Smithsonian Institution

• 1. Introduction

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  The Smithsonian Institution holds more than 157 million objects, making it the largest museum complex in the world. Yet nearly all of its 30 million annual visitors walk through its doors without paying a cent. How did a British scientist who never set foot in the United States end up creating the country's most sprawling monument to knowledge? And how did a bequest that Congress nearly squandered, and a treasury that defaulted on its bonds, survive long enough to give Americans one of the greatest cultural institutions on earth?

  The answers begin not in Washington, D.C., but in the last will and testament of James Smithson, who died in 1829. They run through a decade of political bickering, a dramatic transatlantic journey carrying gold coins in sacks, and the long, contested question of what "the increase and diffusion of knowledge" is actually supposed to mean.

• 2. A Stranger's Bequest

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  James Smithson was born in 1765 and spent his career as a British scientist. He left the bulk of his estate to his nephew Henry James Hungerford. When Hungerford died without children in 1835, Smithson's will redirected the entire inheritance to the United States of America, to fund an establishment in Washington dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.

  Congress accepted that bequest on the 1st of July, 1836. President Andrew Jackson then dispatched diplomat Richard Rush across the Atlantic to collect it. Rush returned in August 1838 carrying 105 sacks holding exactly 104,960 gold sovereigns. At the exchange rate of the time, the sum amounted to approximately $500,000. Adjusting for the size of the American economy in 2007, economists estimated the equivalent purchasing power at around $220 million.

  What followed was not a swift act of national generosity. Eight years of congressional argument ensued over how to interpret Smithson's deliberately vague mandate. The US Treasury, meanwhile, invested the gold in bonds issued by the state of Arkansas, which promptly defaulted. Massachusetts representative John Quincy Adams, himself a former president and a longtime member of the earlier Columbian Institute, stepped in. He persuaded Congress to restore the lost funds with interest and to dedicate the money to a genuine institution of science and learning. President James K. Polk finally signed the founding legislation on the 10th of August, 1846.

• 3. Before the Castle

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  Long before Smithson's gold arrived in Washington, a group of citizens had already tried to build something like the institution he would fund. On the 28th of June, 1816, they gathered to establish the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences, driven by the goal of promoting useful knowledge. Officers were elected in October of that year, and Congress granted a charter on the 20th of April, 1818.

  The institute's membership roster reads like a roll call of the early republic. John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and James Hoban were active members. Honorary membership was extended to James Madison, James Monroe, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Marquis de Lafayette. The architect Benjamin Latrobe, who rebuilt the US Capitol after the War of 1812, and William Thornton, who designed the Octagon House and Tudor Place, served as officers. Each member paid five dollars per year in dues.

  The institute's ambitions were wide. It proposed a botanical garden on the National Mall, a survey of the country's mineral production, better livestock management, and a topographical history of the United States. Reality was narrower. The group met first at Blodget's Hotel, then the Treasury Department and City Hall, before settling into the Capitol building in 1824. Weekly scientific readings began in 1825 but attendance declined quickly. Its charter expired in 1838, but a successor organization, the National Institution founded in 1840, carried the same mission forward and helped shape the philosophical framework that Congress eventually encoded in the Smithsonian Act.

• 4. Building the Institution

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  Joseph Henry, the Smithsonian's first secretary, wanted the institution to function primarily as a center for scientific research. Congress had other ideas, and the collections kept arriving. The US Navy's Exploring Expedition had circumnavigated the globe between 1838 and 1842, returning with thousands of animal specimens, an herbarium of 50,000 plant specimens, shells, minerals, tropical birds, jars of seawater, and ethnographic artifacts from the South Pacific. Military and civilian surveys of the American West, including the Mexican Boundary Survey and Pacific Railroad Surveys, added Native American artifacts and natural history specimens.

  Construction of the Smithsonian Institution Building, known ever since as the Castle, began in 1849. Architect James Renwick Jr. designed it; general contractor Gilbert Cameron completed the interiors. It opened in 1855. The first expansion came with the Arts and Industries Building in 1881, designed by Adolf Cluss and Paul Schulze from plans by Major General Montgomery C. Meigs of the Army Corps of Engineers. Congress had promised that building only if the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition turned a profit. It did.

