How Bad is Being Big?

 The Editor

The Economist                                                                                                                             via email

Re How Bad is Being Big? July 15^th issue.

Your article examines market concentration, churn in share, and “excess profits”. As you point out, bigness per se is not illegal in the US nor is reaping large profits. Lower costs to consumers and customers have been the overriding rationale for approving mergers and acquisitions. But I counter that bigness, particularly via acquisition, is inherently anti-competitive. I favor disapproval of further acquisitive growth and break-up of oligopolistic industry structures.

I base my view on 31 years as a denizen of large corporations and 16 years of consulting with small and independent businesses on how to outperform large competitors. Early in my career, I watched a frustrated FTC wrestle with oligopoly in a consumer-packaged foods market. Their point was that we did not have to conspire or collude to manage prices; knowing who would follow whom gave us the leverage we needed. But under anti-trust law, oligopolies are not illegal.  Later on, in another consumer product market,  I helped consolidate an industry and amass market share through purchase of 14 companies around the world. Later, as central marketing services provider to diverse members of our conglomerate, I provided a range of professional skills and assets, as market and consumer research, distribution leverage, syndication of media content, public relations and advertising expertise, systems development, purchasing and so on. Finally, with a different corporation in consumer and business services, I helped it grow and dominate through internal development, acquisition, and franchising.

What competitive advantages accrue to the large? Lower cost of capital than available to the independent. Ability to recruit promising talent from leading graduate schools. Special skills support such as risk management, quality control, distribution logistics, system development. Basic research that leads to product and service development. Supplier leverage and purchasing clout. Marketable shares with which to acquire. The list goes on and on.

Bigness is an asset. This is not to say the behemoths do not stumble. They generally are not nimble and lose agility. But don’t we often we see one enter a market second and use their inherent advantages to overwhelm and rise to #1? Bigness is inherently anti-competitive.

Is Demography Destiny?

For the most part, yes, though not entirely.

I’ve been fascinated with demography since early in my marketing career. In 1961, Teddy White published Making of the President, 1960. I read it for its political drama, but I was startled by to realize that these political strategists knew a lot more about their voters than we MBA marketing geniuses knew about our own customers.

My career as a marketer – first of consumer foods; then of crafts, games and toys; and subsequently of hotel and travel services – has ever since been grounded in demography. For example, by digging into the data, I helped our Star Wars toys displace Hot Wheels to become the top selling boys’ toys for four seasons. Later on, in the hotel business, it was casino operators who showed me they knew more about their gamblers than did we about the travel patterns of our hotel guests. I adapted Caesar’s Palace’s software to get a better handle on our guest patterns, leading to challenges to room design and décor. My fascination with demographic and behavioral data has been a constant ever since.

I began preparing this talk two weeks ago, playing with some population pyramid data, but the New York Times beat me to the punch with a long article in this week’s Sunday Magazine. For those of you who read the article, bear with me. For the rest, my intention is to pique your curiosity about demography, about population patterns, and to stimulate your thinking about the world your children and grandchildren are about to inherit. It will be a very different world than that we have grown up in and grapple with today.

Is Demography Destiny?

For the most part, yes, though not entirely.

After all, the basic elements, i.e., persons, of the near future of a population are already on the ground; we can count them. What do I mean by “near future?” The next seventy-five years or so.

The number of middle-aged we can count and these, in due course, will become retirees and elders, with attendant demands for pensions and costly health care. Witness Japan, now the oldest industrialized nation in the world, and shrinking in size. Their salad days as the world’s 3^rd largest economy are over.

The number of the world’s children already on hand is known; these kids will become tomorrow’s labor forces, will form families and become consumers – if they have incomes to spend.

The number of pre-school and teen-age girls is already known: they will become women of child-bearing age. The portion of them that will be educated, will live in cities, and the number of children they are likely to bear is changing, changes demographers are watching carefully, for birth rate change is proving to be the wild-card in forecasting future population patterns. I mention urbanization and education: – no surprise – the more citified and educated women become, the fewer children they choose to have.

