Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Support independent student journalism. Support independent student journalism. Support independent student journalism.
The Dartmouth
July 21, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Sherwin may testify on 'Enola Gay'

History Professor Martin Sherwin may testify before the Senate this week on what he calls the "blatant censorship" of a Smithsonian Institution exhibit marking the 50th anniversary of America dropping the atomic bomb in Japan.

Sherwin, also the director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, has been at the forefront of the controversy over the so-called "Enola Gay" exhibit. He said he may appear before the Senate Rules Committee, chaired by Senator Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, on Thursday to talk about the exhibit.

Sherwin said the committee has been vague about the actual issues it will address.

A spokesman for Stevens said Sherwin is not currently on the witness list. The spokesman said the hearings will address procedures about how the Smithsonian will dictate the content of exhibits in the future.

"I've heard they're not interested in talking to any historians on this," Sherwin said. "It may be they'll hear one historian."

In February, the Smithsonian bowed to political pressure and canceled a planned display in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., featuring the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Under pressure from Congress and veterans, Smithsonian Secretary I. Michael Heyman '51 recommended to the Smithsonian's Board of Regents in February that the exhibit be scaled back. Also, Martin Harwit, director of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum resigned last month.

"This was blatant censorship and it was the responsibility of the director of the museum, Martin Harwit, and Secretary Heyman to oppose that censorship," Sherwin said. "Their failure to do so was a tragedy and the failure of intellectual leadership."

Frustrated by the censorship of the exhibit, Sherwin said he and fellow historian Kai Bird formed an organization called the Historians Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima.

"The purpose behind the committee is to encourage conferences, lectures, discussions of sorts on campuses and high schools so students can be exposed to a variety of views and arguments and evidence that the cancellation of the exhibit circumscribed," Sherwin said.

As part of this effort, Sherwin said he will speak at American University this July in conjunction with a course about the beginnings of the nuclear era. Also, the university will display several of the artifacts originally slated for the Smithsonian Institute.

About the same time, Dartmouth will "have a small conference on the Cold War as history," Sherwin said. "We'll bring together a group of distinguished historians who will be looking at and discussing a whole range of Cold War issues, among them the dropping of the atomic bomb."

Sherwin has published columns addressing his stance in recent issues of The Nation and Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, and the Chronicle of Higher Learning published a cover story about the controversy featuring a photograph of Sherwin.

Sherwin, a member of the Smithsonian's Historical Advisory Board that discussed the exhibit before its cancellation, said the exhibit was supposed to educate spectators about how the end of World War II influenced the nuclear age and cold war.

Its critics claimed the exhibit focused too much on American cruelty rather than Japanese aggression and showed the United States in a negative light.

Sherwin maintains the exhibit could have shown more historical evidence that the detonation of the atomic bomb was not America's only option and saving Allied lives not the only rationale in utilizing the bomb.

"It baffles me to hear from the director of the Smithsonian Institution that a memory of those who fought and died in World War II is well-served by censoring history and presenting a complex and controversial subject in a patriotically correct view," Sherwin commented.