by Cynthia Patterson, Professor of History Emerita, Emory University

Note: A somewhat longer version of this text was presented as a lecture to the Emory University Emeritus College on March 18, 2024. Gary Hauk

The significant and direct involvement of Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum with the antiquities market over the past twenty-five years has resulted in collections that startle visitors with their quality and have pushed the Carlos into the upper echelons of U.S. museums, so that some would speak of “The Carlos” in the same breath as “The Getty” or “The Met,” at least with regard to Greek antiquities. Yet how this happened is something about which all Emory faculty members and students should be concerned. The cost—not only in dollars but also in ethical principles and reputation—may have been higher than they realize.

Nothing is more important in an academic community than a commitment to open and critical inquiry, both in our individual disciplines and in the running and management of the university and its institutions, including the university museum. In that vein, it is time for Emory to make the Carlos collections a focus for educating our community and the larger public not only about art and artifacts but also about what could be called “anti-archaeology”: the networks of illicit excavation and trafficking that strip ancient objects of their historical value and their ability to teach us about the societies that produced them, not to mention robbing nations of their cultural heritage. A forthright accounting of what happened at the Carlos would be an act of responsibility of which the Emory community could be rightly proud, and which would serve as a foundation for future acquisitions, gifts, provenance research—and the Carlos Museum’s contribution to the educational mission of Emory.

 My own education about these issues began in 2015, when I started to teach directly with the objects in what I call the ancient Mediterranean collections at the Carlos and to investigate their labels and provenance. The more I learned, the more I  discovered that the Carlos (and even some of my colleagues) was not interested in my questions and concerns. The more I learned, the better I understood the concern expressed many years ago by Prof. Robin Rhodes, of Notre Dame, an archaeologist and a long-time friend, when he learned that the Carlos Museum had hired Jasper Gaunt to curate the Greek and Roman collections. Gaunt’s decade-long association as employee and partner of Robert Hecht, perhaps the central figure in the illicit antiquities market at that time, was well known to those working to expose and combat the looting of ancient sites and the trafficking of looted objects.[1]

When Gaunt was fired in May 2018, I thought that there would be a change of course and the inauguration of a genuine discussion of “market issues” at the Carlos, but that did not happen. I wrote to university administrators but received only polished assurances that all was well, and that of course Emory was interested in the highest ethical standards for the museum’s management and collections. When the former director retired in 2021, I again had hopes that new leadership would turn things around. In March of 2023, however, the museum and the university repatriated to Iraq a small ivory artifact purchased in 2006 that had been looted from the Baghdad Museum, most likely in 2003. Rather than discuss the context and issues openly, the museum spun the story in a different way, and my patience ran out. And so, when Stephanie Lee of the Chronicle of Higher Education contacted me in May 2023 to ask if I would be willing to talk about my experiences with the Carlos, I said yes. I kept on talking, and here I am, still talking.

Best Practices in Museum Collecting in the era of UNESCO 1970

I begin by stepping back and looking briefly at the larger picture of the world of museum collecting in 1985, when the newly configured and reconceived Emory Museum of Art and Archaeology opened its doors in the renovated Law Building, now Michael C. Carlos Hall. I was there. It was the spring of my first year at Emory. The opening of the new museum took place politically and culturally in the immediate wake of the approval by the U.S. Congress two years earlier of the 1970 UNESCO convention (or treaty) on Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. The principles of the convention had been adopted earlier by the Archaeological Institute of America, which in 1973 issued its own “Resolution on the Acquisition of Antiquities by Museums.”

In the wake of World War II, there emerged a call for a united global effort to protect the cultural heritage of all nations and to work for the recovery of sites and objects plundered in the colonial era. There was also increasing concern about the rampant illicit digging and looting of archaeological sites, especially sanctuaries and tombs or cemeteries, and the growing awareness of the market, particularly in Europe and North America, for “art.” Private collectors and museums stimulated and emboldened a trafficking chain connecting the tombaroli (Italian for tomb robbers) to restorers and middlemen, and eventually to dealers and glitzy galleries on Madison Avenue. The United Nations seemed to be the organization that could and should take the lead, under the aegis of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.

After much discussion and two preliminary recommendations, in 1956 and 1964, UNESCO announced in 1970 a new convention calling upon member nations, including many in the developing world now newly independent of imperial control, to work together to combat looting and trafficking of antiquities.

The convention, approved in November 1970, was expressly aimed at, among other things, the illicit excavation (digging up) of ancient sites, sanctuaries, and tombs, as well as the looting of museums and national monuments. Importantly, the convention asserted that from 1970 on, collectors and museums should not acquire any object which could not be documented to be out of its country of origin before 1970, or did not have proof of legal export after 1970. The goal of the convention was to “prohibit and prevent” illicit export of cultural property, with the understanding that the expanding global market was driving the escalating rate of looting. The strength of the convention rests on its insistence that the burden of proof of legal export should be on the seller; unless an object can be shown to have been exported legally, it cannot be legally acquired. It is indeed a statement of guilty until proven innocent—an indication of how widespread was the evidence for trafficking at that time.

How then did museums—and university museums in particular—respond to UNESCO’s newly formulated standards?[2] An important positive example is the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (now called the Penn Museum), which not only signed on to the new standards but had even anticipated them with its own declaration on April 1, 1970. That Declaration reads, in part:

The curatorial faculty of the University Museum today reached the unanimous conclusion that they would purchase no more art objects or antiquities for the Museum unless the objects are accompanied by a pedigree—that is, information about the different owners of the objects, place of origin, legality of export, and other data useful in each individual case. The information will be made public.

In light of this declaration, the Penn Museum was called upon to advise on the final formulation of UNESCO’s 1970 convention. The University of Pennsylvania museum thus took its position early, and it continues to be a leader on these issues today.

Full disclosure: the University of Pennsylvania is my graduate alma mater. I arrived there in the fall of 1971 to join the interdepartmental graduate group in ancient history and took a number of classes at the Penn Museum and also participated in the excavation of an underwater sanctuary in the Greek Argolid. I did not become an archaeologist, because texts instead won my heart; but the experience did instill in me a deep respect for careful and principled archaeology.

The Penn Museum was established in 1877 in conjunction with the university’s excavation of the site of ancient Nippur in current day Iraq; objects from that excavation formed the beginning of the museum’s collections. Participation by Penn faculty in excavations at Ur and other sites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought further additions, with the result that the museum’s collection largely comprised scientifically excavated material—documented, measured, photographed, and recorded when excavated.

In 1966, however, George Allen—a Philadelphia antiquities dealer whose gallery, Hesperia Fine Arts, was a partnership with Robert Hecht—offered the museum the opportunity to purchase an unusual and quite spectacular collection of gold jewelry that Allen (and Hecht) said was from Troy. Given the mystique of Troy and the fact that the legendary nineteenth-century excavator Heinrich Schliemann had discovered similar jewelry, what was a museum to do? The objects had no ownership history, and the Penn Museum staff thought they were most likely looted, perhaps from a variety of sites. But the allure of potentially Trojan gold was strong. And the Penn Declaration was still to come.

Brian Rose, the James B. Pritchard Professor of Archaeology and curator  of the Mediterranean section of the Penn Museum, tells the story of the fate of the “Trojan gold.”[3] In brief, after some discussion and consultation with the Turkish cultural attaché, the Penn Museum went ahead and bought the collection from Hesperia Art for ten thousand dollars. But the decision did not rest easy with the Penn faculty and museum staff; early in 1970 they issued their “Pennsylvania Declaration.” Again, the museum pledged “to purchase no antiquities in the future unless their place of origin and legality of export are certain.” They have kept to their word. But that is not the end of the story of the Trojan gold.

The discovery in 1993 that Schliemann’s own collection of gold jewelry—smuggled out of Turkey and deposited in a Berlin Museum but gone missing in the last days of World War II—had now been found in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, led to renewed attention to Penn’s so-called Trojan gold. In 2009, Prof. Rose invited experts to test and analyze the gold to determine its genuineness and, if possible, its origins. A few grains of soil were found within a loop of gold on the back of a gold pendant, and tests revealed the soil to be consistent with a northern Anatolian (Trojan) origin. At this point Turkey became interested, and a settlement was reached in less than a year, by which Penn returned the gold to Turkey on indefinite loan and, in return, received privileges for further archaeological excavation and museum loans. That Penn’s Trojan gold had been out of Turkey before 1970 did not figure into the discussion.

A number of other university museums followed Penn’s lead, but there was resistance among both the sellers and collectors of antiquities, particularly among museums with a focus on fine art rather than archaeological artifacts. Although Congress in 1983 adopted the relevant sections of the UNESCO standards as U.S. law, the antiquities market seems not to have paid much attention. Or only so much as to recognize a challenge: if a history of ownership was required, then why not invent one?

This brings us to the purchase of the spectacular “million-dollar vase,” an Athenian early red-figure krater signed by the artist Euphronios and acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972. The Met purchased the vase (shown below) from Robert Hecht.

This was the most by far that anyone had ever paid for a Greek vase, and there was immediately suspicion about its origins. The price was also not unnoticed throughout the network’s chain, but re-echoed down to the tombaroli who, unsurprisingly, took even more eagerly to their midnight excavating. The closeness in time of this purchase to the 1970 UNESCO convention should not be taken as a sign of the convention’s emptiness, but rather as an indication of the determined efforts of traffickers to supply the market despite the convention.

