The Ontological Security Politics of US Naval Ship Museums

Abstract

This article explores the politics of United States naval warship museums. Specifically, it investigates the role of museum tour guides in re-embodying and reinforcing, but also contesting and countering, US hegemonic narratives at these popular tourist sites. To explain the politics of these sites, this article is built around three interrelated arguments. First, insights from ontological security studies illuminate identity politics at work, calling particular attention on the routines, narratives, and expertise found throughout these locations. Second, the importance of naval power and the historical narratives at work here are more nuanced than the existing scholarship in critical security studies has considered so far. While hegemonic politics and militarized narratives are embedded, often times overtly, throughout these sites, there are also endogenous tensions within them as well. Examining the role of tour guides, curators, and directors in these settings reveals a contentious politics of US identity representation. Third, we may be witnessing a generational shift in expertise happening in real time. A new generation of experts brings with them new historical sensibilities and attitudes toward the military and US hegemony writ large. We illustrate these dynamics with three short vignettes from ship museums Iowa, Missouri, and Midway.

Resumen

Este artículo estudia las políticas de los museos de buques de guerra de los Estados Unidos. En concreto, el artículo investiga el papel que juegan los guías de los museos con relación a la recreación y al refuerzo de las narrativas hegemónicas de Estados Unidos que tienen lugar en estos populares sitios turísticos, pero también con respecto a la impugnación y a la contradicción de estas. Este artículo pretende explicar las políticas que se llevan a cabo en estos museos y, para ello, se estructura en torno a tres argumentos interrelacionados. En primer lugar, las percepciones de los estudios ontológicos de seguridad arrojan luz sobre el trabajo de las políticas de identidad, prestando especial atención a las rutinas, las narrativas y las experiencias que se encuentran en estos lugares. En segundo lugar, la importancia del poder naval y de las narrativas históricas que operan en estos museos tienen más matices de los que la literatura académica existente en materia de estudios críticos de seguridad ha considerado hasta ahora. Si bien en estos museos están arraigadas tanto la política hegemónica como las narrativas militarizadas, a menudo de forma abierta, también existen tensiones endógenas en ellos. El análisis que realizamos del papel de los guías turísticos, curadores y directores en estos entornos nos revela una política polémica con relación a la representación de la identidad estadounidense. En tercer lugar, es posible que estemos presenciando en tiempo real un cambio generacional relativo a la experiencia. La nueva generación de expertos trae consigo nuevas sensibilidades históricas y actitudes hacia el ejército y la hegemonía estadounidense en general. Ilustramos estas dinámicas a través de tres breves ilustraciones de los museos navales de Iowa, Missouri y Midway.

Résumé

Cet article s'intéresse à la politique des musées de navires militaires américains. Plus précisément, il étudie le rôle des guides touristiques quand il s'agit de rejouer et de renforcer, mais aussi de mettre en question et de s'opposer aux récits d'hégémonie américaine dans ces sites touristiques populaires. Pour expliquer la politique de ces sites, cet article se construit autour de trois arguments interconnectés. D'abord, les renseignements des études de sécurité ontologique mettent en lumière la politique identitaire à l’œuvre, en s'intéressant plus particulièrement aux routines, récits et expertises que l'on retrouve en ces lieux. Ensuite, l'importance de la puissance navale et les récits historiques à l’œuvre ici sont davantage nuancés que la recherche existante en études de sécurité critiques ne l'avait jusqu'ici envisagé. Bien que la politique hégémonique et les récits militarisés soient ancrés, souvent ouvertement, dans tous ces sites, il existe aussi des tensions endogènes en leur sein. L'examen du rôle des guides touristiques, conservateurs et directeurs de ces lieux révèle une politique controversée de représentation identitaire américaine. Enfin, nous assistons peut-être actuellement à une transformation générationnelle quant à l'expertise. Une nouvelle génération d'experts amène avec elle de nouvelles sensibilités historiques et attitudes à l’égard de l'armée et de l'hégémonie américaine au sens large. Nous illustrons ces dynamiques à l'aide de trois courts exemples issus de musées de navires dans l'Iowa, au Missouri et à Midway.

