ABSTRACT
Social museums in the United States constituted an experimental institutional genre. Aligned with Progressive-era reform movements and the emergence of the social sciences, they stood outside the field's mainstream by virtue of their small number, the nature (or lack) of their collections, and their commitment to illuminating contemporary civic problems with an eye toward remediation. This examination of Vassar College's Social Museum and its 1942 exhibition The Great Idea sheds light on the broader turn to storytelling exhibits among museums in the 1930s, a move that made evident that museal display craft is an interpretive act, not a neutral one. Heated arguments ensued about whether suasion, no matter how publicly minded, represented a dereliction of museums’ duties. Examining The Great Idea offers an expanded view of social instrumentality – its possibilities and its limits – as manifested in mid-twentieth-century museum practice.
