An Interview with Spencer Crew
Lynn Shapiro
February was a busy month for Spencer Crew, Director of the National Museum of American History in Washington D. C., yet he graciously found the time in his schedule to meet with Linn Shapiro, Executive Director of the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, for the following interview. --Eds.
Linn Shapiro: You are trained as a research historian--you hold the Ph.D. from Rutgers, and have taught at the university level. You have worked at the National Museum of American History (NMAH) since 1981 and have been its director since 1994. How did you get from academia to public history?
Spencer Crew: It wasn't a planned path. When I came out of graduate school, I started teaching at the Universit
y of Maryland-Baltimore County. I had been doing that for a couple of years when a new director came to the National Museum of American History. He was looking to add new blood to the staff, in terms of people who had been trained in social history. So, I came for a year, just to see what I thought of it, and I fell in love with the place. I liked the forum of public history and the chance to communicate with a much broader, diverse body of people than you do in the university. I love the university; I love the students; I will always miss that, but the chance to have an impact on a much larger number of people is pretty amazing. We get about five and a half million visitors a year. I don't know how many classes I would have to teach to get to that level.
LS: Did you think of it as an alternative career? As prestigious as Smithsonian is, if you have a Ph.D., you really should be at a university.
SC: That's what I have heard. I was at the point where I wanted to experiment with other things. Not that I'd been teaching a long time, but I needed something different to recharge the batteries. I came here to get away for a little bit, to take a deep breath, maybe do a little bit of writing, and then go back to the university. But I was captivated by the work in a museum. It was not a career I would have even considered prior to that. I don't think I had been at the Smithsonian more than once or twice prior to coming here to work.
LS: What captivated you? Did you immediately think, "Five and a half million people that I could influence."
SC: No, I wasn't that bright. I think what struck me--and I give a lot of credit to Bernard Finn, then head of the Department of the History of Technology and Science--is that he started me off by giving me an assignment to do a medium-size exhibition. That exposed me to a variety of people around the institution, gave me a sense of what the various tasks were that went into exhibition development, and the skill and ability needed to take very complex historical concepts and present them in a way that was digestible by the public. It's akin to designing a freshman introductory course. You've got to put it in a format that people can understand, digest, and get excited about. The exhibition work really captured my attention.
LS: Central to museum work is the exhibition team. Central to scholarship is the solitary investigator. Had your graduate training in history or your teaching given you those skills? Did you need to learn new skills to become a curator and an administrator?
SC: There was quite a learning curve. The way you learn is by doing exhibitions, and I did a lot of them, in terms of working with exhibition teams over the first three or four years that I was here. That, as much as anything, helped to hone my abilities. Also, having taught in different kinds of schools--learning how to provide information to fit your audiences--was part of the training that university life gave me. I translated that to a museum setting. The important part was bringing the rigor and the discipline training from the academy. But more intriguing was trying to figure out how to translate the acquired scholarly information into a public setting.
LS: The academic training was an essential base?
SC: Yes. I believe that people who do public history need to come in with subject area expertise and with the skills for research, so that the research you do is meticulous and you can verify it, as you're going to have to do with any kind of a publication. In the Smithsonian, one of the things we pride ourselves on is the accuracy and the crispness of our presentations. This requires pretty stellar scholarship. We try to share our work on exhibitions with our colleagues in the academy before we go public. You want to make sure when you send things out to your colleagues that you feel confident that what you're doing is of the highest quality.
LS: In my eyes, you are a very powerful person. You're the head of the National Museum of American History--which tells the nation's story. You are in some way defining how the nation's history is told to the public. What is the national story--or stories--that you are telling? What is the role of museum director in determining how U.S. history is presented? What do you understand as the constraints on your control of that presentation?
SC: I think the plural is correct and that our approach is to begin to unpeel, if you will, the variety of stories that make up the American story. We want to tell stories about the nation's many peoples and how those stories come together to create the American story, if you want to say that. We are trying to expose as much of the various experiences that make up the American narrative over time. We're picking and choosing constantly, trying to bring new ideas forward, new perspectives, histories of new groups. There is a chance for visitors to learn something new beyond their own circle of experience, and then connect it back to their own. Our task is to begin to illustrate the richness and complexity of history: that it's not a singular story and that there is no one single truth. There are, in fact, lots of different pieces of information that are cobbled together by all of us in many ways. If people begin to understand the various pieces of information that go into the American story, it helps them to think differently about that story. If nothing else, I would hope that people leave here as critical thinkers--that they don't necessarily accept things at face value--but are constantly thinking, analyzing, and trying to figure out how the information we have presented fits within the realm of information that they have.
