The Past Isn't What It Used To Be
FERGUSON, ANDREW
The Past Isn’t What It Used To Be The remaking of the mixed-up National Museum of American History BY ANDREW FERGUSON The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History,...
...Social history dug up mother lodes of valuable material, and enriched the historical understanding of anyone who bothered to pay attention...
...Much was made of the names the Reynoldses had suggested for the Hall, a list that swung wildly from the conventional (Martin Luther King) to the pop (Oprah) to the bizarre (Sam Donaldson...
...The Reynoldses shot back in the local papers...
...Behring said he wanted an exhibit “that shows young people how many people have given the ultimate price...
...The microphone FDR used in his fi reside chats was set out not as a relic in its own right but “as part of the Smithsonian’s efforts to document political uses of the mass media...
...An exhibit on 19th-century immigrants, he pointed out, had dwelt exclusively on “the dark side of capitalism,” suggesting that the social and economic improvement of the nation’s immigrant populations had been owing “to luck, just luck,” rather than hard work, ingenuity, and a uniquely free political and economic system...
...But he kept his public statements to a minimum, and he never directly contested the expertise of the curators...
...So negative...
...But he had enough money left over to give to the history museum...
...In exhibit after exhibit, McConnell said, he had sensed “a drift toward political correctness”—the consistent implication that American history was at bottom a story of exploitation and repression...
...Now the entrance to each exhibition wing is “anchored” by a Landmark Object...
...World War I was reduced to a single small display about the role of women...
...Presumably Heyman arrived prepared for the usual dishwater back-and-forth about budgets and construction timetables...
...For example,” McConnell said, “in the New Mexico Pueblo exhibit, references are made to ‘invasive forms of Christianity.’” He didn’t like the sly pejorative...
...Some kind of orientation exhibit is in the works, with a timeline to give visitors a sense of the sweep of American history...
...Protected from outside political pressure, curators are free, self-consciously or not, to inject their own politics into the museum’s shows, always under the guise of doing disinterested history...
...The commission had further ideas for the museum’s staff: Rework the signage, open up the fl oor plan and let in some light, always keep the interests and habits of the public in mind, don’t be too didactic, and get used to the idea that private donors will infl uence the exhibits they fund...
...An exhibit dedicated to “American enterprise,” first proposed by the commission, will open next year...
...It also helped explain why, among all the Smithsonian museums, the NMAH had one of the lowest rates of return visitors...
...The report proposed an introductory exhibit that would greet visitors as they entered the museum, placing a timeline of the country’s history, from precolonial times to our own, at the center of the building and at the center of the visitors’ experience...
...Though our grandchildren will never believe it, the Republican control of Congress offered fl eeting moments that brimmed with hope and promise...
...And don’t be afraid to “celebrate America’s remarkable strengths and achievements...
...A couple of problems were apparent from the start...
...His chief philanthropy delivers wheelchairs to disabled children in the Third World...
...General Washington’s uniform and camp tent, for example, remained on view, but now a visitor was told they “refl ect the various ways Americans have imagined and remembered Washington as both man and myth...
...In a letter to the regents, the scholars said that including mention of the invasion in an exhibit called “The Price of Freedom” suggested the war was—well, a fi ght for freedom...
...In ceremonies to mark the occasion, the president delivered a speech, followed by the fi rst lady...
...Museum displays are meant to be improving for the museumgoer...
...It sprawled like a postmodern art installation over several thousand square feet of the museum’s fi rst fl oor...
...Sometimes, of course, a donor will indeed try to infl uence the content of a show...
...The “artifact walls” make for a less pretentious and more linear version of “A Material World,” but they’re just as random and anonymous...
...In truth, though, the museum’s picture of America wasn’t ambiguous at all...
...By a long stretch it has been the least popular of the mall’s Big Three museums...
...They’re teaching historical facts in school...
...Mention of the achievements of American farmers was restricted to the abuse of sharecroppers...
...This arrangement clearly frustrated McConnell...
...They saw history as a narrative in which extraordinary people did unusually consequential things...
...It will be a more friendly place...
...The biggest exhibit on World War II—the only exhibit on World War II—was devoted to the internment of Japanese Americans...
...It was as though they’d been asked to write with their feet...
...Small strongly supported the idea, and was seconded by Brent Glass, appointed director of the NMAH after the report came out...
...The new curators had an idea of uplift all their own...
