MUSEUMS: The Smithsonian

▪ 1996

      On June 28, 1995, following over a year of public controversy, the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, the most attended museum in the world, opened its Enola Gay exhibit, which featured a section of the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945. That plane was the main attraction in a commemoration of the bombing and the Allied victory over Japan. In addition, the exhibit featured a 16-minute video in which the crew members stated why they believed that the bombing was both necessary and justifiable.

      The exhibit was very different from the one planned by the museum curators. In addition to the Enola Gay section, they had intended to display a number of artifacts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that dramatized the horror of nuclear war—one of them the burned lunch box of a Japanese child who had been killed by the bomb. Their planned exhibit, with about a 35,000-40,000-word text to be placed on placards and wall panels, had sought to summarize the dominant historical interpretation of the bombing and note some of the ongoing disputes about why the bomb was dropped.

      That original plan had been initially attacked by the Air Force Association, a veterans group and aerospace lobby, and by other veterans organizations, most notably the 3 million-member American Legion. These critics charged that the exhibit was bad history, anti-American, and antinuclear. They claimed that the exhibit treated the Japanese as "victims" and thus implicitly suggested that the atomic bombings were "atrocities." Fundamentally, most of the critics asserted, there was no question that the use of the atomic bombs had been necessary and just and that the bombs had saved many American and Japanese lives by ending the war before the November 1945 invasion of Kyushu, Japan.

      In 1994 and early 1995, the museum had been unable to reach a compromise with its critics. In January 1995, amid mistrust on each side, the museum's director, astrophysicist Martin Harwit, stated that he was going to insert new material into the text noting the army chief of staff's forecast in June 1945 that U.S. forces in the Kyushu operation would suffer no more than 63,000 casualties (dead, wounded, and missing). The Legion was outraged, and veterans organizations soon demanded Harwit's resignation. (He did resign in May 1995.)

      In late January 1995 his superior, Smithsonian secretary (director) Ira Michael Heyman, had announced that he was taking over the planned exhibit, canceling the earlier text and Japanese artifacts, and that the scaled-back exhibit would feature the Enola Gay and commemorate the atomic bombings and the end of the war. It had been a mistake, he asserted, to try to mix academic analysis with historical commemoration, especially on the 50th anniversary of the bombings. Often critics then charged that Heyman was "selling out," destroying "good history," and yielding to the veterans organizations and Congress. His defenders, in contrast, argued that he had rescued history from severe misinterpretation and was helping save the museum, which depended heavily upon federal funding.

      Participants on each side in the controversy had maintained that the dispute was basically about what was good history, who should define it, and how it should be defined. Some on each side agreed that the differences reflected a deep cultural divide in the U.S. Critics of the final exhibit sneeringly called it "patriotically correct," as many of the critics of the earlier planned exhibit had termed that one "politically correct." (BARTON J. BERNSTEIN)

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