Introduction

This article explores the politics of United States naval warship museums. Specifically, it investigates the role of museum tour guides in re-embodying and reinforcing, but also contesting and countering, US hegemonic narratives at these popular tourist sites. US naval ships that are turned into museums are all owned by the US Navy, which maintains control over their physical condition and suitability as museum sites. Ongoing routine maintenance and the operations of the sites themselves are, however, funded through private donations, the ticket sales of visitors, as well as some grants provided by the 1994 National Maritime Heritage Act.¹ The museums are run by non-profit groups, organized in a confederation of associations, including the Historic Naval Ships Association (HNSA), and in the US, the National Maritime Alliance. This includes ships from the Revolutionary War (the USS Constitution) through those deployed in the US War-on-Terror. As the US Naval Institute's website notes, the 164 HNSA-affiliated ships “range from massive aircraft carriers, to intimidating battleships of World War II, to small patrol boats and experimental submarines.”²

To explain the politics of these sites, this article is built around three interrelated arguments. First, insights from ontological security studies illuminate identity politics at work at these sites, calling particular attention on the routines, narratives, and expertise found throughout these locations. Second, the importance of naval power and the historical narratives at work in these ship museums are more nuanced than the existing scholarship in critical security studies has considered. While hegemonic politics and militarized narratives are embedded, often times overtly, throughout these sites, there are also endogenous tensions within them as well. Examining the role of tour guides, curators, and directors in these settings reveals a contentious politics of US identity representation. Third, we may be witnessing a generational shift in terms of the directors and guides who now narrate, or will be narrating these museums going forward. This new generation of experts brings with them new historical sensibilities and attitudes toward the military and US hegemony writ large.

The story behind warship museums and their impact on visitors seems straightforward. In fact, existing scholarship often renders them as reproducing US militarism and supremacy. For example, in Audrey Reeves’ feminist pacifist critique: “curators and memorial managers actively promote consumptive practices and use them as marketing strategies, suggesting that the affects of tourism at memorial sites can be successfully redirected towards the normalization and glamorization of liberal militarism” (2020, 10). Reeves’ is a persuasive explanation regarding the mediating role of material objects at these sites in reproducing liberal militarism, and other scholars take a similar position (e.g., Szitanyi 2015; Åse and Wendt 2021; Wegner 2024). Work on vicarious militarism more broadly, as seen, for instance, in studies by Joseph Haigh (2020; 2024), demonstrates how everyday citizens can be actively encouraged to explore their families and communities’ military history by drawing a sense of vicarious pride, sacrifice, and meaning around commemorative war sites. Thus, sites such as the USS Midway and the USS Missouri do indeed “celebrate” ultimate victory by the US in its wars and can “relax imperial anxieties” connected to the United States as a continuing hegemonic presence in global politics (Reeves 2020, 10).

And yet, we think such a conclusion overlooks some of the nuanced and complex dimensions (“ontological security politics,” as we call them), found in a deeper exploration of these naval museum sites. This includes the unique role of naval power and hegemony, and the particular pedagogical platforms of narrating ships as keys to great power “command of the sea.” With the exception of Natalie Jester's recent study (2021), and Joanna Tidy's (2015) work on veteran dissent and the military peace movement's counter-performative politics, much critical security scholarship also overlooks the “cracks” or counter-narratives present within military spaces. These are features found in the ontological security politics of the guides and directors themselves who enable controversial moments to be included in each ship's story. These narratives fit uncomfortably with a parsimonious reading that sees them as platforms for “glamorization of liberal militarism.” While Reeves acknowledges Lisle's (2016) work on military tourism, which also located spaces for resistance at these sites, there is a third possibility we explore in our concluding section. We suggest that such cracks can be interpreted in two ways—as evidence of the US military's reformed practices and occasional bouts of progressive change, or as Gramscian co-optation that serves to better legitimate US hegemony.³ Furthermore, these cracks oftentimes put “curators and memorial managers” in intense conflict with both the museums’ advisory boards and the existing right-wing narratives regarding an increasingly “woke” US military.

The fieldwork for this research included visits to three naval ship museums in 2022—the USS Midway in San Diego, the USS Iowa in Long Beach, and the USS Massachusetts within “Battleship Cove” in Fall River, Massachusetts, as well as an earlier visit to the USS Missouri at Pearl Harbor in 2005. During these visits, we also participated as observers in public guided tours.⁴ We also participated in the 2023 Council of American Maritime Museums (CAMM) conference in Astoria, Oregon, where we attended nine sessions that focused on the naval museum visitor experience and strategies for curating exhibits. Throughout these visits, we conducted a dozen informal and more formal, semi-structured interviews with guides, directors, and curators of these museums, and followed up the interviews with email exchanges.

We begin with an overview of the importance of naval power for great power status, and its role in military strategy. We then provide a quick overview of the field of ontological security studies (OSS) within International Relations. We then extract from warship museums their narrative, expertise, and routine elements, and use three short illustrations to engage the ontological security politics of these sites. We conclude with some implications for research going forward, two sets of interpretations of these politics, and for ontological security studies more broadly.