...Ceilings suspended low over long hallways confi rmed the subterranean gloom...
...From Hamilton to Eisenhower, most of the great names of American history had been purged...
...The NMAH has been disappointing tourists for 44 years, since its opening in 1964 as the premier showcase for the public presentation of American history...
...They drafted a letter of protest to the board of regents...
...We’re not a great man/great woman place,” one longtime curator told the Post’s Bob Thompson...
...At his urging, the Reynoldses withdrew from the agreement and took their money with them...
...Invasive...
...Another complained sarcastically that “Price of Freedom” would make “a great recruiting exhibit” for the military...
...No chance was missed to turn something charming and evocative into something dull enough to be interesting to a social historian...
...Behring hoped to tilt the museum toward “telling the whole American story,” including exhibits that would celebrate extraordinary individuals rather than social movements and academic abstractions...
...Yet the tourists who wandered in off the mall with their squirming kids in hopes of seeing George Washington’s battle sword or General Sherman’s horse (it’s stuffed and kept in a glass case up on the third fl oor) were likely to be puzzled...
...Anyone who had spent dim hours in the old building can only marvel...
...The curators are back...
...This was made especially clear when it was pressed into service as a working philosophy for museum curators, who found license to discount artifacts and displays tied to individual historical personages in favor of homely artifacts of everyday life, arranged under broad abstractions like “Time” or “Difference” or “Community...
...Will the Smithsonian Institution actually allow private funders to rent space in a public museum for the expression of private interests and personal views...
...The words “revitalization” and even “rebirth” were tossed around by several of the speakers...
...And that was the title he chose for the show: “The Price of Freedom...
...The presidents exhibit was premonitory...
...Curators also refused to make judgments about the signifi - cance of individual presidents relative to one another...
...So visitors were shown the desk on which Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence alongside Warren Harding’s silk pajamas and the ballet slippers Chelsea Clinton wore in a recital during her father’s second term—next to a jacket worn by Martin Sheen on the TV show West Wing...
...No wall text lets you in on what the historical signifi cance might be...
...The NMAH was conceived in the 1950s...
...One of thousands of Barbie dolls manufactured in 1960 could qualify...
...An exhibit on Indians of the Southwest had an equally antiAmerican, anti-Western bias...
...As a former director of the museum told the Washington Post: “We set about to reacquaint Americans with the ambiguity of public life and the ambiguity of American institutions,” an effort that drew criticism, he said, from constituencies that were always “reaching for an artifi cial, false simplicity...
...The interior admitted little outside light, making it easier to protect old documents and other artifacts but leaving visitors to fumble through the shadows...
...In that case he’s outnumbered...
...A designer was hired from outside the museum, Christopher Chadbourne, whose chief ambition in putting together exhibits, he said, is “to tell good stories...
...Look at the light that’s been let in...
...if it did, politicians would be tempted to control their content...
...Ken Behring was more careful and politic than the Reynoldses...
...There’s nothing here about what made this the greatest country in the history of the world...
...I thought, this isn’t the country I know...
...McConnell is a member of the permanent minority on Capitol Hill...
...The castoffs of popular culture proved irresistible—and not just celebrity-touched “icons” like Archie Bunker’s chair, still bearing the imprint of Carroll O’Connor’s hallowed buttocks, or the zippered sweater from Mister Rogers’s creepy neighborhood...
...The donor was careful to give his efforts institutional cover...
...And of course”—he looked around with a big smile— “we’ve got more work to do...
...He made another pile, in Florida and then in California...
...Its language was bland in the institutional manner, but there were hints here and there of scold and exasperation, and its diagnosis was severe...
...Chronology in particular was dismissed as a contrivance—a “coercive category,” as one new historian famously explained, “that by its normative inclusive character denies its own fi ctionality and instability and thereby distorts the creative possibilities of the present and future...
...Quite apart from its merits as a historical method, social history had an undeniable defect: It was deeply boring...
...One of the great accomplishments of social historians was to seize the intellectual high ground—to claim that their crabbed view of American history was the fruit not of politics or temperament but of rigorous professional training and vast learning— and that any view that differed from theirs was simple ignorance or, worse, intellectual boorishness...
...A grand staircase, made of glass, glitters like a Busby Berkeley stage set...
...The characterization seems more apt for a parasitic virus, a plague, than as a means of describing the evolution of Christianity in this country...
...This museum is about context, about putting people and events in place within the social fabric...
