This season as in all seasons, the nation`s capital is a place of amazing possibilities for the tourist.
On a single morning, for example, you can tour the White House of Teddy Roosevelt, join American blacks on their post World War I migration from the rural South to Chicago and other Northern cities, share the experience of an American Indian family in North Dakota in its transition from ancient tribal ways to the modern world of the white man, pilot the new Stealth bomber and design your own aircraft with a computer and fly it-if only on a computer screen.
You can accomplish all this simply by visiting two of Washington`s most popular places-the Smithsonian Institution`s National Museum of American History, at Constitution Avenue and 14th Street, N.W.; and the National Air and Space Museum, at Independence Avenue and 6th Street, S.W.
Many visitors come to Washington with the mistaken notion that, in addition to looking at all the monuments and government buildings, they can set aside a few hours to ”see the Smithsonian.”
This is akin to taking a couple of hours out of a holiday in Los Angeles to catch Disneyland.
A vast complex
The Smithsonian is not one, but a vast, sprawling complex of nine major museums-all but one grouped around the Capital Mall-plus the National Zoo and a number of outlying facilities.
The American History Museum is home to literally millions of objects, ranging from George Washington`s false teeth to the costume worn by Joel Grey in ”Cabaret,” as well as large-scale thematic exhibitions encompassing subjects as extensive as the entire history of American transportation, 19th Century weaponry and presidential election campaigns.
One of the history museum`s biggest attractions this year is the recently installed ”Ceremonial Court,” a re-creation of the grand foyer and other public areas of the White House as they appeared in Teddy Roosevelt`s time.
Based on historic photographs, original architectual drawings and inspection trips to the Executive Mansion two blocks away, the museum re-creation is as stately and imposing as the real thing.
Yet it`s homey
Yet the exhibit has many of the warm, homey touches that First Families have given the White House throughout its history. On either end of foyer`s grand corridor are trompe l`oeil wall paintings realistically replicating the State Dining Room and the White House grand staircase-the latter depicted with two boistrous Roosevelt children at play on it.
The display also offers peeks into the famous Green, Blue and Red reception rooms, and you can stroll through several alcoves and private rooms decorated in the style of the period and crammed with presidential memorabilia.
Artifacts include the mantelpiece next to which Franklin Roosevelt made his fireside chats, the gold piano (Steinway`s 100,000th) presented to the White House in 1903, one of Abraham Lincoln`s top hats, Woodrow Wilson`s golf clubs, George Washington`s telescope and the lap desk used by Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence.
You may find this exhibit even more interesting than the tours of the public rooms of the actual White House.
Epochal migration
The American History Museum`s ”Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration 1915-1940” exhibit movingly presents the story of one of the most epochal events in American history-the mass migration of more than one million blacks from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North during and after World War I.
The children and grandchildren of slaves, most of these people were living hard, primitive lives under a sharecropper system little better than the days of servitude. The outbreak of World War I and consequent rapid industrialization created a tremendous demand for labor, especially when so many white job holders and immigrants from Europe were drafted into the military.
Factory recruiters swept into the South with the lure of steady work, good wages and a new way of life, sparking an exodus that continued through the Great Depression. But the reality proved far different than the promise, as the black workers found themselves channeled into urban ghettoes and subject to new forms of racial prejudice that, as in the 1919 Chicago race riots, often took violent turns.
The ”Field to Factory” exhibit, occupying 7,000 square feet, richly illustrates this extraordinary experience. It is divided into three parts. The first, which includes a replica of a southern Maryland sharecroppers shack, concentrates on life as it was lived before the migration.
On their way
The second section, centering on a replica of a Virginia train station, depicts the adventures and ordeals endured by the migrants on their way North. The third re-creates the often bewildering and painful new world they found, as typified by a replicated Philadelphia rowhouse.
There are all manner of artifacts and a wealth of wonderful photographs, including many of black life in Chicago between the wars.
The migration brought about a profound change in the development of American society and its attitudes. For blacks, it is perhaps best summed up by the poem ”One Way Ticket,” by Langston Hughes, which appears among the literature of the exhibition:
”I am fed up
With Jim Crow laws,
People who are cruel
And afraid,
Who lynch and run,
Who are scared of me
And me of them.
I pick up my life
And take it away
On a one-way ticket-
Gone up North,
Gone out West,
Gone!”
Throughout the 19th Century, American Indians were violently pushed into migrations from their Eastern homelands into less desirable lands in the West. By the beginning of the 20th Century, they had run out of new places to settle, and were compelled to transform their way of life into something approximating the white man`s in order to survive.
Focuses on 1 family
The National Museum of American History`s ”The Way to Independence”
exhibit, which closes Sept. 30, compellingly portrays this experience by focusing on 80 years in the lives of a single family of Hidatsa Indians in North Dakota.
Organized by the Minnesota Historical Society and based on research conducted by anthropologist Gilbert Wilson around the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation in 1906, the exhibit dwells largely on the lives and experiences of an Hidatsa mother named Buffalo Bird Woman, born in 1839; her son Edward Goodbird, born in 1869; and her brother Wolf Chief, born in 1849.
The 500 objects in the show include many wonderful examples of Indian handicraft and native culture, but its most interesting pieces illustrate the ways the Indians adapted the white man`s things to their own traditions, as they learned to cope with civilization and modern times.
The Hidatsa had lived for centuries along the banks of the Missouri River, mostly as farmers. A smallpox outbreak and incursions by white settlers pushed them north.
The courage, dignity, perseverance and adaptability of the Indian people is clearly demonstrated in this show, especially as it views all this through the eyes of these three fascinating individuals.
Air, Space Museum
The Air and Space Museum, home to the Wright brothers first flyer and the first crude Goddard rocket engines, is fairly evenly divided between aviation and space in its wealth of exhibits, giant and small. The space sections, which display all manner of Apollo lunar landing gear, have been especially popular this summer because of the interest in the 20th anniversary of man`s conquest of the moon.
But one of the most enjoyable and addictively intriguing offerings of the huge facility is a brand new exhibit tucked away in an upstairs corner that`s devoted to the now commonplace computer.
Called ”Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age,” the exhibition shows how the computer dramatically revolutionized aviation and made space flight possible-and now gives promise of making many of our space exploration dreams come true.
You might think such a technical subject boring, but this new museum gallery is anything but, especially as concerns the use of computers to design airplanes and space vehicles and operate them in flight.
Hands-on exhibits
The Smithsonian is famous for its hands-on exhibits that permit visitors to work devices and demonstrate discoveries and principles themselves. This computer gallery contains some that might keep you happily occupied for hours. One allows you to design an aircraft from scratch on a computer screen in three dimensions and, in a final sequence, demonstrate its ability to fly.
Farther along, in a section demonstrating the technology employed in futuristic aircraft like the new Stealth bomber, you can use a computer to fly a Stealth aircraft yourself-taking off, undertaking a photo reconnaissance mission, returning to base and landing.
For traditionalists, there`s also a computer set-up with which you can pilot a World War II P-51 Mustang.
This former pilot, who thought he had all the right techniques down pat years ago, had a little trouble. The aircraft he designed, when blown up into three-dimensions, came out looking like an airborne filing cabinet-and flew accordingly.
He also ground-looped the Stealth before it could get into the air and managed to land the P-51 more or less upside down.
But, as all the exhibits in this wonderful museum make clear, progress in air and space has always been a matter of ”if at first you don`t succeed, try, try again.” In this case, it`s a lot of fun.
The American History and Air and Space Museums are open 9:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. daily. After Sept. 4, they close at 5:30 p.m. –
