THE NATION : The Nation’s Museums Locked in a Battle for the Truth

The Smithsonian Institution, America’s national museum, is observing its 150th anniversary with the largest traveling exhibition in U.S. history. But even as the museum publicly celebrates, many in its curatorial and scholarly ranks privately mark the occasion with grave apprehension. The Smithsonian, and countless other museums across the country, face one of the most insidious threats in their history as political correctness, hypersensitivity to issues of race and diversity and an emboldened far right threaten to neuter them. A new and rigid orthodoxy is taking shape in which intellectual debate is anathema, and self-censorship ever more common.

At issue is nothing less than the basic mission of museums--whether their purpose is to provoke thought and independent reflection about society and art, or to slavishly celebrate national accomplishments, even if it means sanitizing history, lest a single soul be offended. Increasingly, they are moving toward this latter role, regressing to the time when museums were either little more than reliquaries of antiquity or the cultural equivalent of cheerleaders.

To see the new orthodoxy’s repressive powers, you only need to look at Washington’s twin titans of culture, the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. Despite its heft and prestige, the Smithsonian is particularly vulnerable to pressure because of its unique role as “the National Museum.” It has concluded it can ill afford to alienate any segment of the population--especially when more than three-fourths of its $480-million budget last year depended on the beneficence of a politically conservative Congress.

It is still too early to measure the fallout of last year’s Enola Gay exhibition, but it could well be the Smithsonian’s defining event--with far-reaching implications for other cultural institutions. That controversy culminated with veterans’ groups enlisting the support of Congress and coercing the museum to reduce a planned exhibit on one of history’s epochal moments to a technical treatment on the restoration of a single aircraft. The head of the Air and Space Museum lost his job, and the museum, much of its credibility.

Soon after, an exhibition titled “Science in American Life” came under attack for reputedly failing to pay adequate homage to the blessings of scientific advancement. The museum could not do enough to accommodate its critics. Then the Smithsonian announced it was scrapping plans for an exhibit on the Vietnam War. Too controversial. By then, curators everywhere were diving for cover and, like other Washington institutions, the Smithsonian had become just another target of special-interest groups.

Today, any potentially provocative exhibit is thoroughly “vetted.” But the real question is whether the Smithsonian can reassert its franchise to interpret and be willing to risk the wrath of those who hold its purse strings on Capitol Hill.

Museum officials contend that the recent contretemps have not made an intellectual eunuch of the Smithsonian. But don’t look for controversial exhibitions any time soon. “This may be the time to duck and let the wave wash over me and eventually let my head come back up,” said one curator. The museum community is looking for reassurances that scholarship and art will be defended and controversy not verboten. More pernicious than the Smithsonian’s vetting is the now rampant self-censorship.

It may be more than coincidence that, for the first time in its history, the Smithsonian is not headed by a scientist but a lawyer. I. Michael Heyman has gotten high marks for management, for calming--some say appeasing--a disgruntled Congress and for aggressively courting corporate donors. But his vision and courage remain unproven.

Last month, the Library of Congress, too, fell prey to the new orthodoxy: Its exhibition, “Back of the Big House,” depicting slave life on Southern plantations was hastily dismantled on opening day. A handful of staffers, many of them African Americans, complained the show was offensive. Never mind that it had been vetted by a committee that included African Americans; had been viewed at a traditionally black college without incident, and would subsequently be approved for display at Washington’s Martin Luther King Jr. Library. Indeed, the exhibition appears to have been a casualty of longstanding racial tensions within the library, not the historical portrayal of slavery. “A non-story,” sniped Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, oblivious to what was at stake.

Earlier in the month, the Library of Congress had killed its planned exhibit on Sigmund Freud. Officially, budget constraints were blamed. Unofficially, it was opposition from those questioning Freud’s place in the psychoanalytic firmament.

Ultimately, these institutions reflect and shape our identity. In recent years, increasing sensitivities to race, gender and political diversity have helped move more stolid institutions beyond narrow Eurocentricism, leading to repatriation of Native American artifacts and reburial of human remains and a long-overdue broadening of the public’s appreciation for multiculturalism. But hypersensitivities now undermine those gains.

“The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian have a threshold of pain beyond which they will not go,” said James Kelly, of the Virginia Historical Society and chair of the Curators Committee of the American Museum Assn. “The question is how far will they go and is that threshold set too low? Does every interest group get a veto over exhibitions?”

History is a prime target of the new orthodoxy, attesting to the fragility of our national self-image and the conversion of museums to purveyors of national myths. It is not enough that the bombing of Hiroshima was a devastating attack--it must be recorded as an antiseptic victory, minus the issue of civilian casualties. It is too disturbing that the degradation of slavery occurred in a society fixated on gentility, rather than one characterized by a cartoon brutishness. And the bust of Freud, his ideas no longer fashionable, must be quietly retired from the pantheon of thinkers. Such spectacles are not lost on other museums that look to the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress as bellwether institutions.

Those on the far right, who chafe against big government, and those on the left, who mouth respect for freedom of expression, both seem comfortable insinuating themselves into the cultural arena, as if it were a spoil of war. The Jesse Helmses believe they now have the mandate to bring these bastions of elitism and liberalism to heel, eviscerating the national endowments, declaring obscene whatever they deem unworthy and railing against cultural images on the canvas, the wide screen and the Internet. As cultural matters pass from the hands of the artists and curators to the ideologues, art and artifact are judged to either advance or obstruct the moral agenda.

The A-bomb museum in Hiroshima long ignored Pearl Harbor, the primary provocation for a war that culminated with the dropping of the bomb. But it is there that Americans must go to weigh the human toll of that bombing. Near the exit is a book for visitors’ comments. One U. S. marine wrote, “Maybe the Japanese should visit the Pearl Harbor Museum.” But another American wrote, “I never really knew the full effects of the bomb until now. I am sorry.” This is the function of a museum, to reflect on history, even if it remains an open wound.

In a totalitarian society, terror dictates what museums may and may not show. In a democracy, anxiety can produce the same results.

For now, the Smithsonian is absorbed in its gonzo traveling exhibition--55,000 square feet, including a carousel with 60 horses, Abraham Lincoln’s beaver-skin top hat, Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz.” and other objects vetted by museum officials. Putting together such a grand assemblage is a daunting task, but far easier than producing a single display of courage in the face of opposition.