LS: That is a large goal--leaving as critical thinkers.
SC: If you are an educational institution of any type--for me that's a fundamental value--that you want to teach people to be critical thinkers, so that they can navigate the world in which they live.
LS: What do you know about us, your audience?
SC: Well, besides gross numbers, we know some
preferences. We also know the profile of visitors to the museum. They tend to be age 25 and older. They tend to be fairly well educated, probably more middle class, and fairly affluent. That's a profile of those coming in the door presently. We want to change that profile, to broaden the base of people coming in. Early on during the time I became director, we did a year-long audience survey to catch a sense of what kinds of things people expected, how difficult it was to navigate the museum, and what things were not here that visitors would like to see. That has helped to key the kinds of work we're trying to do for the future.
LS: Given that profile and that, it seems to me, the stories museums are telling are getting more and more complex, do you have any way of knowing if audiences are following? I'm thinking of the First Ladies gowns exhibition. It used to be a simple story--fancy gowns that reflected changes in fashion. Now it is much more complicated.
SC: Yes, through audience surveys. I can't say we do it in every instance, but the model is to do a front-end audience survey. As you're developing the exhibition concept, different ways of presenting it, you're sharing it with the public to see if they're getting it, and to see if you're getting it in ways that resonate for them, so that they want to be engaged with it. When you're done, ideally you do back-end evaluations to see if, in fact, it's working the way you want to. We are working to increase how often we do that, but I'd say that is more and more the pattern that we follow. It is clear that the First Ladies exhibition we have now, the new one, is the most popular exhibit we have in the building. The adding on of layers has not dampened that whatsoever. Certainly they are still awed by the gowns, but I think a lot of people greatly appreciate the context. That's what we want to do as much as possible, not only give you these wonderful objects, but also a context for them, so you understand their meaning, significance, and reverberations.
LS: That raises the question of objects. You've written, "Objects are dumb, not eloquent. And if by some ventriloquism they seem to speak, they lie." How does this museum deal with the dumbness of objects?
SC: It's not that objects don't speak, but what they say depends on the context in which we put them. To assume that the object by itself is going to tell a particular story is not true. Whoever comes in brings with them a personal set of experiences, and they read the object differently. The point of that quotation is to argue that just laying the object out and assuming it will tell you what it is, is not truthful. We're always consciously making decisions, even when we don't think we are. Why not just understand that proposition and recognize that you are giving context. That's not to say that I don't think objects are powerful. I think objects are the key to our means of presentation in museums. But we have to be very conscious about them and about how we use them and not presume it is enough just to put them out there and let people enjoy them. Even if you are putting a number of objects that show the progression of a particular machine, you are still making a statement about progress.Not to recognize that is a mistake. It parallels the conversation we had in the academy about writing history, that if you lay out the narrative, it will tell the story itself. Well, we all recognize that as a historian, you are making choices about what information you include in that narrative and what you exclude. It is the same thing in the context of objects.
LS: There are probably more curators and designers than research historians on any given exhibition team. Exhibition staffs have a fair amount of freedom. Scholarship is always changing. So where does the central exhibit idea come from? If it is not from the objects, is it from human heads?
SC: It is a combination of both. Here, and I think in most places, a good curator has subject-area expertise and object expertise. That person's breadth of experience and ability is helping to shape the exhibition. But it's not done in isolation. It is done in conversations with colleagues inside and outside the museum. There's an entire process of evolution of a script and exhibit idea. You may come forward with something and in the conversations it gets shaved and changed and moved around based on what the scholarship is, what you think the object says versus what other people perceive, what educators are telling you what the audience is understanding. All of those things shape the final product, and it is a long process of shaping and reshaping, so that what you begin with may not, in fact, end up as the final product. What we are interested in is the intellectual, design, and educational process that gets you to the final product.
LS: Is there an average time to exhibition?
SC: It depends on the size. If a permanent exhibition is a large one--I'd say it takes three to five years' of work. You can imagine after three or five years it is a little bit different than where it began. That's a nice gestation process, because it allows you to play with your ideas. You get input from colleagues, your supervisor, the director, senior managers. You get input from every place, and that input helps to shape and reshape the final product.
LS: Does this museum work with focus groups?
