Exhibition Reviews

"America on the Move." National Museum of American History, 14th St. and Constitution Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20560.       Permanent exhibition, opened Nov. 22, 2003. Daily 10–5:30, summer hours (May 26–Sept. 4) 10–6:30, closed Christmas Day. Free. 26,000 sq. ft. Steven Lubar, project director; Janet Davidson, Laura Hansen, Michael R. Harrison, Paula Johnson, Peter Liebhold, Bonnie Lilienfeld, Susan Tolbert, Roger White, Bill Withuhn, curators; Howard Morrison, interpretive specialist; Shari Stout, collections manager; Ann Rossilli, design manager; Museum Design Associates, exhibition design; Creative Dimensions Group, Meisel Industries, Operand, Squid County Safari, interactive design/construction; Second Story, Web design; EAR Studios, audio design and production.       On the Move: Transportation and the American Story. By Janet Davidson and Michael Sweeney. (Washington: National Geographic Society, 2003. 320 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-7922-5140-7.)       Internet: includes learning resources for students and families, interactive games, films <http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove> (March 7, 2005).
Visitors returning to the National Museum of American History's old Transportation Hall expecting to venerate the Duryea brothers' 1894 motor wagon or to pore once again over the detailed bridge and locomotive models may be sorely disappointed with the new permanent exhibition that has displaced those precious items. But just about everyone else will be pleased to find an exhibition that puts stories about American history and life at the center of changes in transportation technology.	1
"America on the Move" interprets the history of transportation in the United States from 1876 to the turn of the twenty-first century through a broadly contextualized series of case studies or vignettes. The exhibit focuses mostly on ground transportation while incorporating some key maritime artifacts and three small air transportation models. (The three models—a Zeppelin, a dc-3, and a Boeing 707—are accompanied by text suggesting a visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Yet that sister museum, still shy after the Enola Gay experience, seems unwilling or unable to tell a fully contextualized history comparable to "America on the Move.") This is the largest exhibition ever created by the National Museum of American History, and its high production quality, attention to detail, and pleasing aesthetics reflect the $22 million budget. A richly illustrated companion book, an extensive Web site, various curriculum guides, and links to "Hands-On History" and "Hands-On Science" exercises elsewhere in the museum round out the package. Wending through the new 26,000-square-foot installation, one witnesses the unfolding of a story full of connections to familiar, yet often unexpected, aspects of American history and contemporary life. This is a major break from the former use of this space, and although it has some weaknesses, the result is an exceptional exhibit worthy of visitors' time and attention.	2
One of the key goals of the curatorial team was to transform the space from a transportation exhibition into a history exhibition, and in this they clearly have succeeded. "America on the Move" uses an effective blend of museum techniques to place the technology and industry of transportation in its broad social and political context. It touches on themes of interest to a wide range of scholars—technology, urban history, immigration and migration, gender, race, childhood and youth, labor—and those familiar with current transportation-related research will find welcome affirmation that the exhibit historian and curators engaged and understood a diverse and dynamic literature.	3
Visitors can explore the installation at various depths and still emerge with an appreciation of the connectedness of transportation and people in American history. A brisk walk-through reveals a variety of vehicle artifacts, but nearly every one is embedded in a historical setting that thwarts its solitary worship and reinforces the team's primary goal. Visitors with more time to linger will discover large, easily readable text offering tiered levels of information, blocked and color-coded for consistency. Various exhibit techniques, such as large painted backdrops, mild trompe l'oeil, appropriate but not overpowering soundscapes, a few discrete video stations with "bigger picture" documentary clips, and voice dialogues accompanying cast figures, all increase the sense of place and time for each setting.	4
The prolific use of the last is perhaps one of the most distinctive features of "America on the Move." Life-size plaster models of humans and animals—each cast from real actors and models and some with faces sculpted from historic photographs—constitute a cast of characters in the vignettes. Almost every vehicle—bicycle, train, automobile, horse-drawn cart—has one or more human figures associated with it. Representing a considerable investment of time and money, these neutral-toned figures help pierce the usual, invisible boundary between the museum artifact and the lived history of that artifact. In this way, they help "America on the Move" do for transportation what historians of technology have been doing in their research for many years now: The artifacts have been removed from their pedestals and now share the stage with human and animal figures in linked networks.	5
Pictured above is an 1898 Washington, D.C., electric streetcar scene from "America on the Move," an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Photo by Jeff Tinsley. Courtesy National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
It is precisely this decentering of the objects that will likely elicit the most criticism from some visitors. Little attention is given to explaining why particular artifacts were chosen for display or to describing how particular technologies worked. Additionally, the sometimes hard-to-distinguish line between the historical artifact and the meticulously re-created set will bother some. For historians of technology, "America on the Move" misses opportunities to disabuse visitors of the notion of a one-way causal relationship where changes in transportation caused changes in American culture. Nonetheless, the attentive visitor will discover transportation technologies embedded in American culture and uses of technology that have both reflected and influenced our history.	6
