Just past the threshold of the National Museum of American History’s new permanent exhibit on business in America, these words of George Washington are displayed on the wall:
I indulge a fond, perhaps an enthusiastic idea … that the subjects of ambition and causes for hostility are daily diminishing … that the period is not very remote when the benefits of a liberal and free commerce will … succeed to the devastations and horrors of war.
Hear, hear. Neighboring the passage are words from Jefferson and Hamilton, explaining their agrarian and mercantilist visions of the American future, respectively.
Deep stuff, this exhibit. Now, Washington was himself a wealthy businessman, and only a little further into the dark hall there is an interactive game that gives children the opportunity to explore one of the great man’s enterprises: distilling whiskey.
"Use the rake to stir the mash," the monitor dictates. Having succeeded in this modest task, one confronts the next imperative: "Use the bucket to pour the mash into the still." A dense, animated cloud of high-proof steam that floats through the pipes and returns to liquid form in the vessel is then to be transported to the point of sale—which turns out to be a somewhat raucous election day scene. Cruelly, considering that this is only a simulation, the final instruction is to "Pour a glass of whiskey from the tap," before casting one’s ballot. I wonder if the youngsters for whom this game is designed will feel a pang of thirst accompanying their pride in the exercise of the franchise. I did.
Such is the quirky and mildly disorienting experience of visiting the NMAH’s new wing devoted to "Innovation, Creativity, and Enterprise." Having opened earlier this month, the space is a worthy artifact unto itself, providing insight into the pieties and confusions of American identity at this early point of the 21st century. And how our pieties have changed! A progressive of the year 1915 would have had conniptions over the exposure of young people to a game involving the Demon Drink. To be controversial today, the console would have to ask the little tykes to roll their own cigarettes—tobacco cigarettes, specifically, which are terrible, as opposed to weed.
The wing also provides an update on the long-standing contest for the soul of this museum, waged between critics who have called for more chronological storytelling, popular appeal, and a focus on individual achievement, and an institutional leadership that has traditionally preferred thematic approaches, exhibits that interest curators more than crowds, and a focus on social, "bottom-up" history. The new wing is a draw, shot through with uneasy compromises, subdivided into loosely related exhibits, each with different donors and a different approach.
The two principal exhibits are the aforementioned "American Enterprise," and the brightly lit, kid-friendly "Places of Invention," which draws visitors in like moths to a flame, if only because every other room around the hall is so dark. "Places of Invention" does not attempt to tell a story, but investigates a question: "Does place really matter for invention?"
It turns out that the answer is "yes." As the exhibit’s companion guide explains:
To enhance our understanding of the relationship between physical spaces and creativity, we convened an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners in 2007 for the Lemelson Institute on Places of invention. The Institute’s findings offered insights into the qualities of physical space that are conducive to innovation, the ways that creative people shape the spaces in which they work, and the common creative features of inventive spaces and places...
The earnest academese is easy to mock, but the subject matter isn’t really what is awkward. To investigate what kinds of environments are conducive to innovation, which surely happens more in some places than in others, seems like a very worthy research project for a grad student.
What is awkward is that the results of this master’s thesis are being pitched to visiting hordes of 8th graders here on the National Mall. The exhibit takes a broad approach to what constitutes innovation, with displays devoted to Silicon Valley, the rise of hip-hop in the Bronx, and the evolution of pacemaker technology in the Twin Cities. These and other displays ring the room according to no discernible organizing principle of time or geography. The idea seems to be that visitors can take them on as whimsy strikes, perhaps drawn in and inspired by the "Skill Spots" associated with each display:
Skill Spot: Collaboration.
In Silicon Valley, the hobbyist community freely traded their designs and technical solutions. This spirit of collaboration, even among competitors, helped spur the rapid advancement of the personal computer.
Have you ever shared your knowledge with a friend or colleague and received a good idea in return?
While there is something unmistakably awkward about all this, the room is also somehow charming, not least because you can actually read the text on the walls without squinting, unlike so much of the rest of the new wing. The artifacts themselves are also pretty cool: an original Technicolor camera from Hollywood, almost the size of a small car, stole the show for me. People seem to be having fun. Middle school students who like gadgets will be in museum heaven, to the extent that a museum can be heaven to a middle school student.
There is also an admirable, if subtle, political balance. There is the inevitable display on green energy (in Fort Collins?) but also one on Colt in Hartford, including an original Colt Navy revolver from the 1850s. I didn’t see any mention of how Colt struggled for years to find a market for his guns before entering into a correspondence with the Texas Rangers, in which they advised him how to make the revolver a more efficient tool for killing Comanche—but then the overall rhetoric of the new wing is aggressively tactful and bland, like a senator talking to a church group.
Across the hall in the "American Enterprise" exhibit, remarkably, chronology reigns. The visitor starts in the 18th century with the fur trade and is guided through the Industrial Revolution and up to the present era of globalization, illustrating throughout—with often engaging artifacts—what the curators seem to understand as the great tension of American history: that between "capitalism" and "democracy."
The approach is balanced, in the painful, corporatist, center-left way that a panel discussion at the New America Foundation is balanced. Capitalism, one comes to understand, is necessary but often kind of bad, because it involves people pursuing their own interests and thus ignoring the common good. Democracy, on the other hand, is a good thing, because it is synonymous with the pursuit of the common benefit of all. Beginning in the 19th century, large corporations began to accrue immense power, which was bad for democracy. Luckily, businesses have recently come to understand that they have to be good global citizens. Thus, in a kind of grand Hegelian synthesis, big business and democratic government are now partners and, with a few exceptions, corporations today do their best to pursue the "triple bottom line": "Profit, Planet, and People."
It will surprise no one paying attention that "American Enterprise" is sponsored by Mars Incorporated, and further funded by SC Johnson, Intel, Monsanto, and the United Soybean Board, among others. As at Aspen and Davos, so at the Smithsonian: multinational corporations ostentatiously adopt the liturgical patter of liberalism, much as the Medicis put on a pretty good show of believing in transubstantiation. That there might be tensions between the interests of big corporations and those of small businessmen; that corporations find it profitable to be friendly with politicians and bureaucrats; that these politicians and bureaucrats have interests of their own, which are not necessarily identical with the "common good"—the NMAH takes a go-along-to-get-along approach to these things.
None of which is to say that this new wing is without value. But what, exactly, is its purpose? To tell the nation’s story, as far as business is concerned? To provide a venue for tourists to be subjected to the results of obscure academic research? To allow corporations space to defend their good names? If the answer is all of the above—which it seems to be—what is the target age of the audience? By attempting to appeal simultaneously to children and to adults, what ought to be part of a great American institution is reduced to scripting its material like a G-rated movie: Everything must be visually and emotionally engaging for the tots, but with some clever lines thrown in for mom and dad.
The result is not a tragedy. But standing in the middle of this newly renovated hall, with its atomized, awkwardly coordinated exhibits, and contemplating how grand the story of business in America really could be, if properly told—it is impossible not to wonder at how this space could be so, so much more.