By Jonathan Yardley
Monday, February 28, 2000; Page C02

In the matter of the Smithsonian Institution's flirtation with show business, it was argued here last week that the problem is essentially internal: that the Smithsonian, like other venerable museums and cultural institutions, has become infatuated with entertainment and is abasing itself in hopes of raking in entertainment dollars. There is reason to believe that this is so, but, as a number of readers have pointed out, the internal problem at the Smithsonian has external causes.

A history lesson is in order. The Smithsonian was established by Congress in 1846 in response to a bequest of $500,000 to the United States--"an enormous sum at the time," as James Conaway writes in his sesquicentennial history, "The Smithsonian"--in the will of James Smithson, a British scientist, to create, "under the name [of] the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men."

The bequest had actually been made in 1835. It took more than a decade for Congress to settle on an acceptable formula for implementing it. Under the compromise that was reached, the institution was established as autonomous, or quasi-public; it was not (and is not to this day) an agency of the federal government, yet its board of regents is dominated by officials of that government, and though the Smithson bequest was meant to support it, it quickly became clear that appropriations by Congress would be essential to its operation.

So on the one hand the Smithsonian is ostensibly independent, above politics and all that, yet on the other it must regularly go before Congress, hat in hand, to plead for funds. For much of its history this caused little difficulty, as secretaries of the Smithsonian enjoyed chummy relations with Capitol Hill. The Smithsonian was regarded on the Hill as one of Washington's great adornments, a center of scientific and scholarly research and repository of many of the country's most important relics. It was at once in politics and above politics, a Rube Goldberg contraption that somehow worked.

But this began to fall apart after the 1960s, when two starkly different trends emerged: The long arm of left-wing political correctness began to reach into the Smithsonian, and a right-wing Republican majority began to take shape on the Hill. The former had many manifestations, most notoriously an exhibition at the National Museum of American Art in 1991 called "The West as America" and, several years later, the Enola Gay exhibition at the Air and Space Museum. Both took confrontational exception to cherished views of the American past, and both were vigorously criticized on the Hill.

The wounds the institution suffered then and thereafter were thus in large measure self-inflicted, but the congressional response was all out of proportion to the offense. For the sins of a few who used their positions inside the Smithsonian to score political and ideological points, the institution itself is now being made to pay a dear price. This is how one "dedicated" employee of the Smithsonian put it last week:

"The federal contribution to our budget has declined to the point that, while it will pay for some (not all) maintenance of our buildings and for about 75 percent or so of our staff, it will not cover any of the costs associated with mounting new exhibitions or educational programs. Exhibitions are very expensive, especially because, with the budget cuts, we no longer have the staff to do work in-house; contracting it out is very costly. And yet the public expects us to continue as we have in the past, and the belief that taxpayers' money supports everything we do is widespread. It supports the infrastructure, barely, but nothing else. And from this deficit stems a great deal that is troubling, to those of us inside the institution as well as to outsiders like yourself."

The effects are severe. Over the years the Smithsonian put together a loyal, gifted and self-effacing curatorial and scientific staff, but recently attrition, according to another person on the inside, has been "appalling": "Five or six years ago I thought that it would be impossible for morale of the . . . staff to go any lower but it has steadily declined." It hardly helps that, with congressional support at a bare-bones level, the institution's upper-level managers and development staff have prostrated themselves before private donors and have begun merchandising its reputation and resources.

So if the Smithsonian is now renting out curators as "expert" counsel for a Revolutionary War costume movie, and pushing baubles in its gift shops, and hawking Imax spectaculars and other entertainments, much of the blame rests on the outside: on a Congress so blinded by its own ideological fevers that, by way of punishing the Smithsonian for past offenses, it threatens to toss out the baby with the bath water. This is a central part of the problem, and I am happy to correct any impressions to the contrary that may have been conveyed in this space last week.

Still, the choices of alternative revenue sources are not being made by Congress but by the Smithsonian. Some of those choices are misguided at best, wrong at worst. Maybe it's time to bite the bullet and charge admission to the Smithsonian. There are plenty of ways to do so equitably, without punishing schoolchildren or the poor. But if Congress won't meet its responsibilities, and if the only alternative the Smithsonian can offer is to sell its name, its reputation and its soul, perhaps it's time for the people to pay, out of their own pockets, for what is, after all, the people's museum.

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardley@twp.com.

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