SC: In a rudimentary fashion. As we pick a topic area, we're trying more and more to talk with people who have expertise in that area--academics as well as non academics--to get a variety of perspectives. On a lot of exhibitions, if we're working on a period when people are still alive, we will want to have contact with them, get their sense of it to help shape our perspective. We have a group now, for instance, looking at work, so we're talking to workers. We did a show several years ago about memories of World War II--we talked to people from that era, to veterans and other folks--to help figure out the issues, the ideas that ought to be in the center of that conversation. We haven't been as sophisticated about focus groups as such. I think that's a new direction that we want to take and do more of it. As we get more sophisticated, our marketing and publicity activities will get better and better, and we will get a larger educational staff. Our educational staff has not been the size that it needs to be. We're working very hard to try to make it bigger.
LS: Is that a financial issue?
SC: It's a budget problem. It's the reality of tight budgets in Washington for the last ten years, and the fact that we've had a shrinking staff rather than an expanding one. So it has been how do you hold the line and not lose as much as possible.
LS: Putting a positive spin on the Enola Gay exhibition and controversy, I would describe it has having opened a dialogue between the Institution, Congress, the public, and other funders, about how history should be told in this country. Yet, there is also the perception of a chilling effect and the avoidance of controversy. How did Enola Gay affect this museum? Have curators' spirits been dampened? Has corporate sponsorship, which is increasing in this museum, been affected?
SC: Several things strike me as the result of the Enola Gay. It really told us we have to pay attention to the stakeholders in our presentations, especially when they are still around and can have an impact. Much of the conversation around Enola Gay was the memory of the veterans versus what the historians saw from a distance. Maybe we didn't take into sufficient account the power of those memories and our need to pay attention to them. The whole thing the field is talking about now--the importance of memory and how it plays out--Enola Gay may have been one of the first times that happened in the public setting. As public scholars, we needed to pay more attention to that, because the debate clearly is at a much more active level when we do it, as opposed to in a book. I think the other thing that we began to realize was our need to focus more on the complexity of issues and to not focus as much on a singular interpretation. The term we use for it around here is a "balanced presentation." I think there was an impact on the curatorial ranks after Enola Gay and a great concern--more of self-censorship than anything else--that things wouldn't emerge or people would be too cautious. I think that happened briefly, but we're back in balance. People certainly are keeping the lesson of Enola Gay in their heads but aren't self censoring to the same degree.
LS: Can you spot the next Enola Gay? Is there anything in the pipeline that that might be potentially controversial?
SC: Not right now, but I could mention a couple that have come through already. The most obvious one was the show we did about a year and a half ago on sweatshops. We very carefully thought that one through. There was some controversy around it, but by having anticipated some of it, we were much more successful than we might have been otherwise. The other one was a photographic show that we did on the last days of the Nixon presidency. We thought about it ourselves and took it to the board of the museum to ask, "What do you think? What do we have to anticipate?" They were really terrific about saying, "Here are the things you have to think about. You should do the show, but here are the things we need to do to position ourselves in the best possible way." As it turned out, we didn't have much controversy about it. Our biggest fear was that the impeachment trial of Clinton would last forever. That show, in the middle of the impeachment trial, was going to be a tough one to do. Either people would decide that you're denigrating Nixon or you're trying to embarrass Clinton. The best thing that happened was that they got the trial over with, and we could open the show and put it in a historical perspective.
LS: Do you hear from Congress about any of these exhibits?
SC: Sure. It's the nature of being at the Smithsonian, being in Washington. You hear from Congress about a lot of things. We've learned that's part of life. You pay attention to it; you don't dismiss it. You try to be honest and responsive to the issues that are raised.
LS: And do you feel like Congress is fairly responsive to the museum?
SC: Yes, I think we're in a good situation these days.
LS: The official guide describes this museum's tasks as collecting, preserving, studying, interpreting, exhibiting, and honoring the heritage of the American people. How do you shape a museum's activities to honor the heritage of a people?
SC: That is one among our many tasks. People very often come here on a sacred trek to find history, to find themselves in history, to see those icons and those objects that they've heard about and have never had a chance to get near. That has to be part of what you present to people. There are aspects to our history that we really should honor, that ought to be part and parcel of the experience we provide to visitors. Those icons like the Star Spangled Banner, and the lap desk on which Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, and George Washington's uniform.
LS: Have the icons been reinterpreted over the last twenty years? Is there new text for Jefferson's desk?
SC: That's part of the work we are trying to do now. We will use the desk in a slightly different setting in the near future. The flag is being conserved and will be presented in a different fashion when it returns. We want to take into account newer scholarship. You don't want to keep the same things up for over thirty years.
LS: The museum opened in 1964 as the Museum of History and Technology. The name changed in 1980 to the National Museum of American History. There still seems to be a lot of technology exhibitions, not to mention installations that make use of technology. What was the reason for the name change, and what impact has it had on exhibition and collection?
