This was recently posted on the World War II mailing list:
>From the DoD Newswire 6 February 1995
:SMITHSONIAN HEADS INTO ROUGH TIMES AFTER THE ENOLA GAY DEBACLE
The New York taxi driver, who talked as if he had once been a
card-carrying member of the Communist Party, turned to his passenger
as the cab pulled up at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. ``Hey, this is
part of the Smithsonian, isn't it?'' he said. ``Have you heard what
those bastards are doing to the Enola Gay?''
His passenger had indeed. He was Michael Heyman, the secretary of
the Smithsonian Institution. And he had just met yet another World
War II veteran furious over the Smithsonian's plans to display the
Enola Gay--the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima 50
years ago--in an exhibit that made the Japanese out to be innocent
victims of an unnecessary act of vengeance.
The decision last week by the Smithsonian's Board of Regents to
cancel the controversial exhibit was inevitable, Heyman says, given
``gargantuan'' opposition from across the political spectrum. The
American Legion complained; so did 20,000 subscribers to SMITHSONIAN
magazine. Among the many veterans who protested that the atomic
bombing saved their lives by averting an invasion of Japan were two
of the Smithsonian's own regents--former congressman and World Bank
president Barber Conable and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Perhaps
even more to the point, the opposition included key members of
Congress who were threatening to hold investigations and beginning
to talk ominously about cutting the $371 million federal
contribution to the Smithsonian, which makes up 77 percent of its
budget.
Although the cancel lation of the exhibit has removed the
immediate threat of congressional retaliation, it is by no means the
end of the story. The Enola Gay incident has been a severe blow to
the reputation of a revered institution at a time when the
Smithsonian is trying to woo much-needed corporate sponsors for its
planned 150th anniversary celebration in 1996.
And it has, if anything, inflamed a long-festering dispute over
how the Smithsonian ought to be telling the story of American
history. House Speaker Newt Gingrich heralded the victory on the
Enola Gay as the first battle in a new phase of the culture war.
``You are seeing a reassertion and a renewal of American
civilization,'' he told the National Governors' Association. ``The
Enola Gay fight was a fight, in effect, over the reassertion by most
Americans that they're sick and tired of being told by some cultural
elite that they ought to be ashamed of their country.''
And Rep. Sam Johnson of Texas, newly appointed by Gingrich to the
Board of Regents, made it clear that more changes are coming:
``We've got to get patriotism back into the Smithsonian. We want the
Smithsonian to reflect real America and not something that a
historian dreamed up.''
For now, the Smithsonian is in full retreat. Vietnam veterans'
groups will soon receive a letter saying that an exhibit on air
power in the Vietnam War, planned for the Air and Space Museum, will
be put off for at least five years. Heyman has promised the regents
he will review, and rectify where necessary, current exhibits that
board members believe reflect ``revisionist history.'' Board sources
told U.S. NEWS that Air and Space Director Martin Harwit will soon
be dismissed for his part in over seeing the planned Enola Gay
exhibit.
The incident has also left curators and researchers throughout
the Smithsonian shellshocked. The institution has long enjoyed a
scholarly independence and a public reputation unique among
government institutions. Twenty-five million people visit its 16
museums each year. Its collections, from well-known icons to
recondite scientific artifacts--George Washington's false teeth and
Dorothy's ruby slippers to 300,000 sorted and labeled water
bugs--are universally admired by casual museumgoers and serious
researchers alike.
BACKLASH'S IMPACT.
``I'm anticipating a sort of political scrutiny we're not used to,''
says Robert Post, a curator at the American History Museum. A
half-dozen other curators contacted last week agreed. While many
disapproved of the way the Air and Space Museum had handled the
Enola Gay exhibit, they said they feared that the political backlash
would virtually end any attempt at providing context or
interpretation in exhibits. ``Once it's known that Air and Space sat
down to a line-by-line review of the script with the American
Legion,'' says Post, referring to the ultimately unsuccessful
negotiations that took place over the Enola Gay exhibit, ``who's
next? The Christian Coalition?''
Like many museums, the Smithsonian has been gradually moving away
from a style of exhibit that curators derisively call the
``curiosity in a case'' approach. Most museum experts agree it was a
much needed change, especially for the stodgy Smithsonian. Under
Dillon Ripley, secretary from 1964 to 1984, the Smithsonian had
struck an unabashedly ``celebratory'' tone that glossed over
subtleties and emphasized the display of ``icons'' like the Hope
diamond, the first ladies' gowns, and the Wright Flyer. ``History
museums are becoming forums, not temples,'' says Prof. Edward
Linenthal of the University of Wisconsin.
But Heyman and other Smithsonian officials admit that the change
to a more interpretive approach has occurred with virtually no
oversight by top management and no official guidelines. Heyman
acknowledges, too, that critics of ``political correctness'' in some
of the newer and more interpretive exhibits have a point and that
the museum has unnecessarily angered many of its supporters. Last
week, he met with top officials of the American Physical Society,
including two Nobel Prize winners, in an attempt to smooth over the
outrage provoked by one of these exhibits, ``Science in American
Life.'' This show infuriated many scientists--including the American
Chemical Society, which put up $5.3 million to underwrite the
exhibit--with its antitechnology tone, including large displays on
the atomic bomb, DDT and the supposed dangers of genetic
engineering, the latter illustrated with Frankenstein, scenes from
JURASSIC PARK and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
``Everyone came in loving the Smithsonian,'' says Marcel
LaFollette, a professor at George Washington University who served
on the advisory board for the exhibit. But she says the board became
disillusioned by the approach the curators were taking: ``There was
such a deliberate attempt to be negative rather than laying out the
history and letting people make their own judgments.''
Another show that has raised hackles is an American History
Museum exhibit on life after the Revolution. It offers such insights
as, ``White Americans won and preserved their freedom from England
in large part through the labors of the African-Americans they
enslaved.'' A display of a paneled room in a small Virginia farmer's
house is presented with narration that deconstructs the wall
decoration as nothing but a reflection of the owner's status-seeking
``ambition.''
TREADING GENTLY.
Heyman is trying to finesse the whole situation by suggesting, in
effect, that the choice is not simply one of ideological,
inflammatory interpretation versus flag-waving mush. He has ordered
a review to develop basic guidelines for interpretive exhibits; one
possible outcome, he says, may simply be a recommendation to do
smaller exhibits. Shows like the one planned for the Enola Gay, he
says, which are ``half writing and half objects,'' are in any case
``an absolute disconnect'' with the visiting public; people are not
willing to spend the three to five hours required to go through them
and read everything.
Another remedy, he suggests, may be to focus the interpretation
and context offered within an exhibit on explaining events as they
were understood and experienced by the people living at that time;
books or symposiums may be a better way to ``raise the questions
that have come up since,'' he says.
Whatever the outcome, the days of the Smithsonian as a genteel,
scholarly place soaring above the political fray are clearly gone.
Robert McCormick Adams, Heyman's predecessor, who left last
September, ``saw it more as a university--the [museum] directors are
deans and they run their own show,'' says Heyman. ``Clearly that has
to change.''
--
Bob Rogers Internet: [log in to unmask]
Instrumental, Inc. GEnie: R.C.ROGERS
Minneapolis, MN USA Phone: 612-920-6188
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