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
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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 generation-
binding 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.