Carson, Beyond Plan B

BEYOND PLAN B

Cary Carson Vice President (retired), Research Division, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (7/29/09) They say misery loves company. In that case, those of us who gather at Brown next month to talk about the uncertain future of history museums might take comfort from getting to know James Conlon, music director of the Los Angeles Opera. Interviewed in this month’s Opera News, Conlon asks Do you know what the American paradox is? We produce the greatest quantity of high-quality orchestras in the world. There are opera companies all over the place. The level of musicianship that we produce, across the board, is higher in America than anywhere else in the world. So what’s the paradox? I don’t know a single institution that isn’t fighting to keep its audience. Not one! And I’m not talking about the last five months, since the crash, or the years since 9/11. I’m talking about the last 35 years. He continued. I don’t have any grandiose ideas about my ability to change this. I’m just one person. I do think that performing artists have only recently awakened to the realization that we do not exist in an ivory tower. We have to get out there and roll up our sleeves. . . . People want contact with the stage and the personality of the conductor. They see the back of the conductor all the time. They’d like to see the front of the conductor too. But what they really want is to be part of the discourse. There’s a need to find more meaning in music, to understand it on a deeper level, to be educated about it. Already I know from reading the postings on the workshop website that our own agenda is likely to include conversations on two matters that concern Conlon as much as they do museum historians—dwindling audiences and new ways for museum-goers to join in the search for a meaningful past. I wrote about both in the “End of History Museums” essay that Steve reprinted on the website. I need not go over that ground again here. Instead I’d like to raise a more basic issue, one that I didn’t deal with in the piece for The Public Historian. Let’s imagine for the sake of argument that historians and their collaborators did somehow manage to set “Plan B” (or something like it) into motion. What treatment of the past would make that tremendous effort worth the trouble? To paraphrase Wayne Booth long ago, what historical knowledge is most worth having, in particular right now, in the early twenty-first century? If the brain trust that Steve and Kym assemble in Providence doesn’t wrestlewith that one, who will? Conlon’s high regard for the level of musicianship today could be said to have its counterpart in European and American history museums. Never have these institutions of informal learning employed so many professionally trained historians. But to what purpose first of all, and then Conlon’s other question, to what effect? We can all still remember—each of us somewhat differently of course—that moment in the intellectual life of our profession when a few noteworthy museum exhibitions and living history programs made national headlines—Enola Gay, “The West As America,” and “A More Perfect Union” at the Smithsonian, “Mining the Museum” at the Maryland

2 Historical Society, and the 1996 re-enacted estate sale where enslaved Africans were auctioned on the street in Williamsburg. They all had one thing in common. Old and widely respected cultural institutions cashed in their credibility with the general public to weigh in on public issues that burned red-hot at the center of the 1990s culture wars. Looking back, we see that such revered and reviled presentations didn’t really shape the debates so much as they lent the weight of the sponsoring institutions’ reputations and authority to a changing understanding of American history thatwas already well on the way to becoming orthodoxy. Films, television, novels, stage plays, art exhibitions, and other mass media were opening peoples’ eyes to a wider, more tolerant outlook on American society and (less successfully) on the world at large. Museums made their special contribution by giving this new awareness a historical perspective. Getting people ready for change is what public intellectuals do for a living; and it’s what public historians and the intellectual organizations they work for should do too when the need arises. Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan argues in her most recent book that in our secular age history has replaced religion as the setter of moral standards and the transmitter of social values. So, as one reviewer reasoned, we now expect the “judgment of history” not only to meet historians’ particular criteria—objectivity and fairness—but also to be identity-affirming, consensus-building, nation-making, virtue-instructing, and generationbinding as well. While I welcome the fact that these are the goals that nine-out-of-ten history museum exhibitions set out to accomplish, I am unwilling to leave out one more. There are times when our leading history museums and historical societies need to tell the country’s story to open people’s eyes to national problems long in the making, to challenge traditional values that have outlived their usefulness, and generally to make the future less daunting by reminding museum-goers that problem-solving is an American tradition too. Or has been. There are times when courageous institutions need to get out in front of history, which means out in front of many museum visitors, both to point the way ahead and smooth the way toward what comes next. Surely any serious conversation about the future of history museums ought to have something to say about The Future. Let’s promise ourselves that we will spend some of our time at Brown identifying issues on today’s national agenda that have historical and visual dimensions that our museums can address more honestly than do many Congressmen, talk show hosts, and a few distinguished Harvard professors. Let’s leave Providence with a sense of what worthwhile historical knowledge museums can share with today’s visitors who, as music director Conlon would put it, “want to be part of the dialog” about the future of the country.