This August will mark the 80th anniversary of the United States’ dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. On Aug. 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay carried out U.S. President Harry Truman’s instructions and dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Just a few days later, on Aug. 9, the United States dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki using a B-29 called Bockscar. While the total number of casualties is unknown, it is estimated that more than 200,000 people were killed. Both cities were decimated. On Sept. 2 of that year, Japan surrendered. All of humankind had officially entered the atomic age.
To this day, Truman’s decision to use the weapon remains contested. Historians, journalists, and educators have devoted considerable efforts to debating whether dropping the bomb was a necessary or moral decision. The debate has revolved around those who believe that Truman saved lives because, without the bomb, a military invasion of Okinawa by the United States would have resulted in a massive number of American soldiers dead, and World War II would have continued much longer. Other scholars are skeptical, believing that Japan was on the verge of surrender and that using this devastating weapon created a global threat of annihilation under which we continue to live today. Most recently, Evan Thomas explored these questions in his book, The Road to Surrender, where he sided with those who believe the decision was justified.
The debate will continue, as it should. Scholars, journalists, teachers, and museum curators must have these kinds of complex discussions. Doing so is an essential part of understanding the past and educating a citizenry capable of making their nation stronger in the future.
Unfortunately, the culture warriors who are targeting the teaching of history have been successfully restricting the ability of citizens to think and disagree. The freezing of the historical mind is one of the most perilous intellectual developments to have occurred in recent years.
Education has long been a contentious issue in the United States. During the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War, Southerners attacked the efforts of radical Republicans to provide freed Black people with quality education. In the early 20th century, progressive reformers sought to “Americanize” immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe with curricula that aimed to strip them of the knowledge of their ethnic backgrounds. Though it was more about science than history, the 1925 Scopes trial targeted a high school teacher, John Scopes, who had violated a state law that prohibited teachers from discussing evolution. Until the 1960s, schools for Black children in the Jim Crow South refused to teach about Black history and culture other than through the lens of white supremacist ideas. As a key part of the Freedom Summer campaign in 1964, civil rights activists and college student volunteers in Mississippi established makeshift schools that emphasized these very issues. Under U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Education Secretary William Bennett championed teaching a version of history that emphasized heroic figures, classic texts, and American exceptionalism.
The culture wars over the teaching of history greatly intensified in the 1990s, when the burgeoning conservative movement, rooted in the Republican Party, blasted historical scholarship and instruction as progressive, leftist propaganda that was “unpatriotic” and only presented a “negative” depiction of the United States. Influential figures, such as presidential speechwriter and television pundit Patrick Buchanan, rallied conservatives around these arguments.
A high point in these political battles revolved around a 1995 exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum about the Enola Gay. The museum, which opened to the public in 1976, had vastly expanded under Martin Harwit, who was appointed as director of the museum in 1987. Harwit, a Czech American scientist who worked at Cornell University, had set out to bolster the museum’s reputation by creating first-rate exhibits that drew crowds while also providing context for serious scholarship through the artifacts.
Working with a committee of advisors, Harwit decided to create a major exhibit about the Enola Gay to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing. The staff at the Smithsonian started working on the project in 1993. Their vision was to allow visitors to learn about the different perspectives on Truman’s decision while seeing the plane that dropped the bomb. Harwit respected serious history as well as the intelligence of visiting tourists, believing that the Smithsonian could stimulate a constructive and educational dialogue about this momentous event.
In January 1994, Harwit assigned two curators, Michael Neufeld and Tom Crouch, to handle the job. They designed a program called “The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Onset of the Cold War.” The five-part exhibit would include one section focused exclusively on the decision to use the weapon. According to the plan, “At the exit, visitors will be able to share their own feelings and thoughts by writing on prepared cards, in comment books or with a light pen on a computer screen . . . Those who have toured ‘The Crossroads’ will thus leave, we hope, thinking and debating these most crucial historical events of the twentieth century.” The following month, an advisory committee approved the plan.
Controversy broke out immediately. The Air Force Association, which was given a preview of the script, complained that the exhibit was hostile to the military. It then worked with other veterans groups to pressure Harwit to change the content, particularly the part about the decision to use the bomb. Gen. Paul Tibbets Jr., who had piloted the Enola Gay, lambasted it as a “damn big insult.”
In April, Air Force Magazine published an article warning readers that the museum planned to show photographs of incinerated Japanese that would be deeply disturbing. The Air Force Association attacked “politically correct curating.” On May 5, the executive committee of the American Legion, a conservative veterans group, passed a resolution demanding that the Smithsonian cancel the exhibit.
