SAVE THE SMITHSONIAN!

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” Marcus Tullius Cicero

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My first visit to the Smithsonian Museum was on a torrid August afternoon 73 years ago during a family trip to Washington, D.C.  Accompanied by mom (dad was working), my siblings and I entered the red brick fortress-like building and immediately raced down the halls to find the Spirit of St. Louis, the 27-foot-long monoplane Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in 1927. To this day I still recall brother Robert gazing up at the plane and saying, “Can you believe he flew over the Atlantic in that?” 

We also saw the original Star Spangled banner, Abe Lincoln’s top hat and the inaugural gowns of the First Ladies plus other cool stuff. But my visceral and etching memory from that decades-past visit was realizing and understanding that I truly enjoyed going to museums.

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“A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.”

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As a travel journalist later in life, I wrote more than two dozen articles on different, popular yet frequently arcane museums, including Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum with nearly 1,500 shoes and artifacts spanning 4500 years. In San Francisco I eyeballed a vintage cable car from the 1800s at the Cable Car Museum. In London at the British Museum, I was mesmerized staring at the Rosetta Stone and then enraptured as I eyeballed the complete watercolors (excuse me: watercolours) of Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of the Flopsy Bunny.”

Later as a mom living outside New York City with two curious kids, we went to the Museum of the City of New York (a gem!), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (King Tut! Funky Tut!), the inverted ziggurat called the Guggenheim, plus countless others in any city where we traveled. After they became young parents, I listened with excitement and pride  as my kids described their forays to the Natural History Museum in NYC,  the Museum of Science in Boston and the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

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“The modern museum has multiple purposes — to curate and preserve, to research, and to reach out to the public. They challenge us and ask us to question our assumptions about the past.”

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So I was aghast when President Trump recently announced,“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” (I wonder if he’s walked through the National Air and Space Museum which is part of the Smithsonian and dedicated to human flight and space exploration. Talk about success and a bright future!)

Mr. Trump and I diverge on many issues. But I do share his love of the song with the lyrics, “I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free….” 

Because I know I’m “free” to go to art museums where I may not like or appreciate the paintings and sculptures, and that frequently happens. I’m “free” to learn from museum displays and lectures about the Spanish Inquisition, the plight of Native Americans, and the more than 600,000 deaths during our Civil War, even those are controversial and heartbreaking topics.

In all my travels I was never able to visit Germany’s Memorial Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau which features the remains of those concentration and extermination camps. I realize that would have been excruciating to take in. But “our histories cling to us. We are shaped by who we are and where we came from.”

History can be biased, sorrowful, ambiguous, harsh, dubious, appalling, and more. But, “Freedom of thought and expression are foundational American values, and museums uphold them ….”

Even Martin Luther King noted that it’s appropriate to have a Confederate flag in a museum regardless of the fact that it’s not “a unifying symbol.” 

WE NEED OUR HISTORY.  ALL OF IT.  SAVE THE SMITHSONIAN!

(NOTE: Today, the Spirit of St. Louis is displayed in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum; it was moved there in 1976.)