Museum Review | The National Museum of American History
America’s Attic, Ready for a Second Act

WASHINGTON — When the National Museum of American History reopens on Friday after two years and $85 million of renovation, it may begin to shed its reputation as one of the more cramped and confounding corners of the Smithsonian Institution. The nickname “America’s Attic” may still come in handy now and then for describing the Smithsonian’s network of museums, with their squirreled-away treasures, but at the history museum a central five-story atrium now streams with daylight, promising other forms of illumination as the visitor heads off to the new or refreshed displays, with others to open in the next few months.

The new display of the original Star-Spangled Banner inside a glass chamber at the National Museum of American History. More Photos »

This doesn’t mean that the museum has solved its considerable problems — some loom larger now, simply because expectations are higher and more renovations are to follow in coming years. But the sense of change is dramatic. When you enter the atrium from the National Mall, you face a 40-foot-by-19-foot “waving flag” made of 960 reflective panels whose colors subtly shift as you move past — an abstract American flag that seems to affirm an interest in innovation while declaring the museum’s national role.

After all, this is the only national museum of American history as well as the largest history museum of any kind in the United States. Three million visitors a year were coming before the renovation. Its collection, with more than three million objects, ranges most famously from Jefferson’s writing desk, on which the Declaration of Independence was drafted, to Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz.”

One of the museum’s most prized objects now lies just behind the atrium’s glinting symbolic flag in a new gallery space: the original Star-Spangled Banner. The flag, 30 by 34 feet of wool and cotton, is stunningly laid out on a tilted metallic slab in its own, dimly lighted, environmentally controlled chamber, protecting it from anything remotely like the rockets’ red glare that Francis Scott Key saw at Fort McHenry in 1814 before writing the national anthem.

Such are the opening themes the museum now conveys: space, air, light, and the origins of a national symbol. This renovation, using a mix of public and private funds, was undertaken because of stinging criticisms made in 2002 by a commission that included historians, journalists, administrators and public figures. It was convened to help pull the institution out of a muck of controversy and confusion. There were concerns about the ways private donors might influence the museum’s perspective, objections to skewed political positions in exhibitions, and bewilderment about the museum’s focus. (Before 1980 it was the Museum of History and Technology.)

The commission report (online at americanhistory.si.edu/reports/brc/1a.htm.) called for a large-scale “transformation.” The museum, it said, lacked “aesthetic appeal, organizational coherence, and the perception of substantive balance.” Suggestions included opening up the central space of the museum, providing access to natural light, and identifying “important and iconic objects” in the collection that could serve as thematic markers in the museum’s 300,000 square feet of exhibition and public space.

All this was done in the redesign by Gary P. Haney and the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; the building’s 44-year-old infrastructure has also been overhauled. The museum’s geometry has become more clear, and six landmark objects, as the museum calls them, now signal the themes of the various wings: the John Bull locomotive stands at the entrance to one floor’s east wing, devoted to transportation and technology, for example, while Dumbo the elephant (in the shape of a ride car from Disneyland) flies in state at the entrance to west wing halls devoted to entertainment, sports and music.

This, though, was the easiest part of the transformation, which the museum’s director, Brent D. Glass, stresses will continue in coming years. It is more difficult to see whether any more profound interpretive change is in the offing because even in new material, it is not evident. The new corridor leading to the Star-Spangled Banner, for example, gives the flag’s historical context, but it is painfully cursory, while the corridor leading away from it refers to its symbolic importance with little more than video images. This featured exhibition space relies more on sensation than explanation and exploration.

So too with the installation of 400 objects from the museum’s collection mounted in 275 feet of display cases in the new spaces. It is an array of curiosity cabinets loosely organized by subject, with items like an 1870s surgical set, a Kodak Brownie camera, and a set of Vietnamese manicurist’s tools. The objects fascinate, but the miscellany is so deliberate, it is as if variety itself were the subject. That is one of the strange things about this museum. I can’t think of another where individual objects are so impressive, while the whole is so out of focus. The result is not the creation of a historical context but the disruption of one. One looks for coherence in small things rather than in large — in the unchanged gallery displaying musical instruments, say, or the gallery in which, for six weeks, a rarely displayed copy of the Gettysburg Address on loan from the White House will be shown.

One new gallery devoted to popular culture, “Thanks for the Memories,” is almost a parody of this variety-show approach. It displays enough randomly presented stuff to give new life to the attic metaphor. The displays make it seem as if some sports enthusiast had stashed away a baseball uniform of Roberto Clemente (“the first Latino superstar in major-league baseball”), items related to women’s basketball and boxing gloves used by Sylvester Stallone in the film “Rocky II” and stowed them all near Oscar the Grouch and an old Cheech and Chong record.

Objects appear in the museum not as part of an overall interpretation of American history and culture, but as a miscellaneous assemblage of artifacts gathered for tourists. Sometimes they seem put in place as symbols for constituencies. One of the six newly displayed “landmarks objects,” for example, is a telescope whose only distinction is that it was used by “America’s first woman astronomer,” Maria Mitchell. This does not shed any light on the evolution of women’s roles in the United States, nor on the achievements of American astronomy; it makes both themes seem as insignificant as this particular telescope.

These flaws in newer displays seem extensions of this museum’s previous approach. The exhibition “The American Presidency,” mounted in 2000, approaches its subject from many different directions, but almost never historically. One does not get a sense of how the presidency has changed or why; one gets a series of memorabilia related, say, to assassinations or get-out-the vote movements.

Another exhibition, “The Price of Freedom,” from 2004, is a rare attempt to tell a narrative history: presenting an account of the nation’s wars — though here again we are all too often left in the dark about context and cause. Yet another, “Communities in a Changing Nation,” tries to give a picture of 19th-century industrialization and the experience of immigrant groups and black slaves, though it is strangely disjointed. In January a gallery will present a photographic exhibition created by the still nascent National Museum of African American History and Culture, but where will it fit in? It might be argued that the history of the American Indian or of slavery will be told more profoundly elsewhere on the Mall, and this museum can only tell American history in small pieces. But how can such themes — and so many others — be so casually treated when they are so central to the American experience? And how can a national museum not even attempt a major narrative history of this country that might set the stage for self-understanding?

Such a survey could also avoid a single perspective or monocular vision; that would only lead to exhibitions like “Science in American Life” from 1994, in which American science after 1940 takes on a villainous or banal cast with ominous innovations like atomic energy and insecticides mitigated by a few praiseworthy efforts (like the invention of the contraceptive pill). This interpretive filter omits so much, that an imaginative new science exhibition about invention and play is refreshing reproof.

The smartest exhibition here may be “Within These Walls ...” (2001): successive residents of a single house built in the 1760s in Ipswich, Mass., are used to trace the social and political history of two centuries. That is precisely what is missing from the museum as a whole: a sense that within these American borders varied individuals and groups have shaped a unified story that demands telling. The museum plans an “orientation” exhibition surveying American history (something urged by the panel); it will open a few years hence, but such a show should provide the spine of the museum rather than become an ornament.
“What does it mean to be an American?” That was the question the 2002 commission began with. Now, until more rigorous renovations occur, the answer seems to be that we are lovers of variety and sensation, cultivators of conflicting identities, and possessors of an unrequited yearning for coherence.