In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • America on the MoveAt the National Museum of American History
  • Robert H. Casey (bio)

When the late Brooke Hindle was director of the National Museum of History and Technology he published a seminal article titled "How Much Is a Piece of the True Cross Worth?"1 To judge from the new exhibition America on the Move, Hindle's successors at what is now the National Museum of American History would answer: "Less than you might think." America on the Move is an ambitious, visually attractive exhibition that raises a number of important issues pertinent to the present and future state of museums.

America on the Move is big, complex, and expensive: nearly twenty-six thousand square feet, comprising nineteen sections, most illustrating a particular place at a particular time between 1876 and today, all for the eyebrow-raising cost of about twenty-two million dollars. Its basic technique is to employ one or more large artifacts as the focal point of a vignette depicting a local story with national implications, such as: a narrow-gauge locomotive that brought the railroad to Santa Cruz, California; a 1900 trolley car from Washington, D.C., that signifies twentieth-century suburbanization; a school bus such as those that helped eliminate one-room schools in 1930s Indiana; a cargo container that symbolizes a revolution in shipping. The visitor proceeds through the exhibition chronologically, from Santa Cruz in 1876 to the global transportation hub of Los Angeles in 1999.

A great deal of thought, effort, and expense went into the vignettes. Members of the exhibit team visited with Disney Imagineers early in the design process, and it shows. Rather than rely on backgrounds that merely suggest or evoke a particular time and place, America on the Move uses [End Page 812] detailed reconstructions of portions of buildings, streets, a ship's engine room, a new car showroom. Dozens of mannequins populate these dioramas. The figures are monochromatic, but clothes, facial expressions, and details such as folded newspapers add to the aura of verisimilitude. The simulations do not stop at visual replication. Extensive use is made of recorded sounds of machines, birds, even conversations.

There are large numbers of interactives, ranging from simple lift-the-slide-to-answer-a-question devices to three sophisticated and informative programs on touch-screen monitors. Labels are extensive, colorful, and accessibly written. The exhibition ends with what seems to be standard for such large shows these days, the theme-driven store often known as a "retail opportunity." All in all it is a rich exhibit, one that includes the voices of many people—longshoremen, Pullman porters, locomotive firemen and engineers, motor court owners, suburbanites—and makes connections among various transportation technologies, workers and users, and the influence of politics, economics, and personal choice.

An exhibit as large and ambitious as America on the Move raises many issues worthy of further discussion. The first is the role of artifacts. By one measure, this is an artifact-driven exhibit. The choice of stories was significantly influenced by artifacts already in the museum's collection: a school bus, two locomotives, a ship's engine room, a streetcar, a 1903 Winton automobile. Even the physical layout of the exhibit was influenced by the artifacts: Southern Railway locomotive #1401 and the engine room of the buoy tender Oak could not be easily relocated, so much of the exhibit was designed around them. But in reality the artifacts are only points of departure for the stories the curators want to tell. America on the Move uses artifacts in precisely the way Brooke Hindle suggested that they not be used, "as mere illustrations of interpretations unrelated to material culture."2

The problematic role of artifacts is starkly apparent in the very first section of the exhibit. On one side of the space is the narrow-gauge locomotive Jupiter. On the opposite side is a mock-up of a section of a boxcar that speaks to the shipping of crops and also serves as a portal to the next part of the exhibit. The mock-up is so convincing that I am sure some visitors think it is a section of a real boxcar. Indeed, later in the...

pdf

Share