The practice of professional history therefore soon found itself in the target sights of Republicans.įigure 3: Newt Gingrich, the leader of the so-called Republican Revolution in the 1994 mid-term elections. The culture wars were firmly on the agenda for many of the incoming Republicans who believed they had lost control of major cultural institution such as the press, the entertainment industry, universities, and museums.
In the 1994 mid-term elections the Republican Party swept to power and captured both Houses of Congress in what has been called the Republican Revolution. In this regard the Enola Gay controversy echoed earlier struggles in the so-called culture wars over who controlled American culture, who valued the American past, who deserved mention within it, and who controlled any federal action that touched on such matters. Discussions about facts and their importance are well suited for academic conferences and debates, but facts are not enough to make someone, in the case of the Enola Gay exhibit World War II veterans, from letting go of a story they have been telling, and have believed, for most of their lives. The problem with myths is that they cannot be refuted by facts. This is especially true for that part of history encompassed by an individual’s lived experiences. Occasionally, however, the disjunction between the scholarly and public attitude to history is exposed with stark clarity, usually when an ongoing process of historical revision and reassessment focuses on an issue about which many citizens are passionate such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Historians are constantly challenging received wisdom and established interpretations. The exhibit exposed a stark contrast between how historians operate and the way most Americans view the past. By contrast, curators at the museum based their right to interpret the past on their mastery of the source material, their academic degrees, and the advice they received from professional historians. For veterans, collective memory was the same as historical reality. The importance of this image and this collective memory of the US cannot be underestimated. The Three Soldiers statue, which was added later in response to the original wall, is in the foreground. An America without that heroic image is unimaginable to the generation that fought the war, and to those in subsequent generations who have defined their lives by it. A notion of World War II as being the ‘Good War’ prevails in American society. The memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and of World War II as a whole, holds a very special place in the cultural psyche of America. Unlike other instances of controversy surrounding historical commemoration in the US, such as the disagreements surrounding the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, the Enola Gay exhibit could not be saved by a compromise. After five rewrites and nearly a year of intense argument between the museum, veteran organisations, and Congress, the exhibit was cancelled and replaced with a drastically scaled down and less graphic exhibit. The exhibit generated an outcry amongst veterans, members of Congress, and others who felt that it depicted the Japanese as victims in World War II and questioned the morality behind the decision to drop the atomic bomb. The centrepiece of the exhibit was supposed to be the restored Enola Gay, the airplane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The exhibit, scheduled to open in the spring of 1995, the 50 th anniversary of the end of World War II, would focus on the legacy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In March 1994, a heated argument erupted over a planned exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.