...Very pleased,” he said, when he was asked about the new NMAH...
...In the fi rst weeks after the shuttering, you might catch sight of a forlorn tourist tugging at the locked door and turning away in disappointment, but the disappointment just proved that the tourist had never been inside...
...Now a new central hall is fl ooded with natural light, pouring down from a skylight fi ve stories above...
...And what he saw he didn’t like...
...The exhibit rescued many wonderful artifacts and introduced visitors to several historical fi gures they might not otherwise encounter in the museum: James Madison, for example, or Andrew Jackson, who’d previously appeared only as the genocidal architect of the Trail of Tears...
...With conditions...
...He’d just donated $20 million to the natural history museum next door, but he’d never been to the museum of American history...
...There have been years when even the snoozey National Gallery of Art, fi lled with still-lifes and hunks of marble, rivaled the NMAH as a tourist draw...
...The Star-Spangled gallery is best understood in contrast to what came before it...
...The result was an exhibit unlike any the museum had mounted before...
...Heyman responded as a man who’s been blindsided by a 16-wheeler...
...We need to have a chronology,” Darman said in an interview not long before his death last year...
...So I thought”—and here he smiled the smile that only rich people get to smile—“I can help fi x this...
...Visitors often expect that a history museum should have a clear chronological structure...
...They found more relevance in econometric models and statistical tables than in treaties or constitutions...
...I worried: What are kids going to think when they come here...
...And the picture was made even starker by what was left out...
...In the lobby, display cases now greet visitors with 400 artifacts that range from the mundane to the inconsequential: household appliances and board games from the 1950s, computer prototypes from the 1980s, implements used by farm workers a couple years ago...
...And when they see the fl ag before them, slanted behind protective glass and lit with the blue light of dawn, they might get a patriotic chill, too—and a hint of the intellectual change that Brent Glass referred to...
...Behring’s next show was more expensive ($19 million), more explicitly traditional, and unambiguously patriotic...
...His fi rst donation of $4 million funded an exhibit dedicated to American presidents—individuals whose importance a social historian might have trouble discounting...
...The plaque was alongside a display of a cheesehead hat from the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign...
...Behring is very rich...
...When an exhibit touched on the country’s economic system (infrequently), it was to demonstrate capital’s exploitation of labor: sweat shops, the busted-up strikes of Mexican farm workers, tributes to C?sar Ch?vez and Harry Bridges, abandoned textile workers, and the Chinese immigrants who built the railroads and felt the lash for their trouble...
...He’d heard some unkind things about the museum, he said, rumors about persistent bias in the exhibits, unpatriotic slants on the country’s history...
...Lemelson didn’t know at the time that their absence was a matter of curatorial design...
...So it aroused more controversy...
...A press release, a squib in the local paper, and then . . . silence...
...Even the boosters in the Society of Architectural Historians, in their Washington guidebook, had harsh words: “The lack of clear architectural order and hierarchy have resulted in incoherent interiors, where visitors are disoriented and regularly have to be directed to exits, as the architecture does not provide the necessary clues...
...In a unique way their stories refl ect debates over what it has meant to be an American woman...
...It aims to suggest some answers and stimulate vision to look at objects throughout the Museum in a new way...
...They cannot fi nd this at NMAH...
...A far better museum has been made here,” said the historian David McCullough...
...In an age of hyperspecialization, profs and curators face the same professional hazard: As they burrow into the remotest crannies of whatever sub-sub-subdiscipline has entranced them, they forget what their jobs are for...
...But what he had in mind wasn’t unprecedented...
...At the Smithsonian the curators appeared lost in a dorm room bull session or the defense of a second-rate dissertation...
...Visiting the museum, he was dismayed at the treatment of American inventors...
...But by the time the museum opened, a decade later, it was a museum of social history, “history from the bottom up...
...The only historically formidable fi gure referred to here is Elvis Presley, in a movie poster for Viva Las Vegas...
...he said...
...Behring stood looking around, hands in pockets, unrecognized...
...By his sixteenth birthday, Behring had worked a dozen jobs...
...The historians and public offi cials who backed it “keenly felt the need for a museum that would illustrate the ‘American way of life’ and celebrate the nation’s cultural, scientifi c, and technological achievement,” in the words of a contemporary Smithsonian historian...
...The rules committee oversees the Smithsonian Institution, and the only witness this day was Michael Heyman, the Smithsonian’s then secretary...
