseptics. Although perhaps it is not in the power of art to preserve these bodies in that high perfection of from, which the well executed painting in portrait and sculpture can produce.

Peale: “Yet the actual remains of such men, as I have just described must be highly regarded by those who reverence the memory of such luminaries. Sorry I am, that I did not propose the means of such preservation to that distinguished patriot, and worthy philosopher Doctor Benjamin Franklin. He could have been prevailed on to suffer the remains of his body to be now in our view.”

Robert Peck: I think he was serious, Peale was interested in preserving just about everything he could of the natural world. And he thought that by doing so he could not only help people better understand the world around them. But also could leave a lasting legacy going forward.
His portraits were all about recording American history, and so having human specimens preserved in the same way was probably just an extension of that same philosophy. I don’t think he was willing to pursue it to the very end, but he threw out the idea just hoping that somebody might accept. Now by the time he asked for Franklin’s body, Franklin had already been buried, it was too late. But he still had a number of important patriots and early signers of the declaration of independence among his advisory group.
He thought that if he bandied about the idea, perhaps one of them would step forward and say okay. You can have me.

Nathan: So do we know how they reacted to this proposal?

Brian: Good question Nathan, but the answer is probably not. Unfortunately there’s no written record of their reaction. We have to think there were a few raised eyebrows and maybe a few rolled eyes. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall for those conversations.

Ed: But you know Nathan and Brian? I think we might get this idea a little bit of serious consideration.

Brian: I’m, looking forward to this Ed.

Ed: Because lest we think this is completely outrageous. We don’t have to look so far to see political leaders embalmed and put on display. Think about the Tomb of Lenin? Where crowds queue up to view the preserved body of the Soviet leader. Or think about the preserved body of Ho Chi Minh or [inaudible 00:06:19].
But the real figure we should look to is a philosopher, Jeremy Bentham; the English utilitarian philosopher who had his own body preserved. Now he still gets wheeled out for committee meetings at University College London. And as a former university president who has sat on lots of committee meetings, let me tell you he is a sucker for posthumous punishment.

Brian: So Jeremy Bentham actually went so far as to have himself preserved. I think he was bidding for a certain amount of immortality, and succeeded in getting such. He had his body wrapped in clothing of his own choice, and his body is still wheeled out periodically for meetings and so on at the University where he resides in London.

Ed: All this raises a really interesting question in my mind I got to admit. Now I think we all instinctively feel that there’s something a little bit wrong with stuffing people. But is there really an ethical difference between stuffing a founding father and stuffing a silver back gorilla.

Brian: Technically it’s quite the same, the only difference is that with these figures as Peale had hoped, that they would give their own permission to have it happen. With a silver back gorilla, they really don’t have much choice, they’ve been killed for the purpose. Sad as that may be, they do serve some educational purpose I suppose in the long run.
Robert McCracken Peck, and for the record we ask him if he would like to be stuffed after his death, and he said no.