Museums Increasingly Vulnerable To Politics

Miles Lerman spoke as if he might simply be able to barricade the doors of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and keep the history inside safe, untouched.

“The museum deals with history and history only,” said Lerman, explaining his decision not to welcome Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. “My responsibility as chairman of the museum,” he told National Public Radio, “is to protect the museum from politics.”

But the museum, a shrine to the victims of the Holocaust, also happens to be a federal institution. The decision came under intense criticism. Lerman, a Holocaust survivor, changed his mind and issued an invitation.

Although Arafat ended up not visiting, once again a museum had landed in the middle of a larger battle, fueled by politics and memory.

“Here you have a beautiful example of the complexity of the past - competing interpretations, its power to confer legitimacy, authority, respect on different groups,” said UCLA history professor Joyce Appleby.

Arafat’s visit reminded Appleby and other scholars of a fiery spate of museum controversies in recent years that have pitted different groups against one another.

There was the 1991 “The West as America” exhibit at the National Museum of American Art, a big flap over a revisionist’s look at the myth of the golden west.

There was the uproar over the 1995 Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where an exploration of the rightness of dropping the atomic bomb was canceled under pressure from veteran’s groups, politicians and lobbyists.

“What we were trying to do was to bring in both memory and history,” recalled former museum Director Martin O. Harwit. But he lost his job trying to mix such volatile elements.

Since then, Washington has seen exhibits on Vietnam and Freud postponed, a show on slave life dismantled, one on the garment industry disputed. All seemed destined to offend someone’s claim on history, and hence to threaten the repositories of that history.

Since the 1960s, many museums have become “more critical of the past they examine,” said Barton Bernstein, a professor of history at Stanford University.

“The Air and Space debacle,” he said, however, “has had a chilling effect.”

“Basically museums are very political agents,” he added. They are in need of funding and consequently, deeply vulnerable to pressure. “They claim openness and yield frequently.”

Then too, the history they attempt to contain has grown much more complex, and harder to present. In the old days, history was written by the victors. Now the victims have added their versions. With help from a great expansion in higher education, history has flourished. In the process, it has been democratized to include the stories of slaves, Native Americans, women, common laborers.

“Hundreds of thousands of books have been written about the past in the past 30 years, on subjects that were never touched before,” said Appleby of UCLA. The information often comes as a challenge to the cherished view of history.

“Somehow,” said Appleby, “people don’t want history to change.”

This era of revision has raised the stakes in the museum world, said sociologist Steven Dubin, who has studied and written about museum controversies.

“We’ve changed our notion of what museums represent,” said Dubin, who teaches at Purchase College, State University of New York. “Before they were sacred spaces. Now we are living in times when people are struggling toward ownership of history, redefining who they are.”

Dubin is certain the battles will continue. He sees them as a sign of these times, “a symptom of how things are in flux, how we’re rethinking who we are, where we’re going as a society. There’s no clear vision of that. Until that’s hammered out, we’ll see these brush fires flare up.”