‘Ready to migrate’: The field museum exodus of 1907–1908*

ABSTRACT In an eighteen-month period between 1907 and 1908, the Field Museum of Natural History experienced a small exodus of qualified assistants and museum leaders to more palatable and supportive positions elsewhere. Chief among the concerns of those fleeing the museum, including assistants Edmund Heller and Harry Swarth, as well as taxidermy chief Carl Akeley, was the ‘unbearable’ culture of the museum due to arbitrary and ineffective leadership, including the firing of a long-time Zoology Curator Daniel Giraud Elliot. This was one of many similar instances at the Chicago museum in its early history, and as such, serves as a case study of both the museum’s dysfunction, as well as the impact of inefficient leadership in the scientific world more generally.