So yes, within some reasonable range of uncertainty, demography is destiny. Demographics cannot foretell wars or pandemics or famine or drought or floods of course, but hints at potential instability are to be read in the data. Take for example, Nigeria, already Africa’s most populous country, where a huge portion, 43% of the population, is under 15 and will soon enter the work force. If Nigeria succeeds in attracting foreign direct investment and creating jobs, they will be the growth engine of Africa. But if Nigeria fails to generate employment for this huge cohort of literate young men, over one in five Nigerians, these young men will likely turn rebellious, spread social disfunction and crime, and send forth to Europe wave after wave of migrants.  

What else is to be found in today’s data? (Note: these population pyramids are depictions of today's profile by age and gender. The forecast curve at the right shows where such a profile is headed.)

·       That the world population will top out in 2087 at 10 billion, 430 million. Do we know that for sure? No. But given what we do know, that is the best forecast. It was but 3 billion when the Club of Rome was predicting disaster.

 

·       India is the country of the future. Should your grandchild’s trust or 529 Plan portfolio include shares of Tata or Reliance or the State Bank of India?

·       The Chinese economy will not surpass our US economy. At the end of this century, China’s likely will still be 2^nd largest in the world and ours will still be #1 – assuming we can avoid war or famine or pandemic.

·       Why? Because our magic sauce is immigration. Our population – our labor force and consumer base – is healthy because we take in immigrants, which China, Japan, and most of Europe don’t; so long as we prevent Trump or DeSantis or some other jingoist from closing the gate, we will continue growing even into the 22^ndC. China’s and all of Europe’s economies are aging into gerontocracies of expensive dependency. Health care and pensions drain their discretionary investment capacity. 

·       Turkey will become the largest country in Europe even if the rest of Europe were to staunch its decline. Were you a member, would you vote to invite a populous Muslim Turkey into the EU while Germany, France, Italy and Spain shrink?

·       Russia is on track to lose 1/3^rd of its population by the end of the century while the former Soviet Republic “stans” will, in 2060, be 50% larger than Russia.

 

 ·       Add in Afghanistan and Pakistan: these central Asian nations will total 685mm people, nearly twice the size of the US – and will still be growing in mid-22ndC.

 

·       In 2100, 40% of the world will live in Africa. Just 4% in North America. What demands on us can we expect? Should we continue to be the world’s largest arms dealer when who knows on whom those weapons will be trained?

 

Some of you, I know, are thinking, ‘well so what? I can’t change these demographics. I haven’t any power to wield here. I’ll be dead and gone. What does this matter to me?’

Ask yourself, instead, ‘what does this mean for my children and grandchildren? What attitudes and values must I encourage? How should I be preparing for their financial security? To what cultures should I be introducing them? What should our schools be teaching? How can I best help them meet whatever comes in the remains of this 21^stC?’

I hope I have intrigued at least a few of you enough to open https://www.populationpyramid.net/ and browse through it at leisure, moving your cursor to select countries and sliding over the curves, and asking – what might this mean to my kids and to theirs?

Demography is not necessarily destiny, but it’s the best tool we have to anticipate what’s over that horizon. And there is plenty of change coming our way. Pay attention.

 

I, Page Turner

The World's Greatest Chamber Music Party is in full swing, entering week two of the month-long Seattle Summer Chamber Festival. This is only arts genre in which Seattle is pre-eminent. We have a fine symphony, a good ballet, a very good opera and the best large jazz ensemble on the West Coast. But only in chamber music can Seattle claim to be at a world-wide pinnacle.

For years, I have watched page turners, fascinated by the interaction with their pianist; I don't know if I am weird or if others in the audience are similarly wired. Whatever . . .. 

During opening night of the Summer Festival, I mentally composed most ot this imagined confession  -- and yes, was still thrilled by the music; multi-tasking, afterall.  

I, Page Turner

I am paid to be unnoticed.

On stage, I sit off the left shoulder of the pianist, intently reading the music, anticipating her reaching the end of each page, unobtrusively rising, stretching awkwardly across to the opposite corner of the score, making sure to grasp only a single page, and snapping it over when time. She or he as the case may be nods imperiously at the same moment: do they really think only they can read the notes? Idiot: that’s why they hired me! Whatever.

If I screw up, could I derail the performance? Probably not. She has known for weeks what she will be playing, learned the score at home. She arrived three days ago and rehearsed with the rest of the quartet four or five hours working out nuances of their presentation of the work. Still, if I flipped two pages or miss-read there could be momentary stumbles. So, I am paid to pay attention.

