Do museums mark the acme of power?
My wife and I spent half the day at the The National Museum of the Marine Corps not far from Washington, close by the Quantico Marine base. It’s worth more time, but I got hungry somewhere during World War I and hastened through the rest. The narrative seems to end with 9/11, which leaves out a lot of interesting stuff that happened thereafter in Iraq and Afghanistan. An addition is planned.
The museum is encyclopedic if not always 100% accurate. No, the emancipation proclamation did not free all the slaves, only those in states in rebellion. Slavery still existed in the Union until towards the end of 1865, when the 13th amendment was ratified. There are other small glitches.
But it is hard to complain. The Marines “live their history.” The museum catalogues not only the big wars but also what Rudyard Kipling called “the savage wars of peace,” which is an apt description of many of the things the U.S. Marines have been called on to do in Cuba, Haiti, the Philippines, Nicaragua…. The engagements are recounted with the kind of honor, commitment and courage you would expect of the Corps, answering a lot of questions along the way.
No African Americans served in the Marines from after the revolution until World War II. Yes, the Marine Corps engaged on the shores of Tripoli in the early 1800s, but those shores lay at Derna, almost 550 miles as the crow flies from Libya’s modern-day capital. The “Barbary” wars ended not with military victory but instead a negotiated release of American hostages. While the Marines traditionally vaunt their connection to naval power, it is apparent from the displays that their more recent history depends for much of its success on combined air/ground operations. Semper fidelis did not become the Corps’ motto until 1883.
Meant to evoke the famous photograph of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima, the museum’s building is impressive, but not heart-warming. Dedicated in 2006, and presumably designed a few years earlier, the architecture reflects an America at the height of its 20th century power: soaring, inspirational and dominating. The central “mast” reads more like a sword pointing downwards than a flagpole pointing upwards. The bravura quotations in the main “Leatherneck” hall reflect the Marines’ can-do spirit:
The Marines have landed and the situation is well in hand.
The safest place in Korea was right behind a platoon of Marines. Lord, how they could fight!
The well-done introductory film shows lots of fighting and a few injured Marines (always being helped by comrades), but no dead ones. The emphasis is on winning through constancy and character, though the square jaws and PT exercises remind us that being a Marine is a physical as well as a spiritual pursuit.
It is a rich and powerful nation that can afford to honor its fighting men and women with a museum like this one. They deserve it, but I say that with trepidation, because it seems to me grand museums often mark the acme of power. Witness the spectacular museums of London, Berlin, Paris and Vienna. Is America at, or past, its peak?
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“Do museums mark the acme of power?”
No. Not necessarily, anyway. The Czechs built their National Museum (behind the statue of the Horse in every picture of the demonstrations of the Velvet Revolution) before there even was a Czechoslovakia, as part of a century-plus project to win independence from the Austrians. They resurrected their language, developed a literature, built a theater for Czech drama and opera and the museum as a way of exploring who they had been and what they wanted to be. (And choose a philosopher as a leader.) By the time they got independence, they were ready for it.
And then there was Augustus’ museum in Rome, built at the beginning of the Empire … which had a few ups and downs of its own, over the centuries. The idea of American decline is becoming so pervasive, you have to distrust it, on basic principles.
If the question is “Do you think that the days of glory for the USA are behind us” answer is most certainly No. The USA is yet to deliver its promise to the civilisation. That’s what Curiosity demonstrates.