The New York Times initially featured the new Met acquisition in its Sunday magazine on November 17, 1972, then assigned a follow-up to Nicolas Gage, an energetic young Greek American reporter. Gage dug up evidence in the New York customs records about Hecht’s importation of the vase into the U.S. from Switzerland, then tracked the vase back to the Swiss dealers, who suggested that it had come from a tomb recently dug up in Italy. The reporter discredited Hecht’s story that the vase came from an old collection in Lebanon, and Gage also located a tombarolo who claimed to have dug up the vase, but in the end the charges against Hecht and the tombarolo did not stick. Still, the Italian government told Hecht that he was no longer welcome in Italy, so he moved to Paris.

The million-dollar vase remained on view at the Met for another thirty-four years until finally, in 2006, the museum announced that it would return the vase to Italy. The Met said it had been presented with “irrefutable evidence” of illicit digging, which included details in Robert Hecht’s memoir (seized by the French police, in cooperation with Italian investigators, from his Paris apartment in 2001).

The memoir, by the way, was returned to Hecht and is available in semipublished form under the title Bob Hecht on Bob Hecht; the copyright is held by Emory’s ex-curator, Jasper Gaunt. The memoir presents an image of a man who loves buying and selling, acquiring and spending large sums of money, and feels no remorse about dealing in looted artifacts—or any responsibility for the damage done to objects or historical knowledge or cultural heritage. Rather, he boasts that he is providing beautiful objects to great museums (for a price of course).

Hecht’s notion that he was rescuing objects for the benefit of humanity feels like a bitter joke when we look at an example of a looted object in whose trafficking he played a key role. The photos below, of a kouros (statue of a young man), show what can happen to an ancient object that is illicitly dug up.

Only a piece of the kouros dug out of the ground ended up for sale by the Hecht galleries. On November 2, 2000, Hecht sold the kouros fragment to New York hedge-fund billionaire and antiquities collector Michael Steinhardt for $2,348,555. It is currently valued at $14 million. The full story is in New York Times articles and in the Manhattan DA’s official “statement of facts,” which includes details of the looting and sale, and Hecht’s assurance to Steinhardt that the kouros fragment was legally exported. This is not a story of rescue but rather of theft, mutilation, and fraud. Incidentally, Michael Steinhardt, recently returned to Greece antiquities, including the kouros fragment,  worth a total of $70 million dollars.[4]

Bob Hecht on Bob Hecht has proved useful in providing important details of his association with other traffickers and dealers, his numerous partnerships, and names of his various galleries, clients, and customers, which include museums and prominent collectors who donate to museums. An “organigram” discovered by authorities in 1995 in the Rome apartment of a member of Hecht’s trafficking network provides details.

In his account of a New York 1977 grand jury hearing in relation to the Euphronios krater, a hearing he regarded with disdain, Hecht claims to have entertained the jurors by rattling off the various museums and universities to whom he had sold objects—among them, the British Museum, the Louvre, the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Did he say Harvard? In 1971, Harvard had joined Penn in signing on to the UNESCO guidelines and issuing a statement pledging that Harvard would no longer accept objects of questionable pedigree. It seems, however, that enthusiasm at Harvard dimmed over the next couple of decades, as the appeal of fine art beckoned and opportunity for acquisition presented itself.

An article on the front page of the Boston Globe on January 16,1998, with the headline “Harvard Museum Acquisitions Shock Scholars,” presents a story that speaks directly and forcefully to these issues.[5] In 1996 Professor Irene Winter, then chair of Harvard’s Department of Art and Architecture, expressed concerns about the background of a number of objects on loan for an exhibit in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, protesting to the director of Harvard Museums, James Cuno, that the objects on exhibit were “purchased in clear contravention of international convention, for which its purchasers have shown consistent disregard over the years.”

Winter’s formal protest led to campus debate, which spilled over from the Sackler exhibit to focus on a number of objects purchased from Robert Hecht and to a large collection of pottery fragments purchased from an unnamed dealer who had acquired them over the years via the market; both the Hecht purchases and the fragment purchases were defended by Cuno and also by David Mitten, the faculty curator of the classical collections. But Winter stood firm, asserting, “Ethically, given the enormous amount of looted material on the market, we are obligated to presume these to be guilty until they are demonstrated to be innocent, and therefore the burden of proof should be on the purveyor of the object.”

Harvard’s collections are still the focus of some scrutiny, but some aspects of the Harvard experience are particularly relevant to the situation at Emory: (1) the complicity of the director and curator in overriding Harvard’s explicit principles of ethical; (2) the open discussion and awareness in 1998 of Robert Hecht’s key role in trafficking networks and in the Met’s purchase of the Euphronios vase;[6] and (3) the important role of the press.

In cases where there is resistance to making public all evidence concerning the history of ownership, a critical investigative press can provide important assistance, both by digging for information and for holding feet to the fire. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, however, did not take on this role as the Carlos collections grew, but rather played the part of enthusiastic cheerleader. The Emory Wheel, on the other hand, Emory’s independent student newspaper, has stood up and taken a determined interest in opening up the story of the spectacular growth of the Carlos. This is a credit to the spirit of inquiry among undergraduates at Emory University.

The History of the Emory Museum and its collections

The early history of the Emory museum (from 1876—a year before Penn!] and its collections is a well-known part of Emory lore (especially through Gary Hauk’s series of history blog posts). I begin in medias res, when the new plan for a Museum of Art and Archaeology at Emory took shape in the early 1980s under the prodding of Monique Seefried, an Atlanta transplant with a degree in archaeology from the Sorbonne.

The collections of the Emory Museum of Art and Archaeology (chartered in 1982 with Prof. Clark Poling as its first director) combined the Art History Department’s Works on Paper collection with an archaeological collection largely drawn from Egypt and the Near East. The latter included mainly (1) objects gathered by Emory’s William Shelton during his travels in the Middle East in 1920 with James Breasted of the University of Chicago, from the shops in Egypt, and often directly from the ground in Mesopotamia; (2) objects from the early excavations at Jericho in the mid-1950s, directed by Kathleen Kenyon ,in which the Candler School’s Prof. Boone Bowen participated; and (3) objects from the maritime excavations of Edwin Link in the harbor of Caesarea Maritima, in which Prof. Immanuel Ben Dor of the theology school was a participant. In addition, there was a significant collection of oil lamps, providing a sequence from the early Bronze Age to the thirteenth century CE.

But the organizers and the objects needed a space. Here President James Laney stepped in to help, and in the summer of 1981 convinced Michael Carlos, the owner of a prosperous Atlanta wine and spirits distribution company and the son of Greek immigrant parents, to pledge $1.5 million dollars toward the renovation of the old Law Building to house the new museum in what then became Michael C. Carlos Hall.

The renovation took several years, but Monique Seefried energetically set about organizing a preview exhibit of the museum’s collections. The exhibit opened in the spring of 1982 in the Woodruff Library’s Schatten Gallery.

At the opening of the exhibit, Seefried commented to Thalia Carlos (Michael’s wife) that she was sorry there were not more Greek artifacts (three Greek objects are listed in the catalog). Mrs. Carlos responded quickly to this revelation and began to urge her husband to contribute more funds specifically for the acquisition of Greek art, and in 1984 the Emory museum made significant purchases at a number of New York and European galleries. Thus, when the museum officially opened in its newly renovated space in the spring of 1985, it contained some high-quality Greek art.

The 1984 purchases included a small bronze Roman-era head identified as Alexander (shown below), which I have regularly drawn on in my Greek history classes for our discussion of portraits of Alexander the Great.

A few years ago I noticed that the head had no genuine history of ownership other than “Purchased by Emory University Museum of Art and Archaeology from Brian T. Aitken (1952–2009) [Acanthus Gallery], New York, New York.” I thought “Oh no!” Aitken is the gallery owner from whom the museum acquired the black-figure band cup repatriated to Italy in August 2023, and from whom, in 2003, the Carlos purchased the spectacular artist-signed calyx krater (showing Europa) with no record of prior ownership and indeed unknown to the world at large before it arrived at Emory. I have been agitating for more information about this acquisition for the past nine years to no avail.

 Another 1984 purchase was a group of fragments of pottery and an amphora bought from Jonathan Rosen (Atlantis Antiquities), in New York. Atlantis Antiquities was co-owned by Rosen with Robert Hecht.

Two years later, in 1986, the young Emory Museum of Art and Archaeology again acquired a group of Greek artifacts from the antiquities market—noted by the Atlanta Daily World in a short article titled “Michael Carlos’ Wife Donates Art Honoring Husband Sunday.” The article tells the reader that “Thalia Carlos selected 21 pieces of ancient Greek art, valued at $400,000,” and “the new additions bring the number of objects in the collection to over 30.”

Some of the objects listed, including the Cycladic figure illustrated in the article, surely deserved scholarly investigation before purchase. Given the known rampant looting of Cycladic artifacts from the 1960s (they were much desired by European and North American collectors), and the name involved (the dealer Koutoulakis would now raise a red flag and should have at least given pause in 1986), we can ask whether the backgrounds of this and later purchases were investigated with the due diligence required by the 1970 UNESCO convention, U.S. Law , and the guidelines of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Although not mentioned in the Atlanta Daily World article, the 1986 purchases also included another batch of pottery fragments, acquired from the Zurich Galerie owned by Frida Tcachos, another prominent name in the trafficking network.[7] The trafficking of fine pottery fragments is an unsettling development in illicit antiquities trade. Most disturbing is the fact that examination of the breaks suggests that some might in fact be recent and intentional—to multiply the supply of artifacts and disguise their distribution—adding another level of criminality to their trafficking.[8] Currently Emory students study Greek pottery in the extensive Carlos collection of fine pottery fragments. Emory should open up the discussion of their provenance and ownership history to critical inquiry and make sure our students are fully aware of the issues and recent published discussions of the evidence.

