Books: Who Owns America’s Past? The Smithsonian and the Problem of History

The Smithsonian is the world’s largest museum and its diverse collections contain both the Apollo 11 command module and Kermit the Frog (and most points in between).

It is almost inevitable that from time to time there will be occasions when the museum’s interpretation and display of the objects in its care will clash with opinions equally strongly held outside the museum.

On the dust-jacket of Robert Post’s Who Owns America’s Past? is a tightly cropped photograph of the Enola Gay, the plane which flew the first of two devastating atomic bomb attacks on Japanese cities – Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945, and three days later on Nagasaki.

The dropping of the atom bombs was a highly charged moment in history, seen as either the event that helped to bring to an end a long war or one that did so at a price too high in human life.

Each view remains strongly held and the exhibition planned to mark the 50th anniversary of VJ Day in August 1995 plunged the Smithsonian, or more precisely the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), into a firestorm of its own.

The museum was told by house speaker Newt Gingrich, no less, that “Americans are sick and tired of being told by some cultural elite that they ought to be ashamed of their country”. It was a bitter, vicious and protracted row that led to the withdrawal of the exhibition and the resignation of the NASM director.

The case of the Enola Gay is not the only controversy that Post recalls in his well-researched book, writing that by one account, the Smithsonian was involved in 36 exhibit controversies between 1984 and 1998.

But there had been several high-profile controversies before then; for example, in the Smithsonian’s claim that Samuel P Langley, rather than the Wright brothers, was the first to achieve powered flight, all the more tendentious as Langley had been the secretary of the Smithsonian; or in the claims and counterclaims between Elisha Gray, Johann Philipp Reis or Alexander Graham Bell over the invention of the telephone.

But these were merely training grounds for the fiercer battles to come.

In 1970 Dillon Ripley, then the secretary of the Smithsonian, had written, that “in this brave new world of ours, perhaps only objects, which inherently possess truth, can teach truth. An object to be touched, seen, felt and smelled is true.

Furthermore it is a source of data, part of the only data bank we possess.” What he didn’t say was that this data is not historically neutral.

Post claims his book is about “the changing ways in which the Smithsonian Institution has put historical artefacts on exhibition, a progression from an interesting collection of flotsam, displayed with little interpretation”, to “story-driven exhibits in which artefacts, props and stage sets… were richly blended to create an experience.”

Well, yes, but it’s even more about the consequences of these changes and what happens when the leaders of a large organisation, in the midst of introducing significant change, take their collective eye off the ball.

This is a dense book and takes time to get into its stride. A little more context would have been helpful for the foreign reader.

The Smithsonian consists of some 19 museums, a zoo and nine research centres.

It’s not always easy to pick your way through an alphabet soup of acronyms or to get to grips with a huge cast list, many of high intellectual calibre and often with soaring egos that could occasionally take them too close to the sun. Post worked at the Smithsonian for 23 years, retiring in 1998.

He was therefore a highly respected insider and his history of the museum and its displays is undoubtedly well-informed but this seems more of a “shop floor” view than one from the Castle, the seat of the senior management.

When the Smithsonian Institution was established in 1846, the US Congress determined  that it should be governed by a board of regents, consisting of the US vice-president, the chief justice, three members of the Senate, three from the House of Representatives and nine citizens.

Obviously they were meant to be heavy hitters but whom they were hitting isn’t always clear.

Proximity to power is a double-edged sword. The politicians whispering in your ear can also be breathing down your neck.

Unfortunately, in dealing, for example, with the controversial secretary, Larry Small, or the Enola Gay dispute, they seemed to be doing neither; rather they appeared to be absent when they were most needed.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going – but not out of the door.

Timothy Mason is a museum consultant