Often, easier said than done. John Cage or Phillip Glass are so effing boring! Then again, that Bartok piece commissioned by Bennie Goodman is so exciting it’s impossible to sit still. Beethoven’s Archduke is so beautiful you’d have to be deaf – as he was – not to be moved, not sit still. More often than not, the music lures my mind to wander off into my own; I am a jazz pianist, after all. Being paid not to tap my foot, bob my head, neither to grin nor grimace.

At the end of the performance, I wait while the “artistes” take their bows. Then they troop off, and I meekly follow, carrying the score. Back stage, there may be a nod or brief “thanks” but most often, no word. They are too wrapped up in the audience’s applause, in congratulating one another, in deciding whether to troop out again and take another bow. So it goes. I’m paid to be the invisible accessory.

Speaking of pay: he or she gets many hundreds for their rehearsal and performance (plus, here in Seattle, travel expenses and free room and board.) While true: no one pays to come and watch me turn pages, but still . . . $50? And they are featured in the program with bio and picture and praise (much of which their agent writes.) No one knows my name. I am paid to be anonymous.

Someday. Someday, I’ll be known – maybe even have a page turner off my shoulder? Well, second thought, probably not, not for jazz; only these "classical artistes" appear to need them. Anyway, soon enough, all of them likely will be using tablet computers and managing their own scores via foot pedal, page turners just nostalgic artifacts of "the good old days." Oh, well . . ..

~~~~~~~

Tonight's the All Star Ganme. Well, we've got our All Stars right here on stage in Benaroya. For those of you who can reach Seattle, get a ticket and experience the world's great artists presenting wonderful, accessible music. Intimate, gorgeous, challenging listening; a festival, indeed. (But pay no attention to that page turner.) @ www.seattlechambermusic.org

Ann's Birthday Get-away

 

San Juan Island . . .

. . . is a magical mix of rocky shores and harbors, of ridges and meadows, of quaint towns and artist studios, of bikers, hikers, yachters, sailors, of vegetable farms and oyster farms, of madrona, firs, Norway spruce, and flowers of many names blooming in May. We love San Juan Island and chose to celebrate Ann’s nth birthday there, as we had done last year.

Magical: she turned a year younger at Snug Harbor, last birthday, and now two years younger birthdaying at The Lodge at Lakedale. Arrival Tuesday; that night, a marvelous dinner at McMillans, in Roche Harbor.

On B-day, we kayaked out of Roche Harbor, 2 ½ hours snug in a seagoing double with our splash skirts tight, out among seals and along coves with deer and eagles and an oystercatcher, new on my list. No orcas, alas.

Lunch at Madrona Bar & Grill. Super seared ahi on bed of Japanese seaweed and ginger.

B-day dinner at Duck Soup, rack of island lamb with a bottle of 2010 Tablas Creek Bordeaux blend that we bought at their Paso Robles winery with Scott Yoo and Alice Dade. A wonderful wine with wonderful memories attached.

Thursday, June 1^st (OMG; where is this year going in such a hurry?) Hiked – walked, really – up Mt. Grant, the island’s highest at merely 736’. Forests of Madrona, Norway Spruce and Douglas Firs amidst basalt outcrops.

Lunched on clam chowder and ale (for me; wine for her) at Wescott Bay, about as islandized as one can get.

Dinner at Vinny’s in Friday Harbor. What a surprise! Not a standard Italian-American-tourist-town restaurant, but real cucina raffinata. Watched the weekenders arriving on the evening ferry. 

Friday, wandered the shore of Straits of Juan de Fuca, out of American Camp. (For you inlanders, this dates to the border war of the 1850s between the US and Britain over which strait divided Washington Territory from Britain’s Vancouver Island – Haro or Rosario. English Camp was on the north end. The bloodless war began when an American sheep herder/homesteader shot a Hudson Bay Company pig rooting in his kitchen garden. The British protested and threatened the American families homesteaded on the southend as trespassers. The alarmed Americans called for protection; a company of infantry under Capt. George E. Pickett, later Maj. Gen, CSA, of Gettysburg fame, arrived and set up American camp. The dispute finally was settled under arbitration of Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1872.  The Pig War is a tribute to forbearance, for despite twelve years of bluster, there were no other casualties, neither man nor pig.

Swung by Limekiln State Park to see if any whales; alas, none.

Friday night—the only bad meal. Avoid Downriggers on the waterfront of Friday Harbor unless you favor poorly prepared seafood, harried servers, noise to drown out a 747, plus high prices.

Saturday, waiting for the ferry, strolled the farmers market and main street of Friday Harbor. Then front row spot aboard and southern pod of orcas spotted way off in distance. Mt. Baker beckon