Looking back, the purchases of 1984 and 1986 are a significant turn of direction for the Emory Museum, especially given its archaeologically focused origins. In 1987, however, the museum hired its first full-time director—Maxwell Anderson, a young, energetic, and ambitious former Metropolitan Museum assistant curator, who was nevertheless committed to the principles of ethical collection.[9] Acquisitions were made under his leadership (including two that have now been repatriated),[10] but his focus was on developing projects of cooperative international loans rather than market acquisition. The loans made under EUMILOP (Emory University Museum International Loan Program) have been heralded by many in the field as a model for ethical museum practice and cooperation (with avoidance of the market). These were the real glory years of Emory’s museum, when international loan exhibits were paired with symposia and resulted in catalogs to which faculty contributed, and performances of ancient drama staged by our own theater faculty and students.

Another shift came after Anderson left in 1995. A new curator, Anthony HIrschel (hired in 1997) oversaw faculty curators’ gradual return to full-time service in their academic departments and their replacement by staff curators—first Peter Lacovara in 1998 for the Egyptian and Near Eastern collections, then Jasper Gaunt in 2001 for Greek and Roman. Both were interested in acquisition. In 1999, Lacovara engineered the purchase of a nineteenth-century collection of Egyptian mummies and other materials held by a museum of curiosities in Niagara, Ontario. Many at Emory remember the excitement of citywide fundraising to make the acquisition possible.

The hoopla over the arrival of this collection seems to have spurred a new gift from the Carlos family. Gaunt, at any rate, told me that Mrs. Carlos in particular was energized to add substantial funds for purchases that would bring attention back to the collection of Greek art (and Roman art, which she was persuaded to consider a close relative).

Then came the blockbuster announcement: on November 15, 1999, at a lunch gathering he had called together, Michael Carlos announced a surprise gift of $10 million dollars for museum acquisitions.[11] It was “for Greek art,” Mrs. Carlos was reported to say, “because that is our heritage.” After the announcement, the president of the Carlos Museum’s board was also reported to have said that the timing of the gift was excellent, because of “what’s available in the market.” “This will make the classical collection world-class,” he continued. “It’s a defining moment for the museum.” It is startling to read this today and think about the enthusiastic shopping spree in the antiquities market about to occur. What was “available in the market” in 1999 included the kouros fragment purchased from Hecht by Michael Steinhardt the following year.

Acquisitions began quickly and took off exponentially when Jasper Gaunt was hired as curator for the Greek and Roman collections in late 2001. A member of the search committee told me that Gaunt’s appointment was urged because “he knew the market.” Indeed he did, having worked with and for Robert Hecht during the preceding decade.

Tony Hirschel left Emory for the Indianapolis Museum of Art soon after hiring Gaunt, and Bonnie Speed was hired as director in 2002. Gaunt went to work quickly on acquiring for the museum “not the best but the very best,”[12] and within a year, only $2 million of the $10 million dollar gift remained. There were gifts as well, including a large collection of fine pottery fragments collected by Dietrich von Bothmer, the Met curator who, with Thomas Hoving, had purchased the Euphronios krater from Robert Hecht. Many of the fragments donated by von Bothmer from his private collection had also been purchased from Hecht, and remain (so far) in the Carlos collections.

At the very time the museum was expanding its collection of fine pottery fragments in this way, it also made the decision to de-accession the collection of pottery sherds from an important long-term archaeological survey of the Moab plateau in Israel. These had been donated in 1991 by Prof. Max Miller, the director of the survey and a “founding father” and long-time supporter of the Emory museum. There is no better example of how the desire and ambition to make the Carlos a “fine art” museum and a “top five” university museum of classical art had pushed aside the objects and principles of archaeology and a teaching museum—and of ethical collecting. Prof. Miller retrieved his collection, and it is now a part of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (formerly the Harvard Semitic Museum).[13]

But to return to the Greek and Roman collections: until her death at eighty-three in 2011 (Michael Carlos had died in 2002), Mrs. Carlos continued to actively support Gaunt’s purchases, as is clear in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution story “Herculean Try of a Goddess,” in which she is reported to have given him the go-ahead to bid beyond his limit at a Sotheby’s auction in December 2006—and win the prize, an over-life-size head of a goddess (shown below), with a bid of $420,000.

“The marble head,” said Gaunt, “had been sold as Roman ten years earlier, but they’re just wrong. It’s obviously Greek.” Currently, however, the label says: “Culture: Roman. Era: Hellenistic.” Perhaps this is a sort of compromise, but not necessarily all that clear an identification for a museum visitor.[14]

Coming to terms with the  full list of acquisitions made during the years of Jasper Gaunt’s curatorship, and the problems with the provenance stories that were told about them, is daunting.  Also problematic are the labels (often quite fanciful) invented to provide objects with a grounded identity when they had none. Many of these labels were misinformed and misleading. Some have been revised. But problems remain. The way in which objects with uncertain histories have been provided with fabricated historical context or cultural description is antithetical to the principles of a university museum.

The Returns

I close with some comments on the recent returns the Carlos made to Iraq, Italy, and Greece. Some observers point to these and applaud the museum for negotiating repatriations and returns when they are called for. What is needed, however, is (a) a genuinely proactive approach, rather than waiting  for someone to prove that an object had been acquired illicitly and (b) genuine transparency. For example, there is now a placard on view as one enters the Greek and Roman galleries informing the viewer:

Many objects in the Carlos Museum’s collection of Greek and Roman art were acquired from the European and North American art markets in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Few of these objects have documented archaeological provenance or collection histories that can be traced beyond their presence at auction or with antiquities dealers, [meaning that] we cannot always be sure that the objects were excavated and exported legally from their country of origin.  

As Elizabeth Marlowe, professor of art history at Colgate University, commented to the Emory Wheel, this statement fails to take responsibility. “There doesn’t seem to be any desire to undertake any kind of deeper reckoning, acknowledgment, self-reflection [or]examination.” said Marlowe. “That’s really a lost opportunity.”

James Wright, professor emeritus and the William R. Kenan Jr. Chair in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College and former director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, was even tougher in his letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Instead of admitting that a very few from its very large body of unprovenanced artifacts have been returned to the Italian government, the Carlos Museum should take advantage of its scandalous history of acquisition to make it a teaching moment for its public visitors and the students who come to study its collections. Anyone reading the labels in the Carlos Museum today, upon closer examination, may wonder why one object purchased in the last quarter century is labeled as having been “looted and illegally exported” or marked for repatriation to its country of origin while other objects in the same case merely have labels noting purchase date and speculation about provenance.

We are not given full disclosure but rather carefully crafted statements that elide or avoid responsibility. For example, for the Ivory inlay (shown below) looted from the Baghdad Museum (probably in 2003), purchased by the Carlos in 2006 from a Washington, DC dealer, and finally repatriated to Iraq in March 2023, we find the following acquisition details: “When the object was purchased in 2006, the provenance information supplied to the museum indicated that it came from a private collection that was formed in the 1960s.”

It would have been a simple task to investigate a possible connection with the Baghdad museum, especially given the wide publicity surrounding its looting in 2003 and the worldwide alert that went out to museums to be on the lookout for items looted from Iraq. But that was not done, even though the likely connection between the ivory inlay and the site of Nimrud (in Iraq) is acknowledged in the Carlos Museum’s own “Highlights of the Collections” (2011).

A further point about the consequences of looting is evident in a comparison of the two photos of the inlay posted on the Carlos web site (pre- and post-looting). Looters do not handle with care, and it is obvious that this extraordinary object has been seriously damaged.

There are similar issues on the returns to Italy and Greece, and the excuse that “we were not given accurate information,” what the Manhattan DA calls the “ostrich defense,” wears thin very quickly, especially when the objects were purchased from dealers with known reputations for trafficking. Consider the seated figure (below) from a grave monument, bought from Michael Ward in 2003.

The Carlos Museum states in its repatriation announcement that “no provenance information was given by the dealer.” Michael Ward’s connections to the trafficking network were well known in 2003. There were published accounts of settlements after a 1999 conviction; recently his name has surfaced in the Manhattan DA’s “Statement of Facts” regarding the 2021 seizure of illicit antiquities from Michael Steinhardt (a Ward client). The Carlos Museum collections include a substantial number of other objects bought from (or given by) Michael Ward (the most recent in 2016); the investigation of these should be a top priority for the Carlos.[15]

Finally, there is the marble statue identified as a “Goddess or Muse (Terpichore),” purchased from Robert Hecht in 2002 and repatriated in January 2024 (below).

On the Carlos website, the details provided for repatriation are that in April 2023 the museum met with Greek officials in Athens and was presented with evidence from a 2011 court case showing that the statue had been illicitly excavated in 1997. The statue, however,  had already been identified and claimed by Greece in 2007, and evidence for the statue’s looting had been published and discussed by Christos Tsirogiannis and David Gill in 2008.[16]  The Carlos states that the museum “purchased the sculpture in 2002 from New York-based dealer Robert Hecht (1919–2012), who stated he and partner George Zakos (1911–1983) had owned it since 1974.” Hecht, as we have seen, was not someone to trust on any statement of provenance.

In 2008 David Gill, honorary professor at the Centre for Heritage at Kent University, inquired with the Carlos Museum about the 2007 Greek claim for three objects (the Muse and Minoan Larnax—both returned to Greece in January 2024—and a large pithos, not returned despite significant evidence). The Carlos spokesperson responded by forwarding the museum’s statement on acquisitions: “The Museum will not knowingly acquire any object which has been illegally exported from its country of origin or illegally imported into the United States.”

