A Late Morning With the Smithsonian Secretary

We start with Annette Gordon-Reed. She is a Harvard University professor known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning work elucidating Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello with whom Jefferson had multiple children. Her first book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, came out in 1997. She has since published five more books, including two on Jefferson.

“She offered a new perspective on something that had been written about for 200 years,” I say. “What’s the importance of having a black woman write about Thomas Jefferson and what has that done for academia, history, general knowledge, people’s perception, things like that?”

“I would almost argue that it’s even bigger than that,” Bunch says. “The most active field in the academy has been the study of black history, for the last 30, 40 years. Most active. Some of the most innovative scholars—whether it’s Annette Gordon-Reed—they have mined data in fundamentally different ways so you’re telling different stories. You’re privileging the enslaved and you’re looking at it through the lens of women. But more importantly, they’ve been able to say: How do you better understand America through the lens of whatever you’re writing about? That’s fundamentally different because it’s saying that the stories of African Americans—the stories written by African Americans are not ancillary stories but they’re the central stories to understanding who we are, and that’s what Annette does.

“Part of the power of history is you’re always in search of new discoveries. You’re always mining and thinking about things in different ways, and you’re also fundamentally shaped by the time you live in. So [for example] you ask yourself about gender in a way that you may not have 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. I think the exciting thing about history is that it’s always changing, always morphing.”

“I guess that’s happened contemporaneously with your tenure in academia?”

“I’d say that Annette is roughly my age”—she’s six years younger—“and we had the same sort of growth as scholars. I think you’ve gone from justifying that you’re exploring black history to recognizing that it’s the best way to understand what it means to be an American. It’s a real profound transformation.”

“What was that shift like in academia? Did you have to fight for it? Were the entrenched people like, ‘Nah, that’s silly?’”

“Part of the recognition was that you had, for the first time, a larger diverse pool of scholars. So therefore, they were raising different issues, and there were fights where you had to say, ‘This is a good dissertation topic, even though you don’t think it’s a good dissertation topic.’

“But I think what has happened is that as more of the amazing work came out, whether it was John Blassingame’s work in the ’70s on slave community, that you’re beginning to see people say, ‘Wow, there are really interesting new things to look at.’ You look at the work that’s come out about slave ships—fascinating stuff. We’d never thought about that. That’s because people ask different questions. I think the best thing about scholarship is you can have scholars ask different questions and find more nuanced answers.”

“I think the best thing about scholarship is you can have scholars ask different questions and find more nuanced answers.”

“How deeply has that penetrated today?”

“Oh, I think it’s very deep. I think that while the numbers are still smaller—there aren’t a large number of African American scholars in every department, but every department has African American scholars, which they didn’t when I was going to school. I think that the ideas have permeated. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a backlash. There have been the groups that have said: You’re balkanizing American history. So there’s always that.

“But I think what is interesting to me is that the scholars that are writing about race were initially telling stories to fill the voids—things that were left out of history. Now what they’re doing is writing the grand narratives—rethinking Jefferson through the lens of Sally Hemings. In a way, you had to have that foundation work that provided the knowledge base, and now you’re having scholars being able to say, ‘Let’s write about the sweep of history through this.’ When you think of Nell Painter’s work on the history of white people—fascinating stuff which really wouldn’t have happened without generations of the sort of grounding work.”

There’s a story easily found on the internet about Bunch being a kid and going to North Carolina to visit family—his grandfather, a sharecropper-turned-dentist, moved to New Jersey in the early 1900s—and then trying to eat lunch at the local Woolworth’s luncheonette, just like he did at the Woolworth’s in Newark. Once again, someone deemed his skin color inconvenient, this time to the practicing of good capitalism, and Bunch got sent hungry on his way.

This, in part, leads us to Richmond, Va., my hometown. It’s the former capital of the doomed Confederate States of America and the home of an avenue where a few of that stillborn nation’s dead generals are venerated, their four-year sedition romanced in stone and shaped metal. Here Bunch discusses the Lost Cause, the late-19th and early 20th century movement of fabulist revisionism intended to recast slavery-fond insurrectionists as genteel victims.

