A Mall tourist itinerary, circa 2050.
Here’s one way it could look: Day One: Zoom to the top of the Washington Monument, stroll over to the Asian American Museum, then swing by the German American Museum.
Proposed ‘melting pot’ of American history: One museum over all?
Courtesy MTFA Architecture - A rendering view of the National Museum of the American People from 10th Street. The organizers proposed to plant the museum near the L'Enfant Promenade with views of the Maine Avenue waterfront and Washington Channel.
James Smallwood/The Washington Post
(Courtesy MTFA Architecture) - A rendering view of the National Museum of the American People's lobby area.
Day Two: Take in the Italian American Museum, then the Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders Museum and finish up with a rousing spin through the Museum of the Irish American People.
Of course, other than the Washington Monument, none of these attractions actually exist circa . . . the present day. But could they? Should they? How many ethnic, racial and national origin museums is too many ethnic, racial and national origin museums? Is it possible to have too many — or too few?
Such are the questions aroused by a provocative museum proposal that is challenging notions of identity and surfacing some subtle tensions about who should get what and who should pay for it when it comes to the area in and around the national lawn. The concept — known as the Museum of the American People — would attempt to tell the story of “all of the people who became Americans, from the prehistoric period through today,” according to its backers. Still in the infant stages of the glacially paced and bureaucratically ornate national museum creation process, the proposed museum has already garnered reductive nicknames, such as the “Immigration Museum” or the “Melting Pot Museum.”
“Everybody’s story is included in the museum,” says Sam Eskenazi, a 69-year-old retired federal public affairs specialist who came up with the idea, hit by some bolt of inspiration, while walking on the Mall several years ago.
But wait a minute. Aren’t there already museums — both existing and nearing existence — that tell the stories of some of those people who became Americans? There’s the National Museum of the American Indian,near the southeast corner of the Mall, and there’s the National Museum of African American History and Culture, set to occupy five prime acres of Mall space by 2015. And there’s the proposed National Museum of the American Latino, which has graduated from infant to toddler stage after the creation of a presidential commission that generated a report on the proposal.
The specter of these three museums — one operating, one about to be built, one just past the presidential commission stage — could complicate the effort to build an omnibus museum. But, spun just so, the other museums could also be used as an argument to support the concept of a catch-all attraction.
Think about the possibilities:
Anti-all-encompassing museum: It’s redundant!
Pro-all-encompassing museum: Those other museums are proof that one ethnic museum can lead to another and another . . .and another.
Rep. James P. Moran (D-Va.) is sponsoring the legislation that would create a presidential committee to study the Museum of the American People proposal and has rounded up about 20 co-sponsors. He realizes that the museum could be a long way off, but he likes the idea of drawing a line now, “before we have any proliferation of additional ethnic museums.”
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