Space artifact or Nazi weapon? Displaying the Smithsonian's V-2 missile, 1976-2011.

Debates over how or how not to display intrinsically controversial subjects in a museum setting have been part of museum life for decades. And the Smithsonian Institution on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., has more often than not been a ‘flash point’ [1] for episodes ranging from the interwar controversy over the Langley Aerodrome and Wright Flyer, to the so-called ‘rerun of the Scopes trial’ in a 1978 suit brought against the Smithsonian, to the Enola Gay affair of 1994–1995. Stakeholders from every conceivable walk of life have, at one time or another, expressed annoyance with the way some part of human culture, or the natural world, is portrayed. Accordingly, the Smithsonian has gone through cycles where it becomes very cautious about what it displays, and how it displays, social, cultural and scientific artifacts, notably since Enola Gay [2–8]. To be sure, in behaving this way, the Smithsonian is no doubt a reflection of larger forces that have tried to shape what it is and does, forces that reflect behavioral norms and values in a nation’s constant search for identity. A case in point, for the purposes of setting the stage for this essay, is why the National Mall of the United States does not have an explicitly military museum, and how the Smithsonian has become, in effect, a surrogate agent in the process. Beyond a pervasive suspicion and antipathy toward showcasing the armed forces on the Mall, as Joanne London has argued, there were other forces, including ‘the Smithsonian’s exhibition traditions, personalities, bureaucratic obstacles, the military establishment’s ambivalence about the value of museums, the United States’ involvement in the Korean and Vietnam war and the general environment of the Cold War, and changes in museology. . .’ [9, p. 259]. London traces the historical pathways through which military interests attempted to establish a presence on the National Mall, and how, in 1961, Congress attempted to control or moderate this drive by creating a National Armed Forces Museum Advisory Board to the Institution that would authorize some form of coverage. This fostered a debate centered on the question of whether the Smithsonian’s newly established Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History) could better address the expressed desires of the military than could a wholly new museum bureau devoted to the subject. The Smithsonian resisted the idea of a new bureau, arguing in a position paper in about 1960 that it could better integrate ‘the military exhibits into a museum