Whose History Is It? Planning Henry Ford Museum's Clockwork Exhibit

What kind of history Americans should read, see, or fund is no longer merely a matter of professional interest to teachers, historians, and museum curators. Everywhere now, history is increasingly being held hostage, but to what end and why? ¹

“History wars” have been discussed on television, in the news, and at professional meetings. Today public history is being contested as part of a national debate about who owns history, a debate that climaxed with the cancellation of the Enola Gay exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. As part of this debate, critics are denouncing museum exhibits as too authoritarian, as insensitive to the multiple perspectives, experiences, and values of their diverse audiences. The questioning of authority in exhibit planning is, in fact, a relevant issue in countless museums, not just those publicized in the national media. Henry Ford Museum’s Clockwork: American Time and Timepieces, is a case in point, illustrating how questions of authority within the planning team, and between the team and important “outside” interests, had an impact on the exhibit’s final product.

Changing ideas of time, clock technology, and the history of the American clock industry are all subjects that have received historical scrutiny in recent years. ² To the exhibit planners, the process of incorporating current scholarship and some recently acquired pieces into an updated exhibit of the museum’s timekeeping collection at first seemed straightforward. Right from the beginning, however, the team found itself mediating between advocates of dramatically different goals, points of view, and value systems.

Setting the Context

The original charge given to the exhibit planning team in the fall of 1994 was to redesign the museum’s “clock corridor” within the brief span of a little over a year and with the modest budget of forty thousand dollars. The funding for this exhibit was bequeathed to the museum by J. Alford Jones, a clock collector who donated many clocks to the museum. Because funding came from a member of the local, close-knit clock collectors’ “community,” the museum assumed from the outset that the exhibit had to retain, at its core, examples of the museum’s exceptionally fine clock collection. From the beginning, two clock collectors became actively involved in the planning. The two had previously cataloged the museum’s clock collection and had been instrumental in obtaining the funding for the exhibit. Their voluminous notes on roughly 250 of the “most significant” clocks in the museum’s collection served as an invaluable resource in selecting objects for the exhibit. In deciding which objects were “significant,” the planners thus used the perspective of clock collectors.

The so-called clock corridor in the museum is a long, narrow hallway, comprising about 2,500 square feet and used for many years to display rows and cases of clocks from the museum’s extensive collection. This corridor was dark and gloomy, and the labels were several years if not decades old. Many clocks had not even been exhibited for many years. Corridor spaces such as this one are particularly tricky spaces in which to develop exhibits. Studies of visitors in museum exhibits have shown that when faced with “competing” exhibits along both sides of a hallway, most visitors will generally look along only one side and will not return to view the other side. ³ The exhibit thus had to be designed so that people would continually move from one side of the corridor to the other. The corridor’s imposing architectural features, including several large pillars—part of the 1929 building’s colonial revival detailing—also posed challenges to an updated exhibit design. Another restriction to the design was the corridor’s ancillary role as an emergency fire exit (the fire marshal’s restrictions on the corridor’s space became increasingly rigid as the exhibit planning progressed). Furthermore, the hall was the only accessible entrance to the offices of the museum’s security staff.

Other museum staff imposed (or sought to impose) limits on the exhibit design as well. The museum conservators’ views on the...