...Yet instead of supplementing traditional narrative history with fresh information, social history supplanted it altogether, driving traditional historians from their usual professional perches in the universities and museums...
...We’re going to get across—yes, Americans made mistakes, and yes, we’re going to talk about those—but we’re going to get across to the young people that this is still the greatest country in the history of the world...
...He wanted to see for himself...
...It just showed the things we did wrong, not all the things we’ve done right...
...Like them, he insisted that he have direct infl uence over the content of the exhibits he funded...
...Curators were appalled...
...Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and the author of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America...
...Traditional displays also fell victim to the earnestness...
...The commission’s report, issued in 2002, remains a touchstone in discussions of the future of the NMAH and an outline of the current renovation...
...Museum offi cials have to raise money for everything beyond personnel and maintenance from foundations and corporations...
...The goal, said another curator, was to “challenge visitors’ preconceived notions and views on American history and the world around them...
...The new historians were more interested in broad concepts than in discrete events, in the vast movements of peoples rather than the doings of statesmen, reformers, explorers, diplomats, and generals...
...McConnell had other ideas...
...One such moment came on July 28, 1999, during a hearing of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, Sen...
...A Material World,” along with other exhibits, was the practical result of the shift in historical understanding...
...Wayne Reynolds told the Post: “It just frustrates those curators and ‘scholars’—I use scholars in quotes, because I don’t know what their credentials are—who for 30 years have been collecting movie posters and coins and ceramic pots...
...The theorizing of social history offered curators an excuse to display anything...
...Again historians and curators were irate...
...Nor is any other organizing principle evident...
...Only two of the six landmarks— Clara Barton’s ambulance and the lunch counter from a civil rights sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina—are tied to a signifi cant person or event...
...The literature announced that the purpose of “A Material World” was “to provide tools for a new way of seeing”—a goal far more ambitious than even a traditionalist might come up with...
...The museum offi cially reopened last month, and there were hints that its long record of failure was about to be reversed...
...Inevitably, the Smithsonian’s obsession with social history descended into political correctness—a dismal accounting of American history as an endless manipulation of powerless groups by a powerful elite, punctuated now and then by the triumphant, but always incomplete, liberation of the oppressed...
...By then, aware perhaps of the museum’s precarious fi nances and its dependence on Behring’s good will, the NMAH Congress of Scholars could issue only a half-hearted protest, objecting to a small display on the Iraq war...
...They also, as you’ll notice from the quotation above, began putting ironic quote marks around phrases like the “American way of life...
...they’re educational or uplifting, horrifying or ennobling...
...Over the years, there were occasional public complaints about the dullness and the pitilessly ideological content, some lampoons of absurd exhibits like “A Material World,” but mostly the curators benefi ted from that deference to experts that is another hallmark of the American experience...
...Any contested decisions about the content of the exhibit were taken out of the curator’s hands and given to Small, who was unambiguous about the kind of uplift the Hall of Achievers was meant to provide...
...Traditional historical displays might inspire a love of country or deepen an appreciation for the sacrifi ce of forebears...
...And the snippets weren’t accurate...
...Little attention was paid to military sacrifi ce and heroism, diplomacy, national politics, religion, the Constitution, or the bounty of capitalism and its remarkable spread across every race and class...
...The display stayed where it was and has since been expanded...
...What’s to come was suggested by Brent Glass, the museum’s director for the last six years, who said in an interview as the renovation began, “We’re looking at an intellectual change as well as an architectural change...
...These along with that Clinton-Gore cheesehead were part of a display called “Treasures”: “One hundred fi fty of our most prized and important artifacts...
...Thus the family with the squalling kids might have stepped in from the mall with a relatively benign view of their country, based on personal experience, but the museum wised them up pretty quick, as they found themselves relentlessly challenged with ambiguity...
...And yet, and yet: The opening last month revealed fresh evidence that curators will continue to fl og visitors with the wet noodle of social history...
...The curators’ protests threatened to become an institutional mutiny...
...They were scarcely to be found...
...The show was about individual persons who succeeded one another in a position of great power, but the curators somehow managed to avoid the “coercive category” of chronology...
...By its own account, the Smithsonian Institution, including the NMAH, is scandalously underfunded...
...It was highly unusual for the federal government’s cultural bureaucrats to be second-guessed by people in positions of budgetary authority...
