[On July 16,
1945, the first
atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site, New Mexico, an explosion with
numerous aftereffects and meanings. This week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of
such Trinity connections, leading up to a special weekend post on a foreign
film that’s also profoundly American.]
Three
lesser-known, telling details from the controversy over the Smithsonian’s
proposed Enola Gay exhibit (all drawn
from this wonderful
“History on Trial” website).
1)
An origin point:
According to the two main architects of the proposed exhibit, Smithsonian
Secretary Robert McCormick Adams and Director of the National Air and Space
Museum Martin Harwit, the initial idea of the exhibit as “The Crossroads” was
inspired quite directly by their experiences of the Cold War and atomic age in
the 1970s and 80s. This is a really complicated way to envision an exhibit
about a specific historical moment: to frame it more (or at least as much)
through the lens of what followed in the half-century after the moment, rather
than (for example) what led up to it. I personally agree with that wider frame,
but it’s important to note that it could be controversial for reasons not
simply related to partisan political divisions or the like.
2)
A very specific debate:
As the website highlights at length, the nearly year-long debates over the proposed
exhibit included numerous topics and questions, voices and controversies. Yet
the culminating debate, and the one that apparently derailed the initial
exhibit for good, was focused on a much more specific historical question:
invasion casualties, the number of American lives that might have been lost in
a hypothetical invasion of mainland Japan. In part because that historical
question is and will always remain so hypothetical, and in part because like
most historical questions it’s impossible to separate from different perspectives
and opinions in the present, the answers were stunningly wide-ranging: from an
estimate of one million casualties provided by supporters of the bombing to
Martin Harwit’s quote of about 63,000 casualties in a January 9th
response to the American Legion (the letter that led the Legion to call for
cancelling the exhibit entirely). A good illustration of how fraught and
significant such specific historical debates can be in our collective memories
and conversations.
3)
The past isn’t past: The
whole controversy proves that point quite effectively, of course. But nearly a
decade after the initial debates, another Enola
Gay controversy sprung up that echoed and extended the first. The Air and
Space Museum was opening its new
museum space near Virginia’s Dulles Airport, and the Enola Gay was to be moved into that new, more expansive exhibit
space. Apparently the initial plan was to label and exhibit the plane solely as
a “magnificent technological achievement,” a framing that received pushback
from the Committee for a National Discussion of Nuclear History and Current
Policy as well as from the Japanese and Japanese American communities. As I
wrote in this
piece on San Diego’s U.S.S. Midway
museum, the question of how to exhibit instruments of war is always a
complicated one—but I can think of few debates that offer more instructive and
crucial examples of the ongoing presence and meaning of the past, and more
exactly of the value in engaging with how we represent as well as remember
those histories.
Next Trinity
connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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