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Exhibition Review
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum. Simi Valley, Calif. http://www.reaganlibrary.com.
Permanent exhibition, library and museum opened Nov. 1991. 240,000 sq. ft. Duke Blackwood, director.
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| President Ronald Reagan often spoke of America as a "shining city on a hill," and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library perched on top of a hill in California seems like a realization of that vision. The Reagan Library complex, with its huge expansion to house a decommissioned Air Force One, is by far the largest presidential library. At 240,000 square feet it is 90,000 square feet larger than the runner-up, the William J. Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. The size of the Reagan Library reflects Reagan's importance to the Republican party, which has had few recent presidential heroes: Richard M. Nixon resigned in disgrace, Gerald R. Ford was unelected and served less than three years, the first President Bush lost his bid for reelection, and the second President Bush is deeply unpopular. The importance of the Reagan Library as a Republican shrine was emphasized when it became the only presidential library to host debates among the Republican candidates for president in 2008. And, in 2004, the library was seen by millions of Americans during the live coverage of Reagan's burial in a cinematic sunset ceremony overseen by his widow, Nancy. |
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The Reagan Library, like all federal presidential libraries, has two main functions. As branches of the National Archives, presidential libraries preserve and make available to historians the raw materials of presidential history; and as museums also run by the National Archives, they present a popular version of presidential history to the public. In other words, presidential libraries are supposed to operate in the public interest and have been sold to the public that way by presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt through George W. Bush. In practice, however, the libraries have increasingly become tools for presidents and their supporters to run a final campaign for a better place in the presidential pantheon. All of the libraries function to some degree as publicity centers for their presidents, but the Reagan Library is an extreme example of that tendency. |
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Most presidential libraries lean toward uncritical celebration of their subjects, but in the museum at the Reagan Library there is more Hollywood glitz and less serious historical content than at any presidential library museum I have studied (Benjamin Hufbauer, Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory, 2006). Most remarkable is the museum's almost total erasure of controversy. |
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The museum begins with exhibits about Reagan's childhood and young adulthood, and although these are drenched with nostalgia, they do not falsify national history or Reagan's biography in the way that other exhibits in the museum do. The first exhibit evokes Reagan's boyhood in Dixon, Illinois, with a re-creation of the large metal arch emblazoned with the town's name that stretched across the main street. Nearby, a re-created kitchen with appliances from the World War I–era suggests the gulf between Reagan's childhood and the present. The exhibit shows visitors Reagan as a teenage lifeguard, as a radio broadcaster during the depression, and as a budding movie actor in 1937. In a recreation of an old-fashioned movie theater, lit with a marquee that reads "STARRING RONALD REAGAN," visitors watch clips from dozens of films. |
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