A visit to the Sixth District Federal Reserve Museum is free and worth every penny. When I went to the CDC's Museum of Public Health, while there are some nifty artifacts of slow lingering deaths of yesteryear, like iron lungs and dead polio virus, there was a lot less of that at the Federal Reserve Museum.
I'm not even sure how to describe it. I went with my little hand-held recorder to grab some audio for a future podcast. I was hoping that the usual bunch of anti-Fed protesters would be outside and that I could interview them, but no. I hoped that I would be able to speak to a guide or perhaps a guard or someone inside the building, but I have learned that one approaches someone with that kind of weaponry cautiously.
When you enter, you get a little visitor's badge and they show you where the cloakroom is. I carry with me at all times a relic of graduate school, my briefcase, which has seen much, much better days. Let's say that back in St. Louis I would visit my parents and leave the briefcase at their place. Aside from acute separation anxiety--everything that I need is in there--I would have to suffer my mother's phone call: "You left your purse over here."
"It's not my purse, mother. It's my man-sack."
They stopped calling it a purse after that.
But back to the museum. They shooed me into a place where I could leave my man-sack, a cloakroom next to a gigantic cow that had money painted on it.
A cash cow. Also, Moolah.
I found an empty locker made a deposit, as it were. And then it was on to a helluva boring self-guided tour.
It was like an electronic stations of the cross commemorating money, and we were being led in prayer by Charles Osgood (it took me a few minutes to place the main narrator's voice). Despite the fairly new technology and obvious production value on display, however, the narrator's voice changed and some exhibits seemed to be excerpts from independent documentaries.
Now there were some interesting artifacts. The history of money exhibit was sort of neat.
Of course, there are a lacquered fish and a stuffed bunny that represent "barter" in the first case. (Ron Paul's America, everyone.) There are also examples of various items that were used as money, including trinkets, doodads and whosits. Lots of them were metal. One was just a big damned whale tooth. That was really interesting. There was the solid gold bar worth several hundred thousand dollars that that you could pick up when the lever to the picker-upper machine (I'm pretty sure that's what they called it) was not broken. Cool.
At the back of the museum, you could look into a room where there were some guys sorting money. LOTS OF MONEY. TONS OF ASSLOADS OF MONEY. FIVE STORIES OF MONEY RIGHT THERE BEHIND THE VAULT WALL! There was a very (secure) crate of over 2 million dollars in small bills, sitting right there!
There was also a shredder, blowing stacks of destroyed loot up what looked like a pneumatic tube. Very sad.
I think that the strangest thing was that the "yay, banks" message, which I was not expecting. Don't get me wrong. I appreciate banks as much as one can embrace uncaring profit-driven institutions, but the fawning over "banks," the perpetual hard-on for Alan Greenspan that suffused the exhibits, well, it was a little creepy.
My next stop will be the Paper Museum. I have a feeling that it will be a lot like the money museum, only worth less.
HJ
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