by Catherine Spaeth
...In the late 19th century, Columbus was a city very proud of the institutions it had founded -- its prison, its schools for the deaf and blind -- and of its place as the seat of state government. The Columbus elite put a lot of faith in the role of institutions to support a healthy and productive society.
It was in this spirit that in 1892 the Columbus Museum of Art and the Columbus College of Art and Design were founded together. Their founder, Francis Charles Sessions, had a very clear intention for their social role; another institution he co-founded, the Ohio Historical Society, holds the documentation of it.
Sessions was a Congregationalist social reformer and banker who believed that art served a social and economic function. He wrote that looking upon a secular painting could elevate and refine the soul, and that American character is formed by what is seen every day. As a businessman, Sessions was very open about his desire to educate and uplift workers through art so that American industry could compete economically with England and France.
American character and industry were obsessions of the Anglo-American elite. As a Christian social reformer, Sessions was caught up in the 19th century contradiction between a culture of refinement that molded itself upon the English aristocracy and a democracy of equals. A part of his strong identification with England was his involvement in the Christian temperance movement. In Sessions' writing of his travels through England, he described ministers' sermons on the subject, and in Columbus he was active in the Murphy Movement, an early equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous, to the extent that he reported on the success of local Murphy Meetings to the Columbus Dispatch.
In 1892, the U.S. government proclaimed that labor unrest of the era was due to intemperance rather than to low wages. Abstinence defined a character that was self-controlled, hard working, frugal and morally correct. Sessions regarded his pro-temperance work as an effort to secure America as a leader in the world economy, writing that England was losing economic ground because of its workers' poor habits and that America would surpass it.
Another interest of Sessions' was industrial art education. At this time, drawings from the hands of laborers were a widely discussed topic among urban reformers. Industrial drawing was already taught in European schools, and it was feared that if America did not also offer instruction it wouldn't be able to compete in the world market. A Columbus journalist even went so far as to claim that if drawing were privileged over reading, the morality of children could be saved from the dangers of "the pernicious and mind-destroying character" of print culture.
Sessions actively lobbied for the support of industrial art education in the Columbus school system through an essay for the Ohio Historical Society Journal, and boasted of the French Commissioner of Education's display of art by Ohio school children in the Paris Pedagogical Museum.
In the same essay, Sessions made an appeal to promote national visual literacy through art. He wrote, "In civilized nations, in proportion to the intellect and fancy, we find the fine arts entering largely into the ornamentation of even the most common as well as the greatest objects."
Sessions concluded this essay with a description of nearby Cincinnati's success in comfortably maintaining an art school with a museum attached. Only a short while before, he stated, "[The] wakening in England which led to the application of fine art (which had been so long fostered by the seats of higher learning in the kingdom, and by such collections as the British Museum, the national Gallery and the others) to the industries of the country, had not yet begun to stir the people of the United States."
The origins of the Columbus museum and art school were caught up in a social imagination of these institutions as something like a machine to produce together an American character and industry.
The country's identity had yet to be firmly established in 1892. In that year, legislation was considered in Columbus to compensate for damage of property incurred by mobs and riots. An increasing number of immigrant workers were flooding American cities and the period was characterized by the urban elite's paranoia of an invasion by the unwashed masses. There were fears of mob hysteria and threats to social order, and workers gathering to lobby for just wages were policed and feared. Founding such cultural institutions was one manner of containing and managing what was regarded as social disorder....
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