Curating America's Painful Past
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Curating America's Painful Past

Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination

Tim Gruenewald

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eBook - ePub

Curating America's Painful Past

Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination

Tim Gruenewald

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About This Book

During the global BlackLivesMatter protests of 2020, many called upon the United States to finally face its painful past. Tim Gruenewald's new book is an in-depth investigation of how that past is currently remembered at the national museums in Washington, DC. Curating America's Painful Past reveals how the tragic past is either minimized or framed in a way that does not threaten dominant national ideologies. Gruenewald analyzes the National Museum of American History (NMAH), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).The NMAH, the nation's most popular history museum, serves as the benchmark for the imagination of US history and identity. The USHMM opened in 1993 as the United States' official Holocaust memorial and stands adjacent to the National Mall. Gruenewald makes a persuasive case that the USHMM established a successful blueprint for narrating horrific and traumatic histories. Curating America's Painful Past contrasts these two museums to ask why America's painful memories were largely absent from the memorial landscape of the National Mall and argues that social injustices in the present cannot be addressed until the nation's painful past is fully acknowledged and remembered.It was only with the opening of the NMAAHC in 2016 that a detailed account of atrocities committed against African Americans appeared on the National Mall. Gruenewald focuses on the museum's narrative structure in the context of national discourse to provide a critical reading of the museum. When the NMAI opened in 2004, it presented for the first time a detailed history from a Native American perspective that sought to undo conventional museum narratives. However, criticism led to more traditional exhibitions and national focus. Nevertheless, the museum still marginalizes memories of the vast numbers of Indigenous victims to European colonization and to US expansion. In a final chapter, Gruenewald offers a thought experiment, imagining a memory site like the recently opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Montgomery, Alabama) situated on the National Mall so the reader can assess how profound an effect projects of national memory can have on facing the past as a matter of present justice.