That statement is what I was given when I started teaching with the Carlos collections in 2015 and asked about acquisition policy. I call it the “mission statement” on acquisitions, and my classes studied it carefully. The new director of the Carlos, Henry Kim, in his efforts to chart a new path, has articulated and posted a new statement on acquisitions. His revision tightens up a number of things, changing “we will not knowingly acquire” to “we will not acquire” and insisting on the 1970 cutoff date. His statement also notably insists on the same standards for loans as for purchases or gifts—and he has taken the strong action of sending back long-term loans that were accepted without this assurance.

Still, the continued reliance on the guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors is in some ways unsatisfying. The art museum directors were concerned with managing the tension between the desire of art museums to collect and the ethical and legal requirements of the 1970 UNESCO convention. To that end, they offered the guidance that members may acquire objects that do not satisfy the UNESCO requirement if the museums “exercise responsibility when making informed and defensible judgments”about such objects. In 2008, to push museums to acknowledge their noncompliance with UNESCO requirements, the AAMD (under then president Maxwell Anderson) instituted a “new object registry,” where members could enter information about all objects acquired after 2008 for which “exceptions” to the 1970 rule were claimed, and in 2013 the AAMD further strengthened the rules, suggesting that all objects lacking the requisite provenance be registered.

The Carlos Museum’s use of the registry deserves some attention. Its first entry was in 2015 (one object standing in for a large collection of gems, gifted to the museum by a Los Angeles collector).[17] After that there was nothing until 2018, when there began a rapid series of entries;[18] currently the Carlos has registered 660 objects, by far the most of any museum.[19] Many of these registrations include little to no information about provenance or explanation for noncompliance with UNESCO requirements and AAMD guidelines.

When I asked Max Anderson about this use of the object registry, he wrote: “I don’t have a detailed reaction to the Carlos entries in the Object Registry, but do feel that the enormity of its entries signals a problem that can’t be cured by illustrating 660 works lacking adequate provenance.”

I hope that going forward, the Carlos will attend carefully to the use of the AAMD object registry to make provenance details publicly available. I also hope that the Carlos will hold true to its commitment to genuine transparency: “We strive to provide transparency on what we own and the methods by which our objects were acquired.” 

To conclude: Since this article has been primarily concerned with Greek art and Greek cultural heritage, it will perhaps be appropriate to let a Greek philosopher offer some concluding advice. Plato’s Gorgias offers a dialogue in which Socrates takes on questions about the use and abuse of rhetoric, the nature of virtue, and the good life. Socrates insists that rhetoric used to defend injustice is useless, and that the only proper use of rhetoric will be to publicly and critically call attention to injustice—whether our own, or that of our family, our companions, or even our country. I think the Carlos Museum would do itself and us all a good turn, and make Emory proud, by taking these Socratic sentiments to heart.

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[1] The partnership of Hecht and Gaunt (with Gaunt the junior partner) is documented from 1990 and continued at least until early 2000, when Gaunt offered a Greek funerary stele to the Carlos on behalf of Hecht Galleries. See, for instance, https://twitter.com/ChasingAphrodit/status/1694791964192035292. See also the Manhattan DA “Statement of Fact” in relation to the antiquities collection of Michael Steinhardt, Dec. 2021, pp.  109–10. Gaunt is identified as a “partner of Robert Hecht” in relation to a  1996 sale. The Carlos Museum’s archives include Gaunt’s December 1999 letter on Hecht Gallery letterhead to assistant curator of the  Michael C. Carlos Museum: file on “Stele of an Athlete.” At what point Gaunt became a candidate for the curatorship at the Carlos is not clear. In a personal conversation with me, former director Anthony Hirschel remembered talking with him about the position in September 2001, when Hirschel was preparing to move to Indianapolis. The Emory Report reported that Gaunt was on campus in December 2001, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said that he made his first official purchase as curator that same month..

[2] The recognition that the market spurs looting was of course not a completely new idea in 1970. In 1937, the SouthWest Museum in Los Angeles decided to acquire only objects that could be established not to have been gathered illegally, with the principle that “[t]he only way to stop the pothunter is to deprive him of his market. That market consists principally in museums and in other institutions of learning and research” (see Patty Gerstenblith, “The Meaning of 1970 for the Acquisition of Archaological Objects,” Journal of Field Archaeology 38 (2013) 364–73, at 366.

[3] “Beyond the UNESCO Convention: The Case of the Troy Gold,” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 5 (2017) 87-91.

[4] It is common but not public knowledge that the Hecht-Steinhardt kouros was offered to, and came close to being accepted by,  the Michael C. Carlos Museum in 2018.

[5] Boston Globe, Jan. 16, 1998.

[6] David Mitten contended that Hecht was a reliable supplier: “He’s very square with us. We have every reason to believe him.” To this, Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had with his curator Dietrich von Bothmer purchased the million-dollar vase from Hecht, responded, “Nobody would accept anything from Robert Hecht unless they were really loony. In his entire career maybe there are two or three pieces he had that, by chance, were legitimate, that fell onto the truck. But the rest, no way.” Hoving’s comment  should cast some doubt on Anthony Hirchel’s statement to Stephanie Lee that he remembered hiring Jasper Gaunt [in late 2001], “before the full extent of Bob Hecht’s activities was widely understood.”   See  also Hoving’s 1993 memoir Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art for his open acknowledgement that the Euphonios vase (the “hot pot”) was looted.

[7] Frida Tchacos’s husband, Werner Nussberger, was an active participant in the fragment business. See David W. J. Gill, “Context Matters: The Fragmentary Gifts of Werner Nussberger,” Journal of Art Crime 24 (2020): 57–60. A large south Italian amphora (showing the “Sack of Troy”)—a favorite of Museum visitors—also was bought from Tchacos and Galerie Nefer, in 1999.

[8] See Graham Bowley and Tom Mashberg, “The Kylex Marvel: Why Experts Distrust the Story of an Ancient Cup’s Rebirth,” The New York Times, Apr. 25, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/arts/kylix-cup-greek-metropolitan-museum.html.

[9] See Anderson’s comments about his Met experience in Stephanie Lee, “The Little Museum’s Big Score,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 23, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-little-museums-big-score. See also her follow-up articles: November 1, 2023, “Under Pressure, Emory’s Art Museum Admits Some of Its Antiquities ‘Were Looted,’” (Nov. 1, 2023), and  “Emory U. Is Returning 3 Allegedly Looted Antiquities to Greece” (Jan. 22, 2024). I am grateful to Stephanie Lee for her excellent journalism and commitment to following this story.

[10] During the eight years of his tenure, Anderson approved the acquisition of nine objects that he now considers deserve further investigation. In a memo to me, he identified these objects and discussed their provenance, concluding: “While the standards were less rigorous than today, I accept responsibility for these acquisitions, and encourage the current administration of the Carlos Museum to dedicate the time and resources necessary to cooperate with inquiries into title of and all works about which there may be concerns, including those nine acquired during my tenure.”

[11] But from looking at the significant number of  acquisitions with 1999 numbers, I think that the gift or some of it might have been made (at least informally) somewhat earlier in the year.

[12] The phrase seems to be Michael Carlos’s: “We are not looking for the best but the very best”: “A Legacy Rooted in Ancient Worlds,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dec. 22, 2002. And Jasper Gaunt seems to have enjoyed repeating it.

[13] Oded Borowski, emeritus professor in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and Jewish Studies and a long-time director of excavations at Tell Halif in Israel, told me he was disappointed to see the display of oil lamps taken down at about this same time.

[14]In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “Herculean Try for a Goddess, Jasper Gaunt is reported to have claimed that his Goddess had a provenance “that stretches back to the early 20th century.”    That provenance is not, however, currently on the object’s official provenance entry, which does not go back beyond 1985.

[15] See Lynda Albertson ARCA (Association for Research into Crimes against Art), Oct. 12, 2023, https://art-crime.blogspot.com/2023/10/unravelling-one-antiquities-looting-and.html.

[16] See David Gill, “Context Matters” column “The Michael C. Carlos Museum Returns Antiquities” in the most recent Journal of Art Crime, with details on the identification of the Muse by Christos Tsirogiannis.

For criticism of a museum’s “deal-making” to avoid full disclosure and investigation, see Yannis Hamilakis, “Sorry, But This is Not ‘Repatriation,’” Hyperallergic, Nov. 3, 2022 (“The Met’s deal with the Greek government to “repatriate” billionaire Leonard Stern’s Cycladic art collection is not what it seems”).

[17] Information from AAMD (personal communication).

[18] Deduced from information provided by Patty Gerstenblith and Stephanie Lee (personal communication).

[19] For list of Museum entries:  https://aamd.org/object-registry/new-acquisitions-of-archaeological-material-and-works-of-ancient-art/browse.

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The death of Mikhail Gorbachev on August 30 made me recall his visit to Emory University thirty years ago. It was May 11, 1992, and fifteen thousand graduates, friends, and family members filled the Emory Quadrangle to hear the Commencement address delivered by the last person to preside over the Soviet Union. It was the largest Commencement crowd in the University’s history, and that Commencement became the benchmark for all future Emory graduation exercises in terms of size, security—and celebrity (the last criterion not always met to the satisfaction of the students).

The year before, Eduard Shevardnadze had delivered the Commencement address. He had been foreign minister of the USSR until its dissolution and would later serve as first president of the Republic of Georgia. His granddaughter Tamuna Mosashvili was a student in Emory College, and a burgeoning academic and health-sciences relationship between Emory and Georgia paved the way for his appearance. Building on that experience, Emory President James Laney decided to invite Gorbachev as a follow-up act.