ed us back to mainland and home again, home again. What a great get-away!

The Lodge at Lakedale

Atop Mt. Grant

Limekiln State Park 

Hotel de Haro, Roche Harbor

Limekiln Light

Mt. Baker Beckons

Evening at Roche Harbor

South Beach Walk from American Camp

Lakedale 

Tom D Hunt Totem Pole

Kayaking Off Spieden Island

Westcott Bay Oyster Farm

Lodge Room #9

Evening Ferry Arrival, Friday Harbor

The Birthday Girl

There is no "The American Dream" . . . and Anyway, It's Not Dead . . . But Harder Than Ever to Achieve

Confused? Good; listen up. I’m hearing “the American dream” about twice a week now. Nobody troubles to define it but everyone is in favor of it, whatever it is. And I foresee we’re going to hear it ad nauseum as we approach November, ’24. Tiffany Smiley (is that not a politician’s ideal name?) after being soundly defeated in her Senatorial run against Patty Murray last November, announced the formation of the Endeavor PAC, to help Republican candidates across the country: “every dollar goes to helping candidates” who, she told Fox News, “are ready to rescue the American dream for our kids today.” Turns out the kids she had in mind are her own; the PAC’s only expenditures have been to pay off her own campaign debts.

In 2012, Hedrick Smith wrote Who Killed the American Dream? a book that pinned the blame for the destroyed hopes and ambitions of the middle class on unscrupulous banks that created and sold over-rated mortgage-backed securities; predatory variable rate lenders that lured families into unaffordable homes; Bush-era tax breaks for the upper class that exacerbate income and wealth inequality while increasing the national debt; inflated costs of post-secondary education; replacement of pensions with 401ks; off-shoring of jobs; decline of unions; globalization of trade – all the usual suspects we’ve been hearing about ever since the financial crises of 2001 and 2008.

Smith’s title, too, suggests that The American Dream is a universal; the book implies that generally it has to do with prosperity and economic security – home ownership, dependable work, savings, retirement funds, higher education for the kids, and so on.

In 2016, candidate Donald Trump proclaimed, “The American Dream is dead.” Moreover, if you elect me, I will resuscitate it. “Only I can fix it.” By 2020, despite four years as President Trump, he again announced that the American Dream is dead.  And repeatedly since then. So much for fixing it. It appears his and his kid’s real “American dream” was to monetize his campaign to line family pockets.

Despite a supposedly deceased dream, despite recession and pandemic, in 2020 over 700,000 people legally emigrated to the US. An uncountable band of illegal immigrants snuck in as well.  And last year, 2022, 1.2 million persons legally sought and achieved entry into our country! That’s more than in the peak Ellis-island years of 1910, ’11, ’12, and ’13. Somebody’s dream of becoming an American hadn’t died.

What is The American Dream?

This drumbeat of “The” American Dream piqued my interest. I began inquiring of young, native-born Americans and of recent emigres to this country about its so-called dead dream.

• Shawn T, Iranian-born civil engineer and real estate entrepreneur:

        “I came for education; I stayed to practice my faith free from religious persecution.”

        “No, I don’t think in terms of an American Dream.”

• Kalina M, Polish-born artist:

        “I’m not sure what the American Dream is but here I am free to be myself outside the bounds of             culture and tradition.”

These conversations and others give me my first finding: “the American Dream” is a phrase not used much by immigrants. Instead, it appears to be a phrase we native-born use to explain to ourselves why these newcomers want to live here.

 Second, it’s not The American Dream, it’s Their American Dream, each individual’s set of aspirations and ambitions.

• Besom A, Armenian-born owner of a lawn and landscape service company:

        “My Dad brought us here for safety. Here I’m doing better than he did and my kids will do better             than me.”

• Corriell S, American-born municipal maintenance crew chief:

        “It’s about choice – freedom to choose.”

• Teena P, Thai-born, co-owner of a salon:

        “My Mom brought the family here. She was being pestered by pimps offering her cash to buy her             oldest daughter, my sister. She had to get us out of there and a cousin said come here, they’ll be             safe and you’ll be free to start over.”

Immigrants always come with a purpose, an intention, an aspiration. Each wave of immigration has had its own motives, its own goals, their own dreams in response to their challenges and conditions. My mother’s English Separatist forebears emigrated from Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, to Leyden in Holland and, later, from there to Plymouth in order to worship in an autonomous church free from the strictures of the Church of England. (And, wrote some, because their kids were speaking better Dutch than English and beginning to think in Dutch.)

