THE MUSEUM OF MULTICULTURALISM

BROOKS, DAVID

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MULTICULTURALISM By David Brooks Let's say you've brought your kids to Washington, D.C., on their summer vacation. You've ./taken them to the Washington Monument and the...

...It opens with a movie in which an A DISPLAY ABOUT TWO MORE OBSCURE FIRST LADIES, GRACE GOODHUE COOLIDGE AND LOU HENRY HOOVER, IS CALLED "A SUBTLE FEMINISM...
...Along the Mall, you notice a large building called the National Museum of American History, part of the famous Smithsonian Institution...
...Or, alternatively, we could fix this museum...
...But until visitors show they actually care how American history is presented, the museum will undoubtedly go on as it has, quietly distorting the country's past and stifling the enthusiasm of the unsuspecting parents and kids who wander in...
...You will not learn what the major parties have stood for over the course of their histories...
...You notice everybody goes through the colored one...
...Similarly, the American Founders held certain ideas about government, about inalienable rights, about America's destiny...
...Similarly, there is but one showcase devoted to World War I. And that showcase is devoted to the role of women in the war...
...You remember this exhibit from a trip you took to the museum years ago...
...The small World War II section shows what a barracks looked like, with authentic foot lockers, shovels, and plates...
...Then there's a section showing the implements, such as lacrosse sticks and farm tools, that would have been used by a family in the Seneca Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy...
...You head back to the statue of Washington, still looking for the exhibit on the Father of his Country...
...You know you should hang around all this stuff and read all the information, but your kids seem bored, so you move along pretty quickly...
...As you approach, you scan the long quotations from John Adams and James Smithson carved into the wall above the doors, high-minded sentiments about the diffusion of knowledge...
...How has power shifted from one branch of government to another...
...A typical display declares, "They discovered and exploited human resources, the cultural practices and products of Indians and Hispanics . . ." The final showcase in the exhibit shows a bunch of Native American crafts...
...Then there is a David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...There's a room on Jewish immigrants...
...These are the implements of campaigning...
...When you get to the statue, which, a plaque informs you, used to sit on the grounds of the Capitol building before it was moved to the Smithsonian in 1908, you turn to your left and move straight into an exhibit called "Field to Factory: African-American Migration 1915-1940...
...This obsessive focus on the quotidian means that the museum virtually ignores any larger issues, like what role fascism and democracy played in the war...
...What began individually as a tingling sense of revolt against injustice has become a wide, deep sympathy of women for one another...
...But you will not learn that some elections in America were fought over ideas...
...You and the kids then pass into a room called "Hispanic Resistance and Self-Determination," where you can see a short movie about Hispanic efforts to resist American cultural hegemony...
...The National Air and Space Museum gives a straightforward account of its subject...
...The women's movement exhibit leads to another -L called "After the Revolution: Everyday Life in America 1780-1800," which looks promising, since it at least mentions the American Revolution...
...Some joined their husbands in the political struggles of the day," one of the signs reads, "others championed social and political causes...
...Wherever you go in this museum, whatever subject is being addressed, you will see a lot of dishes and farm implements...
...But personal greatness is simply excluded...
...But when you get to the map and scan it, you realize the truth about the National Museum of American History...
...The National Gallery of Art presents its treasures in a balanced and open-minded fashion...
...The first has a picture of John Brown...
...This exhibit is about early feminist causes such as the suffragist movement and the National Women's Trade Union League...
...It has an Al Smith banner, some Clinton-Gore and Bush-Quayle posters, and the two lecterns used in the 1976 presidential debates...
...You can see the implements many of these poor migrants used to do their washing...
...It ignores or virtually ignores most of the major events in American history...
...There's a room showing the farm implements and domestic furniture that were used by African-American slaves...
...Most people's imaginations, especially kids', are fired by the deeds of great heroes...
...For some victory meant immediate political and economic freedom...
...And there are some vivid exhibits relating to segregation, including one in which you are forced to choose between two doorways, one marked white and the other marked colored...
...The museum systematically shortchanges political history...
...On one side are the words "Destruction" and "Domination" in big letters, and on the other side are "Self-Determination" and "Survival...
...The curators of the American history museum are fixated on everyday life, on the conditions of the common people...
...actress reads a rousing speech...
...There are also displays about more obscure first ladies...
...Six times more space is devoted to the internment of and prejudice against Japanese Americans than to the entire rest of World War II...
