times acrimonious topic in the nation’s ongoing discourse about the meaning of the war. In the early 1990s, the Smithsonian Institute’s Air and Space Museum began planning an exhibit that would use an artifact—the Enola Gay—to explore the historical context surrounding the waning days of the war in the Pacific and the decision to drop the bomb. Curators also intended to show the human consequences of the bomb by displaying stories, artifacts, and images collected by the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.28 Fearing that the museum was using the exhibit to promote a revisionist interpretation of history that dishonored the sacrifice of American veterans, the Air Force Association, the American Legion, and conservative members of Congress lobbied to have the exhibit cancelled. Eventually, the planned exhibit was replaced by a simple marker identifying the Enola Gay as the aircraft that “dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat,” and otherwise avoided nuanced discussion of the bomb’s complex historical context or, notably, any discussion of its casualties.29
From a Classroom Assignment to the Topaz Museum
The controversy over the Enola Gay exhibit demonstrates that long after the final battle of World War II was fought, a war over historical memory has continued to play out in political discourse, school textbooks, museums and historic sites, and even popular culture. And although some Americans remain reluctant to examine the darker chapters in our nation’s historical narrative—or to fully explore the deeply personal consequences of war—there has been, in recent years, a nationwide movement to create memorials or curate museum exhibits that offer a more balanced examination of human trauma and tragedy.30 The establishment of the Topaz Museum and the donation of a tiny but culturally significant artifact to the museum at Wendover Airfield has huge implications for the state and signifies that Utah, like America, is beginning to confront some of the ghosts of its past. In time, perhaps, these kinds of honest meditations on our past will lead to more informed decisions in our future.
Delta was a boomtown in the 1980s, when construction of the Intermountain Power Plant attracted workers from all parts of the United States and Sweden. The streets were packed with trucks with Los Angeles Water and Power logos on their sides. Pick-ups from Texas were just as prolific. The city had to install a stoplight to allow people on the north side of town to get to the post office without taking a five-mile detour. Another elementary school was built on the south side of town. The new trailer park was full, as were all of the motels. Naturally, the high school was crowded with students who fell into two groups: those whose families had lived in the area since 1913 or so and those who had come into town on Tuesday. Instead of just one journalism class with ten students, I had two classes with about thirty-six students. It was all the editor of the school paper and I could do to think up fresh stories to assign them. Right after homecoming, I knew I had to branch out and find stories outside of the school for them to write about. Another problem in class stemmed from the “two groups of students”— the newcomers did not like being in Delta. Too small, too boring, too far from anything. The
N O . I 8 6 V O L . I U H Q
Looking back, 1982 seems as if it were just a few blinks ago, punctuated by a whole bunch of high school graduations. Life is like that for a high school English teacher. Just when you talk a class into liking poetry, doing a little research, or laughing at lame jokes, they graduate! But sometimes, if you are lucky, you can get students interested in a bit of local history with national significance. That’s what happened in my journalism classes at a small public school, namely Delta High, in 1982, when we embarked on an oral history project about the Japanese American internment camp that was located sixteen miles outside of Delta during World War II.
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By Jane Beckwith
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