I had an unusual experience shortly after the Smithsonian Institution surrendered unconditionally to critics in late January and abandoned its plans for a major exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum on the use of the atomic bomb to end World War II. I was, to coin a phrase, “disinvited” from giving two public, off-campus talks, both of which had been roughly framed in terms of “thinking about the bomb.”
The disinvitations were conveyed in a genteel manner, of course. I remained welcome, my erstwhile sponsors explained. I should just come prepared to focus on a different aspect of American-Japanese relations. The bombs that the United States dropped on Japan simply had become “too controversial” a topic.
Thus, in ways that have gone virtually unreported by the mass media, the dispute over the Smithsonian’s exhibit has emerged as a case study of the many levels at which censorship can operate in an ostensibly democratic society -- ranging from overt political repression (epitomized by Congressional pressure to change the Smithsonian exhibit and cut the institution’s appropriations) to subtle forms of self-censorship.
Confounded by a vitriolic campaign against “revisionist” interpretations of a “good war” by conservative forces both inside and outside government, the nation’s premier institution of public history did more than just jettison its plans for a serious retrospective look at the use and consequences of the atomic bomb. The Smithsonian also indefinitely postponed plans for an exhibition on an even more controversial moment in recent American history: the Vietnam War. In addition, it announced that the current exhibition on “Science in American Life” (at its National Museum of American History) would be revised, in yet unspecified ways, to modify critical mention of negative byproducts and consequences of 20th-century science. In the latter instance, the Smithsonian is responding to criticism by professional scientific societies.
Not content with these victories, the Smithsonian’s critics have demanded that heads roll. Curators have been placed under intense political scrutiny. Congress has held hostile hearings on the planning for the original Enola Gay exhibit. The director of the National Air and Space Museum recently resigned under pressure, and it is an open secret that morale among members of the Smithsonian’s professional staff has been shattered. In this new McCarthyism, the catchall indictment is no longer “Communism” but rather “political correctness” or even just plain “revisionism.” Few people in the media or among the general public seem to find the enforcement of a purely celebratory national history alarming.
We praise other countries, especially those in the former Communist camp, for engaging in critical reappraisal of the past. We castigate the Japanese when they sanitize the war years and succumb to “historical amnesia.” Yet, at the same time, we skewer our own public historians for deviating from Fourth of July historiography. We are so besieged by polemics and sound bites that almost no one has time to dwell on the irony of demanding a pristine, heroic, official version of a war that presumably was fought to protect principled contention and the free play of ideas.
It is in this milieu that the chill of self-censorship has appeared. My “disinvitations” do not appear to be isolated events. After the Smithsonian was brought to its knees, a fellow historian similarly was disinvited by the newsletter of a major archive from contributing a critical essay on President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use the bomb. A television program to mark the anniversary of the devastating Tokyo air raids of March 9 and 10, 1945 -- in which the United States inaugurated the policy of targeting Japanese civilians -- was canceled by the network.
A scholarly symposium on the use of the atomic bomb, scheduled to be held at one of the service academies, was abruptly moved, at the last moment, to the campus of a private college (and the military officers who participated appeared in civilian dress). Officials at an archive devoted to World War II reportedly considered addressing the topic of the postwar Allied war-crimes trials of our German and Japanese adversaries at the archive’s annual conference in 1996, but quickly rejected the idea as “too controversial.” Such inquiry presumably would have led to a discussion of the miscarriages of justice that sometimes occurred in the Allied trials of Japanese military men.
In this climate of political pressure and self-censorship, academics should attempt, at the very least, to do four things. First, we must convey to the public how we go about historical scholarship. Second, we must make more broadly known what we have learned or concluded from our specialized studies. Third, we must try to define what “celebrating” the American experience ideally should mean. Finally, in light of the Smithsonian’s sad capitulation to the purveyors of an official historical orthodoxy, academics -- social scientists and humanists in particular -- must give serious attention to the appropriate mission of “public history.”
What, in brief, do these tasks entail?
As the Smithsonian controversy and the larger “culture wars” have revealed, “revisionism” has become a mark of political incorrectness, according to conservatives. There have been miserable excesses on all sides of this debate, and, in our present age of invective and unreason, it is a daunting task to try to convey to the public the idea that critical inquiry and responsible revision remain the lifeblood of every serious intellectual enterprise.
Serious historians, like serious intellectuals generally, draw on new perspectives and data to reconsider and rethink received wisdom. The challenge of this task is difficult to convey to people who believe in fixed, inviolable historical truths. It is doubly difficult where patriotic gore and a “good war” are concerned.