SC: The reason for the name change was to say that first and foremost we're interested in history. Technology is a subset of that, as is social history, the history of science, intellectual history, political history. You are right that there is plenty of technology and history of science in the museum, but more and more they are connected to people, to society, to trends. It is not the story of the progress of a particular piece of machinery, but how does the evolution, the activities of that piece of technology, and those technological changes, impact people? The Material World exhibition that visitors see when entering the museum represents that transition. We are trying to talk technology and culture and people--not only what is the object made of, but how does it connect to your life? You recognize the object because it connects to you in some way. Then you think about what it's made of and how the world has changed as a consequence of these materials. That begins to give a bigger canvas to the issues and the ideas we are interested in.
LS: Is that exhibition permanent?
SC: No.
LS: What will be there next?
SC: American Legacies, which in an engaging and attractive way gets at questions of how we think of ourselves as Americans and how museums think of themselves. It looks at several things simultaneously: What has been the changing perception of the meaning of being an American? How have we thought of ourselves differently over the years? How do we do research and create interpretation? How does one object have several different interpretations at the same time, depending on what avenue of inquiry you decide to make? The other part is sort of a history of collecting at the museum. The objects that we decide to bring in help to create the memory that people have of the history of this country, so it is at the core of what the museum is really focused on trying to accomplish. We're really excited about American Legacies. I think it will create a different initial experience of the museum.
LS: How is the museum itself organized? Is it structured like a university with academic departments?
SC: It's not quite like a university. You have the director, the deputy director, then five or six units below the director. The five units are management and administration; curatorial affairs, which is the curators and collections management and conservation folks; public service, which is education and exhibit production; external affairs, which is development, marketing, publicity; and capital programs, focused on special projects, infrastructure, and facilities. Closest to a university is the office of curatorial affairs, where most of the curatorial scholarly staff is located.
LS: That's where historians would be employed?
SC: Yes.
LS: What activities do historians perform in this museum?
SC: If you're interested in working at a museum like this one, you are expected to be a public scholar, to do research directed toward a public outlet. You need to be thinking about forums in which you can share history with the public. It could be an exhibition, it could be a public program, it could be a written piece for a public setting--those sorts of things need to be the end products that one thinks about in this setting, which is quite different from our colleagues in the academy.
LS: Would you recommend that people who are working toward doctorates think about this kind of work or are you looking for people with other skills, like the education staff who might not necessarily be Ph.D. historians?
SC: I recommend it as a place to think about. As historians, we have to think about getting the public excited about history, presenting history in a way that people say "Gosh, you know, that's interesting, something I want to know more about." Now it tends to be "Gosh, it's just boring facts and figures and nothing else." History, for those of us who love it, is not the dates; it is the connections and the events and understanding how the current of things change and differ over time. The task is translating the excitement that we find in our work to the public so they have that same joy, or at least interest in that, as we do. As I said earlier, you need good scholarship to help ground that, but it's then thinking about the way in which you disseminate it—that is the difference.
LS: Is the museum world more open to women historians and people of color than the academic world?
SC: I think it reflects society. If you look at the museum field, access for women may be a little bit better than it is other places, but overall, I would say it pretty much reflects society. I'm working with a group that is really trying to think about that issue in the museum field. How do we prepare more non-traditional people to think about museums as a career? It is a pipeline problem. Not a lot of people grow up thinking, "I want to be a curator." It's just not the first thing that comes to your mind. Making people aware of this possibility is crucial. The other thing is getting to the point where going to work at a museum--as a scholar--is not seen as somehow straying from the true path. I think a lot of us in the early years who chose to do this were seen as lesser historians. It is much, much better now. It's not perfect yet, but it is better. Museum work needs to become recognized as important work in the academy, so that if someone wants to do an exhibition as part of their work toward tenure it is not sloughed off as "Well, it is in the public service fifth of your work, but where's your book?"
LS: What are the museum's relations with K-12 teachers?
SC: We have an education office that works with teachers to, among other things, create educational kits and programming. Over the last two years, we've developed a terrific new program called "Our Story in History." We take museum objects and create a storytelling morning around them--bringing in storytellers and books on the topic--and then have activities and exchanges for younger visitors. They can see what connects them with the stories, so that they see that the history and the stories we're telling have some parallels to them. We're also part of the National Council for History Education and very active with National History Day.
LS: I want to talk a little bit about the exhibit, Field to Factory: African American Migration, 1915-1940, which you curated. What role does personal biography play in curatorial practice?
