Designing the Centennial by Giberti Bruno;

Author:Giberti, Bruno; [Giberti, Bruno]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE JURY SYSTEM

In addition to securing a design for Judges’ Hall, the organizers of the Centennial had to devise a method for evaluating the goods on display. In this, they faced the dilemma of whether or not to adopt some version of the existing jury system.5 This implied a large international body with hundreds of members, subdivided into specialized groups that examined the goods and made anonymous recommendations for graded awards—gold, silver, and bronze medals, honorable mentions, and so on.6

The defects in the system were numerous. First, the juries tended to favor the countries with the most floor space, since these appointed the largest number of members. Second, the most qualified candidates could often not afford to serve as members, since the positions were honorary, not paid. Third, the juries tended to shrink with the passing of time; since the positions were not paid, the members felt no compunction in quitting when it suited them. Fourth, the juries tended to be chauvinistic; the members felt it was their duty to secure as many medals as possible for their own countries. Finally, the awards were made anonymously and without any explanation. “The medals, when distributed, were as silent as the verdicts,” observed N.M. Beckwith, the Centennial commissioner from New York and U.S. commissioner-general at the 1867 fair in Paris; “moral responsibility for the decisions attached to no one, and the awards thus made conveyed as little useful information, and carried as little weight, as anonymous work usually carries.”7

Beckwith’s concern for the exhibition as a source of “useful information” was typically American in its pragmatism.8 His concern was shared by General Francis A. Walker, a statistician, a veteran of the Civil War, and, at the time of his appointment as chief of the Centennial’s Bureau of Awards, a Yale professor of economics and history.9 Walker put the problem in an explicitly commercial context:

The radical defect of the medal system is that it conveys no practical information. The bronze medal, or the cross of the Legion of Honor, even if given with discrimination, merely signifies that the product awarded is good; but it does not answer the question with which Socrates was wont to confound his adversaries: Good for what? On the contrary, it may easily become the means of misleading the public and the body of purchasers, through the failure to state the uses to which the product may be best applied, or the conditions under which alone its use may be advantageous.

As an example of the ways in which the purchasing public could be misled, Walker provided the “familiar illustration” of the New England farmer comparing two prize-winning mowing machines: the “Triumph,” the recipient of a gold medal at the Paris fair, and the “Farmer’s Pride,” the recipient of a silver. On the basis of this information, the farmer orders the Triumph. “When it arrives, he finds it an instrument of a high perfection of parts, great reach, and rapidity of operation; but, to his sorrow, he also finds that it

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