Material Politics

Francis Patrick Garvan (1875-1937) knew how to wield the power of Americana. In 1930 he donated his outstanding collection of early American decorative arts to Yale University with an explicit goal: to instill patriotism as a bulwark against socialism and communism. Garvan believed his treasures would shore up political fealty in the face of subversive ideologies, and his ambitions for his collection and his political beliefs were fueled by his government work. As Alien Property Custodian during World War I, he seized enemy-owned property in the United States, including hundreds of valuable German chemical patents. As an assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice, Garvan relentlessly persecuted anarchists and "Bolsheviks" during the postwar Red Scare. In this book, Catherine Whalen demonstrates how this out-spoken ideologue's political and business dealings informed his collecting practices and unpacks the hefty symbolic freight that he believed American antiques carried in the service of an ambitious nationalist project.
Whalen shows how objects can represent political agendas and operate as important forms of cultural power, particularly when those objects, like Garvan's, are housed at academic institutions and are interpreted and reinterpreted by scholars with shifting points of view.