Hailing the Chiefs

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 5, 2001 | by Stephen Goode

George W. Bush among peers: The Smithsonian Institution includes the new chief executive in its, recently installed permanent exhibition on the presidency.

It's surprising there hasn't been one before, given the combination of significance and opportunity. An exhibition about the presidents of the United States seems to be a natural for the Smithsonian Institution, which is, after all, the repository of the nation's memory. But until very recently there never had been one.

That regrettable deficiency now has been remedied in a most impressive way by a new and popular show -- "The American Presidency, A Glorious Burden" -- at the National Museum of American History in Washington. It is the same museum that long has housed such displays as the gowns worn by first ladies at inaugural balls, as well as many other historical artifacts of U.S. history, but somehow managed to ignore the presidents in a permanent show.

More than 100,000 visitors have passed through its rooms since the exhibition opened its doors, a number that compares very well indeed with other shows over the past many years, say Smithsonian officials. And it's being well-received. On Insight's first visit to the show, the crowd was noticeably enthusiastic: "This is neat" one teenage boy said to his friend as they watched segments of Hollywood movies from the last five decades about U.S. presidents. Before a display of 19th-century presidential-campaign materials an elderly lady said to her companion, "This is fascinating"; a middle-aged man from the Midwest was heard to say the whole exhibition is "damn good!"

It's a comprehensive show. Every president gets his due: from George Washington, whose general-officer uniform dating from the 1790s when he was president is one of the first things visitors see, to George W. Bush, now represented by Bush/Cheney campaign posters but whose administration will have much else on display as time passes and his presidency takes form and substance. For the presidents in between, there's everything from campaign buttons and Harry S Truman for President neckties to examples of ballot boxes and posters from the women's-suffrage and civil-rights movements.

But it also is a show that's much more than the sum of the material items on display. A big theme of the exhibition is that character counts big time when it comes to evaluation of America's presidents, and nowhere is that theme better presented than in the introduction by Lawrence M. Small to the exhibition's excellent catalogue. Small, who was installed last year as Smithsonian secretary, writes: "In the end, character will tell -- character that began to be shaped as long ago as childhood, yielding sure instincts, a steady inner moral compass, a capacity for prudent risk, a predisposition to courage and compassion."

Amazingly, the show rarely succumbs to current politically correct notions about who was a great president and who wasn't. It neither praises lavishly nor debunks with a vengeance. Franklin Delano Roosevelt doesn't overwhelm the exhibit, as he often does any discussion of presidents. And figures long regarded by fashionable academics as minor, or who have been the object of scorn and even ridicule by liberal historians -- Calvin Coolidge, for example -- get serious and balanced consideration.

That comes as a very pleasant surprise indeed. Exhibit curator Harry R. Rubenstein tells Insight that the guidelines museum staff used to put the collection together were simple: "What we did was put up what we thought were the most significant, the most interesting and the most fun objects we could find."

It is this simple formula that accounts for the show's success, plus the overwhelmingly compelling quality of so much that is there to see. A real crowd pleaser is the original teddy bear, created by the Ideal Toy company, based on a 1902 political cartoon in which Theodore Roosevelt, noted outdoorsman and hunter, was depicted refusing to shoot a bear cub. The stuffed animal did wonders to convince the public of Roosevelt's deep compassion -- as well as to underline his love of what he liked to call the "vigorous life."

There are the scandals, too. In the section of the exhibition on impeachment, Bill Clinton is shown on video in that famous crowd shot of him embracing Monica Lewinsky. The foibles presidents are inclined to aren't forgotten, either: President Ulysses S. Grant and wife, Julia, sitting down with their guests to 29-course White House banquets surrounded by a lush decor introduced by the Grants that has been ridiculed in the press as "Steamboat Gothic."

A poignant note about the isolation and loneliness of the presidency is sounded in a film about the presidents that tells viewers Coolidge loved to sit on the White House porch and watch pedestrians walking along Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a simple pleasure that came to an end when crowds of people started gathering to stare back at the president.

That such personal stuff is a crowd pleaser isn't surprising. A masterful essay in the catalogue by historian Richard Norton Smith, biographer of George Washington and director of the Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum, notes: "Over the years I have observed that most visitors to presidential libraries come seeking a personal encounter with the president or first lady." The fact that Ford, born Leslie King, was the product of a broken home who didn't meet his birth father until he was 17 years old "may strike a more responsive chord among today's young people than his role in the Helsinki Accords or SALT II."