Over the past several months, the Gerald R. Ford Museum in downtown Grand Rapids has hosted an exhibit titled "Enemy Within: Terror in America, 1776-Present." The exhibit focuses on a variety of "domestic terrorism" threats and movements that have "attacked America at home." The exhibit focuses predominately on "extremist" movements of the left and the right, including information on anarchists, the Ku Klux Klan, militias, and other radicals. In this way, the exhibit paints challenges from the left and the right to the status quo as entirely negative, advocating for the type of incoherent "middle ground" ideology that is frequently advocated by proponents of the status quo and those that hold positions of power in the United States.
The exhibit focuses its attention on several different periods in United States history with bold topic headings that accompany the information in the exhibit. The viewer walks through sections titled "Hate 1865-Present," "Radicalism 1917-1920," "Subversion 1945-1958," "Protest 1969-1976," and "Extremism: 1992-Present"--all of which are accompanied by a variety of artifacts, videos, and images associated with the subject areas. In many ways, these period names reflect the way history is presented in high school text books, promoting the view that throughout its history the United States has faced a series of crises that have "threatened the nation," but that ultimately, the country has "prevailed." For the most part, all would be vaguely familiar to most viewers--anarchist attacks in the 1900s, the potential for a Japanese or Nazi invasion in World War II, the Red Scare, antiwar protests, the militia movement, and organized hate groups.
Unfortunately, while the broad categories might be familiar to many viewers, the exhibit does fairly little in terms of giving viewers nuanced information about the periods in question. A particularly clear example of this is the section on "Protest 1969-1976." The exhibit focuses primarily on the emergence of a militant leftist movement in the United States, although little context is given about how the movement emerged or the motivating factors that caused some groups to consider militant tactics. As people walk into the "Protest" portion of the exhibit they see the bold phrase "If the government doesn't stop the war, we'll stop the government," which is attributed to the Weather Underground despite the fact that its origin was actually the May Day Tribe--a group that advocated civil disobedience--not violent confrontation with the government.
The fact that the "Protest" exhibit begins with an inaccurately attributed quote sets the stage for the entire section. It gives viewers the impression that the entire protest movement turned "violent," despite the fact that only a small portion of movement adopted violent tactics. It does this by focusing on the Weather Underground--a group that emerged out of the student and youth left--and the Black Liberation Army (BLA)--a group that formed in response to the systematic oppression of African-Americans by the state. Of course, this kind of context is absent, instead folks see only cursory attempt to connect the actions of the Weather Underground and the BLA to what was going on at the time. While more context is given for the Weather Underground's actions--namely that they were in response to US foreign policy at the time--little is said about what motivated the Black Liberation Army. The exhibit also asserts that the actions were "to cause maximum damage, chaos, and fear" rather than focusing on the true goals and motivations.
This pattern of dismissing popular movements is also seen in the "Radicalism 1917-1920" section, which focuses primarily on smearing the anarchist movement in the United States. Again, like the "Protest" section, there is fairly limited contextual information given about the motivations behind the actions. Instead, much of the activity is reduced to "conflict" between workers and "bosses." The activities highlighted are bombings, assassinations, and other such actions that at the time were hotly debated in the anarchist and associated left movements. Like the "Protest" section, it associates the entire movement with those who advocated violence, especially in a section that has photos of Emma Goldman, Big Bill Heywood, Joe Hill, and Leon Czolgosz under the heading "Enemy or Victim? You Decide." Similarly, the anarchist Alexander Berkman is described by the sentence "He not only advocated violence--he used it," but there is no explanation of what Berkman did or why.
The sections on "Subversion," "Hate," and "Extremism" are similar in that they provide little in terms of detailed explanation of the groups or movements that they survey. In the "Extremism" section, the exhibit focuses on far right groups, although it is interesting to note that in the "Militiaman's Closet" section, the exhibit includes printouts announcing antiwar protests, despite the fact that there would be little crossover between the militia movement and the antiwar movement.
The exhibit concludes with an overly patriotic film titled "We Are Under Siege" that seeks to explain to the viewer that the United States has consistently faced attack and threats from domestic sources. The video--complete with emotional music, shots of the Statue of Liberty, and flag imagery--promotes the ideological thread that runs throughout the exhibit--that the United States is under attack from "extremists." It promotes the idea that citizens and the government of the United States must be ever vigilant and ready for an attack, which could come from essentially anywhere. The film promotes a climate of fear in which people in the United States must be ever afraid, despite the fact that a more nuanced view of the movements profiled would have given people a more sophisticated analysis of the threat posed by these groups.