...The purpose would be to “recognize the power of the individual to shape American life and impact the course of history...
...This is the museum reverting to default mode, and it’s unclear where the pressure will come from to rouse it from its social history stupor...
...It will send a clear message,” Small said, “that with courage, with determination and hard work you can achieve your goals, no matter what the odds...
...The money usually comes with no strings attached...
...I didn’t think it was very careful criticism . . . to characterize the whole on the basis of snippets,” Heyman told the Post when he retired six months later...
...Stop and consider the materials...
...One display climaxes with a manicure kit recently given to a Smithsonian curator by a Vietnamese-American beautician in Fairfax, Virginia...
...Where are the great people who made it possible...
...He was born in Freeport, Illinois, in 1928...
...The changes Behring has brought to the museum, while significant, are scattered and precarious, hard to reverse but easy to curb...
...For now the architectural transformation is the most noticeable change...
...Knowing that the Smithsonian was perpetually strapped for cash, Lemelson in 2001 offered $40 million to fund the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, under the stipulation that its exhibits would concentrate “particularly on the individual inventor . . . to inspire a new generation to enter this all-American profession...
...Markers on the timeline could direct them at appropriate points to the special exhibits that treated individual subjects more deeply...
...His agreement with Small and the museum called for a permanent exhibit “highlighting the history and contributions of the American people (but focusing primarily on the military’s role) in preserving and protecting freedom and democracy...
...Yet even here you couldn’t miss the awkwardness of social historians trying to do something they’d never done before...
...Just about the time that McConnell strode through the museum, spy glass in hand, Kenneth Behring was wandering there too...
...It was just so dark,” he said in a brief interview last month...
...Most years it’s drawn roughly half as many visitors as the Museum of Natural History next door and a third fewer than the Air and Space Museum across the mall, despite the thousands of schoolkids bused in from the surrounding suburbs as a painless way for their teachers to juice up their social studies classes...
...We might credit this to the often lamented indifference to history on the part of Americans—a forward-looking people too consumed with getting ahead to dawdle over the past—but just as likely the museum’s nearly half-century of failure is the fault of the museum itself: of the unsightly building that houses it and of the exhibits it has mounted and, perhaps most of all, of the tedious and voguish view of history its curators have imposed upon visitors...
...But word spread throughout the institution’s ranks that an ideological cleansing, led by Republicans, was imminent unless some gesture was made...
...Sometimes the criteria seemed more journalistic than historical...
...With the aid of the usual soundtracks and video tricks, visitors can not only see the fl ag but, in three or four minutes, learn a fair amount about the Battle of Baltimore, the War of 1812, and 19th-century fl ag making...
...when it doesn’t, protests ensue...
...The most expensive of the recommendations— the physical renovation of the museum, fi nanced in part by Behring—was unveiled in those ceremonies last month, to spectacular effect...
...Of the museum’s three million artifacts, some are so revered that even the curators couldn’t justify placing them in mothballs to make room for a Hulk comic book or Phyllis Diller’s cigarette holder...
...Light is still uneven in the exhibition wings, but blacked-out windows have been stripped wherever possible and the rooms brightened by unobtrusive ceiling fi xtures...
...It was odd that curators who proudly display Jerry Seinfeld’s “puffy shirt” should object to an exhibit highlighting Mary Lou Retton’s contributions to American culture, but it wasn’t the question of taste that provoked the curators’ anger...
...ditto a Swanson’s TV dinner tray from 1967, a pair of Keds sneakers, a Topps baseball card, a nurse’s cap...
...In the 1980s, AIDS activists could scarcely keep their famous quilt together for fear of NMAH curators’ grabbing another scrap to show museumgoers...
...We] have downplayed individual genius in an attempt to portray the bigger picture of scientifi c and technological developments, the system and networks that produce change...
...Lemelson, however, thought this emphasis on the abstract shortchanged the unique contributions of the plucky dreamer tinkering under a bare light bulb in his garage after work—another part of the American experience the curators had ignored...
...In the mid-nineties, the inventor Jerome Lemelson, who got rich by developing the machines that read bar codes, had had a revelation similar to Behring’s...
...Advisory historians insisted the exhibit showcase the Mexican War and the SpanishAmerican War, confl icts that had less to do with freedom, one historian said, than with the “acquisition of territory and the subjugation of peoples...
...And then, if you’re good, we’ll let you see the horse...
...He had recently visited the NMAH...