SC: With all our research, personal interest certainly plays a role in the things that we pursue. My dissertation work is on the migration period in New Jersey, which has no connection to me personally, but I'm very interested in the movement of African Americans to cities in the early twentieth century and how that changes the nature of the city and the nature of the demands put on it. I am also interested in the nature of the perception of African Americans in the history of this country. I brought those interests to the museum, and when I had a chance to do my own exhibition, those were the topics I wanted to explore. The sidebar to it was wonderful--I was able to learn more about my own family's history. Rufus Crew, a man in one of the exhibit's photos, is my grandfather. He moved from South Carolina to Cleveland around the 1920s. Thus, the idea of the exhibition is to personalize it, not just for me but for everyone who comes in. We want you to be pulled in and find resonance in your existence. The neat thing about the exhibit is that that resonance is not only there for African Americans. It is a story that really is part of the history of a lot of people in this country. People moving for opportunity's sake is the legacy of this nation. You are seeing it through an African American perspective, but people can connect it very quickly to their own personal family histories.
LS: Each visitor entering Field to Factory has to choose to walk through a door labeled "white" or a door labeled "colored." That's one of the most powerful museum experiences I've ever had. I've watched people make the choice. Most walk easily up to the doors and then freeze as they note the racial designation. Rarely do white people walk through the colored door, at least when I've been watching, but they have stopped and noted that they are walking through the white door. There's no interpretive commentary before or after. What did you hope to have us learn by presenting that choice? Do you have any information on visitor response?
SC: Only anecdotal. People are most conscious of their children's response. Children are constantly surveying their world, up and down, all around, because they're short, and they've got to look around. Adults are sort of locked in and don't look around them. The purpose is to remind people of the tyranny of segregation, that nobody had a choice. Not only did segregation contain a commentary to people of color about their place, but many whites didn't have a choice either. That system imposed itself on everyone, no matter how you might've felt about it. There were repercussions for making the wrong choices no matter who you were. The point is to show once again, in a very strong way, how segregation forced people to choose.
LS: It works.
SC: When I worked with the designer, we took a deep breath and showed it to the then director. He didn't bat an eyelash, which was terrific.
LS: Is Field to Factory a permanent exhibit?
SC: Yes.
LS: What are the criteria for designating an exhibition as permanent?
SC: Field to Factory didn't start off as a permanent exhibition. It was slated for no more than a year. Fortunately, its popularity kept it up. I have told the staff, "If you think of something better, I am not going to be territorial." Each time they tell me, "No, it's going to stay," so I think it has some resonance, which is good. Most often we will have thought about the designation of an exhibition beforehand. Field to Factory was an anomaly in a sense. There was recognition that the museum needed to do more to attract the African American population into the museum. The hope was that Field to Factory would start that interest, and it did, and it turned into a permanent show. In the future we want to plan better for permanent shows. We want to focus on spaces that have not changed for many years and update them in terms of scholarship and presentation format. You really want to do things that work for today's audience.
LS: How much space do you need to work on?
SC: I'd say probably a third, at least. We've got work for several years ahead of us. Most of the exhibitions we do now are funded on the outside. Funding for exhibitions is not federally supported, except for staff. Their funding comes from Congress, which we're happy to have. In terms of the other monies that you need to do these exhibits, we rely on fund-raising.
LS: Where will we see the innovations in the museum in the coming years? In exhibition design? Collecting? Technology?
SC: I think the innovations will be in design and presentation, because I think we need to figure out the presentation format for the twenty-first-century audience, with people raised on MTV and Game Boys. I think that technology will also help in terms of providing our experiences, our programming, beyond the walls of the museum. We are going to have to look at the Internet and long distance learning as ways of sharing our knowledge with people who can't come to the museum and are interested in that material. The conservation work will change, too. We're learning a lot through the work we're doing on the Star Spangled Banner about a textile of that size and age. That information is helping to inform our colleagues across the country. The biggest challenge for us is to be more sophisticated in our understanding of our audience's interests, by presenting exhibitions that have a foundation built on good, solid research and scholarship and are also interesting.
LS: From your perspective, as a historian and as director of our national museum of history, what are the most important tasks facing historians in the new century?
SC: Our most important task is to be in the middle of the conversation about American identity. What does it mean to be an American? How do we reconcile those different perceptions and understand them better? If you talk about the new millennium, you're talking about a nation that is changing dramatically. We want to help people see not only the differences but the connections that exist, and to have comfort with that rather than feel ill at ease. Facilitating that kind of a conversation is critical, if we're going to be successful as a nation and cope with the changes that are in front of us.
Linn Shapiro is the Executive Director of the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C.