Out of power since 1991, Gorbachev had decided to go on a speaking tour of the United States, including a stop at Westminster College in Missouri, where Winston Churchill had delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946. Emory was able to lure Gorbachev by promising a meeting with President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Presidential Center might serve as a model for the kind of post-political career Gorbachev could have.

I was part of the delegation that met Gorbachev at the Atlanta airport, where he arrived on a private jet supplied by Malcolm Forbes, the publisher of Forbes magazine. The irony of name of the plane carrying this communist leader was lost on none of us waiting on the tarmac—Capitalist Tool.

Interest in hearing this former head of the Soviet Union was so intense that people with no connection to Emory and from as far away as Florida wanted to attend the event; the Quadrangle had to be fenced off for the first time to ensure that graduates and their guests would have seats. Even so, the graduates could receive only a limited number of tickets, making for a lot of unhappiness.

The day was magnificent. Senator Sam Nunn 1961C 1962L introduced President Carter, who in turn introduced Gorbachev. The audience listened to the speech twice—first in Russian and then in English, as Gorbachev and his translator alternated paragraph by paragraph. It did go on, and the audience was no doubt happy to stand and applaud the final words. Having received his honorary degree, Gorbachev departed the stage and went on to his next stop.

For more on this episode, see chapter 8 of my book Emory as Place: Meaning in a University Landscape (University of Georgia Press, 2019).

Gary S. Hauk

A new Emory History Minute just went live today, August 22, 2022.

Thanks to Emory videographers Corey Broman-Fulks and Stephen Nowland for their excellent work.

You can see more of these brief history videos by googling “Emory History Minutes” for the entire playlist of 28 videos that Corey and I did for the 175th anniversary of Emory back in 2011.

Gary Hauk, Emory University Historian Emeritus

As Emory prepares to host a major conference on slavery and the dispossession of Native American lands, I turn to Mark Auslander for this latest post on Emory history.

Mark is a former faculty member at Oxford College and is now a research scholar in anthropology at Brandeis University and visiting associate professor at Boston University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He spent years uncovering the documentary history of enslaved men and women who helped to build, operate, and maintain Emory College in its antebellum years, as well as tracing and celebrating the legacy of their descendants. The results of that extraordinary research became his book The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

With Mark’s permission and that of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Boook Library, I am reposting here  “Uncovering Enslavement on the Main Emory Campus: Two Receipts from the Civil War Era,” a post that first appeared September 2, 2021, on Scholar Blog, the Rose Library’s blog.

UNCOVERING ENSLAVEMENT ON THE MAIN EMORY CAMPUS: TWO RECEIPTS FROM THE CIVIL WAR ERA

by Mark Auslander

Let us consider two receipts issued during the Civil War in the town of Decatur, Georgia. Both cast light on the structures and experiences of enslavement on the lands that would become, many decades later, parts of the main campus of Emory University.

The first document (Fig.1) is found in the Rose Library, in a scrapbook assembled and donated by the descendants of Washington Jackson Houston (1831–1911), a major landowner and entrepreneur in Decatur and Atlanta. The document reads:

1st Confed Cav Regt [regiment]

Near Decatur GA

July 18th ’64

Recvd of W. J. Houston

Two hundred and ninety bundles oats, forage for horses of this Regt [regiment] while on picket

J. W. Irwin Capt [Captain]

Co. G. 1st Confed Cav Regt

Kellys Cav Div [Division]

The 1st Confederate Cavalry Regiment had been organized in Tennessee in April 1862.[1] After the Battle of Chickamauga, the 1st (also known as the 12th Cavalry Regiment) had been placed within the division of Confederate Brigadier General John Herbert Kelly, Army of the Tennessee, who had commanded units with distinction at Chickamauga (September 18–20, 1863) and  the Battle of Pickett’s Mill (May 27, 1864), both Confederate victories. General Kelly would die six weeks after the receipt was signed, on September 2, 1864, while participating in an effort in Franklin, Tennessee, to cut off Union General Sherman’s supply lines during the final phase of the Atlanta campaign. As it happened, September 2 was the very day that Atlanta surrendered to General Sherman. 

In mid-July 1864, the 1st Cavalry Regiment was assigned to the outer defense of Atlanta during the prolonged struggle over the city that would play a determinant role in the ultimate outcome of the Civil War. The regiment was under the command of General Joseph Wheeler, its mission to harass advancing Union forces and provide intelligence and reconnaissance reports to the Confederate command.

Who was Captain J. W. Irwin?

Captain J. W. Irwin was James William Irwin (1835–1914), who grew up in Savannah, Hardin County, Tennessee, the son of James and Nancy Sevier Irwin. He enlisted as a 2nd lieutenant on October 1, 1861, and served throughout the war, surrendering with his unit [2] in Gainesville, Alabama, on May 4, 1865. He was paroled May 11, 1865, and returned home. In 1870 he is listed as a dry goods merchant back in Savannah, Tennessee. In 1868 he married Cornelia Broyle; the couple raised six children. Captain Irwin held prominent positions in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and local Masonic chapters. It is worth remarking that both Captain Irwin and Washington Jackson Houston, who had such a brief encounter on the eve of the Battle of Atlanta, survived the war and lived well into the twentieth century, dying within three years of one another, in 1914 and 1911, respectively.

Who was W. J. Houston?

Houston’s great-great-grandson Richard Houston Sams, who resides near the Emory campus, recalls family stories that during the Civil War, Washington Jackson Houston routinely traveled back and forth between his home in Decatur, some six miles east of Atlanta, and his home in Atlanta, where he oversaw railroad logistics for the Confederate war effort. (For this reason, he was excused from military service.)  As the war intensified and Atlanta became a likely target of Union military advances, he had arranged for his wife, daughters, and enslaved people to be transferred out to the Decatur area, which he anticipated, erroneously, would put them out of the line of fire. On December 24, 1863, he purchased a major tract of land north of present-day North Decatur Road, from his wife, Amanda’s, father, Dr. Chapmon Powell, and settled his family and enslaved people there.[3] 

Sections of this property later became part of the Clairmont Campus of Emory University and the Lullwater Preserve (home of the Emory president), as well as the Houston Mill House property owned by Emory and named in Houston’s memory. Washington Jackson Houston acquired the cabin in which his in-laws, the Powells, had lived, known as Dr. Powell’s “medicine house,” and built his home around it. (The original medicine house cabin was later relocated to Stone Mountain park, where it remains on display.) It was at this location that Houston presumably received the receipt for his oats.

Although the parties to the receipt were unaware of the fact at the time, that week was to prove pivotal to the trajectory of the war. The day before, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, relieved General Joseph Johnston of command for the defense of Atlanta, putting in his place General John Bell Hood. Sherman reportedly was pleased over the news, knowing Hood’s reputation for aggressiveness and impetuousness, which made it more likely that he would send troops beyond the sturdy defenses Johnson had overseen, meeting Sherman’s troops in open battle.

July 18 was also the day before Union troops, in the 23rd Army Corps of the Army of the Ohio, commanded by John M. Schofield, crossed the South Fork of Peachtree Creek and set up a command post, which served as temporary headquarters for General William T. Sherman. The headquarters was the subject of an illustration published the following month in Harper’s Weekly, by the celebrated northern artist and war correspondent Theodore R. Davis (Fig. 2).

These events were commemorated by a plaque along Clairmont Road, placed in 1954 by the Georgia Historical Commission but no longer standing:

“West of this point 75 ft., was the antebellum residence of James Oliver Powell (1826–1873), Sherman’s headquarters, July 19, 1864. Sherman traveled with Schofield’s 23d A.C. from the Chattahoochee River at Power’s Fy. July 17, & arrived here July 19. The house was used as a temporary hospital while the 23d A.C. was in his vicinity. Cox’s (3d) div. moved to the Paden plantation (Emory University); Hascall’s (2d) div., together with Dodge’s 16th A.C. occupied Decatur occupied Decatur after a spirited conflict with the defenders of the town — a detachment of Wheeler’s cavalry (CS).

The nearby Hardeman Primitive Baptist church (located beside the present-day Clifton School on the Clairmont Campus) was used as a field hospital for wounded Union soldiers. When the Union army made ready to depart, they burned the structure. Houston’s descendant Richard Sams believes the burning was likely a sanitation measure because of the large number of limbs that had reportedly been amputated within it by Union Army surgeons.  Two days later, Sherman’s army would fight the Battle of Peachtree Creek, and then face Confederate defenders in the climactic Battle of Atlanta of July 22, commemorated in the Cyclorama at the Atlanta History Center.

On July 19th, as they set up temporary headquarters at the Powell place, these Union troops would certainly have informed the enslaved people on the Houston and adjacent plantations that under the terms of Emancipation Proclamation they were legally free. Many previously enslaved African Americans would choose to follow Sherman’s troops four months later on his March to the Sea across Georgia.

The fall of Atlanta in early September 1864 struck an enormous blow to the Confederate effort and virtually guaranteed Abraham Lincoln’s reelection in the November 1864 election, dashing Confederate hopes that the Federal leadership would ever sue for peace.  It also helped doom the eventual fall of the slavery system on which the Confederacy was anchored.

Identifying Enslaved Persons

Who precisely were the enslaved people on the Houston plantation who must have produced, among other things, the 290 bundles of oats for the Confederate horses, referenced in the receipt? The 1860 slave schedule lists Washington Houston as owning only two slaves at his Atlanta residence, a girl age 10 and a woman age 50. It seems likely that when he purchased hundreds of acres of land from Chapmon Powell, he must have bought a number of enslaved people as well.  (Chapmon Powell had owned sixteen slaves in 1850, and six slaves in 1860.)