  The National Zoological Park, designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, opened in 1889. The National Museum of Natural History, designed by the D.C. firm Hornblower and Marshall, opened in June 1911. Detroit philanthropist Charles Lang Freer donated his private Asian art collection and funds to build a gallery to house it; the Freer Gallery opened in 1923, among the Smithsonian's first major gifts from a private individual. More than four decades would then pass before the next museum, the Museum of History and Technology, opened in 1964, designed by the world-renowned firm of McKim, Mead and White.

• 5. What the Collections Hold

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  The National Museum of Natural History alone accounts for more than 148 million of the institution's total holdings. Its invertebrate zoology collection contains over 49.8 million specimens, the single largest component of the Natural History collection. About half of those natural history holdings are stored off-site at the Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland. The Smithsonian Institution Libraries hold roughly 2.1 million volumes, and the Smithsonian Archives hold about 162,000 cubic feet of archival material.

  Fewer than one percent of the total collections are on public display at any one time. The rest are maintained for research. The Collections Search Center makes 9.9 million digital records available online. In February 2020, the institution went further, launching Smithsonian Open Access and placing about 2.8 million two- and three-dimensional images and roughly 173 years of staff-created data into the public domain under a Creative Commons Zero dedication. At the time, it was described as the largest and most interdisciplinary open-access release by any museum. The collection has since grown to more than five million images.

  Among the objects on display, some carry an outsized hold on popular imagination. First Lady Helen Herron Taft donated her inauguration gown to the museum in 1912, starting the First Ladies' Gown display at the National Museum of American History. The same museum holds the Star-Spangled Banner, the stovepipe hat worn by Abraham Lincoln, the ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, and the original Teddy Bear named after Theodore Roosevelt. In 2016, curators at the Air and Space Museum restored the large model Enterprise from the original Star Trek television series.

• 6. Questions of Ownership

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  On the 29th of April, 2022, the Smithsonian adopted a new ethical returns policy that places moral arguments above legal ones when evaluating how objects entered the collection. The policy permits the return of items acquired under circumstances considered unethical by contemporary standards. A month before the policy took effect, the National Museum of African Art had already announced plans to return most of its 39 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria.

  On the 11th of October, 2022, those bronzes were formally handed over to Nigerian cultural officials in a ceremony in Washington, D.C. Nigerian Minister of Information and Culture Lai Mohammed and Prince Aghatise Erediauwa, representing the Oba of Benin Kingdom, both spoke. Mohammed called the decision to return the artworks worth emulating.

  The institution also faced scrutiny over human remains. It holds the remains of more than 30,000 individuals, mostly at the National Museum of Natural History, including roughly 250 brains acquired largely in the 19th and early 20th centuries without consent. After a 2023 Washington Post investigation, the Smithsonian formed a Human Remains Task Force in April 2023. In February 2024, that task force recommended halting the collection, display, or research use of human remains without consent, and working toward returning all remains regardless of cultural affiliation. Under the National Museum of the American Indian Act of 1989, the institution had already repatriated or made available for return the remains of more than 7,500 individuals.

• 7. Governance and Funding

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  The Smithsonian's annual budget runs to around $1.25 billion, with two-thirds drawn from federal appropriations. The remainder comes from an endowment that stood at approximately $2.6 billion as of 2024, alongside private and corporate donations, membership dues, and retail, concession, and licensing revenue. Almost all of the institution's facilities are free to enter; the exception is the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, which charges admission.

  A seventeen-member Board of Regents governs the institution. Its ex officio members include the chief justice of the United States and the vice president. The chancellor, the nominal head, has traditionally been the chief justice. Three members each come from the House and Senate; nine citizen members are nominated by the board and confirmed by Congress. The chief executive officer carries the title of secretary and is appointed by the board. Lonnie Bunch, the fourteenth secretary, took office on the 15th of June, 2019, after founding and directing the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

  In 2011, the Smithsonian launched its first-ever capital fundraising campaign, targeting $1.5 billion. By the time officials made it public in October 2014, more than 60,000 individuals and organizations had already contributed, including 192 donors who gave at least $1 million each. Board members across the institution's various museums donated a combined $372 million. By September 2017, the campaign had raised $1.79 billion, with three months still remaining. Funds were directed toward the National Museum of African American History and Culture building and renovations of the Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the Renwick Gallery, with a portion set aside for educational programs and the digitization of collections.