History with Boundaries: How Donors Shape Museum Exhibits

From the OAH President
Pete Daniel

Daniel

James Smithson’s gift to the United States for an institution dedicated to the “increase and diffusion of knowledge” has grown into a complex of nineteen museums and several notable research centers. Until recently the Smithsonian Institution boasted a sterling reputation. The public trusted that the Smithsonian was objective and above politics, and this inured people to its aloofness and occasional poor management. Recently, the institution has been swallowed in controversy and shame as Secretary Lawrence Small and several other top administrators resigned in disgrace amidst charges of outrageous travel expenses, lack of attention to work, service on corporate boards, bloated salaries, and other problems, all committed with the complicity of the Board of Regents. Despite the failure of the Smithsonian’s top leaders, the staff has continued to receive high marks both for scholarship and for integrity.

These sad and inexcusable lapses at the top have diverted attention from significant issues that plague the National Museum of American History (NMAH) and reflect directly on its core mission, “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”  Since the mid-1980s, the curatorial and technical staff has been decimated while donors have increasingly intruded into exhibit planning and, unchecked by directors, have eroded the museum’s intellectual landscape.

Before the 1980s, Congress funded most Smithsonian exhibits. Curators conceptualized exhibits and had responsibility for scope and content. Unlike a lone historian writing a monograph, a curator headed a museum exhibit team that consulted with academic historians, chose objects that fit the story, explored how best to present relevant public programs, created a dynamic design, and produced a legible script that neither offended experts nor confused eighth graders. Museum practice demands that curators maintain responsibility for all these elements.

Since the late 1980s, the NMAH staff has been pruned not only by resignations, retirement, and death but also by design. Curators who left the museum were seldom replaced, resulting in a void of fresh and bold ideas generated by younger scholars. Specialists with decades of knowledge of collections and unique technological skills retired with no effort either to preserve their knowledge or to replace their skills. Because of reorganization and funding cuts, remaining curators took on burdensome clerical and secretarial responsibilities, leaving less time for creative pursuits.

Trends in exhibits over the past two decades provide a cautionary tale, not only of curatorial decline, but also of the impact of private funding. In 1987, Congress funded the NMAH exhibit, A More Perfect Union, an exhibit on Japanese internment that marked the two hundredth anniversary of the U.S. Constitution. Curator Tom Crouch and director Roger Kennedy not only endured outraged criticism for bringing up this nasty chapter of U.S. history but also received death threats. To caution visitors that internment was not a celebratory chapter of U.S. history, museum visitors first saw a TV monitor featuring John Chancellor who explained that the exhibit was an instance when the U.S. Constitution failed. The exhibit’s success demonstrated that the American public did not flinch from controversy. Since 1987 the museum has mounted some successful exhibits, but none that pushed so far and achieved so much as A More Perfect Union.

While the National Museum of American History stood by A More Perfect Union in the face of opposition, in the early 1990s Smithsonian Secretary I. Michael Heyman failed to support curators at the National Air and Space Museum in the Enola Gay fiasco.  The Smithsonian Institution, with its hoary tradition of conservative exhibits and the trust of millions of visitors and admirers, abandoned Air and Space curators in their effort to present a provocative and challenging exhibit on the end of World War II and the opening of the nuclear age. I agree with the verdict reached by Richard H. Kohn, former chief of Air Force history for the U.S. Air Force, member of three advisory committees for the National Air and Space Museum, and currently professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “The cancellation of the National Air and Space Museum’s (NASM) original Enola Gay exhibit in January 1995,” he wrote, “may constitute the worst tragedy to befall the public presentation of history in the United States in this generation.”  He faulted Secretary Heyman both for folding before pressure and for warning curators that controversy within the Smithsonian would not be tolerated. An intellectual chill settled over Smithsonian museums (1).

When Congress cut exhibit funding the spectrum of possibilities narrowed considerably, for donors shied from controversy and challenges to conventional wisdom. Still, the opportunity existed for museum curators and funders to work together. Science in American Life, begun in the late 1980s and opened in 1994, emerged as the transitional exhibit. In the late 1980s, the American Chemical Society (ACS) agreed to fund an exhibit on science and insisted on a review board composed of scientists selected by the ACS and historians appointed by the museum. In addition to its weekly meetings, the five-member curatorial team met monthly with the review board to discuss script, objects, and accuracy. Understandably, the ACS wanted an exhibit that featured lab-coated scientists doing heroic research while curators and historians insisted on also stressing the impact of science when it left the laboratory and entered society. In most cases the exchanges in the review meetings were cordial and informative, but scientists had concerns about, among other things, our treatment of nuclear testing, pesticides, and a fallout shelter.

I worked on sections dealing with the Manhattan Project, atomic testing, polyesters, a 1950s house and yard, pesticides, and Rachel Carson. The exhibit mixed heroic (and controversial) science with social and cultural history. We replicated the racquet court beneath the University of Chicago football stadium where Enrico Fermi’s team constructed the first critical pile, and we created a video that used animation to explain what was going on inside the pile as it went critical. To discuss plutonium production, we collected a control panel from one of the first nuclear reactors at Hanford, Washington. Despite the Enola Gay crisis down the Mall at Air and Space, we included photographs of ground-level destruction caused by an atomic bomb. A hydrogen bomb casing hung above the section that discussed living in the shadow of the bomb during the Cold War. We even displayed a prototype of B. F. Skinner’s World War II weapon, a pigeon-guided missile. In my estimation we reached a successful balance between laboratory science and its impact upon society (2). Science in American Life demonstrated that, with strong backing from the director, curators could maintain control even faced with an aggressive donor.