The identities of these enslaved people are hinted at by the fact that six years later, when the 1870 census was enumerated, the W. J. Houston household  (Dwelling #120), included an African American woman named Ophelia Powell, age 22, born around 1848, employed as a domestic servant. She appears to be the adult child of the African American couple Irvin Powell (b. 1828) and Ursilla Powell, who in 1870 lived with five children twelve households away from the white Houstons in Decatur (Dwelling # 132). It seems likely that at least some members of this African American Powell family had been owned by W. J. Houston during the Civil War period. It may be that Ophelia is a match for the unnamed ten year old child listed in the 1860 slave schedule as property of W. J. Houston in Atlanta, and had been with the white Houston family for an extended period, even while most of her family was owned by the white Powell family in Decatur. (In his 1857 will, Chapmon Powell indicated his desire to bequeath a girl child slave to his daughter Amanda, the wife of Washington Jackson Houston; he may have given or sold other slaves to Houston during the Civil War period.)

Washington Jackson Houston must have been confident he would be compensated in full for the costs of the 290 bundles of oats from the Confederacy at some point; it appears this never happened, since, as his descendant Richard Houston Sams notes, the receipt remained in the family possession until it was donated to Emory Special Collections. The Confederate military, after all, was occupied with the defense of Atlanta, and evacuated the city on September 1, 1864, so there was never an opportunity for Houston to redeem his receipt. The document remained among the Houston family descendants until Richard Houston Sams generously donated it to Emory’s Special Collections, as part of the W. J. Houston Scrapbook some years ago.

In contrast, Mr. Houston’s neighbor Thomas Noteman Paden, just up the road (living at what is now the intersection of North Decatur and Springdale Roads, in Druid Hills) was clearly reimbursed twice for providing the Confederate army with fodder earlier during that fateful summer. On June 9, 1864, he sold 1,750 pounds of fodder for $87.50. July 15, three days before the transfer of oats from W. J Houston to the 1st Confederate Cavalry, he sold 7,500 pounds of fodder for $300.00, and was clearly paid. [4]

A Receipt for Lucy

As it happens, Thomas Noteman Paden is referenced in a very different kind of receipt (Fig. 3), which dates to a few weeks before the official start of the Civil War. This document, preserved at the Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center, reads as follows:

“Georgia, DeKalb County.  Received of my father James Paden a negro girl by name Lucy about seven years old of dark complexion and valued by Daniel Johnson and Robert Medlock at six hundred dollars, as part of his estate this 25th day of March 1861. Witness my hand and seal Thomas N Paden. Robert Medlock”[5]

James Paden (c. 1792–1864), who gave seven-year-old Lucy to his son, was a Judge of the Inferior Court in DeKalb County, who owned a 700-acre plantation adjacent to the Powell and Houston properties. His lands occupied the lands that now house the core campus of Emory University and the Druid Hills Golf Club. His house was located at the northwest corner of what is now Clifton and North Decatur Roads. In 1860, he is recorded as owning twenty enslaved people. One of these was an enslaved female, age seven, who presumably was Lucy.

Lucy’s parents, Jerry and Grace, were enslaved by Judge Paden, as were her brothers Jerry (Jr.) and Sandy, and sisters Rose Anna and Sarah. Sarah had been transferred some years earlier, as a provisional gift, to Judge Paden’s daughter Caroline Lettice Paden Chandler, wife of W. B. Chandler; she was taken with the Chandlers to their home in Fannin County, Texas, about 700 miles from Decatur.  (In his will, written in 1859, Judge Paden finalized this gift, formally bequeathing Sarah to Caroline.)[6]

Now, in March 1861, Lucy too was being separated from her parents and siblings. Thomas Paden’s plantation was about a mile west of Judge Paden’s house, a little south, as noted, of the intersection of present day Decatur and Springdale Roads, in the modern day Druid Hills neighborhood. She presumably was able to see her family from time to time, but the move must have been traumatic for the little girl and her loved ones.

Why did Judge Paden choose to transfer young Lucy to his eldest son Thomas on this day? The  late days of March 1861 were ones of enormous national tension as the fate of besieged Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor remained uncertain and war loomed on the horizon. Open warfare  would not officially begin until the morning of April 12, when Confederate batteries opened fire upon Fort Sumter, but throughout March pro-Confederate fervor ran high in Georgia and plans were already being made for military mobilization. Perhaps the Judge anticipated that his son would soon enter into Confederate military service and wanted to provide Thomas’s wife, Nancy Caroline Guess Paden (1819–1904), with household help during Thomas’ upcoming absence. Or it may be that the timing of the transfer was coincidental; many people in Georgia, after all, did not anticipate that the North would fight to preserve the Union.[7]

In any event, a little more three years later, the day after W. J. Houston received the receipt for the oats was a momentous one for the enslaved people on the Paden plantations. General Jacob Dolson Cox, whose 3rd Division was part of Schonfield’s advancing army, occupied Judge Paden’s house as his temporary headquarters on the evening of July 19. Union soldiers camped that night in what is now the CVS parking lot in Emory Village. It seems likely that Union officers would have informed the enslaved people on the Paden plantations that under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation they were now legally free.

True freedom, however, would be delayed for many months. After Judge Paden’s death, in December 1864, his property was divided among his heirs in January 1865; in the eyes of the DeKalb County Court, slavery was still fully operational.  A dozen enslaved people were distributed, tearing apart several families, including Lucy’s relatives. Lucy, now owned by Thomas N. Paden, was not herself redistributed, but her parents, Jerry and Grace, were sent about seventy miles northwest of Atlanta to be enslaved by Judge Paden’s daughter Elizabeth Paden Strange. Lucy, then around ten years old, must have feared she would never see her mother again.

However, within five years, the family was reunited. The 1870 census records the following household living in Atlanta:

Jerry Paten age 63  (b. 1807, born in Virginia), farm laborer

Grace Paten, age 60 (b .1810 in South Carolina)

Jerry Paten   24  (b. 1846)

Rosanna Paten.  23 (b. 1847)

Lucy Paten,  16  (b. 1854), attending school

Sandy Paten,  12  (b. 1858 ),  attending school

William Daniels, age 23 (b.  1847)

Aaron Williams, age 22 (b. 1848)

I am not sure if William and Aaron, residing in the Paten household, were kin to the Patens. Ammi Williams, a major Atlanta-Decatur property owner, owned a plantation immediately north of the Padens (on the grounds that now include the Emory north campus and the Centers for Disease Control) on which were enslaved a number of people. It is possible that Aaron came off of that property.

Life must have been challenging for the newly freed Paten family in the 1870s, as they negotiated the sharecropping system, the end of Reconstruction, and the mounting strictures and disenfranchisements of the segregation era. Yet we know that Lucy and Sandy were pursuing their education, and were together once more with their loved ones, facing the uncertain future together.

What’s in a Receipt?

Pondering these two brief documents, it is worth reflecting on what precisely is involved in a receipt. It is formally a minimal contract, ratifying a commodity-based transaction between buyer and seller, or giver and receiver, as property moves from one party to another. Yet, as we have seen, receipts can evoke a good deal more than that, including traces of lives lived in the relative shadows, whose full existence is not fully recognized by the legally authorized figures who receive and relinquish property in the recorded transaction.

Karl Marx long ago noted insightfully that property is not so much a relationship between a person and an object as it is a relationship between people through objects. Those people, whose labor makes possible the transferred objects, may not even be mentioned in the legal record; the enslaved individuals who plowed the fields, harvested the oats, and who perhaps were ordered to feed and tend to the horses, are nowhere noted in the July 1864 receipt. While Lucy is notated in the 1861 receipt, and her appraised value of six hundred dollars is recorded, her personhood is emphatically not acknowledged in the document. She is legally only chattel, a token of value to be transacted at the whim of her owners. Her value of course was bound up in her reproductive potential; the appraisers must have anticipated that she would give birth to many future enslaved children, who would in turn increase the wealth of Thomas Paden.

And yet, behind the receipts are the lives of so many people who performed uncompensated labor on behalf of their white masters, including the families of Irwin and Priscilla Powell, and Jerry and Grace Paten, who would see their families torn apart during the slavery era, and then struggle to preserve their families’ integrity against all odds.

Finally, we might give some thought to the horses themselves, being fed the oats that day, July 18, 1864, during a brief interim between hostilities. We do not know how many horses carried the cavalrymen of Company C of the 1st Georgia Regiment, but we can assume many of them did not survive the coming rifle and artillery fire, as General Wheeler’s regiments tried in vain to slow Sherman’s progress towards Atlanta. For some, presumably, those oats were their final meal, as they and their equine brethren on both sides of the conflict were sacrificed in the bloody maw of war. From that violent conflict, to be sure, would emerge the liberation of four million souls, and, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “a new birth of freedom.” Yet, as we honor the lives of the formerly enslaved Powells and Patens in freedom, and celebrate all those who built new worlds in the aftermath of Emancipation, we should also allow these two receipts to stand as quiet memorials to all those, human and nonhuman alike, who did not live to see the war’s conclusion in April 1865.

Acknowledgements: This research was made possible by support from the Ginger Smith University Archives Fund for the Travel Award from the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. I am grateful to the staff at the Rose; the DeKalb County Historical Society; the Probate and Real Estate divisions of the DeKalb County, Georgia Courthouse; the Georgia State Archives, Georgia Division of Archives and History; and the Kenan Research Center (Atlanta History Center) for their assistance and guidance. Special thanks to Gordon Jones, Curator of Civil War History, Atlanta History Center, Ginger Hicks Smith, Emory University archivist emerita, John Bence, Emory University archivist, and Rev. Dr. Avis Williams.

