Bomb's Away at the Smithsonian

Abstract

The quashing of the Enola Gay exhibit provides a vivid example of how political power in the present grants a group of interested actors the ability to define the past—in this case, the history of use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This power to define a national history, a “patriotically correct” history, means that these actors’ beliefs continue to control U.S. foreign policy. These powerful political actors include military veterans' organizations, such as the American Legion and Air Force Association, and their allies among the Right. They control the past by being able to define the dropping of the atomic bomb as the “only” reasonable choice the U.S. could have made to avoid a long, bloody invasion of Japan that would have cost a million or more American casualties. The patriotically correct narrative teaches us that military might and technological superiority are the paths to peace. As described by Stanley Goldberg, one of the historians on the Smithsonian's Enola Gay advisory panel, the quashing of that exhibit has been a “dispiriting morality play.”. By now, the basic plot line of this incident is well known: historians create an historically sophisticated exhibit, veterans and right wing groups angrily react, label it “politically correct history,” and ultimately kill the exhibit by threatening to cut off the museum's funding. But we can also present a more sociologically informed analysis of these events, showing the importance of political power in the social construction of reality. As citizen‐activists, we must understand these dynamics in order to resist them. As educators, we must teach our students how to think about these events, reading between and beyond the lines of popular media coverage. Stanley Goldberg used the analogy of a play to tell the story of the Enola Gay exhibit. We'll do the same here. The story represents a tragic execution of historical truth, complete with cover‐up and betrayal, and as such constitutes a classic tragedy in five acts, with an epilogue outlining the lessons this saga has taught us.