Primary curatorial responsibilities revolve around research, publication, collections, and exhibits. During these years of funding transition, I collected objects that would populate an exhibit on southern rural life and attempted to find financial support. I dreamed of an exhibit based on my book, Breaking the Land:  The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (University of Illinois Press, 1985). All I needed was several million dollars. Director Roger Kennedy supported my efforts, and the development office worked with me to produce a brochure and make contacts.

Our proposal interested a farm implement dealer and, after the necessary groundwork, I traveled with our development staff to its Midwest headquarters. We felt that all signs were positive and made the “ask” but, to our surprise, the spokesman pleaded hard times and refused support. As we were leaving his office, the corporate spokesman shook my hand and said, “Why don’t you do wheat?”  His words felt like a slap, for I immediately translated them as “whitebread.”  I bit off the first angry words that came to mind and said simply, “It’s been done.” The issue was not so much financial as the lack of courage to deal with slavery, racism, poverty, government intrusion, and the human costs of mechanization. Like internment, southern rural history was not altogether a success story. My final proposal in 2002 for an exhibit on the rural South incorporating the scholarship of a dozen former museum fellows was tabled (forever) by the Exhibits and Projects Committee, often referred to as the Exhibits Prevention Committee. While the NMAH has never mounted an exhibit that dealt with my research, Science in American Life led me to the line of research that resulted in Toxic Drift:  Pesticides and Health in the Post-World War II South (Louisiana State University Press, 2005).

In the years since the Enola Gay controversy, power has shifted from curators, who are, after all, employed to collect objects, do research, and work on exhibits, to donors and pliant directors who demand exhibits fatally lacking in scholarship.

Consider The Presidency exhibit installed in 2000. Kenneth E. Behring, whose $80 million bought his name etched on the entrance to the National Museum of American History, suggested an exhibit on U.S. Presidents to Secretary Lawrence Small, who ordered museum director Spencer Crew to put up a major exhibit on the presidency in ten months, to open at election time in the fall of 2000. When curators understandably complained that there was not enough time for adequate research for a presidency exhibit, Behring suggested that they consult encyclopedias. Secretary Small and Kenneth Behring directed curators and staff to produce an exhibit that neither originated from the museum staff nor engaged more timely scholarly topics.      

Behring next demanded an exhibit on the American military. Museum leadership scrambled to please him. The result was a disservice both to the American military tradition and to the public, for it did not challenge museum visitors to think deeply about freedom or war. The Price of Freedom garnered caustic reviews, including those of Carole Emberton in the Journal of American History [link] and of Scott Boehm in American Quarterly. The exhibit was faulted, among other things, for its uncritical celebratory theme and for donor intrusion. Both the Presidency and The Price of Freedom were generated not from curatorial ideas about potentially significant exhibitions, but from the agenda of Kenneth Behring and the failure of museum directors to stand firm for the tradition of intellectual freedom at the Smithsonian. The only bright spot in this train of exhibits was when NMAH curators, supported by numerous scholarly organizations, successfully fought to prevent Catherine Reynolds’s $38 million Great Achievers exhibit.

Donor pressure also permeates exhibit planning. Recently, I spent a year working with an excellent museum team on an introductory exhibit suggested by a Blue Ribbon panel. We met weekly, created themes, selected objects, began writing the script, and were assured all along that Director Brent Glass approved our approach. Then, abruptly, he pulled the plug. Our work did not please Kenneth Behring, we heard. Several other teams have also failed to please him. Thus one donor has intruded not only into the business of curators, but also dictates what exhibits are mounted in the National Museum of American History.

There has been among Smithsonian leadership and, of course, throughout society, an aversion to portraying the U.S. as anything but perfect. Yet history warns against hubris and fabrication. There is enormous potential to create exciting, timely, and research-based exhibits at the National Museum of American History. It could dare to present exciting and controversial interpretations based on recent scholarship, or, as in A More Perfect Union, explain failures. Instead, the museum has settled for donor-demanded exhibits, ignored recent scholarship, marginalized curators, and now strives for mediocrity. History exhibits are too important to suffer from this radical departure from conservative and responsible museum practice. History with boundaries not only demeans museum staff but also cheats museum visitors. I resent any pressure to bend the writing hand or to subvert curatorial practice to suit a political purpose or a donor’s desire. History is simply too important to be a manipulative tool.   

Endnotes
1. Richard H. Kohn, “History and the Culture Wars:  The Case of the Smithsonian Institution’s Enola Gay Exhibition,” Journal of American History 82 (December 1995), 1036.

2. See Arthur Molella, “Stormy Weather:  Science in American Life and the Changing Climate for Technology in Museums,” in Graham Farmelo and Janet Carding, eds., Here and Now:  Contemporary Science and Technology in Museums and Science Centres, proceedings of a conference held at the Science Museum, London, November 21-23, 1996.