Colorado State Pioneer Museum

The Colorado State Pioneer Museum (CSPM) is housed in the old El Paso County courthouse that was built in 1903. It is free to the public and well worth the time. Guests will learn about Colorado Springs and the American West. 

One of the museum staff told me that decision to convert the courthouse to a museum was done to save the building from being razed to make room for a parking garage. That would have been a terrible shame! It is a beautiful example of the architecture and style of the Progressive Era city beautiful movement. There is a recreated courtroom on the third floor and functioning 1906 Otis elevator, which moved a lot quicker than I thought it would. There are numerous items representing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

General William Jackson Palmer was the founding spirit of Colorado Springs. He was a Civil War cavalry officer who won the medal of honor in 1865. After the war Palmer became a railroad executive, industrialist, and, in 1871 founded the settlement that would become Colorado Springs. As a wealthy man and town leader, Palmer attracted much attention from newspaper writers and gossips. Unsurprisingly, many myths and legends emerged about the Palmer family. CPSM has an entire room focused on separating Palmer family fact from fiction. 

Author Helen Hunt Jackson lived in Colorado Springs. Her house is partially rebuilt in the CPSM. In addition to A Century of Dishonor 1881), her ground-breaking work on American treatment of Native Americans, Jackson also wrote poems and other stories. 

Colorado Springs became known as a playground for rest and recuperation, especially for those suffering from tuberculosis (TB). A room with replica doctor's offices, TB patients, a pharmacy counter, and explanative plaques tells this prominent part of early Colorado Springs history. There is a small exhibit on women's suffrage, which Colorado granted in 1893. In my humble opinion this could have been expanded upon. An exhibit entitled "Any Place North and West" examines the life of African Americans in Colorado Springs. Although there as no de jure (legal) segregation in Colorado, there was de facto (practiced) segregation. I think it is always important to remind people that segregation was not a strictly southern phenomenon. There were many examples of segregation practiced in northern and western cities. And not just small ones like Colorado Springs. Chicago was a heavily segregated city through the use of public housing money and restrictive covenants to ghettoize African Americans. 

There were several different collections of Native American artifacts. The most impactful to me was the work of guest curator Gregg Deal who used the photographs of Roland Reed taken around 1910 to show how the camera distorted native life. Deal's exhibit is divided by theme with about five or seven Reed photographs in each theme. For example, one theme was entitled Romanticism and showed how Reed's staged and posed photographs and the use of scenery and costume, were designed to best appeal to white Americans who felt pressured by the pace and demands of modernity and industrial capitalism and longed for a primitive life. Here Reed gave it to them. The larger point that I think Deal was making is that this was appropriating Native American images and then using those photographs to define their lives without their own agency for the gratification of a white audience. Yet, another example of appropriated Native American culture. However, I should mention that Deal is not overly didactic in his presentation. After a brief five minute introductory video, the emphasis is on the creation and organization of the themes around the very large images, not explanations. The point is to let the guests do their own thinking about this. Ironically, I was wearing my St. John's University t-shirt and hat. Their sportsteam used to be called the Red Men. Although this was probably more  because of the school color, it did, nonetheless, appropriate the image of Native Americans. When I was a master's student there in the early 1990s, St. John's renamed their teams the Red Storm. It is long overdue for others to follow.  

Andrew Johnson and the Tennessee State Museum

Andrew Johnson, seventeenth president of the United States, died today, July 31st, in 1875. He was

sixty-six years old and had recently been elected to the United States Senate by the Tennessee state legislature. Johnson is generally considered among the bottom, and quite possibly worst, among the presidents of the United States. Granted he inherited a difficult situation upon the assassination of Abraham Lincoln six weeks into his second term, but Johnson managed it as disastrously as one could with his racism; his opposition to the extension of civil rights during Reconstruction, a move that encouraged white resistance and the violent repression of blacks in the South; his complete lack of sympathy for the freedmen; his impeachment and escape of removal from office by a solitary vote in the U.S. Senate; and his demonstrated pattern of unfitness for office through his behavior. My view of Johnson has always been much colored by Eric McKitrick’s Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, which is, admittedly, a dated work almost sixty years old. It is not the only work that I have read on Johnson, to be sure, but McKitrick’s emphasis on his subject’s psychological shortcomings sticks with me. 

While Johnson was a terrible president, he seemed to be an ingenious vice-presidential candidate in 1864 on the National Union Party ticket, the name that the reflagged Republican Party used to appeal to war Democrats. As a pro-war Democrat from a southern state who opposed secession and was the only member of the entire southern congressional delegation that remained in his seat after his state seceded, and who served as war governor of Tennessee, Johnson offered a powerful example of national unity during civil war to the ticket. By showing up to his inauguration as vice president visibly intoxicated, Johnson got off on the wrong foot. With the exception of receiving some well wishes and support following Lincoln’s assassination, it was almost all downhill for Johnson.  

How is Johnson portrayed in the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville? I only ask because I was there earlier this month. And I must say upfront that it is a large and impressive museum that examines the Volunteer State's history from pre-history through to the current day. First, the museum celebrates him as one of the state’s famous sons and one who became president, like Andrew Jackson

and James K. Polk before him. Second, they emphasize that he was a common tradesman who worked his way from illiterate poverty to the White House. He was a tailor know for always being well dressed (unlike his gangly predecessor who often appeared slovenly). The suit to the right is an example of Johnson’s handiwork. Third, they illustrate his work as a pro-Union war governor and emphasize his role in pushing for the ratification of the 13^thAmendment. Yes, he used readmission as a lever to obtain ratification and the ultimate end of slavery, but he also failed to use that same power to ensure civil rights and welcomed state constitutions containing the infamous Black Codes that so restricted the freedom of blacks that it was a form of pseudo slavery. Although the Radical Republicans and President Ulysses S. Grant did much to undermine the Black Codes, many of their features would re-emerge in the post-Reconstruction segregated, Jim Crow, South.