Naval Power and Supremacy

Naval power's relationship to great power status is a long-studied topic in international relations, military history, and strategic studies. It is well established that “one of the defining characteristics of a naval force is its special role in projecting power” (Gartzke and Lindsay 2020, 623). Indeed, the quickest (albeit also a costly) way towards achieving great power status has been through building up naval power (Murray 2018).

The function of ships within naval power is central, as a “principal function of warships has always been to protect one's own sea communications, that is, one's freighters and transports and the men and goods they carry” (Potter 1981, 1). Ships are important in how they fit within the broader command of the sea, which is a measure of relative strength of contending navies: “the one that is sufficiently stronger than the other enjoys freedom of action, including the ability to move its nation's army by sea, disperse to protect its commerce and come to the aid of allies” (Rubel 2015, 47). Capital ships are those that shape command of the sea, the most valuable ships that transform the relationship between a country and its ability to project power in the ocean. Alfred Thayer Mahan's work helped situate such naval strategy via three “operational rules”: (1) keep a capital fleet concentrated, (2) keep naval assets (with some exceptions) away from land, and (3) do not tie those assets to geographic features such as islands, points, and the like, so as to avoid their detectability (Rubel 2015, 49–50). For Mahan, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, “the centerpiece of naval strategy should be the battleship, which represented the material embodiment of world power status and the strength of the nation in world affairs” (Murray 2018, 149).

Which ships are capital ships, while defined at times in agreements and treaties,⁵ has changed throughout the twentieth century as technology, firepower, and strategies evolved. The British “Dreadnought Revolution,” launched with the construction of the HMS Dreadnought in 1906, ushered in a new era of ships with turbine engines and “vastly increased main armament[s] of eight to fourteen big guns” (Fairbanks Jr 1991, 246). However, leading up to and during the Second World War, as airpower became more sophisticated, and could extend operational spaces and the projection of power, battleships gave way to aircraft carriers as the most valuable ships in a capital fleet. This shift seems to have occurred most markedly in a few key, early battles of both theaters. In the European theater, the Battle of Taranto (November 1940) in the Mediterranean Sea near Puglia, involved a small British aircraft carrier with nothing more than Swordfish biplanes attacking, and destroying, half of the Italian fleet. Yet while this attack ended the “long inter-war argument among naval officers” regarding which ships were most valuable, with the aircraft carrier becoming the “dominant naval weapon of World War II,” the “US Navy did a poor job of analyzing and applying the lessons of Taranto” (O'Connor 2010, 3). The United States thus maintained, through the Pearl Harbor attack one year later,⁶ that the battleship remained the most important platform for war. It was not until the Battles of Coral Sea and Midway in 1942, in the Pacific, that the aircraft carrier would be fully acknowledged by US naval strategists as a capital ship going forward (Potter 1981, 289), a status it continued to hold throughout most, if not all, of the twentieth century.⁷

Capital ships, then, not only reflect but also reinforce and re-embody hegemony. The naval ships that we analyze in this project were either capital ships, or supported capital fleet strategies towards command of the sea. Yet justifying these expenses, and the ships’ importance for attaining great power status, had to be cultivated within the United States following its turn to naval expansion.⁸ The naval ships museums recall, in both nostalgic and aspirational narratives, different eras of US military hegemony.

Ontological Security: A Quick Overview

Much of the development of ontological security studies (OSS) in International Relations proceeded from the works of R.D. Laing (1960) and Anthony Giddens (1984; 1991), with more recent inspirations following from the psychoanalytical tradition of Jacques Lacan. Ontological security has been variedly defined as a “sense of continuity and order in events” (Giddens 1991, 243), “a strategy of managing the limits of reflexivity, death as undetermined’’ (Huysmans 1998, 242), or an “existential dimension of feeling safe in society” (Schütze 2022, 4).

Scholarship on ontological security began emerging in International Relations through McSweeney's (1999) and Huysmans’ (1998) initial references, but was more thoroughly introduced to IR in the mid-2000s (Kinnvall 2004; Mitzen 2006; Krolikowski 2008; Steele 2008) and gradually expanded throughout the 2010s (Zarakol 2010; Croft 2012; Browning and Joenniemi 2013; Subotić 2016). It has further extended and expanded in the 2020s, and it is fairly uncontroversial to say that work on ontological security in IR is now vast, providing opportunities for application across a number of “agentic” levels but also challenges to quickly summarize, let alone index and inventory comprehensively.⁹ As a research community, OSS is an approach towards understanding identity politics in IR, widely construed, from levels of the local/everyday (Croft and Vaughan-Williams 2017; Innes 2017; 2019), national (Gazit 2021), and systemic/global (Kinnvall 2006; Hom and Steele 2020; Rumelili 2020).