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Year
2021
ISBN
9780700632404
Topic
Art
FRAMING PAINFUL PAST FOR THE NATION
THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY
1
Like no other museum discussed in this book, the National Museum of American History (NMAH) is dedicated to framing the US national imagination as it is explicitly tasked with representing national history. For this study, the NMAH serves as a benchmark for how a museum narrative and visual rhetoric fosters nationalism and patriotism. Not dedicated to any specific group like the other museums, the NMAH sets a standard for framing painful past from a national perspective against which to evaluate the other museums. As the oldest, the largest, and the only one covering American history at large, the NMAH defines its mission as presenting the most comprehensive approach to US history of any national museum: “Through incomparable collections, rigorous research, and dynamic public outreach, we explore the infinite richness and complexity of American history. We help people understand the past in order to make sense of the present and shape a more humane future.”1
The museum’s aspiration to help the visitor “understand the past” in order to comprehend the present and “shape a more humane future” suggests commitment to promoting social justice. At the same time, the wording is kept vague enough to accommodate viewpoints opposed to a more activist role. Either way, such an emphasis calls for a particular focus on the painful chapters of US history, on the injustices and on collective violence committed in the nation. Achieving the goal of contributing to a more “humane future” should benefit from knowing and reflecting on the inhumanity of the past. In short, the NMAH serves as a useful starting point for examining the intersection of the US national imagination with memory of painful past. The museum should provide a useful indication of how a national museum frames painful past in the context of the National Mall.
The NMAH is the nation’s most popular historical museum, normally attracting circa 4 million visitors each year, although that number dropped to 2.8 million in 2019.2 Of the museums discussed in this book, the NMAH features the largest exhibition space and houses the largest collection of more than 1.8 million items, including some of the most famous objects from US history. Visitors are especially attracted to the museum by this comprehensive material compendium from the American past, which includes popular culture, politics, and economic history. They crowd particularly around a select group of famous large-scale objects such as the John Bull locomotive or Julia Child’s home kitchen and iconic relics such as Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz or Abraham Lincoln’s top hat. The museum also features the most celebrated national flag in the United States, the Star-Spangled Banner, which is displayed in one of the museum’s most prominent exhibitions. The museum stages such iconic objects in a way that imbues them with a sacred aura. Exhibitions take advantage of such national iconic symbols to construct a narrative supporting tenets of American national ideology such as liberty and freedom. In addition to key objects embodying the national imagination, this chapter focuses on how the NMAH approaches the nation’s difficult histories and painful past through its display and arrangement of historical objects.
African American and Native American history are American history and should be expected to feature prominently in the museum, including particularly painful memories of slavery or forced removal. One could imagine an argument for minimizing Native American and African American history in the NMAH because both groups have a Smithsonian museum dedicated in part to representing their history. Such an argument should be rejected because it would present a distorted version of US history that reduces rather than explores the complexity mentioned in the museum’s mission statement. In addition, Americans of European descent dominate the exhibitions of most of the Smithsonian’s other museums, and it would be equally nonsensical to exclude European American history from the NMAH because it is also represented elsewhere.
To be sure, the NMAH does not follow such a flawed logic. However, three of the museum’s flagship exhibitions focus on US military history, which bolster patriotism and foreground military heroism. These exhibitions relegate painful aspects of military history to the margins, including Native American and African American experiences, even though they are closely related to America’s wars. US military history offers a unique occasion to explore the agonizing complexities in America’s past. While I am focusing in this chapter on the representation of African American and Native American past, this approach could include the painful experiences of soldiers during and after wars such as the difficulties of reintegrating into civilian society while suffering from PTSD, which has received much attention since the Vietnam War.3 Likewise, the suffering of veterans’ families and of women during the war should be included in the memory of war.4 Such painful experiences are largely excluded on the National Mall and at the NMAH, which is a missed opportunity to explore the “complexity” in the American military history.
Instead, the NMAH’s treatment of war presents the national story as a struggle on a path toward attainment and defense of American ideals, driven forward by individual war heroes against enemies of national progress from inside or outside. The United States has been at war for much of its history. Wars have marked the pivotal moments of US history, such as the Revolutionary War, the American Indian Wars, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Vietnam War. While the museum’s narrative focus on wars is hardly surprising, it is important to remember that for some of those conflicts racial injustice was pivotal during the wars and in their aftermaths. A comprehensive discussion of the entire museum cannot be accomplished in the scope of this chapter. It is also not possible to take into account past temporary exhibitions dedicated to the painful past.5 Instead, I will focus on the museum’s long-term exhibitions on US wars, which are among the museum’s most famous exhibitions, have been shown for decades, and can be expected to remain on display for the foreseeable future. Particular attention will be paid to how the museum stages memory of war to imagine the nation. The second focus will be on whether the museum includes or excludes the difficult past discussed in chapters 3 and 4, that is, how the museum remembers the wars’ impact on Native Americans and African Americans.
