Material Politics: World War I, a Silver Inkstand and Object-Based U.S. Cultural Nationalism
My starting point is the silver inkstand used by the signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence in 1776. 150 years later, Americana collector Francis P. Garvan (1875-1937) commissioned dozens of replicas of this artifact, with each inscribed, “commemorating our fight for American chemical independence.” That “fight” was Garvan’s support of the U.S. chemical industry against German rivals during and after the Great War. As WWI Alien Property Custodian, he seized hundreds of German chemical patents, including those needed to produce explosives and poison gas. With federal authorization, Garvan created the Chemical Foundation, which licensed those patents to American manufacturers. It was, he argued, the nation’s best defense against the “menace” of Germany’s resurgent industrial expansion and future chemical warfare. But critics questioned the Foundation’s legality, and lawsuits followed. The Supreme Court ruled in its favor in 1926, the U.S. sesquicentennial. For Garvan, an avid collector of colonial American silver, the opportunity to create a “Liberty Inkstand” to dispense to his supporters—Congressmen, judges, lawyers, and chemical manufacturers—was too good to pass up. Soon thereafter, Garvan donated his vast collection of early American decorative arts to Yale University as a bulwark against “Socialism” and “Bolshevism.” In both instances, he mobilized objects to perform “material politics”; that is, enact political agendas and operate as an important form of cultural power. This interpretive framework can readily be applied to other such examples of ideologically charged material culture.