Culture Versus Commerce: The Libby Prison Museum and the Image of Chicago,1889-1899

Abstract

This paper examines the complex relationship of museums to urban landscape production and image creation in Chicago in the 1890s. In the late nineteenth century American elites transformed museums from entertainment-oriented commercial affairs to public institutions that represented their home cities both locally and nationally. The Libby Prison Museum, a collection of Civil War artefacts housed in an actual Confederate prison reconstructed in Chicago, spanned the peak years of this transition and illustrates the tensions it engendered. Faced with negative evaluations by the national press, the museum’s directors attempted to assert its cultural legitimacy as well as that of the city of Chicago, yet their claims were skewed by a longstanding rhetorical tradition which celebrated the city as a place of startling contrasts. They were equally hampered by their adherence to older aesthetic standards and cultural practices, which were out of tune with their ostensible goals. The directors ultimately contradicted their own definition of both the museum and the city, demonstrating that the image of a city, built up over many years of accumulated visual and textual representations, is powerfully self-perpetuating, while cultural institutions can be heavily influenced by tradition and inherited conventions even as they undergo change.