...We need it not just so people can get oriented but also so they can see a story unfolding, with real human beings doing significant things, even as these broad forces are at work that the museum has always emphasized...
...Darman is dead, Small resigned last year after an expense-account scandal, and Sen...
...Behring is one of the country’s great philanthropists...
...It was clear as could be, from the smallest detail to the largest strokes...
...Brent Glass said that while editorial work proceeds on the timeline, he and his curators worry that “visitor research”—museumgoer focus groups—shows people are “turned off ” by too many dates and facts, which can remind them of school...
...Within the Smithsonian, and in press reports, statements like this were taken as rank philistinism...
...I think people are going to enjoy it more—especially young people...
...In time he opened his own dealership, made a pile of money, then turned to real estate...
...A wealthy couple from the suburbs of Washington, Catherine and Wayne Reynolds, were less successful...
...The whole idea was a heresy against the reigning ideology of social history...
...Finally, though, beginning about a decade ago, people started to notice what was happening at the National Museum of American History—people who could do something about it...
...Attendance for the Thanksgiving weekend was nearly three times what it was before the renovation...
...NMAH had boasted that “in recent years the emphasis on individuals has given way to a more complex, collaborative story that better refl ects the reality of invention and discovery in 20th century America...
...The museum took the money and turned its attention to those plucky dreamers...
...The Price of Freedom” remains, along with the “Presidents” and the “First Ladies,” too, in a refurbished exhibit...
...To lead the commission Small chose the late Richard Darman, a veteran Republican operative and dealmaker, assisted by Sheila Burke, a former aide to Bob Dole...
...Here was Bakelite, there was cotton, pig iron was over there, and plastic— lots and lots of plastic—was everywhere...
...The Price of Freedom” is comprehensive and chronological, vivid and dramatic, loaded with artifacts to delight at least male children (lots of carnage, lots of weapons) and their parents (battle plans, uniforms, archival footage, the personal effects of military heroes...
...It’s not purely celebratory of American arms—the dubious Spanish-American War is honestly portrayed, and a display on Hiroshima injects a dose of challenging ambiguity—but it’s often moving, particularly in its concluding display, devoted to recipients of the medal of honor...
...A fargone English professor will try to turn freshmen into deconstructionist literary theorists when all they really want is for someone to explain what The Golden Bowl is supposed to be about...
...It wasn’t much noticed at the time—nothing beyond a glancing story in the Washington Post a few days later...
...Instead objects appeared higgledy piggledy, grouped according to curatorial concepts: “Communicating the Presidency,” “Life and Death in the White House,” and so on...
...They just had the machines,” he said, “not the people...
...When the infl uence matches the inclinations and tastes of the curators, it is accepted as a worthy contribution to the increase and diffusion of knowledge...
...Wherever you turned, some artifact was threatening to raise your consciousness...
...If he’s worried or uneasy, he didn’t show it the other morning, after the dedication ceremony...
...among the four other landmarks are the telescope used by “America’s fi rst woman astronomer” and a car from the Dumbo ride in Disneyland...
...Such a judgment, the letter said, “runs counter to our neutral public mission...
...And it did, more successfully than the curators knew: In a single exhibit it expressed the museum’s understanding of its purpose and its relationship to the public...
...The Past Isn’t What It Used To Be The remaking of the mixed-up National Museum of American History BY ANDREW FERGUSON The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, which squats like an immense, unopened crate of machine parts on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., closed its doors for a two-year renovation in September 2006, and here’s the interesting thing: Hardly anybody seemed to notice, or care...
...The president and fi rst lady had left, the stage was being dismantled, and guests milled about in the new atrium, basking in the natural light...
...When cops busted a sweatshop in El Monte California in 1995, Smithsonian curators swooped in, dismantled the room, and trucked it back to the museum in Washington, where it was reassembled and labeled “iconic...
...Escalators and elevators were tucked away in remote corners, and glyphic signage offered no help in getting from one fl oor to another—and unintentionally raised the question of why you’d want to bother...
...The main plaque had an explanation for them: “This exhibit does not attempt to answer all possible questions about culture, aesthetics, technology, or use...
...This was provided by a “blue ribbon commission” of Smithsonian outsiders that the regents impaneled, at Behring’s insistence and with Small’s encouragement...
...Still, Glass says he came to the NMAH in hopes of implementing the commission’s recommendations, including its “intellectual change” toward a history that is more accessible, less obscure, and more dramatic...
