The Home-Coming

For at least a century, students and practitioners of American material culture have meticulously written about and examined the American Wing period rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Contemporaneous to the Met’s first American Wing room installations, but largely ignored by scholars today, are the period rooms at Wanamaker’s New York City department store. These early twentieth-century spaces must be examined together and resituated within the complex debates over immigration, race, national identity, and eugenics of which they were a part. Fully understanding them also requires revisiting our accepted understanding of what makes a “period room.” The period rooms at Wanamaker’s and the American Wing cannot be rigidly categorized as noncommercial, educational, or authentic—their relationships were fluid and the institutions symbiotic. The rooms instilled nativist ideologies in their visitors and spurred a type of consumption intended to benefit American industry and support American nationalism. By appealing to homemakers who consumed their objects and ideas, they also shaped the future by enforcing a xenophobic, racist, and patriarchal narrative through a dream of the past that excluded immigrants and disremembered Black experiences to place so-called Anglo-Saxon whites at the nation’s center. Today, the United States is once again preoccupied with conflicts over who is American and how to safeguard the so-called American way of life. We are haunted by the politics and ideologies that surrounded the early twentieth-century period rooms at Wanamaker’s and the American Wing. Amidst public battles over who was or could become American, department stores and museums constructed period rooms that presented a compensatory fantasy of American history and identity. Examining these ostensibly commercial and noncommercial spaces together reveals their combined role in creating consumers, and therefore citizens, with a shared and fictional narrative defined through the furnishing of the home.