___

For further reading on the 1864 Atlanta Campaign, the Battle of Atlanta, and the work of memory, please see:

Daniel Pollack.  Spectacles of American Nationalism: The Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama Painting and The Birth of a Nation. Southern Spaces. July 19, 2021.

Spectacles of American Nationalism: The Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama Painting and The Birth of a Nation

[1] Marcus Joseph Wright, Tennessee in the War, 1861-1865; Lists of Military Organizations and Officers from Tennessee in Both the Confederate and Union Armies; General Staff Officers of the Provisional Army of Tennessee, Appointed by Governor Isham G. Harris (Williamsbridge, New York City: A. Lee Publishing Company, 1908).

[2] A brief regimental history records a Captain J. U. Irwin with the First Cavalry, slightly misidentifying the officer who signed the receipt. Tennesseans in the Civil War, Vol 1. 1964. Civil War Centennial Commission of Tennessee.

[3] DeKalb County Deeds;  Richard Houston Sams (personal communication).

[4] Confederate Papers Relating to Citizens or Business Firms, 1861–65, National Archives. I am grateful to Gordon Jones of the Atlanta History Center for calling these transactions to my attention.

[5] United Daughters of the Confederacy Collection. MSS 765,  Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center.

[6] A copy of James Paden’s will is in the Asa Griggs Candler collections, MSS 001, Stuart A. Rose Library, Emory University.

[7] Thomas N. Paden was appointed 2nd Lieutenant in the 1st Company, DeKalb County, Georgia Militia on March 21, 1864, as the Atlanta Campaign loomed. (United Daughters of the Confederacy Collection, MSS 765, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center).

To the best of my recollection, this is how the the statue of Dooley came to Emory.

The initial idea belonged to Lance Henry, an economics and music major who graduated from Emory College in 2007. He had an interest in Emory history and once proposed resurrecting the name of the first Emory student publication – The Collard Leaf, from before the Civil War – to create an alternative to the Emory Wheel and the Emory Phoenix. When he approached me about getting the new publication started, we got so far as designing a banner and recruiting writers, but waning interest and lack of funds meant that the Collard Leaf never sprouted.

Determined, I suppose, to leave his mark at Emory somehow, Lance next proposed erecting a statue of Dooley. His vision was to mount it on top of the old Dobbs University Center (replaced by the current student center) – like the statue atop the U.S. Capitol – with Dooley facing east, toward his home in Oxford. This seemed self-defeating to me – how would anyone see Dooley a hundred feet above them on top of a fairly flat dome? – but I agreed to help him see whether the notion of a Dooley statue somewhere on campus could get traction. Lance took the proposal to the Student Government Association, which offered encouragement but no funding.

To gauge campus interest, we created a survey to see which Emory students had any knowledge of Dooley and whether attitudes toward Dooley were mostly positive or negative. Unsurprisingly, far more undergraduates knew about Dooley than graduate or professional students, and while the undergraduates varied, a majority leaned positive.

After discussing the proposal with the Public Art Committee, and with the help of Linda Armstrong, Kerry Moore, and other members of the Visual Arts Department, the Traditions and History Committee published a national request for proposals in Art Papers and Sculpture magazine, asking sculptors for credentials and photographs of representative work. We received nineteen responses, and after reviewing all of the materials, a selection committee invited four artists to present models of their proposed statue of Dooley. The artists came from Maryland, Atlanta, Washington State, and Chicago; one was an alumna.

In early 2007 we brought the artists to the Visual Arts Studio to meet with the selection committee, who included members of the Visual Arts Department, the Public Art Committee, and the Traditions and History Committee. Of the four presentations, one clearly stood out – the model presented by Matthew Gray Palmer, of Friday Harbor, Washington. Among his many sample photos, we saw sculptures of birds and animals that were constructed of thin metal plates curved, cut, and attached in a way that suggested shape but also latent and kinetic energy. His model for Dooley used the same technique. The accurate representation of a life-size skeleton appeared to be hurrying forward and leaving in its wake an enlivening rush of wind and energy – just what one would expect from the “spirit” of a place. Whimsically, Matthew shows Dooley casting aside his skeleton costume to reveal that underneath, he is really — a skeleton! A mystery within an enigma.

Installation of the sculpture required approval of a series of committees as well as the board of trustees. We presented the model and the site proposal to the full Public Art Committee and to the Real Estate, Buildings, and Grounds (REBG) Committee of the board. The minutes of the May 23, 2007, meeting of the REBG Committee state:

Dr. Gary Hauk joined the meeting with a model of the Dooley statue designed by Matthew Gray Palmer. This design is the culmination of student surveys and a national sculptor search. The design has received affirmations by the Public Art Committee, the Art History Department, and the Visual Arts Program. The statue will be constructed in either bronze or steel and will be placed between the Anthropology Building and the roundabout on Asbury Circle. The Emory Alumni Association will be asked to support fundraising for the project, estimated at $85,000.

The committee approved the statue, as did the board at its meeting the following month.

We commissioned Matthew to complete the sculpture, which took about eight months. In addition to funds for the sculpture, we had to find money for the site preparation. Much of the funding came from donors, with the balance coming from a university landscape fund. The campus community gathered for the dedication of the sculpture in September 2008.

Campus reaction was mixed. One longtime faculty member, at Emory for more than three decades, told me that it was the best addition to the campus in years. Some admired the statue’s sense of grace and dash. Others, however, thought the statue was (like Dooley himself, in their view) “ghoulish” or disturbingly dark.

Almost immediately the statue became a mannequin to be adorned with costumes appropriate to the season, whether hearts for Valentine’s Day, a green headband for St. Patrick’s Day, beads for Mardi Gras, or whatever fit the theme of Dooley’s Week in a given year. His outstretched top hat often contained coins dropped in by passersby presumably inviting good luck.

One online commentator (at https://www.roadsideamerica.com/blog/lord-dooley-mascot-statue-no-boner/ ) remarked, “Immortal public art often takes time to be accepted. The same will likely be true for Lord Dooley. . . . Dooley is proof that college is still a place where ideas can flow and shape freely, even if the end result is a scary skeleton that reminds people that they will die. And when the cultural pendulum eventually swings and campuses again resemble a 1970s Grateful Dead concert, Emory students will say that they have the most freakin’ awesome mascot ever. And they will be right.”

The death of Hank Aaron on January 22 reminded me of his receiving an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Emory at Commencement in 1995. When the University celebrated the man who broke racial barriers along with Babe Ruth’s home run record, the occasion seemed to call for the citation writer — me — to swing for the fences too. And if I couldn’t hit the ball over the fence with my words, at least I could summon an echo of poetry. Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” came to mind, with its line that “good fences make good neighbors.”

Home-Run King, Diligent Citizen:

A young man not yet able to vote,

you left family and home to follow your life’s great calling.

North and South you pursued, as well,

your nation’s destiny of colorblind opportunity.

Along the way you entered the large and consequential realm

of American myth. Through perseverance and fortitude,

you showed good fences make good targets.

In our springtime of anxiety about America’s pastime and future,

your career—in baseball and since—reminds us that,

however simple the games of our youth,

our collective history has no simple eras.

For your heart—its strength and striving toward good—

and for your hands—their power and building of good—

we confer on you the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.

You can see more about Hank Aaron and his relationship with Emory here.

In a day when plenty of fences still divide us, our country owes great thanks to this American hero. Thank you, Henry Louis Aaron, for helping us to see that we can change society for the better without violence, but with courage, truth, and hope.

Gary Hauk

Emory Historian Emeritus

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic earlier this year, many questions have come up about the impact of the 1918-20 pandemic on Emory. How did that terrible influenza more than a hundred years ago affect life on campus for students, faculty, and staff? What role did Emory’s new medical school play in battling the pandemic, if any? How did Wesley Memorial Hospital (later Emory University Hospital) respond in its location in downtown Atlanta? (The hospital moved to Druid Hills in 1922.)

When the virus hit in 1918, Emory college was still located on its original campus, in Oxford, Georgia, while the schools of theology, law, and medicine had barely gotten a start on the Druid Hills campus, which opened in 1916. The student body on both campuses was small, and both campuses were somewhat isolated from major population centers. Still, the 1918–20 influenza pandemic infected millions of Americans and killed more than 31,000 Georgians in 1918 alone.

Caelan Bailey, a first-year student at Oxford College of Emory University, has written the most thorough history of that earlier pandemic as well as the current pandemic in the context of Emory. I’m grateful to her and to the Emory Wheel, where the story was originally published, for permission to repost the story here.

Gary Hauk

Emory University Historian, Emeritus

The 1918 Pandemic: Then and Now

by Caelan Bailey

Copyright, The Emory Wheel

November 18, 2020

When a virulent disease upended Katherine Anne Porter’s life, the author turned to writing to process her experience. 

“All the theaters and nearly all the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of funerals all day and ambulances all night,” Porter wrote.

While the scene may sound familiar in 2020, that excerpt is from “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Porter’s 1937 collection of short stories largely based on her experience surviving the 1918 influenza pandemic, commonly known as “The Spanish Flu.”

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

October marked 102 years since the deadliest month in American history when 195,000 Americans succumbed to the Spanish Flu. The peak of the pandemic came in the fall of 1918 and by the end of 1919, the disease left a total of 50 million deaths, 675,000 of whom were Americans.

Despite its immense toll, with influenza deaths surpassing those of coinciding World War I, Emory pediatrician and medical historian Dr. Hughes Evans noted that knowledge of the 1918 pandemic was not widespread until recent decades.

