The exhibit opened June 28, and by the end of July, 97,525 people had gone through it. The eventual cancellation of the proposed exhibit should therefore be understood as indicative of far wider ideological battles in US culture. Every morning, a long line forms at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., to see the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima fifty years ago. Instead, the culture wars have given rise to a new climate for debate, one in which personal conviction based on strong emotions far outweigh any well-reasoned argument based on logic and dispassionate research.
Over the next year, this script, and the versions following it, would generate one of the greatest controversies the Smithsonian ever experienced. In 1994, the National Air and Space Museum completed an exhibition script titled The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Origins of the Cold War. This dissertation will argue that the controversy, as part of the wider culture wars, helped lead to a rejection of such notions as compromise and settling disputes through reasoned debate in American political and cultural discourse. At the 50th anniversary of the atomic bomb, controversy surrounded the context in which the Enola Gay was to be displayed. This dissertation therefore seeks to understand how the controversy related to, and had had an impact upon, other debates in the culture wars such as those surrounding provocative art, sexual orientation, and the teaching of history in US schools. The Smithsonian Institute drastically had to alter a fiftieth anniversary exhibit about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb, because veterans. Although this is certainly part of the story, there has been no serious attempt at establishing the location of the controversy within the wider cultural battles in the US. The resulting dispute has traditionally been understood as a clash between commemorative and critical voices in the US. The controversy surrounded the preparations for an exhibit of the Enola Gay – the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima – at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. This dissertation seeks to place the so-called Enola Gay controversy of 1994-5 into the wider context of the culture wars in the United States.