Anyone who has lost a par-ent knows the process of recapitulation and re-evaluation, which the surviving son or daughter goes through years after the mother or father has died. 

Part of our reconsideration of their lives comes from our own personal growth and experience. Sometimes it comes from new information that no one told us while Mom or Dad was alive.

A similar phenomenon lies at the heart of a dispute over a new Capital Mall memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower. The celebrated architect Frank Gehry wants to depict the World War II?general and president as “a barefoot boy” in Abilene, Kan. – a self-description Eisenhower himself once used. The Eisenhower family objects to that depiction.

Reporting this epic disagreement Tuesday in The New York Times, Robin Pogrebin writes of how our perceptions of great leaders change with the decades. For instance, “The Lincoln Memorial probably would not have included text of the Gettysburg Address had it been built in 1865, the year of Lincoln’s death, G. Martin Moeller said. At the time it wasn’t really regarded as an important speech,’ he said. Only later did it become iconic. Our attitude about specific individuals tends to change over time.'” Moeller is senior vice president and curator of the National Building Museum.

Astoria itself is a good example of how history treats people and places differently with the passage of time. McAndrew Burns, executive director of the Clatsop County Historical Society, notes that Astoria’s centennial in 1911 attracted much more national attention than our recent bicentennial. Americans 100 years ago were much more conscious of the pivotal role that Astoria had played in the nation’s westward expansion.

The current issue of Gilcrease, the Journal of the Gilcrease Museum, carries a discussion of how many times the history of the American West has been rewritten. “Unmanifesting Destiny. Unclosing the Frontier – 19th Century American Expansion Reconsidered,” is by Stephen Aron of UCLA and the Autry National Center in Los Angeles.

“The American past has been written – and rewritten – countless times,” says Aron. “But whether cast as triumph or as tragedy, these interpretations have tended to treat the course of American expansion as an inexorable force. That is unfortunate, because it deprives this history of its confusions and contingencies. Better to build from the premise that just as nothing about the future is inevitable, so, too, nothing about the past is either.”

Aron’s admonition that we should allow for confusion in our study of the American West reminds me of what Sherlock Holmes says in the Basil Rathbone film Sherlock Holmes Meets the Spider Woman. “I expect nothing,” says Holmes, “and everything.”

The difficulty with selling this thesis is that most Americans are uncomfortable with confusion or ambiguity. They prefer the certainty of the Manifest Destiny version of America’s westward expansion. As an example of that tendency, Aron describes the furor raised by The West as America, an exhibit mounted in 1991 by the National Museum of American Art. The exhibition’s ambiguity about the history of expansion caused fierce backlash from cultural conservatives in Congress. As a consequence, the Smithsonian canceled the exhibit’s national tour.

The Gilcrease Museum is about to embark on a reconsideration of how it tells the story. The Gilcrease holds the largest collection of art of the West. According to James Ronda, Gilcrease is about to close its western art galleries while its board and curators discuss how to reorganize the telling of the story. Ronda, author of Astoria and Empire, is a member of the Gilcrease Museum National Board.

The depth of the Gilcrease holdings is awesome. Illustrating Stephen Aron’s article is the mammoth Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, an allegory by Emanuel Gottlieb in which pioneers atop the Rockies view the vast western expanse. A copy of this painting fills a staircase landing in the U.S. Capitol. I?remember laying eyes on it for the first time when I was 16.

Gottlieb’s painting shouts Manifest Destiny – the notion that Americans were meant to populate the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But Professor Aron writes:?”This is not a history of manifest destiny, but of good luck.”

S.A.F.