“For a long time, people called the 1918 epidemic America’s forgotten epidemic because it was as if it never happened,” Evans said. “No one talked about it, no one taught about it, no one read about it.”

Ten months into the COVID-19 pandemic, global deaths have reached one million worldwide. By press time, the New York Times estimated that 246,879 Americans and 8,740 Georgians have died of COVID-19. 

“It’s useful to make a comparison [between 1918 and 2020] only to say that the virus is the public health crisis of the century,” said Dean of the Rollins School of Public Health Dr. James Curran. “We’ve not had anything like this in a hundred years that has such worldwide impact and such consequences — economic consequences, other health consequences, international consequences.”

While the specific origin of the 1918 strain of influenza is unknown, the first outbreak occurred in March 1918 at Camp Funston in Kansas, according to John M. Barry’s “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Plague in History.” Troop movement during World War I facilitated its spread throughout Europe and the world, likely mutating along the way to become deadlier to humans by its second wave.

The disease was later dubbed the “Spanish flu,” which was largely due to Spain’s reporting of the sickness when no other countries did, according to infectious disease expert Dr. Robert Gaynes of the Emory School of Medicine. 

“When it began to occur in Spain, they reported it,” Gaynes said. “People erroneously believed it started there.”

Today, the World Health Organization uses “Spanish flu” as an “example to be avoided” in the naming of new diseases, advising against including geographic locations in names of viruses. President Donald Trump’s use of “China virus” to describe COVID-19 has endured similar criticism.

Unlike most viruses, including COVID-19, the 1918 influenza largely impacted young and healthy people. Gaynes said as fear grew about the swiftly acting disease, the phrase “well at breakfast, sick at lunch and dead by dinner” became popular.

Medicine at the time, according to Evans, was in its “pre-virology days.” 

“They knew it was a respiratory infection,” Evans said. “They thought it was probably bacterial, although I think there was some vague understanding that there may be something else going on.”

In Georgia, the disease first appeared in September 1918 at Camp Gordon, a temporary military training camp outside of Atlanta. Military officials placed the camp under quarantine, with reports of “iron-clad sanitary precautions being forced on each man at the camp.” Nurses were in short supply.

However, by Oct. 4, 1918, the Georgia State Health Board issued a warning as influenza showed “a considerable presence,” advising that “the epidemic now sweeping the country must be intelligently met or a vast toll of suffering and many deaths will result.”

In Atlanta, doctors reported 230 influenza cases in early October and the city instated a “ban on public gatherings” as the police force was “instructed to keep vigilant watch over persons who expectorate in the streets.” As the Red Cross opened work rooms to sew masks, health authorities assured the public that there was “no reason for alarm.” 

The Atlanta History Center noted public outcry in October 1918 as movie theatres closed to prevent the spread, citing former President Woodrow Wilson’s own continued patronage. Outdoor entertainment like the Georgia state fair and college football games, however, continued with masked crowds, as they do today.

By the end of October 1918, The Atlanta Constitution ran the headline “Influenza Showing Decrease in State.” A health official credited the “early closing of schools, churches, theaters, and other places of public assembly” for the “relatively small number of cases in Georgia.” By November, the Atlanta city health officer announced the threat had subsided. 

In the Georgia State Board of Health report for 1918, officials wrote, “We will never know how many succumbed to the disease in Georgia, but the death rate has been high.” With 30,768 instances recorded, influenza was listed as the leading cause of death.

According to Oxford College’s Dean of Campus Life Joseph Moon, Emory College chose its original location in Oxford, Georgia, because it was away from coastal marshes that harbored diseases like malaria, although influenza spread would theoretically not have been impacted.

In 1918, when it was still a white men’s college, Emory began its last school year on Oxford campus. There is a gap in University records for that time, for which archivists credit the move to Atlanta and World War I. Oxford campus partially converted into a military training camp during this time. 

At the end of the school year, Atlanta University, now Clark Atlanta University, extended its academic calendar by two weeks in the summer “to make up for time lost in the fall on account of the influenza.” 

In June 1919, however, The Atlanta Constitution reported on “the historic final Oxford commencement of Emory college,” writing it was “delightful.” The paper made no note of influenza.

The newly amalgamated Emory University School of Medicine and School of Nursing were active in treating the outbreak both in Atlanta and abroad, mobilizing medical resources as Emory’s schools are today with COVID-19.

The School of Nursing’s 1918 annual report stated “very few cases” of influenza were recorded among nurses at the school and “none were serious,” although the house physician “contracted the disease and died.” The school was “very much handicapped this year for want of lecturers,” although the report was unclear about the purpose of doctors’ absences.

University Historian Emeritus Gary Hauk wrote about a group of Emory doctors and nurses dubbed “The Emory Unit” who established Base Hospital 43 in France, where they treated influenza patients during the third global wave in 1919.

Barry underscored that during those past epidemics, “governors and mayors, and nearly all the newspapers insisted that this was influenza, only influenza.” Meanwhile, the Public Health Service sent out six million copies of an informational flyer whose “warning to avoid crowds came too late to do much good.”

According to Gaynes, the recurrence of influenza to this day is due to changes in molecules on the outside of the virus that specifically trigger mammals’ immune responses. In 1918, the shift of both at the same time caused such a virulent strain. The virus then causes a “cytokine storm,” where immune cells leak too much typically helpful liquid, which leads those afflicted to “essentially drown in their own fluid.” 

Medicine was ill-equipped to respond. In the Georgia State Board of Health’s original statement, it incorrectly identified the cause of influenza as “influenza bacillus,” a bacteria scientists could inconsistently isolate from patients. Scientists developed a vaccine to treat the bacteria, and the board wrote that their “laboratory forces cannot begin to supply the demand for this vaccine.”

Barry wrote that “no medicine and none of the vaccines developed then could prevent influenza.” He added that due to the presence of improved antibiotics today, “modern medicine could likely prevent significantly more than half of those deaths” in a modern-day 1918 pandemic. 

Despite such improvements, the danger of a potential epidemic still loomed. 

“We were worried about a H1N1 flu epidemic a few years ago and no one thought it was going to be as bad as 1918 but we were concerned that it was going to be quite a disruption,” Curran said. “COVID has really been as bad as we were worried about H1N1 flu. … We have a new organism which seems to, in some cases, defy treatment and has kind of taken over the world.”

Evans highlighted that medicine has been “decreasing the deadliness” of COVID-19 by tailoring treatments for those infected. Curran emphasized that the over 5,000 patients admitted to Emory Hospital “do really quite well compared to the national average with COVID.”

In a recent interview, Barry underscored that COVID-19 is a slower spreading and less deadly disease than influenza, although they share similarities in respiratory transmission, ability to affect various organs and novel demands on public health. 

Regarding long term effects, Barry added, “In 1918, there were complications that didn’t surface at all until the 1920s. We just don’t know.”

Doctors have reported strokes and seizures associated with COVID-19. Recent research has documented a range of neurological effects in hospitalized patients and there have been recent instances of “brain fog” after those infected recover.

Evans noted that masks in 1918 that were often made out of gauze or other thin fabrics likely did little to protect people. PBS’s American Experience compared wearing a mask to combat the 1918 influenza to “trying to keep out dust with chicken wire.” In contrast, modern masks significantly reduce COVID-19 spread.

Distancing procedures, however, have remained as effective a century later.

“The main method has always been there,” Barry said. “Social distancing is more important than anything else.” 

World War I was a critical cultural context for the influenza outbreak as well. Barry wrote, “the preservation of morale itself became an aim” for the Wilson administration. When the pandemic threatened the war effort, Wilson “express[ed] concern about shipping troops to Europe,” but otherwise “continued to say nothing publicly.”

Wilson contracted influenza in the spring of 1919 amid peace negotiations, leading some to draw parallels to Trump’s recent contraction of the virus after dismissing ts threat.

When state and city health officials spoke on the virus, they denied the severity of influenza to maintain wartime morale, quickly losing the public’s trust. 

“It is impossible to quantify how many deaths the lies caused,” Barry wrote.

Curran expanded on this lack of government transparency, saying, “Public health is always political because we’re trying to save the lives of groups of people. … [There] are different political considerations that require consistent leadership at the state and federal level to bring people together.”

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, inconsistent directives on mask-wearing have stood in the way of establishing mask-wearing as the public-health norm. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp filed a lawsuit against Atlanta’s mask-mandate over the summer before dropping it in Aug. and shifting his position to allow local mandates. Georgia local governments have since passed 25 mask mandates.

In 1919, influenza receded despite the lack of an effective vaccine. According to Evans, influenza viruses “kind of just peter away.” With COVID-19, numerous people have asked Curran: When’s it going to be over? Where’s the magic bullet?

“It’s very clear the vaccine is not going to be the answer, it’s going to be hopefully another tool,” Curran said. “We don’t really know exactly what’s going to happen.”

Curran noted Emory’s ability to control COVID-19 case numbers, largely due to the accessibility of asymptomatic testing, contacting tracing, mandated masking and distancing on campus. 

In September 1919, The Atlanta Constitution published an excerpt from the U.S. Health Service’s Flu Warning: “The most promising way to deal with a possible recurrence of the influenza epidemic is to sum it up in a single word, ‘preparedness.’ And now is the time to prepare.”

The COVID-19 pandemic is not our first. Yet even after 102 years, Americans were ill-prepared for another. 

“This is the public health crisis of my lifetime and our century,” Curran said. “I think there will be a recognition of the shortcomings and needs for public health going into the future. Save your masks. I think that they’ll come in handy after COVID is over.”

Caelan Bailey (22Ox, 24C) is from Charleston, South Carolina.