A Tug of War

At the American History Museum, Battle Lines Are Being Drawn Over The 'Price of Freedom' Exhibition

(Hugh Talman -- Smithsonian Institution)

It's a single glass case in an 18,200-square-foot exhibition, but it's likely to draw more flak than its size would suggest.

You'll find it near the end of "The Price of Freedom: Americans at War," the expensive new military history show set to open Thursday at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. It's just past a display of a twisted structural column from the World Trade Center and before the exhibition's concluding display on Medal of Honor winners. Inside the case will be the artifacts that museum curators have chosen to represent the war in Iraq -- among them the uniform of a U.S. Army ranger killed by a roadside bomb, a set of the "Most Wanted" cards handed out to American troops to help them identify key fugitives from Saddam Hussein's regime and a piece of decorated glass from one of Hussein's palaces.

The Iraq display has already generated internal dissent.

"Treatment of current events without benefit of historical distance and analysis is a risky enterprise," wrote Katherine Ott, chair of the NMAH branch of the Smithsonian Congress of Scholars, in a July memo to museum management expressing some of her colleagues' concerns. In particular, Ott wrote, the choice to include the operations in Iraq under the "Price of Freedom" title "presents a partisan view of the current war and is counter to our neutral public mission."

NMAH Director Brent Glass disagrees.

"It's important for a history museum to show the connection between the present and the past," Glass says. To exclude a major conflict "where Americans are losing their lives" would be wrong.

Stay tuned. The long-running firefight over history on the Mall may be flaring up again.

It has been a contentious decade for history at the Smithsonian. One major battleground has been whether the nation's most important history museums could raise difficult questions about such charged events as the American decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, as the National Air and Space Museum was prevented from doing in its exhibition on the Enola Gay. Another has been the seemingly unrelated issue of how much control private donors should exercise over these public museums.

The two battlegrounds converge in "The Price of Freedom."

When real estate developer Kenneth E. Behring signed a gift agreement in the summer of 2000 promising $80 million to the Smithsonian, he already had a military show in mind. The agreement required NMAH to construct a permanent exhibition "highlighting the history and contributions of the American people (but focusing primarily on the military's role) in preserving and protecting freedom and democracy."

Behring's role in the remaking of NMAH would soon be overshadowed in the public mind by that of local businesswoman Catherine B. Reynolds, whose gift agreement mandated the construction of a hall of achievement devoted to "life stories of eminent Americans." The Reynolds exhibition generated furious opposition inside and outside the Smithsonian, and she eventually withdrew her gift, leaving Behring as the major donor influencing the museum.

Accounts vary as to just how influential he has been.

"Without his gift we wouldn't be doing this exhibit," Glass says, but "that's been the single biggest influence that he has had." David Allison, the veteran NMAH curator who took over as project director for "The Price of Freedom" in the spring of 2003, emphasizes that although he has briefed Behring on the show's progress, he has never met privately with the donor (that's Glass's job, he says) or sent him script drafts for review.

Allison's predecessor, Robin Reed -- who left his temporary job with NMAH to accept a permanent position at Colonial Williamsburg -- had a different view of Behring's role.