Re-Imagining The Ruin, Fortifying Religion: Architecture, Internationalism, and the American Campaign For “Protestant Modernism" (1919-1939)

Following the Ottoman Empire’s breakup after WWI, American archaeological institutions gained unprecedented access to ancient sites in the Middle East. Under the mantle of scientific archaeology, they projected onto these ruins religious, social, and political interpretations that paralleled American interests. Of these institutions, the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute achieved the greatest success. Industrialist John D. Rockefeller Jr., who later financed the restoration of French monuments and the excavation of the Athenian Agora, created the Institute in 1919, putting it under the leadership of Egyptologist James Breasted. The two men planned the O.I. as a premier scientific institution that would use modern methods to study the ancient Near East. This paper shows how the Institute’s architectural infrastructure also doubled as scaffolding for the construction of a modern religion and an American-led internationalism. I analyze this marriage of religion, science, and politics, at the site of ancient ruins, by studying the Institute’s archaeological facilities in light of Rockefeller’s interest in “Protestant Modernism.” Claiming God’s immanence in modernity, this now-forgotten theology sought to preserve American Protestantism’s hegemony in an age that was both increasingly secular and religiously diverse. The Institute’s buildings have received little scholarly attention, but it is their design and physical interface with ruins, “tells” and urban squares—from the Middle East to the Midwest—that reveal how the O.I. advanced Rockefeller’s theopolitical goals. I argue this point through three case studies: the Institute’s Chicago headquarters, a proposed museum for Cairo, and a cluster of expedition-houses dotting the Fertile Crescent.