Daniel Gifford, University of Louisville – Lessons From A Failed Whaling Museum

If you move a symbol from its community, does it lose its power?

Dan Gifford, affiliated professor at the University of Louisville, looks to the past to find out.

Daniel Gifford teaches courses in American history and museum studies at the University of Louisville. His career spans both academia and public history, including several years with the Smithsonian Institution. His scholarship focuses on American popular and visual culture, as well as museums in American culture.  He received his PhD from George Mason University in 2011. His most recent book is The Last Voyage of the Whaling Bark Progress: New Bedford, Chicago and the Twilight of an Industry (McFarland Press, 2020). It retraces the voyage of the whaling bark Progress from New Bedford, Massachusetts to the Chicago World’s Fair, and explores questions of commemoration, historical memory, and what it means to transform a dying industry into a museum piece.

Lessons From A Failed Whaling Museum

What can a failed whaling museum from the 1890s teach us about memorialization and commemoration? Today museum curators work to interpret industries in transition that once defined America’s economic might such as coal, steel, and manufacturing. As these stories of industrial decline and transformation become museums and exhibits, it is useful to remember the whaling bark Progress, a New Bedford whaler sent to Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

By the 1890s the American whaling industry was a ghost of its former heyday. Even in New Bedford, the city that once claimed to light the world with whale products, the focus had shifted to cotton manufacturing.

But when Chicago began planning a world’s fair, New Bedford saw an opportunity to teach the world about an industry increasingly relegated to the past. The Progress was selected to become a floating museum to whaling. In reality, the whaleship became a failed collection of marine curiosities and a metaphor for a dying industry out of step with modern times. Fire and dynamite eventually sent her to the bottom of Lake Michigan.

To New Bedford, whaling’s importance had been self-evident and innate, so much so they comfortably sold the Progress to a Chicago syndicate with no background in whaling or its history. But the physical and psychological distance between the fair in Chicago and the wharves of New Bedford turned out to matter. The further the floating museum moved from the community it represented, the more it became something else entirely.

As we work to properly memorialize more recent stories of industrial decline, the Progress serves as a caution to museums and visitors. It is connections to communities of workers that make these exhibits successful, and those connections can never be lost or forgotten.