For those who aren't automatically deleting posts with this
header after all the furor:
The whole sorry mess strikes me as an administrative failure.
At the start, some sort of community or constituency contact
would have alerted all to the potential storm. Of course,
it is also reasonable to expect that somebody might have
foreseen just a little bit of the controversy. As others
have pointed out, the 50th anniversary of the various mile-
stones of WWII is the last big one for the generation that
fought the war. Few will be around for the 75th.
My heart goes out to the curatorial staff who have been
savaged, but they too might have tested their work at
an earlier stage of completion.
There have been many controversial exhibits. Many
of us worked on aspects of the Statue of Liberty
centennial. Crude and demeaning ethnic stereo-
types were featured, and many treasured myths
surrounding the immigrant experience were de-
bunked. Hmmm: revisionist history, nastiness
of the past exposed, frontal assault on big
chunks of the "useable past" . . . sounds a
little like Enola Gay.
The difference, I think, was that
the Statue projects all had some
sort of citizens committee involved. Some of them
were prudent insulation by officeholders. Others
existed primarily to raise funds or make a nesting
place for grants. All of them served de facto or
de jure as a kind of test public for the work. In
the exhibit I worked on, we had some furious argu-
ments over exhibit script, publication text and
illustrations, and selection of lecturers.
Nothing was removed and no participant was
rejected. The whole project was stronger for
the internal testing. I and my colleagues who
saw to the content were forced to justify our
work in terms that non-specialists could not
only understand, but support.
I also sympathize with Dr. Heyman, who inherited
the project and much of the flap that went along
with it. However, it is hard to agree that
commemoration and interpretation are mutually
exclusive. In fact, much of public history
involves bringing some depth to the process
of civic memory. Any port in a storm, I guess,
but I can't help wondering whether the worst
long-term damage will result from this plea of
intellectual impotence.
Matthew Roth
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