Museums providing perspective on attacks
Historical groups are coming to see themselves as essential to the process of understanding - and healing.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
November 4, 2001
As the nation and the region struggle to understand the emotional and political ramifications of the Sept. 11 attacks, cultural organizations are coming to see their roles as central to the process.
Nowhere is this more true than with historical collections, archives and societies, which are asserting themselves as uniquely capable of providing perspective on those calamitous events, offering public settings for people to gather and discuss topics from America's coming of age as a world power to waves of racially and ethnically motivated political arrests.
"We had been wondering how we should respond to these crises," said Derick Dreher, director of the Rosenbach Museum and Library on Delancey Place. "And we realized we were sitting on a gold mine of historical documents that deal with every conceivable kind of crisis. What better time and what better way to learn about past crises and how we lived through them than by visiting a museum?"
David Moltke-Hansen, president and chief executive of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, firmly believes that history is "a tool people can use as they distance themselves from the immediacy and shock" of recent events.
"History is a tool for thought and analysis, and it's a tool for moments like this that erase conventional boundaries in our lives and disorient us," Moltke-Hansen said.
Officials at two grant-making arms of the Pew Charitable Trusts agree with this assessment and have asked history organizations to put together funding proposals for projects and programs that respond to the events of Sept. 11. The Pennsylvania Humanities Council is preparing to do the same thing.
Joseph Kelly, head of the humanities council, said he wants institutions to pull together programs that promote "reflection."
"People need the space to reflect on their own beliefs and values at a time they feel very vulnerable," said Kelly, citing a particular need to counter ethnic attacks.
Pew officials have also sponsored a talk tomorrow by Edward T. Linenthal, professor of religion and American culture at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh and author of The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory, just published by the Oxford University Press.
Linenthal is scheduled to speak (at 9 a.m. at the College of Physicians, 19 S. 22d St.; admission is free) on "September 11th and After: Museums, Memory and Meaning," exploring, he said, "the landscape of violence in America and on what I consider to be two new activist memorial museums - the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Oklahoma City National Memorial."
The 1995 bombing of the Murrah federal office building and its aftermath, Linenthal said, foreshadowed not only the violence of recent events but also responses to that violence and nascent efforts to understand and remember it.
"After the Oklahoma City bombing, a whole series of cultural debates opened up about the death penalty, habeas corpus reform, the relationship between civil liberties and security, the nature of hate speech," Linenthal said. "It seems at some level the seismic impact is not so much about the bombing but ultimately the nature of the America that emerges from the rubble."
Officials at a number of history institutions in the Philadelphia area believe they have an important role to play as these same debates reemerge after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Institutions like ours can give people perspective," said Roland H. Woodward, president and director of the Chester County Historical Society. "We can talk about national challenges of the past and how the nation has responded. There have been many times of fright, many times of terror, many times when widespread actions were taken based on race and ethnicity . . . that have led to great sorrow. History institutions are in a position to show that we are a lot stronger than we think, and that our strength comes from our institutions and not just from our mighty police."
Woodward said he is putting together a series of talks that will run from the end of November through December and explore past threats to civil liberties, contemporary Islam, and photography in lower Manhattan.
A week after the destruction of the World Trade Center, "Liberty on the Anvil," an exhibition focusing on William Penn's founding documents for Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, opened at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. While the show had been planned before the attacks, society officials considered its themes extraordinarily timely and waived admission fees through Veterans Day, Nov. 10.
"This exhibit happens to be built around themes relevant to the present crisis," said Sharon Ann Holt, the society's publications and program director. "Through its founding charters, Pennsylvania made active and pioneering commitments to diversity in its population, to religious liberty, and to protecting citizens from unjust uses of governmental power. Understanding this legacy may help people now as they struggle to reaffirm our national ideals and respond fruitfully to the attacks."
The society is also planning a series of talks in conjunction with the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, which is setting up a celebratory festival prior to the beginning of Ramadan for the area's Arab and South Asian communities. (The Balch program is also a response to the post-Sept. 11 climate.)
The Rosenbach Museum is joining with the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania to offer a program of readings. Five texts from the Rosenbach collection have been selected - loosely based on themes such as anger, witnessing and the home front - and will be read by the likes of Sheldon Hackney, former Penn president and chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Five poets will also read their own work. (The readings will take place at Kelly House, 3905 Locust Walk, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday.)
"There is a wonderful philosophical letter from William Carlos Williams musing about the importance of art in times of crisis," said the Rosenbach's Dreher, describing the texts. "There's Ezra Pound being cranky about fascism. There's a letter written by [poet] H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] from a London racked by the blitz. There's [artist] Joseph Cornell writing about his commute to a munitions factory, and [poet] Elizabeth Bishop, who did volunteer work for the Navy putting together mechanical equipment . . . hated it and left after a few days. And there's a letter from Marianne Moore to Pound, angry about Pound's stance on fascism."
The Independent Seaport Museum, Penn's Landing, is taking advantage of a just-opened exhibition about the ship Olympia, docked at the museum. The Olympia served as Adm. George Dewey's flagship during the Spanish-American War and then ferried home the Unknown Soldier from the European battlefields of World War I. Roberta Cooks, head of interpretation at the museum, said she hoped to have a discussion and lecture program in December that will explore the country's emergence as a world power (thanks to the two wars in which the Olympia served), the role of the media in fomenting a sense of national crisis leading to the war with Spain, and similar issues.
The National Museum of American Jewish History is also planning lectures and discussions for December.
"There is a longer history to the interrelationships between the American Jewish community, U.S. foreign policy, and foreign Muslim populations than is reasonably supposed," said Wesley Fisher, director and chief executive of the museum. "We are the only museum in the country devoted to American Jewish history and, given that we are symbolically located on Independence Mall, our relevance to the national dialogue should be quite strong."
While they believe providing historical perspective is important, sponsors of the Linenthal lecture would like to see area history institutions take an even more active role in response to Sept. 11. For one thing, they want to see these institutions begin collecting artifacts and stories that relate to recent events.
"There is no one in the country who is unaffected by these events," said Barbara Silberman, director of Pew's heritage investment program. "It is important to collect the information and document the event so that it's available to future generations. Looking back, people will want to know."
Margo Bloom, director of Pew's history exhibitions project, said collecting material now "is absolutely something institutions can and should do."