The same people who speak of inviolable truths, however, also generally are receptive to language that evokes “the perspective of time” or the “judgment of history.” Popular wisdom thus holds open a door through which historians can enter to try to explain -- judiciously and painstakingly -- how the passage of time, the discovery of new information, the posing of new questions all may lead to revised understanding and reconstruction of past events. (The Smithsonian’s own spokesmen, caught in the whirlwind, never vigorously tried publicly to explain and defend the serious historical considerations on which their original plans rested.)
In the case of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, what we scholars know in our specialized areas of expertise is certainly conspicuously different from what viewers will encounter at the stripped-down display at the Air and Space Museum, which consists of little more than a section of the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the taped reminiscences of the bomber’s crew. We now know, for example, that many imperatives, in addition to saving American lives, propelled the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. We also know that the American military had not planned to invade Japan until several months after the bombs were dropped; that Japan was on the verge of collapse before the atomic bomb was used; and that alternatives to the bomb were considered and rejected.
We know, too, that the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki included not only Japanese but also many thousands of Koreans, who had been conscripted for hard labor by their Japanese overlords; more than 1,000 Nisei, who were trapped in Japan after Pearl Harbor; a small number of white American prisoners of war, most of them beaten to death by Japanese survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima; and smaller numbers of Chinese, Southeast Asians, and Europeans. We now also know that the total number of people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of them civilians, was considerably greater than initial estimates -- more than 300,000 by current official Japanese calculations (and thus more than triple the total number of U.S. fighting men killed in the entire course of the Pacific War).
Through film, photographs, and personal accounts, we gradually have become better able to visualize the peculiar grotesqueries of death from nuclear radiation. Much of the documentary record of the human consequences of the bombing was initially censored by U.S. authorities. (Atomic-bomb survivors in occupied Japan were not allowed to publish accounts of their experience until late 1948, for example, and film footage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained classified for two decades.)
Moreover, years passed before many survivors found it psychologically possible to articulate their traumatic experiences in words or drawings -- some of which have become accessible to Americans only in recent decades. The horror of the early deaths from radiation poisoning was initially concealed from the world. It is still little known outside Japan. Similarly, the long-term medical consequences of exposure to radiation from the bombs remain known mainly to specialists. These legacies range from mental retardation among infants in utero at the time to a higher-than-normal incidence of various cancers, especially leukemia, among survivors.
“Lack of context” is an argument hitherto monopolized by the Smithsonian’s critics, who charged that the institution’s original plans for its exhibition failed to convey adequately the nature of the war before 1945 and the aggressive, atrocious, fanatical behavior of the Japanese military machine. Such criticism was reasonable. Instead of leading to a fuller exhibition, however, it has resulted in a “commemorative” display, in which basic knowledge about the use and consequences of the bomb itself has been completely excised. Thus it has become the responsibility of academics and ordinary citizens to publicly convey the knowledge, perspectives, and controversies deemed unpatriotic and improper in official circles.
And, indeed, in recent months, many academics and universities have taken up the challenge, through lectures and symposia on the war and the bombs. In the most politically visible and courageous example of such assumption of responsibility, American University in Washington, D.C., is sponsoring an exhibition on the human consequences of a nuclear strike, based in major part on materials from Hiroshima that were to be included in the Smithsonian’s exhibition.
Such activities are crucial to countering the chill of self-censorship. At the same time, they also should be understood as an attempt to promote a true celebration of what America ideally stands for -- namely, tolerance of dissenting voices and the capacity to confront and transcend past evils. This may be a dream, but it is a dream worth struggling for. The alternative is to accept the current public definition of celebration: the parroting of nationalistic myths and honking of patriotic horns.
If this more radical notion of celebration is to be honored, however, we must turn serious attention to what we mean by “public history.” The argument that has temporarily won the day is clear and explicit: Tax-supported institutions such as the Smithsonian (or the National Endowment for the Humanities or the National Endowment for the Arts) have no business endorsing criticism of our national experience. Their mission is to praise, exalt, beautify, and glorify all that America has been and has done.
This is precisely what we criticize and ridicule when espoused by other nations and other cultures; we would be better off practicing what we preach. America has much to be proud of and a great deal to think critically about. Sometimes, as in the case of the last “good war” and the almost nonchalant incineration of hundreds of thousands of enemy civilians that accompanied it, it seems excruciatingly difficult to separate our truly heroic from our horrendous deeds. Yet we must face these terrible ambiguities squarely -- and do so at our public, as well as our private, institutions -- or else stop pretending to be an honest and open society.
That is the kind of “public history” worth struggling for in a genuine democracy.
John W. Dower is a professor of history and international cooperation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
