This reduction of the exhibit to nationalist propaganda deeply disturbed two constituencies: historians and peace activists. military might and of a uniquely virtuous United States while eliding all reference to the human cost of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Smithsonian curators sat closeted with American Legion officials, transforming the script into a celebration of U.S. As 1994 wore on, the debate over the atomic bombing, the pictures of dead Japanese, and references to the postwar nuclear arms race disappeared from the script, replaced by new sections on Japanese expansionism, atrocities, and fanaticism. Senate unanimously endorsed a resolution praising the Enola Gay for helping "to bring World War II to a merciful end" (Dower 1996, 73).įaced with this assault, officials at the Smithsonian ordered the script revised to meet "patriotic" standards. Pat Buchanan charged that historians were serving up a diet of "anti-Americanism" that denied the country's "greatness and glory" (Hogan 1996, 219). Republican conservatives spearheaded the attacks. Congressmen denounced the proposed exhibit as "anti-American" (Hogan 1996, 215) and threatened that, unless it were changed, there would be a Congressional investigation and a cut in federal funding for the museum. Calling for the firing of the museum director and the scrapping of the exhibit, the Indianapolis Star claimed that the exhibit was "tearing down national morale, insulting national pride, and debasing national achievements" (Kohn 1996, 280). Although a few newspapers wrote sympathetic editorials, the vast majority were venomously hostile. The Wall Street Journal declared that the Smithsonian had been influenced by "academics unable to view American history as anything other than a woeful catalog of crimes and aggressions against the helpless peoples of the earth" (Dower 1996, 74). They were joined by the Air Force Association-a military lobbying group focusing on the glories of American air power-in denouncing the planned exhibit as "anti-American" (Engelhardt and Linenthal 1996, 2). In the words of General Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, the planned exhibit was "a damn big insult." He and other veterans demanded that the bomber be displayed "proudly and patriotically" (Hogan 1996, 205 Tibbets website). The American Legion, the Retired Officers Association, and other veterans' organizations lashed out at an exhibit displaying pictures of dead Japanese civilians and raising questions about the postwar arms race rather than celebrating the quintessential American triumph. A preliminary script, drawn up by the curators, was approved by an advisory panel of prominent historians.īut when the museum submitted the script to interested citizens' groups, controversy erupted. The plane was the projected centerpiece for an exhibit that would inspire public reflection on the development and use of nuclear weapons, as well as on the dawn and denouement of the nuclear era. In the early 1990s, with the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the curators at the Smithsonian, a complex of eighteen museums in and around the nation's capital, proposed to display the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the giant B-29 bomber that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Nevertheless, more hawkish forces, appealing to narrow definitions of patriotism, easily won the battle for public opinion. During the Smithsonian disputes, peace groups and historians provided a spirited and informed critique of the necessity for the Hiroshima bombing and highlighting its human costs.
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government’s Smithsonian Institution help to clarify the bases for this stubborn defense.
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The heated controversies surrounding the opening in 19 of bomb-related exhibits at the National Air and Space Museum of the U.S. Over the nearly six decades since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a substantial majority of Americans has continued to defend the action. The Enola Gay, the Atomic Bomb and American War Memory