My father’s forebears arrived in Massachusetts and Connecticut thirty years later, Puritans in search of freedom to worship “pure” Christianity unadulterated with C of E carry-overs from Roman rites. Also, to manage their local governance, which Oliver Cromwell’s military Protectorate would not allow back in England.

No matter how long you've been here, your forbears came with desire and courage -- even if "indiginous", your forbears migrated here from somewhere else. Ann’s forbears came from Sweden at the turn of the century, presumably to escape conscription, rigid social stratification, and the rigidity of Lutheran Church of Sweden.

The Irish, in the 19^thC came to escape famine and Ascendant English landlords, and to work, digging our canals and laying rails. German socialists came after failure of the 1848 revolts with the dream of pursuing equity and opportunity free of repressive monarchs. The Swedes came to homestead cheap RR land and stake out their own farms. After our Civil War, the Chinese came to the West Coast to work the transcontinental railroads and mines and earn money, silver, to send back home. The Eastern European Jews came to New York for freedom from pogroms. Southern Blacks migrated North to escape Jim Crow and to trade sharecropping for factory work. Mexicans came for employment; Cubans to flee Communism. El Salvadorans come to escape crime gangs and keep their children safe; Indians to find entrepreneurial opportunities.

And so it has gone – people of courage and initiative come with their own dream but the common denominator is the freedom to try and make yourself and your family better off than you might be back there. Not all make it; about a third of Eastern European immigrants in the first decade of the 20^thC returned home. But not all.

• Anna Q, Vietnamese-born salon owner:

        “the American Dream is to work for yourself, to own your own business with no one telling you                 what to and what not to do.”

It’s the same for native-born Americans.

• Taylor R, American-born marine services operator:

        “it’s about mobility. My grandparents moved from Oklahoma to California to Alaska, looking for             opportunity. Mom became a therapist and moved us to Washington State.”

You move from Oklahoma to California, from California to Alaska. You hold a job as a diesel mechanic and send your daughter to law school. You’re free to pursue a better, however you choose to define it.

It appears that there is no “The” American dream but many “Their” American Dreams.

So, this slippery phrase: where did it come from?

James Truslow Adams is usually credited with coining “The American Dream” in his 1931 book, The Epic of America. But in fact, the phrase was used long before: in 1900, the New York Post wrote “. . . the American Dream was of democracy – of equality of opportunity, of justice for all.” Walter Lippman, in 1914, expressed his skeptical view that “the American Dream of endless progress . . .  is a delusion.” (These references I have drawn from Prof. Sarah Churchwell’s essay ‘The State of the American Dream’ published in The Catalyst, a journal of the Bush Institute. Check it out; it’s a very good read.)

Before WWII, the American Dream was not so much about material prosperity as it was about social mobility and democracy. James Truslow Adams wrote “ . . . not a dream of motorcars and high wages, merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and woman shall be able to attain the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” If I add to that Martin Luther King’s dream “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’ ” then I get a version of the American Dream that replaces prosperity with the ideals to which I should aspire.

Attaining Their American Dream is getting tougher

What Rick Smith wrote about is not the holding of a dream but its achievement, the realization, of it. And it’s gotten harder, not easier.

• Ella B, American-born tattoo artist and jewelry designer:

        “The American Dream is dead: credit card debt and interest rates, student loan debt, apartment             rents. How can you save and build capital?”

Economists and sociologists term it social mobility – climbing the socio-economic ladder – and inter-generational mobility – children becoming better educated, more secure economically, enjoying a higher status and earning more than their parents.  So, how are we doing?

The World Economic Forum rates and publishes a widely used Social Mobility Index, ten measures in five categories:

1. Health and health services
2. Education: (Access, Quality and Equity)
3. Technology Access
4. Fair Work Opportunities
