In the words of its founder, Francis Greenwood Peabody, Harvard's Plummer Professor of Christian Morals from 1886 to 1913, the Social Museum of Harvard University was established "to promote investigations of modern social conditions and to direct the amelioration of industrial and social life." The extant collection comprises over 4500 images made by professional and amateur photographers and by such pioneering documentarians as Lewis Wickes Hine and Frances Benjamin Johnston. It includes more than 1500 related diagrams, albums, blueprints, plans, booklets and handcrafted objects, as well as handwritten matter. Touted as the first attempt to "collect the social experience of the world as material for university teaching," the Social Museum served during the first three decades of the twentieth century as an academic and public tool to promote the study of social conditions and institutions in America and abroad.

Established as the cornerstone of the University's new Department of Social Ethics, the Social Museum's organization deliberately mimicked that of science museums, offering categorized specimens for comparative study. Peabody intended the material, displayed on walls and stored in specially designed cabinets, to assist his students in understanding philanthropic, social, and industrial progress in the same way that a laboratory was crucial to the study of chemistry or biology and that other comprehensive museums, both at Harvard and internationally, served fields such as anthropology, art history, and natural history. The Social Museum's classification system and didactic presentation also aligns with the display techniques used by other social betterment projects of the time.

Peabody's enthusiasm for photography as an essential primary source for the Social Museum reflected the medium's vital role in the larger progressive movement, which affected every aspect of the social program and raised issues about society's obligation to the individual that still resonate in our time. Social reformers used photographs as if they were incorruptible specimens of social problems and solutions, exploiting the power of the image to persuade especially in connection with text and statistics. The photographs in this collection encompass a broad range of styles and formats, from carefully composed large-format pictures to modest snapshots and from luscious platinum prints to crude halftone reproductions. The diversity of technique and inconsistency of approach expose the expansive use of photography as a social document decades before the codification of a documentary style and collide with the institution's obsessive system of classification and display. This disjuncture also evidences the uncanny capability of the Social Museum photographs to simultaneously index and elude their framing contexts.

“Classified Documents” is the first significant public presentation of works from this collection in more than thirty years. In addition to the richness of the material as individual objects, the display boards and their groupings provide a time capsule that illustrates social reform pedagogy during its early stages. Indeed, it is the confluence of these kinds of graphic materials, their method of display, and the context they create that makes the Social Museum Collection unique.

Image Credits: The Social Museum, Emerson Hall, Harvard University, c. 1906, Harvard University Archives, HUV 51 (1-8); Francis Greenwood Peabody, Harvard University Archives, HUP Peabody, F.G. (5)