“To make traitors not traitors,” Bunch clarifies. “That’s so interesting to me. … I’ve always argued that you can have every statue that you want to Confederate soldiers if you said they rebelled, they were traitors and they lost. If you said that, you could leave everything else up.”

“I actually think some of them are going to come down eventually,” I say. “They’ve even started committees to examine it.”

“I know. They’ve called me. I’ve heard about those committees. I’ve gone down. It’s going to be interesting.”

“But based on what I know about the Richmond City Council, I’m not sure it will be alacritous.”

“I think that’s absolutely right. Let’s just say that 20 years from now, we’ll still be talking about Monument Avenue.”

“But they do throw red paint on the statues pretty often now.”

“There’s always hope.”

We’re still at the round table. Bunch, wearing a coat and tie, doesn’t move much except sometimes to take off his glasses and put them back on. He does this professorially. The national fight over the razing of Confederate monuments represents a multi-decade shift in academia and museum gestalt.

“It’s important to realize that one of the differences has been the desire to tell stories, to tell narratives and not to celebrate artifacts,” Bunch says. “Then I think the second layer that’s changed during my career has been recognizing that there’s a social justice component to museums. Museums are as much about today and tomorrow as they are about yesterday. And so, you see, then that work really begins to effect great change—but it’s really relatively recent. The first major exhibition that looked at African American life at a national level was ‘Field to Factory,’ and that was in the early ’80s. So it’s not that long ago. That was the Museum of American History. … And I did a big exhibit in ’82 on blacks in the Olympics, which was a comparable thing. It was the first time you had these big exhibits, so it really has been during my career that you see these changes.”

“This may be a romanticized view of it because it’s been a long time,” I say, “but there was the early Smithsonian stuff, like treasure hunting and the British exploratory and scientific societies. This may just be movies and I may be conflating history, but was there an artifact fetish in the 1800s, early 1900s? Because you have in that age, especially with dinosaur hunters—”

“What you have is scholarship driven by artifacts as well as public interest in finding dinosaurs and finding relics. That’s really going back a long way. But so what you see, though, is there’s always been an interest in the artifact. When I started my career, the artifact was king and queen.”

“Why is that?”

“Because that was the last thing that was real. That’s the thing people came to see. That’s the thing you put in the box, and people said, ‘Oh my god, that’s wonderful!’ My notion was that I was only interested in an artifact if it was part of a mosaic—if it was an artifact, an image, a word, an idea. That was the way to tell stories. I remember even when I came to [the] American History [Museum] in the ’80s, there was a sense of Are you an artifact guy or not? And I said, ‘I’m a storyteller,’ and artifacts are crucially part of it. There were all these debates about How dare you use artifacts to illustrate?! They’re just too important to illustrate!”

“That’s a much more nuanced perspective than saying, ‘Oh, this is a thousand years old.’”

“Right.”

“Maybe that’s why it took so long to catch on. It’s not so easily explained.”

“I think it’s less than that. I think it’s the shift in the kind of people who were hired to work in museums. You had a lot of people who were artifact-trained. … Then you had social historians like me and Spencer [Crew]—a variety of people that came in. And while we learned to almost revere the artifact, we never made the artifact the center. We wanted to be able to interpret, to be able to engage. We wanted to be able to challenge. If the artifact helped us do that—great. If it didn’t, then it was just part of the illustration.”

“Do you think your background had something to do with that? I go back to the story you told about being rejected from the museum, and, you know, me, growing up as a white kid, I know what my story is.”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“I’m not saying you don’t have a story, and again, I’m broadly generalizing, but if you don’t see your story represented, I think there might be a natural inclination to want to tell it. That may not have been true if I became a museum guy. I probably would’ve been artifact-focused as well because it’s just what I’m—”

“Or, let’s say you were working in a museum in Boston. You might have wanted to tell Southern stories because the Boston museum doesn’t think of that. So we all bring the issues that we care about. For me, history is my weapon to fight for social justice. Museums, for me, were part of that ecology—to give voice to the anonymous, to make visible the invisible, but then to use that to say: Here’s the way you can understand yourself. Here is how a country has been made better by the efforts of those 100 years ago or 50 years ago. For me, I’ve always had a political agenda: to make a country better.”