5. Social Protection & Efficient Institutions

The top ten nations are Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Luxembourg -- all small, all northern European. Where are the large countries? In the second ten: Germany, France, Japan, UK, Canada and so on.  But the US?

We are 27^th! And falling! 27^th out of 82 countries the WEF rates. The lowest social mobility index of the G-7.

You all know the obstacles to achieving social mobility and intergenerational mobility:

·       costs of education rising steadily faster than inflation;

• ·       wage stagnation,
• ·       highly unequal distribution of incomes and wealth,
• ·       job relocations overseas,
• ·       high costs of housing,
• ·       regressive taxation
• ·       weakened unions
•  -- you’ve heard all this before.

And intergenerational mobility? The Brookings Institute study, using World Bank and Pew Research data, concluded that “While Americans have an optimistic faith in the ability of individuals to get ahead within a lifetime or from one generation to the next, there is growing evidence of less intergenerational economic mobility in the United States than in many other rich, industrialized countries . . ..” In fact, we're lower than all but the UK.

Yet still they come, despite these barriers, in pursuit of their dream of becoming an American.

• Yvgenia P, Russian-born architect (who became a citizen of the USA last year along with 900,000 other strivers):

        “If I lived in France, I would never be French. Here I can be an American. In France or Russia,                   it’s about blood and language; here, it’s about an idea.”

Removing those barriers

Don’t we who are securely here have a duty to reduce obstacles, to remove barriers to achievement of whatever American Dream youngsters and immigrants hold? We need these new citizens: their energy, their imagination, their courage, their determination to raise children and make America work for them. We’re not an Orban who believes that strength comes from illiberal homogeneity. We relish freshness, differences, new ideas and perspectives – don’t we?

What should you and I do? We should seek to remove barriers, those impediments and obstacles that block realization of the dream. We should at least support those who aspire to public service, who want to tackle inequity, to lessen inequality and increase opportunity, to increase the odds that newcomers earn realization of their American dream.

Every public policy proposal and every political and civic leader should be judged on whether and how well they facilitate realization of dreams. Not for nothing are these young undocumented called Dreamers. We must stand for removing barriers.

Make this your litmus test: do your senators and representatives, your church or club or town council or alma mater make it easier or harder to realize an American Dream of life getting better, of being heard, of climbing that socio-economic ladder?

Ask of yourself: how can I help remove barriers to realizing one’s American Dream?

 

(A note to Democrats, whether moderate or progressive or of whatever stripe: Removing Barriers is an over-arching, unifying and winning frame.)

Should Museums Tell Tales?

This is the script from which I gave a talk at the Olympic Club last week. The italics are prompts to be emphasized; the underlining reminders to gesture or use voice inflection. 3 1/2 pages, 16 type size. I speak at about 90 words a minute, and this worked out to be about 20 seconds over our alloted eight minutes. (This younger Gen Z speaks so fast! I'm reminded of what Ezra Taft Benson said of Hubert Hunphry: "He speaks at 120 words a minute with gusts up to 200.")

                                                      

                                                      Should Museum Tell Tales?

I grew up in Washington DC. In Jr high, as a member of the Potomac Rocks and Minerals Society, I got to know some curators at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Some Saturdays, I would take a bus and a streetcar down to the Mall and work in the back rooms of the Dept of Gems and Minerals -- puttering about, cleaning, filing and just exploring the thousands, literally thousands, of stored specimens. Pretty relaxed attitude about security at that time: After all, this was 1948 and ’49.

In those days, museums were three-dimensional encyclopedias – storehouses of objects, facts on who made or collected them and when, maybe some context but no commentary, no Op-eds. Like Sgt. Joe Friday said: “Just the facts, Maam.”

In 1995, the National Air and Space Museum put Enola Gay on display along with an explanation that between 70 and 100 thousand Japanese civilians were killed at Hiroshima (the number of deaths is indefinable still.) There was an immediate outcry from the American Legion and the Air Force Association: how dare you suggest that America did something akin to a war crime! What about the millions of American casualties saved by not having to invade Japan’s homeland?  Congressmen chimed in; the Smithsonian caved and removed the information.