The pressure kept building. These groups even demanded that the Smithsonian jettison its plan to display a ceramic lunch box that a child had taken to school on the day the bomb fell. On Aug. 10, a bipartisan coalition of legislators—18 Republicans and six Democrats—sent a letter to the Smithsonian complaining that the curators seemed to be whitewashing the aggressive actions of the Japanese. “The planners of this exhibit ignored many of the constructive criticisms,” the lawmakers complained, “The revised version still does not give a balance perspective of the events surrounding the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The U.S. Senate, via a unanimous resolution on Sept. 23 sponsored by Kansas Republican Nancy Kassebaum, urged museum officials to show “appropriate sensitivity” in the exhibit to U.S. veterans.
Several mainstream media outlets also joined in the attacks. The Wall Street Journal complained about academics who were “unable to view American history as anything other than a woeful catalog of crimes and aggressions.”
Back at the Smithsonian, the curators scrambled to rewrite the plan and keep the exhibit alive, which included the addition of a section on Japanese atrocities. However, veterans groups continued to complain no matter what they did, and more politicians joined the fray.
As the curators continued to revise the plans to turn the exhibit into a pure celebration, professional historians grew increasingly furious. A coalition of historians sent a letter to the Smithsonian secretary, Michael Heyman, criticizing the “intellectual corruption” and “historical cleansing” that was taking place because of political pressure.
But the direction of politics did not move in their favor. During the November midterm elections, Republicans—led by Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich, a historian by training—won control of both the House and the Senate for the first time since 1954. Gingrich sensed that this was an important issue, and as House speaker, he threatened to cut funding for the Smithsonian. The controversy fit into a broader narrative about the way that radical, elitist leftists in the Democratic Party were destroying the United States.
The tipping point took place in January 1995, when opponents of the exhibit learned that the museum planned to show lower estimates of how many U.S. soldiers would have been killed had Truman not dropped the bomb, based on the research of Stanford University historian Barton Bernstein. Harwit authorized the change, hoping to calm historians. After the American Legion and Air Force Association each called for the exhibit to be canceled, the Smithsonian conceded on Jan. 30. The museum would show the Enola Gay’s fuselage and nothing else. “We made a mistake,” Heyman acknowledged. “We did not give enough thought to the intense feelings such an analysis would evoke.”
The historical profession had been defeated. Gingrich declared victory, saying, “Political correctness may be okay in some faculty lounge, but the Smithsonian is a treasure that belongs to the American people and should not become a plaything for left-wing ideologies.” As many Democrats would later do when confronted with these issues in the future, President Bill Clinton didn’t have much to say other than offering some words of support. Japan’s prime minister, Tomiichi Murayama, called the outcome “regrettable.”
The battle over the Enola Gay exhibit created a template for conservative interest groups and politicians to weaponize the teaching of history and demand that specific questions about the United States’ past be expunged, rather than debated, from lesson plans. In the coming year, the Smithsonian would cancel other exhibits, for fear of stirring additional controversy. “Fear and trembling have become a part of the daily operations,” one historian told The New York Times in 1996.
In recent years, Americans have been living in the dangerous shadow of the Smithsonian’s defeat. The Trump administration has been removing exhibits from national parks that don’t fit Trump’s understanding of the past and even removing books from gift stores that are too “leftist.” Government workers were instructed to report any displays that “disparage” the nation. In an executive order, Trump attacked the Smithsonian for “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” The Smithsonian has removed references to Trump’s two impeachments in an exhibit on the subject. Trump has also been leaning hard on universities to back away from teaching subjects that his advisors would classify under the guise of addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. In doing so, Trump has been building on the work of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who have both worked with their state legislatures to impose restrictions on school curricula. More is coming.
The loss that the United States is suffering from these attacks on education is immense. True patriotism necessitates a robust and honest conversation about U.S. history that explores the good and the bad. Anything less is merely propaganda, leaving people with a diminished understanding of who they are and what their national story has been.
The Smithsonian’s decision in 1995 did nothing to erase the difficult conversations that people still need to have about moments such as Aug. 6 and 9, 1945. By saying nothing, the museum only pushed the issues out of sight and out of mind, and it failed to end the questions that Truman opened about foreign policy. Erasing history from museums and classrooms makes people weaker citizens, less capable of grappling with who they are and less able to build a greater future.