...Nothing dramatic or immediate came from this fl ash of Republican mau-mauing...
...In the NMAH the exhibit became a study of how “First Ladies embody the contradictions and confl icts that accompanied the changing role of women in American society...
...There’s nothing a social historian likes better than a “system” and a “network,” especially if it involves “complexity” and “change...
...Neither the exhibit’s beginning nor its end was clearly defi ned, so in theory visitors could wander around until they dropped dead from boredom...
...The United States, as presented in its preeminent museum of history, was a diffi cult place to love...
...The Smithsonian had displayed the fi rst ladies’ inaugural gowns since 1914...
...In 2001, they offered the NMAH $38 million for a permanent exhibit, a “Hall of Achievers,” that would showcase the lives of prominent Americans, winners of the Nobel prize and the Medal of Honor, businessmen and athletes, both the dead and the living...
...And he started small...
...After 18 months of controversy, Small gave up...
...The political critique was implicit from early on...
...The Reynoldses signed a contract with the secretary of the Smithsonian, Lawrence Small, that was heavy with stipulations...
...His father made 25 cents an hour in a lumberyard and his mother cleaned houses and took in laundry...
...But Behring is still here, too...
...It was attentive to both the grunts in the trenches and the generals and politicians who, for better and worse, told them what to do...
...But the Smithsonian labors under peculiar burdens...
...Colonial pipers piped and historical reenactors reenacted, and the unavoidable Colin Powell—fast becoming our nation’s toastmaster general, as George E. Jessel was to an earlier generation—read the Gettysburg Address...
...I saw quite a lot,” McConnell told Heyman, “and much of what I saw, I didn’t like...
...A Material World” was an exhibit only a curator could love...
...Actually, the snippets were accurate—McConnell could have found much worse if he’d looked more closely...
...After losing a football scholarship he dropped out of college and began selling cars...
...He offered the Smithsonian’s governing body, the board of regents, a gift of $80 million...
...Mitch McConnell presiding...
...Lemelson proved that with a single stroke an outsider could alter the museum’s approach to a historical subject— so long as the stroke was done with a pen, at the bottom of a check for $40 million...
...For the public, the consequences were profound...
...For one thing, fewer and fewer Americans had preconceived notions about American history because they hadn’t been taught any...
...in the same way a museum curator will forget why people come to look at museums in the fi rst place...
...It does not exist...
...Only those who have actually entered the Smithsonian’s American history museum, eager to dive into the drama and wonder of the country’s past, know how disappointing a museum can be...
...Every government agency, by its own account, is scandalously underfunded...
...A wall plaque from a recent exhibit gives the fl avor: “In daily life, national identity often merges, overlaps, and interacts with many other kinds of identities, [which] can help illuminate the forces that have shaped American history...
...And it wasn’t a coincidence that all this “reacquainting” ran in only one direction, politically...
...The original architects had designed 300,000 square feet of public space to suit the needs more of curators than the public, whose convenience and interests were ignored with iron discipline...
...At the mall entrance a new gallery houses a refurbished Star-Spangled Banner, the fl ag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write his poem and that the Smithsonian has made a curatorial fetish for many years...
...Chronology, the commission said, would make a fi ne organizing principle...
...And the changes were long overdue, as everyone seemed to agree...
...For more than 20 years an exhibit called “A Material World” was meant to serve as an introduction to the museum...
...It was an unfriendly place...
...The Museum does not seem to meet any obvious test of comprehensibility or coherence,” the commission said...
...Behring’s agreement stipulated that he be consulted at every step...
...As for the others, signals are mixed...
...Congress typically doesn’t fund exhibits...
...Now he gives his money away, full time...
...Artifacts loosely defi ned—most of them were commercial products—had been scattered on the fl oor and on tables, plucked without evident method from the machine shop, the business offi ce, the factory fl oor, the library, the tailor’s workroom, the beauty salon, the bank: guitars, combs, lampshades, shoes, toys, razors, tires—items made from, as brief plaques explained, different kinds of material (hence the name...
...That there’s somebody who comes in there who really doesn’t have the emphasis on collecting but on inspiring kids, it freaks them out...
...The show opened in 2004 and broke attendance records for a single exhibit...
...Museum fl acks emphasized that the reopening marked the completion of only the fi rst phase of a planned three-phase overhaul...
Vol. 14 • December 2008 • No. 13