Fast forward to today, 2023: How times have changed. On the mall in Washington, along with Air and Space and Natural History and the National Gallery of Art and all, there are three purpose-built museums – whose purpose is to tell a story – of African American Culture and the struggle for citizenship, of Indigenous American tribes -- treaty violations and our seizure of their Indian lands -- , and the story of Germany’s attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Communists, Gays and Gypsies.

A couple of weeks ago, Ann and I visited those three. I found myself deeply moved despite my familiarity with much of each story:

·     ~~ the cynically broken treaties with Indian nations and our attempts to exterminate both tribes and bison;

·     ~~ the story of slavery; of reconstruction, the KKK and Jim Crow; of the battle for civil rights and murders of Medgar Evers, Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman; of the stories of Emmett Till and the Pettus Bridge and Letter From a Birmingham Jail;

·     ~~ and lastly, the story of the rise of National Socialism and Germany’s demonic “Final Solution”.  

In the café, after 3 ½ hours of touring the Holocaust Museum, I intruded on and sat down with a group of high school students and asked them “what did you see?” A junior said she had missed seeing many things  . . . “because I was crying so much.” Another of her companions said he couldn’t help but think about his small Oregon town as he studied the pictures and artifacts from a Polish shtetl the Germans eradicated – simply erased from the earth. 

Those kids got it; they were disturbed; the stories struck home.

And then I imagined how Gov. DeSantis would pretend to be outraged at disturbing children. I imagined Governor Abbott frothing at the mouth for critically thinking about Texans’ violations of Sam Houston’s treaty with the Cherokee, or both fuming over the “un-patriotic” portrayal of Pres. Andrew Jackson willfully ignoring Congress’ instructions in the Indian Removal Acts and improperly assigning the US Army to police the Trail of Tears -- all to give Georgians and Mississippians more land to cultivate into cotton fields -- with slave labor, of course.

In my view, this is history and a challenge to think critically. A Georgian or Texan, however, might well view it as propaganda.

And that raises a couple of questions:

·      Who decides what story to tell?

·      And who pays for it?

When we got home from Washington, I did some research:

·      The Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian was built 1/3^rd with Federal money – taxpayer money --  and 70% from private donations, much of which were Indian tribal funds.

·      The Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture was built 50/50 with private/public funds; the Federal budget supports 70% of its annual operating and capital budgets.

·      The Holocaust Museum was built entirely with private funds (Congressional antisemitism at work?) but on land freely given, valuable Federal property. 57% of its operating budget is subsidized from Federal funds.

So, while I endorse the tone and content of the stories being told, not all American taxpayers would do so.  “Whose truth is being told?” And who decides?

The Museum Directors are hired by the Smithsonian. So, who and what is “the Smithsonian?”

The Smithsonian is a unique, independent “Federal Trust Instrumentality” established by Congress in mid-19^thC to administer James Smithson’s bequest to the United States. It has by statute a nine-person board of Regents chaired by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; his co-Regents are the Vice-President, the Attorney General, three Senators selected by the Senate and three Representatives selected by the House. Under their policy direction, the Institution is managed by its “Secretary”, what today we’d call it’s CEO.

The Smithsonian is the world’s largest public education, museum and research institution, operating 19 museums, 21 research libraries, and the National Zoo. It is funded by Federal appropriations, donations and grants, and by sales of gifts, books, and souvenirs. For fiscal 2023, its total budget is a bit under $2 billion dollars, 62% of which is federally funded, i.e., $1 billion, 144 million in taxpayer dollars.

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So, what do you think? Is it worth it? Is it good use of your tax dollars? Is it bringing Americans together?

Should Museums Tell Tales?

What is the value

·    ~~  Of presenting history candidly?

·    ~~ Of thinking self-critically?

·     ~~~~~~~~~~~~

of   ~~ of making a high school girl cry?

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    PS

African American Museum
(mine)

Holocaust Memorial Museum
(Google)

Museum of American Indian 
(Google)

Go see'em!