...There are some rooms showing what everyday life was like for women in the period, and a display on Jane Addams's Hull House, but you zip through this exhibit because you're anxious to get to the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the westward expansion, and some of the other central events in American history that your kids have been asking about...
...The bottom floor is devoted to technology, and some of the displays there, notably on the evolution of information technology, are quite interesting...
...But the museum doesn't distort history only in the way it allocates attention...
...But since those ideas didn't revolve around hoes and butter churns, they are neglected here...
...The curators are absorbed with one type of history, one multicultural dogma...
...For example, up on the top floor there is a section on the armed forces...
...For others it did not...
...There is a room on the top floor devoted to politics...
...Everything that doesn't fit into that approach is simply repressed and excluded...
...But it is here as if preserved in amber...
...Inside there's a music shop that advertises jazz, folk, be-bop, and blues CDs, and you shepherd the kids past in search of history...
...The exhibit has changed a bit...
...If you start adding up the space devoted to different subjects, you discover the museum has allocated its space in all sorts of absurd ways...
...There's a display case showing what a typical dining room table in the pueblo looks like on a feast day, with bowls of food and one can each of Pepsi, Coke, and Tetley iced tea...
...There are 7 showcases devoted to the war between the states...
...Then you walk into something called the "Pueblo Resistance and Self-Determination Theater" where you can watch a short movie about Native American efforts to resist European invasion...
...At this point, they are just wandering through, not even pretending to read all the signs, or look at yet another display case of plates and carpentry tools...
...They seem to just wander through, noticing a rake here, a printing press there...
...The problem with the museum is narrow-mindedness...
...Hamilton and Jefferson had contrasting visions of what sort of country America should be, a debate that was not trivial, but because Hamilton and Jefferson were members of the elite, their dispute is beyond the pale...
...The exhibit on the African-American migration is well put together...
...The sign reads, "This exhibit explores what the promise of America meant to different communities pursuing freedom, equality and abundance . . ." There's a room on class struggle between owners and workers, which features the everyday implements, such as sewing machines, that were used by early industrial workers...
...There is no reason this museum couldn't cover American history honestly and offer a few exciting displays illuminating the major themes of our experience...
...And if it ignores these figures, needless to say, the museum makes no effort to explain figures like Washington, Lincoln, TR, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Truman, or Reagan...
...It's in this room that you hit your first oblique reference to the U.S...
...As you move down the hall, you pass a display called "Sitting for Justice," which features the actual counter from the Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, where African-American students protested segregation...
...You figure you had better get a map to find out where the exhibits are on the subjects that most interest you...
...The Indians survived the incursion of Catholicism by Indianizing it," one of the signs informs...
...In short, anybody who came to this museum to learn about American history would find a dour and distorted view of the nation's past...
...Have you ever heard visitors just back from Washington say that what they really liked about their trip was the National Museum of American History...
...The New Mexico exhibit lets out right into the display of the first ladies' inaugural gowns...
...The one on Grace Goodhue Coolidge and Lou Henry Hoover is called "A Subtle Feminism...
...The next room shows the tools that would have been used by slaves in the Chesapeake area...
...Then there's a final short movie about old cultures being threatened by commercialism...
...Just a handful of consciousness-raising cliches, repeated in room after room...
...Their approach leaves individuals with almost no role in shaping history...
...This is the coolest artifact you've seen so far, but you move on, drawn by a large statue of Washington at the end of the hall...
...The museum devotes lavish attention to ethnic communities, and sometimes an individual is mentioned as a spokesperson for a group or gender...
...The kids recognize the display on Hillary Clinton's health care campaign, and you look over the one on Eleanor Roosevelt's efforts on behalf of human rights...
...By now, you've been wandering around for an hour or so...
...You've seen almost everything on the main floor, and your kids are getting tired...
...How did it grow...
...The next room is called "Faith and Defiance," on the Christianization of the natives...
...The first room shows the sort of crockery and farm implements used by a typical Delaware farm family after the Revolution...
...Perhaps we should just retitle this the National Museum of Multiculturalism and keep all its exhibits intact, so that future generations can learn about an ideological fad that swept through certain circles in the late 1980s...
...But there is little inspiring in that way here...
