The Smithsonian Institution's decision to scrap much of the Enola Gay exhibit should teach Americans that controversy is the inherent price of rewriting history.
Rather than adhere to the original plan of providing viewers with a 10,000-square-foot exhibit and a 600-page script that, in part, was critical of American decisions, museum officials decided to present only the fuselage of the famous plane.
History will be limited to a small plaque delineating essential facts of the bombing.
For years the prevalent interpretation of President Harry S. Truman's decision to use atomic weaponry was that it was the only alternative. As the veteran military historian Samuel Eliot Morison put it in his "Oxford History of the American People" (1965): "Although many Americans have expressed contrition over exploding the first atomic bombs, it is difficult to see how the Pacific war could otherwise have been concluded, except for a long or bitter invasion of Japan."
Now, of course, dissenting views about Pacific war strategies are being infused, with veterans groups and some congressional officials believing that the revisionist Smithsonian language was too favorable to the Japanese. Although the original exhibit was canceled, the debate will go on, just as rewriting the past has TC always stirred ideological clashes.
Recall that last year the National Center for History in Schools released a recommended set of voluntary, national standards for the teaching of American history in grades five through 12. The report was followed by recommended standards for the teaching of world history. Two years in the making, both reports have provoked much commentary from critics who believe that traditional American heroes are being upstaged by less significant individuals and that Western civilization is presented in unflattering terms, as well as given short shrift in the world chronicle.
The goal of both reports, financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Department of Education, is to help youngsters understand the emergence and roles of many individuals in American history and those of areas other than Western civilization.
Critics such as Lynne Cheney, former head of the NEH, and radio personality Rush Limbaugh suggest that the standards were devised by "politically correct" liberals intent on substituting multiculturalism for history and rewriting world history to lessen Western achievements.
Defenders such as Carol Gluck, a member of the National History Standards project, point out that thousands of individuals had an input into the drafting and that "no other country makes curriculum by consensus."
So who's correct in these squabbles ranging from the Enola Gay in particular to history in general?
Well, during my 30 years as a professor of courses ranging from world history and Western civilization to American history, and, more recently, as a co-author of a high school U.S. history text, I have heard a similar debate each time historians try to tinker with the past. The reason is that each person who has had any history courses during a lifetime -- which means nearly everyone -- can recall the way that past was represented. The older the individual is, the more likely the interpretation was a sort of fervent American patriotism, an emphasis on Western civilization, from which American values were derived, and minimal coverage of anything else.
This traditional interpretation was heavy in pro-American values and great men -- usually presidents who were so far removed from contemporary times that emotion derived from witnessing their deeds firsthand was impossible.
For example, Woodrow Wilson was depicted as the last great president, but not Franklin D. Roosevelt, to whose record there were still witnesses.
The good and bad news for both critics and defenders of rewriting the past is that change comes watered-down and very slowly into United States and world history. The proof of the historical pudding of controversy is in the eating: U.S. texts still stress political, upbeat history, and give some attention to economic and social history, minority and ethnic groups, and women -- but never as much as the reformers want or the stand-patters fear. Ditto for world history, in which Western civilization still bulks large.
In the 1960s, radical historians tried to infuse a New Left interpretation into textbooks, emphasizing the seamy underside of the nation's past. But the most that they got in textbooks was a little more criticism of individuals and events. And that's what they will get when it comes to the Enola Gay matter: Textbook writers will not cast the Japanese as innocent victims in the closing phases of the war, but they might refer to the argument that President Truman, as some contemporaries advised, had other options, as, for example, to explode one bomb on a deserted island to convince the Japanese of its destructive force.
In the 1970s, as the Sunbelt states increased in population at the expense of other areas of the nation, historians from Texas and California in particular urged that textbooks and teaching give more attention to these areas in the evolution of the United States. Two decades later, there is greater coverage of these areas, but no reader of an American history textbook today could argue that a pro-Sunbelt stance emerges.
The most positive aspect of the push-and-pull of changing American and world history is that textbook writers are obliged to give teachers and students more sides of events and issues. That means that history, like other social sciences, becomes a debatable subject, in which historians and readers weigh often conflicting evidence. To be sure, this approach is quite common in college courses, but if it is increasingly employed at lower levels, it will suggest to students that history, once written, need not be dry and cast in a concrete -- and that each generation, including their own, will have the opportunity to find and debate perspectives about its past.
Thomas V. DiBacco, co-author of "History of the United States" (1995), is a historian at the American University in Washington.