Controversy Around Smithsonian's "Price Of Freedom" Exhibit

There are no uniforms for these battles, nor are the casualties particularly heavy this time around. They are certainly not the focus of attention at a new $16 million, 18,200-square-foot exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

But there are signs of scarring, if not open wounds, and they affect the impact of this permanent exhibition, which opens on Veterans Day. The exhibition is ''The Price of Freedom: Americans at War'' and is billed as this country's first comprehensive exhibition of its military history, and is a major step in the redesign of the Smithsonian.

It is astonishing that something like this has not been done before. With David Allison as its curator and Christopher Chadbourne and Associates as the designer, the exhibition is an ambitious, if flawed, chronological account of American wars, beginning with the French and Indian War and ending with the war in Iraq. There are 850 objects on view, ranging from George Washington's sword and scabbard to a restored Huey helicopter used in Vietnam.

Uniforms, furniture, documents, weapons, photographs, videos, dioramas, first-person accounts, explanatory panels and allusions to controversies all punctuate a guided narrative, which begins near an ersatz tree in which a Revolutionary-era ''tax collector'' is hanged in effigy. The chronology ends near pieces of twisted, rusted metal from the World Trade Center and a pack of ''Iraqi Most Wanted'' playing cards.

But the behind-the-scenes battles in the construction of this exhibition may have given it a split personality. These battles were over the nature of the national museum, over how American history should be portrayed, and over who gets to tell the story. These issues haunted the Smithsonian in the 1990's, in controversies over exhibitions about the atomic bomb, sweatshops, slave life and Freudian theories.

In this most recent show, could anything less be expected, given topics that include American Indian wars, the cold war, Vietnam and war in Iraq? All of these continue to spur political confrontation.

Only in this latest exhibition, the controversies may have left their mark in advance. In July, for example, Katherine Ott, the chairwoman of the American history branch of the Smithsonian Congress of Scholars, wrote the museum's management arguing that including Iraq in ''The Price of Freedom'' exhibition ''presents a partisan view of the current war and is counter to our neutral public mission.''

The Iraq display, it turns out, is careful to note that after major combat operations ''coalition units remained entangled in a controversial effort to establish an Iraqi democracy.'' Allusion to controversy becomes a substitute for explaining it.

This is a minor problem in a contemporary portion of the show, which will, no doubt, be changing. It is more of a problem when trying to make sense of historical events.

In museum controversies of the 1990's, critics feared that the exhibitions would lean too far to the left.

Before this exhibition, the fear of critics and historians was that it would lean too far right, because of its hortatory title and because the exhibition was financed with an $80 million donation from the real estate developer Kenneth E. Behring. Mr. Behring explained that he wanted to emphasize how many have paid the ''ultimate price'' for American freedom.

Accusations about Mr. Behring's undue influence on the exhibition were made (and denied), spurred partly because of a controversy over another donor's attempts to influence an exhibition.

The secretary of the Smithsonian, Lawrence M. Small, has also inspired controversy with his solicitation of corporate donors. Such debated helped lead to the creation of a Blue Ribbon Commission, which included historians, to analyze the National Museum of American History. Their report, delivered in 2002, included a withering criticism of the museum for its cramped incoherence, challenging it to remake itself as a national history museum that could begin to reflect strands of the past not on display: histories of immigration, struggles for freedom, the development of capitalism, the evolution of diversity, the influence of religion.

The issues mentioned in the commission report are almost all reflected here. Some historians, the report noted, argue that history should focus on heroic individuals; others prefer social and economic forces. Some suggest that American history should celebrate American achievements; others are more interested in failures and frailties. The commission challenged the museum to ''attend fairly to divergent frameworks.''

In this exhibition neither pole is fully present and a synthesis never fully takes place. The artifacts tend to emphasize the heroism of figures like George Washington, but there is little discussion of his achievement other than his renunciation of leadership after the war and his insistence on the civilian control of the military.

Apparently, in compensation for the show's overall de-emphasis of individual heroism, a display at its conclusion is devoted to soldiers who have won the Medal of Honor.

There is also tension about how the exhibition treats war's suffering. The close-standing formations of Revolutionary-era soldiers, it is explained, ''kept scared soldiers marching forward while those beside them exploded in blood.'' This is a bit overdone, though a display of photographs of the mutilated bodies of Civil War survivors is haunting and historically suggestive, for such wounds influenced the development of American nursing and surgery.

Perhaps because the particular lessons are ambiguous, the educational enterprise is also oddly undeveloped; it can easily swerve into pandering or pointlessness. A cake of lye soap, for example, is mounted in a cylinder, challenging young viewers to decide who would have used it in the Revolutionary War; the cylinder must be ''interactively'' turned to reveal the answer: women doing laundry.

But more important is the exhibition's difficulty in establishing proportion. World War II seems reduced to miscellaneous impressions. The exhibition is dominated by a Willys jeep and a life-size model of G.I. barracks, but also includes battle photographs, war posters, references to the Japanese internment and descriptions of strategy. Wartime leaders shrink in size. The struggle starts to seem less significant than its social results and its aftermath, even though this war, on its own, earned the exhibition's title.

Contemporary perspectives loom extraordinarily large, like the shadows from a hand held up to a flashlight. The Vietnam War, for example, is treated as one of the United States' four major military conflicts (along with the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II). That may be more because of its continuing impact on American politics than because of its long-term importance. What if it had been integrated into a longer cold war narrative about the failures and successes in that half-century conflict? Even now, a major display about the Vietnam War is just a timeline of photographs chronicling the 60's and early 70's, punctuated with postings of American troop strength in Vietnam. There is more sensation than context.

Any historical survey can be open to similar challenges, but there is a curious sense that the results are remnants of long-fought battles and compromises. By the end it is unclear just what price is being paid and what is being fought for until one hears, in a closing video, the final words of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Then, one almost wants to start again, from the beginning.