The Public's Historians

Students in my public history classes generally start out wondering why the topics extend beyond setting up attractive exhibitions, raising funds, conserving artifacts, and other practical matters. The class readings and discussions steadily draw people to recognizing the relevance of addressing social constructions, rightful ownership of artifacts, diverse voices, and the relative merits of commemoration and historical analysis. Since most of the course readings explore these issues through the experiences of individual museums, the debates initially seem distant and particularistic—not something for students to worry about just yet.

Then, courtesy of a former student, the “History in Museums” class saw Nightline’s October 1994 program on the Enola Gay crisis at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM). ¹ Seeing the political issues that museums can face dominate a national, high-profile confrontation worthy of network television raised the class’s appreciation of politics’ role in public history. The students became eager to compare what does happen with what should happen when exhibition planning meets partisanship.

Why did this case elicit such reactions from the students? More broadly, why did the Enola Gay exhibit set off such a furor in the public arena? The four books under discussion here explore the factors that converged to ignite a national firestorm. From different vantage points and at different levels of analysis, they tell the story of the 1994–95 death by a thousand cuts of The Last Act (the title of the proposed exhibit). My responses to these works here have two goals. I write first as a historian trying to assess the character of this acrimonious episode in public history. I write also to engage fellow historians, both professional and avocational, in a discussion about our place, as historians and citizens, in the body politic.

The four books imply that some public history confrontation of this intensity was inevitable somewhere, given the larger political context. The Enola Gay crisis occurred at what now appears to have been a climax in the most recent history wars in the United States. Lobbyists, especially the Air Force Association, and assorted polemicists rallied World War II veterans to aid in the assault, one of many intense efforts to discredit liberalism through its intellectual supports. Several essays in Edward Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt’s History Wars provide a good sense of those wars and their contexts. The book does, however, slight other public history confrontations of the 1990s that were part of those wars, such as those over the quincentenary of Columbus’s voyage, the redefining of Little Bighorn/Custer National Park, Disney’s siting proposals for Manassas, Williamsburg’s efforts to come to grips with slavery, and the Smithsonian’s earlier battles. Concurrent battles over the National Standards for United States History brought schooling issues into the contests over public history as well. Why, then, the Enola Gay? Why such a high profile for this public history confrontation, and why such a resounding success for the national museum’s critics? ²

Half-century anniversaries of catastrophes, including wars, carry heavy emotional loads, even in the calmest of times, as survivors and their families seek closure. Martin Harwit, then the NASM’s director, appreciated the significance of the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In An Exhibit Denied, he details his and the NASM staff’s efforts to combine commemoration and analysis, to respect both the veterans’ memories and the documentary evidence. Harwit and the NASM staff generally, if not always optimally or soon enough, followed the now standard procedures regarding consultation with stakeholders and scholars. As early as 1984, veterans had initiated efforts to restore the Enola Gay and had raised funds for the project; they pressed to insure its display and so were on the scene from the start. Harwit declares repeatedly that from the autumn of 1987 he grappled with conflicting interests and sought to build a consensus. He insists that Secretary I. Michael Heyman’s apologetic statement, “Frankly, we did not give enough thought to the intense feelings such an analysis would evoke” (Harwit, pp. viii–ix; see also pp. 353, 420), belied years...