...There is no mention of Eisenhower, Patton, Marshall, or MacArthur, leaders who weren't exactly incidental to American conduct of the war...
...You've ./taken them to the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, shown them the U.S...
...The first sign introduces the display: "They were a diverse people, white, black and red, male and female...
...it's the only thing you remember from that visit...
...This women's movement is as natural, as beneficial, as irresistible as the coming of spring...
...Another contains General Sheridan's horse, Rienzi, now stuffed, but next to no information on who General Sheridan was, what he did in the war, why the war was fought, how it was fought, or who won it...
...The curators are not incompetent...
...This pure brand of multiculturalism has been under assault of late from both right and left...
...But it's doubtful that many visitors leave with anything at all...
...These issues, part political and part intellectual history, are apparently irrelevant to the parochial concerns of the Smithsonian curators...
...There is also the kind of attention it pays...
...So while the museum devotes huge space to African-American history, it makes little or no mention of Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, or any other history-shaping individual...
...Though their displays are somewhat dry—filled with lifeless showcases and endless signs that require a lot of standing around reading— there are nonetheless some effective presentations...
...On the other side of the statue is an exhibit called "Communities in a Changing Nation: The Promise of 19th-Century America...
...From there, a passageway leads you to "From Parlor to Politics: Women and Reform in America 1890-1925...
...Finally you come to the gowns...
...You can see what the train compartments they rode in looked like...
...Likewise, if you measure by display space, the culture of Puerto Rico, about which there is a separate exhibit, is vastly more important to American history than the Civil War...
...If the curators of the Smithsonian's American history museum were asked to do an exhibit on the Book of Exodus, they would devote room after room to Israelite walking sticks and totally ignore the Ten Commandments...
...If you judged by the National Museum of American History, men had no role in World War I. Nor would you have any idea why World War I was fought, who was on which side, or how America came to be involved...
...So you speed out looking for displays on the major figures whose monuments the kids have been touring—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln...
...There is no spirit of curiosity...
...Straight ahead through the atrium the first thing you hit is an exhibit called "American Encounters: New Mexico History," which describes day to day life in an Indian Pueblo...
...This exhibit shows you what everyday life was like for the African Americans who migrated from the South up North in search of opportunity...
...IF THIS MUSEUM PORTRAYED THE BOOK OF EXODUS, IT WOULD FEATURE ISRAELITE WALKING STICKS AND IGNORE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS...
...The source of the speech isn't mentioned, so you don't know whether it's an authentic historical document or something one of the curators wrote...
...It is now called "First Ladies: Political Role, Public Image...
...Next comes a room devoted to the everyday life of a New England merchant family (they had nicer plates) and then another on the day to day life of working people in Philadelphia...
...On your way over to the information desk you formulate a mental list of a few of the topics you had hoped to see addressed in a museum of American history: The exploration of the American continent by people like Columbus, Henry Hudson, and Lewis and Clark, the British colonial system, the Puritans, the role of rebels like John Adams and Patrick Henry, the American Revolution and why it was fought, the drafting of the U.S...
...longer section called "Tourism: Buying and Selling Culture...
...This is a museum of multicultural grievance, which simply passes over any subject, individual, or idea, no matter how vital to American history, that does not have to do with the oppression of some ethnic outgroup or disfavored gender...
...Capitol, and you find they're charged up about American history, maybe more than at any other time in their lives...
...Is there such a thing as foreign affairs...
...That means before you get to any gowns there are walls and walls of pictures and signs describing various first ladies...
...By this time your kids are not anxious to see any more farm tools and crockery...
...Constitution, the lives of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton, the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the Civil War, the pioneers, Teddy Roosevelt, big city political machines and the Progressive reform movement, World War I, the rise of Broadway, Hollywood, and American popular culture, the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, Vietnam, Watergate, the Cold War...
...What institutions are important to it...
...So you figure you'll spend an afternoon there with the kids showing them more about the nation's past...
...There is nothing in the museum to explain the evolution of national power...
...Constitution: "When the American colonies sought to unite during their war with Britain, some leaders thought the [Iroquois] confederacy might serve as a model in some respects for the new American government...

Vol. 4 • June 1999 • No. 36


 
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