I will begin the discussion with a look at how the NMAH presents the relationship between wars and the nation in The Star-Spangled Banner exhibit. This exhibit represents one of the key nonnarrative memory spaces in Washington, DC, for understanding how national museums construct the national identity. I argue that the NMAH repeatedly ties the origin of the nation and the national imagination to war. It presents war itself as the foundation of the nation. The emphasis on military struggle for central American values of freedom and liberty integrates seamlessly with the militarized discourse of the National Mall. The meaning of freedom, of course, depends to a large extent on the perspective of those affected by violent conflict. The freedom of one group as presented in the exhibitions often is tied to the suppression of freedom to another. As we will see throughout this book, US national museums aim to present and preserve a national story consistent with the founding ideals of liberation and freedom despite the fact that the founding and expansion of the nation depended on the denial of freedom to many. The key question for this chapter is to evaluate to what extent the museum accounts for those complexities and contradictions in the nation’s battles for “freedom.” We will start these considerations with one of the most important celebrations of the national flag anywhere in the United States.
The Star-Spangled Banner: Sacrifice and National Origin
In a city rife with national symbols, the Star-Spangled Banner exhibition stands out even on the National Mall. Few objects, if any, can match this national flag with regard to its importance to the national imagination. Since the first flag of the United States is lost, over time the Star-Spangled Banner was deliberately promoted to become the most venerated historic embodiment of the national flag since its donation to the Smithsonian Institution. Throughout the history of its display, its increasing value as a national treasure is reflected in its careful treatment and nearly permanent presentation to the public. Loaned to the Smithsonian in 1907 by its owner, Eben Appleton, the flag was hung on the outside of the Smithsonian Building to be exhibited to the public and then stored in a case in the Arts and Industries Building’s Hall of History. It was presented next to George Washington’s military artifacts, which already indicated its national importance.6 For the following fifty years, it was continuously presented with the exception of a few years during World War II, when it was moved for safekeeping outside the capital along with other national treasures from 1942 to 1944. In 1964 the display of the flag was significantly upgraded as it moved to the new National Museum of History and Technology, which included a dedicated Flag Hall where the flag hung until 1999.7 After a massive, ten-year restoration project at a cost of more than $40 million and a major renovation of the museum that was completed in 2008, the Star-Spangled Banner is, more than ever, the centerpiece of the NMAH. Located in the center of the building, the flag is now lying on an altarlike display protected by a climate-controlled glass case at a ten-degree angle to be seen in full by the public (see figure 1.1).
figure
Figure 1.1. Presentation of the Star-Spangled Banner with Francis Scott Key’s lyrics of the national anthem at the National Museum of American History.
The mythology of the Star-Spangled Banner is enhanced in an article of the Smithsonian magazine, which claims that during the nation’s first years the national flag had no particular significance until this particular flag was hoisted: “That all changed in 1813, when one enormous flag, pieced together on the floor of a Baltimore brewery, was first hoisted over the federal garrison at Fort McHenry. In time the banner would take on larger meaning, set on a path to glory by a young lawyer named Francis Scott Key, passing into one family’s private possession and emerging as a public treasure.”8 Thus the article claims that the exalted symbolic significance of the US national flag began because this particular flag inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” which eventually would become the national anthem.
The manner of the flag’s presentation ensures that anyone is made aware of the object’s special status. Although completely sealed off by a protective glass cover, it is permanently guarded by museum staff, who periodically remind the visitors that photography is strictly forbidden (even if nobody holds a camera). The light is dim and the viewers automatically lower their voices. The national significance is further amplified through the national anthem as its text is shown in a large font above the flag, and the melody of the anthem is heard at low volume in the background. Mise-en-scène, soundscape, and lighting all contribute to the quasisacred atmosphere of the display. The presentation of the flag in its current exhibition can only be described as intending to evoke a transcendent experience, comparable only to the presentation of the Charters of Freedom at the National Archive.9 Like a religious experience, the mise-en-scène is designed to fill the visitor with awe and deference. Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle have pointed out that the US national flag has attained the status of a sacred object: “How does the flag operate in American life? Religiously, in a word.”10 They see the flag as the main totem of American nationalism and argue that violent sacrifice is at the center of the national imagination, which the flag helps cover up:
In American civil religion, the flag is the ritual instrument of group cohesion. It transforms the bodies of insiders and outsiders who meet at a border of violence. This is the kernel of the totem myth, endlessly reenacted in patriotic life and ritual, and always most powerfully in the presence of the flag. Though the structure of totem myth is as familiar to Americans as anything can be, it remains largely unacknowledged. Though it governs our political culture, we do not recognize it. When it threatens to surface, it is vigorously denied. What it conceals is that blood sacrifice preserves the nation.11
The context of the flag in the exhibition itself confirms its interpretation as a sacred object that derives its meaning as a national totem from violence in its history. The flag is preceded by an exhibition on the story of the War of 1812 and the Battle of Baltimore, which is referenced in the national anthem lyrics. The exhibition concludes with several images of the national flag’s use, many of which are in a military context. The exhibition consists of three chapters and an epilogue: the War of 1812, the display of the flag, and the history of the flag. The first chapter connects the idea of sacrifice to the flag, which begins with the fall of the capital city and the burning of the White House. The backdrop of the display is fiery red to evoke the violence of the siege, and sounds of explosions suggest the shelling of the young nation’s capital. The emotional impact of the assault is emphasized in the display text: “Every American heart is bursting with shame and indignation at the catastrophe.” The following text panel drives home the theme of violence and raises the stakes with a depiction of the Battle of Baltimore. The nation itself appears threatened: “America’s future seemed more uncertain than ever as the British set their sights on Baltimore, Maryland, a vital seaport. On September 13, 1814, British warships began firing bombs and rockets on Fort McHenry, which protected the city’s harbor. The bombardment continued for twenty-five hours, while the nation awaited news of Baltimore’s fate.” The viewer is positioned to take the perspective of Francis Scott Key, who observed the battle from a few miles away and saw in the early hours of September 14 the flag waving above Fort McHenry. The sight moved him to write “a song celebra...

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