Museums have long been dominated by the Left, as the controversy of the Enola Gay exhibit in 1994, video above, demonstrated. Private museums may do as they wish, but tax supported museums should not be allowed to lie about our history, or to engage in tendentious revisionist battles that distort history.
Hmm. The enabling law says that? Enforce it and be done with it. If that means the whole crew gets fired and replaced, so be it. Won’t happen, but maybe some of the lefty gnomes can be scared enough to actually follow the charter.
We counted among our friends the founding director of the Genesee Country Museum outside of Rochester and my mother had a number of curators among her friends. They weren’t political sectaries.
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Of course, the assumption is that the values and passions of employees of the permanent government are the gold standard.
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Democratic Administrations do not have to be explicit in smacking down cultural institutions because those institutions will do as they say without a public fuss (and, indeed, will anticipate their preferences). There are arguably a number of vectors at work in making the educational sector what it is, but the notion that blacklisting has not been at work beggars belief. (See Uri Berliner’s account of the composition of the NPR staff at the time he was fired and how NPR employees reacted when he pointed that out). The educational sector is predominantly though not exclusively public; leftoids think and behave as if public institutions are their property.
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Two of the three officials at the Smithsonian responsible for the Enola Gay fiasco grew up abroad. One arrived in the United States at age 15, the other at age 25. That may have influenced their inclination to use museum exhibits to critique government policy. The thing is, our home-bred intelligentsia is so awful that it’s not difficult to imagine they’d have produced something just as bad.
The Smithsonian now has a museum devoted to black history. I want an exhibit on the hookers servicing the King party when he went to Oslo in 1964 to pick up his Nobel Prize. (IIRC, Taylor Branch’s biography has a short section on Bayard Rustin remonstrating with Norwegian police officers ready to arrest the lot of them). I’m sure Brian Behar will enjoy it.
It reminds me of the last time we went to Colonial Williamsburg. Now just Williamsburg when it advertises as a vacation resort. We had gone before, but this was after about a ten year break. We were stunned. That’s when my second oldest quipped ‘between killing Indians, beating slaves and oppressing women, where did they find time to fight a revolution?’ Not all those working there were like that, and some clearly were trying to resist. But most of the tours and presentations by then focused exclusively on the bad and the bad alone. And it was worth noting, the dedication and commitment to authenticity that blew us away the first times we went was badly lacking by that point. I hope it has improved, or perhaps this will get it to improve if it hasn’t.
I took a tour of Colonial Williamsburg in 1974 and again in 1997. There was deterioration in the quality of presentations in that time and I kvetched to a fundraiser when he called my home. One of the presenters did tell me that some of the things I’d seen in 1974 had been discovered in the intervening years to be historically inaccurate and thus discontinued. You know what’s historically inaccurate? A dame in period costume playing a harpsichord with a plastic coffee mug perched on the instrument.
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Nothing woke, though.
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History hasn’t changed. The culture and attitudes of those in the education business have changed. For the worse. Over a period of 60 years or more.
The Smithsonian museums vary in quality. The only one that really falls short, for me at least, is the American History Museum. It’s novelty trash, first ladies’ gowns, and left-wing politics.
But most of the tours and presentations by then focused exclusively on the bad and the bad alone.
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The whole point of a museum like Colonial Williamsburg is to immerse you in the material culture of the period. They call their guides ‘interpreters’, because they’re there to help the artifacts do the talking.
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Place needs a housecleaning.
Pinky:
The British kept the “kitsch” stuff in the Victorian and Albert and some small local museums, but it never soiled the others. The Continental museums I visited had none of it. I admit I was last in Europe (NW England and North Wales) in 2008.
This year I was at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Last year I was at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Both were filled with woke garbage. They were both disappointments.
The Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport is terrific, but you have to pay $15 to park. The Air and Space Museum in DC is still being renovated.
No cost to get in but the cafeterias are hideously expensive.
Once again, President Trump is right.
I did not see woke nonsense at Gettysburg. A good place to go see is the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. I was last there in 2006. You can go for a ride in a Model T. Then again, I always did like Fords.
Natural History? It’s been a while since I’ve been there, but that surprises me. I didn’t think there was much there that could be wokified.
Author D. M. Giangreco has a book “Truman and the Bomb: The Untold Story” published August 1, 2023. Amazon has a sample from the book. The Read sample button is under the picture of the book cover. The sample has a lot of interesting information. It includes a letter written by James Michener to a friend of the atmosphere of dread that preceded the anticipated land invasion of Japan and the relief when it was no longer necessary. James Michener knew what the reactions would be in the circles that he traveled in and made his friend promise to not release the letter until after his death. The sample has a lot of material that deals with the revisionist histories that developed after the war, including the Enola Gay controversy. The book has an appendix that deals with the revisionist histories “The Historiography of Hiroshima: The Rise and Fall of Revisionism.”
Pinky:
Cro-Mag colonization led to the extinction of the Mastodon (AKA “Elephants of Color)!
…Also, there’s clearly nothing more ‘white supremacist’ than covering most of the planet with ice.
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