Significantly, given recent fears that the nation's attic was being unduly influenced by wealthy donors intent on telling their own success stories, "America on the Move" does not shy away from some touchy issues. It directly challenges the American myth of the freedom of the open road by addressing "Jim Crow on the Road." Utilizing the cover of a 1940 Negro Motorist Green-Book, one of several travel guides used by African Americans to circumvent racial discrimination and violence while traveling by automobile, it questions how free and open the American road really was. Likewise, the "Southern Railway" vignette effectively incorporates the 189-ton number 1401 steam locomotive in virtually the same location where it rested in the former Transportation Hall exhibit but with dramatically different effect. "America on the Move" places the locomotive at a re-created Salisbury, North Carolina, depot waiting room and provides a powerful touch screen interactive where visitors can listen to the words of Charlotte Hawkins Brown as she describes the tribulations of an African American traveler on the nation's railways in the 1920s. Dr. Hawkins Brown is eerily present as a full-scale cast character seated on the "colored" bench across from a full-scale fictional white male traveler. One can sit on the bench next to her and then go and sit across the room. In this setting only the most rushed visitor could avoid feeling the discomfort and anxiety of racial segregation in American transportation. (Unfortunately, the final exhibit layout placed H. Nelson Jackson's bright red 1903 Winton automobile and his begoggled dog Bud across the aisle, distracting many visitors' attention from the less-flashy depot.)	7
Even in the context of a "feel good" 1930s camping trailer exhibit, a text panel raises the issue of the "trailer problem" and the association of lower social class with particular transportation and housing technologies. Across the aisle from the camping trailer, a Muirkirk, Maryland, motor cabin of the same era features two more cast figures and a voice-over narrative that raises the issues of vice and changing social mores. The young daughter of the proprietor tells a weary traveler that her daddy does not rent cabins to locals who might be using their cars and his cabins for improper relations. All these vignettes place transportation in social-historical contexts that visitors can "get" and that will tweak and expand their understanding of how different Americans used changes in transportation technology for their own ends.	8
This is not to say that the fractious politics of Washington and the massive corporate sponsorship of "America on the Move" (General Motors [GM] and the American Automobile Association were among the major donors) had no influence on the exhibit. Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) is in the exhibit, but the tale of gm's underhanded efforts to undermine his public credibility by snooping into his private life is not. The 319-page companion book to the exhibit, where one would expect more complete coverage, gives little sense of the heated political battles over automobile safety and emissions that embroiled Detroit and Washington for the last four decades of the twentieth century. In the book, the issue of auto safety garnered a seven-paragraph sidebar and six paragraphs of main text—the latter evenly divided with three on design-related safety issues, such as seat belts and collapsible steering columns, and three on the auto industry's favorite distraction, the unsafe driver. One has to wonder how this text ended up so precisely balanced between these two perspectives. Automobile emissions get even slighter treatment—two paragraphs move the topic from 1960s Los Angeles through Honda's 1975 Controlled Vortex Combustible Chamber (CVCC) engine to the 1990s when "both foreign and domestic new cars incorporated computer controls, fuel injection, and other recent technologies that reduced auto exhaust pollution even further" (Janet Davidson and Michael Sweeney, On the Move, 272–73). The passive depiction of this benevolent change is astonishing to any who lived through or study the topic. This part of America's transportation history evidently is still too contentious to explore openly in an exhibition cosponsored by some of the major combatants.	9
Finally, the visitor gets no comparative sense of how other nations and cultures have addressed similar transportation issues. In this respect, "America on the Move" reflects the broader political culture of contemporary Washington: immigrants from around the world come to the United States and contribute to our experience, but we need not look outward to compare our judgments and decisions. Given the recent history of the Smithsonian, it was no doubt wise to avoid the kind of in-your-face critique of American car culture that some might wish to see. That decision has real consequences for the finished exhibition: the questions and critiques it raises are subtle and careful.	10
On the whole, will "America on the Move" change the public's mind or perception of the role of transportation in American history? It seems sure to increase awareness of transportation in historical and contemporary daily life. Many school-age visitors seemed almost compelled to read at least some of the exhibit text as they eagerly lifted the numerous flaps, opened the doors, and peeked inside the crates and boxes that hold answers to posed questions. The school-age visitor will think about this exhibit—even if fleetingly—the next time he peels a banana (the exhibit provides rich examples of the geography of food), the next time he hops in a minivan (yes, there is one in the exhibit), the next time he waits in that minivan for a train to pass and notices container after container going by and then looks at the Peterbilt truck waiting in traffic next to him with yet another identical container on its trailer bed. In that setting, perhaps the adult will recall the longshoreman's union jacket and the dramatic changes those containers brought to the dock culture. Or, later in the workweek, while the adult rides the D.C. Metro or the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, she may recall the re-created conversation in the 1959 Chicago "El" car and ponder what public transportation means to her fellow commuters today or how automobile-fed suburban sprawl has made such an experience so rare in America.	11
Although the exhibition has some limitations, visitors to "America on the Move" are given ample opportunities to consider what freedoms and limitations come with our transportation decisions. This is what makes "America on the Move" an exceptional exhibit and warrants an extended visit from any reader of this journal.	12
Kevin L. Borg James Madison University Harrisonburg, Virginia

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