Chapter 3: “Patriotic Orthodoxy and American Decline” by Michael S. Sherry Summary
The controversy around the Enola Gay exhibit reflects the change in American patriotism over the decades of the twentieth century, according to historian Michael C. Sherry. Until the 1930s and 1940s, patriotic culture had been more self-reflecting and outward-looking. The idea of America as a melting pot was celebrated, while the war effort for World War II brought racial and cultural minorities into the mainstream, if temporarily. Though this culture was by no means perfect, it was still somewhat unified in its quest for American expansionism abroad. However, after the Vietnam War, people increasingly began questioning the necessity of American expansionism. Embittered by the losses of Vietnam, conservative critics turned their gaze toward the enemy within. This enemy was increasingly identified with minorities, liberal voices, and critics of America. Those who disagreed with the idea of an idyllic, artificial American past were increasingly deemed anti-national.
Humiliated by the Vietnam defeat—“the United States had never before so clearly lost a war”—the American orthodoxy wanted to score victories at home. The supremacy of American culture had to be established within America. The Enola Gay exhibit was an easy victim for this changed patriotic culture. As the museum conceded to the demands of the AFA and the American legion, it only emboldened them to ask for more revisions in the script of the exhibit. The challenges to the script became a way for the orthodoxy to keep notching more victories, the ultimate being the resignation of Martin Harwit as museum director. The irony here was that patriotic culture had been more open in the lead-up and aftermath of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings. Usually considered the upholders of the status quo, even army generals like George Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower had been very circumspect about the use of nuclear power, as had navy admirals, believing that the bombings were unnecessary since US fleets had greatly weakened the Japanese Imperial Army. But by 1994, most critical voices had been canceled from the patriotic narrative. To be patriotic now meant to celebrate American history uncritically.
While conservative critics claimed that attempts to contextualize American history were “revisionist,” the truth was that the biggest revisions were being committed by orthodox critics themselves. The conservative critics denied the truth that debates around the bombings had existed as early as 1945. Additionally, they peddled the lie that all Americans had always agreed the bombings were heroic. Such was the power of this mythical narrative that even veterans of World War II began to invent new fictions to further it. For instance, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, the Enola Gay’s commander, now said the United States was forced to use the atomic bomb as protective defense: “the urgency of the situation demanded that we use the weapons first—before the technology could be used against us.” The truth, of course, was that no such threat existed to the United States from Japan at the time.
Such myth-making was especially important around 1945, since the role of military expansionism had begun to shrink in American foreign policy. Though conservatives and some Republican senators lobbied for an increase in the defense budget, expansionism itself was no longer part of America’s future. Now, glory lay in the past, and enemies waited at home. For both these reasons, the historians and museum curators of the Enola Gay exhibit launched particularly vicious attacks from 1993 onward. Not only were they perceived as wanting to sully the glorious past, they represented the enemy at home. During the Enola Gay controversy, few critics focussed on anti-Japan rhetoric. Patriotic vitriol was now directed toward homegrown enemies—the so-called “revisionists,” liberals,...
(This entire section contains 1110 words.)
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historians, and anyone who viewed American culture critically.
Another interesting aspect of post-Vietnam orthodox patriotism is that it has absorbed elements of the anti-war culture. Anti-war movements focus on saving the lives of American soldiers; wars should be avoided because they lead to unnecessary deaths of military personnel. In contrast, historically the pro-war or commemorative front had focused on the deaths of soldiers as proof of their bravery and sacrifice. Death in combat was seen as noble and worth celebrating. But in the 1980s and 90s, orthodox patriotism, too, began to discuss war in terms of saving American soldiers. Retroactively applied to 1945, the saving-lives narrative posited that the atomic bomb was necessary to save the lives of American soldiers. Had it not been dropped, hundreds of thousands of soldiers would have been killed in combat. The number of potentially dead soldiers was absurdly exaggerated. In August 1994, a commentator in USA Today “established a new high for American lives saved [by the bomb]—six million—and claimed that this was ‘the consensus view.’ ” The six million number of course evoked the memory of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust; the insinuation was that the atom bomb avoided another Holocaust. Thus, dropping the atom bomb could be labeled a morally unassailable decision.
The Enola Gay debate was actually about who controlled and constituted American culture. For the orthodoxy, American culture had always been white-dominated, male-dominated, masculine, and triumphalist. Whenever their control over this culture was threatened, they lashed out, as in the case of the earlier Smithsonian exhibits on airpower and the settlement of the West. “Rehashing those exhibits while mounting its case against the Enola Gay display, Air Force Magazine heightened its adherents’ sense that there were powerful and dangerous connections among these controversies.” The most vocal of orthodox protests took place in 1993, against gays and lesbians in the military. This was the same year in which the Clinton administration enforced the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which prohibited military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closeted homosexual or bisexual service members or applicants but barred openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service. The exclusion of openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual personnel had nothing to do with their ability and everything to do with the threat they represented to the purist notion of American masculinity. Supporters of the ban feared the inclusion of people of all sexualities in the military would pave the way for their integration into the rest of society, much as military acceptance had done for Black Americans. To preserve the American ideal of sexual and cultural purity at home, pro-ban conservatives were ready to exclude a section of Americans from a military force already short on enrollments. The 1993 pro-ban movement and the Enola Gay controversy were part of the same battle for the vision of a pure America.
Ironically, despite all the battles, the purist vision of a glorious America was already being lost. The American dream of military hegemony was in its death throes, as the culture wars proved.