“Obama Makes History,” blared the headline in the
Washington Post last November 5. A few days later
in the same newspaper, Robert Kaiser acknowledged this as “a
statement of the obvious,” but then asked, “What does it mean to
make history?” A good question! Mr. Kaiser thought that “History is
made in two ways: By dramatic occurrences, often surprises, such as
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; and by the slow accretion of
small changes over long periods.” The election of President Obama,
as he saw it, combined both. Well, I agree that his election made
history, but I would like to propose a third way in which history
is made—particularly when it is the kind of history that appears
in newspaper headlines. History is also made when people find
something happening in the present that makes them feel good about
something that happened in the past.
The newly elected president, for example, made history not just
by being elected, but also because to the kinds of people who work
as writers and editors at the Washington Post his election
was in an important respect a repudiation of history—a part of
history that made them feel guilty and ashamed. The repudiation
made them feel better about themselves and their country and so in
a way represented to them what the fall of the Berlin Wall did to a
popular author of a couple of decades ago who wrote,
oxymoronically, of “the End of History.” The End of
History is history too. But it is interesting how much of what we
call history in President Obama’s America is now history of this
third kind. A fortnight after the election, Washington saw the
reopening, after three years of renovations, of the Smithsonian
Institution’s National Museum of American History, which is full of
it.
This museum has always had an interest in “social history,”
though not necessarily of the type practiced in universities, which
usually involves a greater or lesser degree of Marxism, or the
various sorts of neo-Marxist ideologies such as feminism or
post-colonialism that are based on a Manichean division of the
world into oppressors and oppressed. It is actively hostile to
traditional and “great man”-centered interpretations of the past.
The story is his-story no longer, but rather that of the
oppressed peoples—whoever you like them to be—struggling for
liberation. There is some mostly unobtrusive history of this kind
at the newly reopened museum. At one point, for instance, as part
of the history of industrialization in the 19th century, a wall
card tells us that
affluent Americans developed their own class consciousness. They
promoted a sense of their entitlement through institutions they
established and through the popular press which they often
controlled. To justify their wealth when so many were poor, some
misapplied Charles Darwin’s ideas on evolution, arguing that their
rise reflected the survival of the fittest.
Here, “a sense of their entitlement” must refer to the quaint
belief still harbored at the time by these “affluent Americans”
that their wealth was actually their own and not ripped unjustly
from the trembling fingers of the poor. The assumption that some
are poor because others are rich and that the latter should be
called on “to justify their wealth”—inevitably with some
“misapplied” theory such as Social Darwinism—is a Marxian habit
that few ideologues ever break themselves of, although it has never
been one shared with the majority of Americans. Shouldn’t the
majority also have a voice here, we wonder?
Well, it does in a way. For under its superficially more benign
aspect at the NMAH, social history presents itself mainly as
nostalgia. Nostalgia is to history as celebrity is to fame. Both
are ways for ordinary people to expropriate things that are
other, and that insist on their difference from the
ordinary, and to make them, instead, matters for their own feelings
to feed on. The British novelist L. P. Hartley once was famous for
writing that “the past is another country: they do things
differently there.” Not anymore. By assimilating history to
nostalgia, we enable the present, in effect, to colonize the past
and erase its differences.
That’s why the Museum of American History devotes so much of its
exhibition space to the ephemera of pop culture. Here are to be
found Carrie Bradshaw’s Mac PowerBook from Sex and the
City and Grandmaster Flash’s turntable, as well as the
original text of the Gettysburg Address and the flag that inspired
Francis Scott Key to write “The Star Spangled Banner.” By putting
these artifacts on a level with each other, the museum creates in
the present a feeling of familiarity not with the reality of the
past—which, as R. G. Collingwood long ago demonstrated in The
Idea of History, is mental—but with its artifacts. That is:
with the part of the past that is still present.
This creates the illusion for us that we still possess it,
though at the cost of being unable to make necessary distinctions.
Julia Child’s kitchen is here, for instance, presumably because she
was on TV. She was a part of our lives—at least if we are of a
certain age—and we therefore feel a warm glow on being reminded of
her reassuring presence. George Washington’s campaign chest and
camp stool are here too, but without much to suggest that he was of
any more significance for American history than Julia Child.
The assumption that the existence of poverty requires those who
are not poor “to justify their wealth” is a form of unexamined
egalitarianism common to the late 20th and early 21st centuries,
and so fits in with those other contemporary crazes, less familiar
to our ancestors, for celebrity and nostalgia. These are also
egalitarian because they insist that our admiration for a thing
gives us rights of equality with it—makes it somehow ours
instead of its creators’ or the context in which it was created.
The old-fashioned cash registers and the Radio Flyers here, just
like the costume of the original C-3PO from Star Wars, are
the celebrity photographs of the past that make it our own. Before
the renovation, there seemed something almost pleasingly tacky
about going to the museum to see, preserved in a glass case,
Dorothy’s ruby slippers from the film The Wizard of Oz.
These are still there, along with hundreds of similar officially
preserved souvenirs, but it soon begins to seem that you can take a
good thing too far.
WHERE HISTORY AS TRADITIONALLY understood still exists at the
museum, there is an attempt wherever possible to repatriate it to
the present. The best thing by far about the renovation is that it
includes an extensive exhibition on the top floor titled “The Price
of Freedom: Americans at War.” Sponsored by Kenneth E. Behring,
whose generosity was responsible for much of the museum’s
face-lift, it gives a relatively straightforward account of
America’s wars from the French and Indian to Desert Storm, though
there is almost nothing about the war in Iraq of the last six
years. Too controversial, I suppose. But controversy is also on
display, especially in the part of the exhibition devoted to
Vietnam—which was apparently nothing but controversy. I’m
guessing that that’s what gets it the spread it has. It was on TV
too, after all. The Korean War, by contrast, is barely
mentioned.
Even World War II—still, obviously, very much “The Good War” so
far as the Museum of American History is concerned—had its share
of controversy, it seems. “In July, 1945,” one bit of the display
informs us, “President Truman made his controversial decision to
use atomic weapons.” But in July, 1945, the decision was
not controversial. Only in recent years, as the
circumstances in which the decision was made have faded from
memory, has an air of controversy been projected back onto it.
People are constantly being encouraged to look at the past with the
sensibility of the present and never for a moment cautioned that
there might be anything wrong with this.
To understand the past, you have to understand the mind of the
past, which once provided the context for all these dead artifacts.
Once taken out of that context and deposited in a museum, they can
only mislead those who have not taken the trouble to inform
themselves about the context—even so much of it as that dry and
boring list of facts and dates that the Museum director has told
interviewers he wants to eschew. To make the past attractive, it
seems, all that makes it the past has had to be taken out of it.
But, then, why should we expect a celebrity-struck museum to do
otherwise, when academic history is quite as likely to be found
filleting selected bits of the past from the circumstances that
give them meaning in order to make it more palatable to a
narcissistic public?