Ontological security as a concept has three purposes within our analysis. The first is organizational and analytical, in that three of its core referents in Giddens's structurationist approach—routines, narratives, and expertization—prove useful for understanding how trust develops in subjects and society. Routines are a practice through which agents confront anxiety to make it manageable. Experts and expertization assist and counsel individuals and groups in the construction of “healthy” forms of those routines (Giddens 1991, 31; Ejdus 2018). Narratives structure the self and groups of individuals (Kinnvall 2004; Subotić 2016), and a specific form, biographical narratives, also help organize social life through the stories individuals and groups tell about themselves to make sense of their past in the context of the present and the future. These referents provide us with a straightforward way of describing the otherwise complex subject of US naval ship museums.

Two additional strands of OSS speak to our choice to utilize ontological security as an analytical framework. One is the role of history and memory politics in the ontological security seeking of agents, including political communities. This research focus has always been present in OSS since its incorporation into IR (Steele 2008), including the role of “chosen traumas” and “glories” in political memory (Kinnvall 2004). But it has become increasingly prevalent in the past decade of scholarship (Mälksoo 2015; Subotić 2018; Donnelly and Steele 2019; Subotić 2019; Mälksoo 2021; Nakano 2021). Work on “mnemonical security,” especially, has foregrounded the practices of “securitizing memory,” or “making certain historical remembrances secure by delegitimizing or outright criminalizing others” (Mälksoo 2015, 221). With its focus on routines, narratives, and expertise, as well as “circulations of affect" of everyday settings (Solomon 2018), ontological security has already proven useful in analyses of museums and memorials (Gustafsson 2014; Mälksoo 2015; Subotić 2019), and militarism in commemorations (Wegner 2021). We extend this research by using ontological security as a lens through which to analyze, and grapple with, the politics of US naval ship museums.

Another strand of OSS deals with status politics and is thus a third reason for deploying ontological security here. This focus examines how the attaining, keeping, or regaining of status for individuals, groups, and political communities generates ontological (in)security. This strand of research has centered on great power narratives related to past, current, and future positions within the international order.¹⁰ Within this scholarship, Linus Hagström focused on “weakness” and “strength” in both US and Chinese narratives (Hagström 2021), Christopher Browning examined Brexit in the context of British ontological insecurity (Browning 2018; 2019), Jonny Hall (2022) studied presidential rhetoric on “winning” in US narratives, Catarina Kinnvall (2019) and Priya Chacko (2014) investigated India's aspirations for international “greatness,” and Subotić and Steele's study in this journal (2018) examined “winning” as a source of US ontological insecurity. Most germane to the current subject are the emphases on military and armed forces, and ontological security. This is evident in Steele's work (2019; 2022) on micropolitical expressions of US ontological (in)security vis-à-vis soldiers and veterans, Hom and Campbell's work on the “liturgy of triumph” in US narratives on the military (2022), and the importance China places on increasing its naval power as a prestige marker for attaining great power ontological security (Curtis 2016; Gilady 2018; Heritage and Lee 2020; Chavoshi and Saeidabadi 2021, chapter 3).

In what follows, we apply these insights from ontological security studies and related scholarship to the exploration of the politics of US naval ship museums.

US Naval Ship Museums

For context, we begin with a brief background on two of these ships: Battleship Iowa and the aircraft carrier, USS Midway.

USS Iowa-BB61–“Best of the Last”

The USS Iowa was part of the Iowa-class of battleships (New Jersey, Missouri, and Wisconsin) ordered on the eve of WWII and commissioned and put into action in 1943 in the North Atlantic. The Iowa is known as the “Battleship of the Presidents” because of the number of presidents who have been aboard, starting with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943, who traveled on the Iowa to the Tehran Conference. In 1944, Iowa went through the Panama Canal and served in the Pacific Theater, as a support vehicle for carrier strikes and the shelling of islands in battles throughout the rest of the war. In the last stages of the war, three of the Iowa-class battleships were mainly utilized for bombarding cities in Japan in preparation for Operation Downfall (the invasion of Japan). This was Iowa's main purpose and function in the Korean conflict as well, shelling North Korean targets and ports. The ship was decommissioned in 1958 but then recommissioned in 1984 as part of Ronald Reagan's “600-ship” strategic plan for the US Navy. Iowa was mainly deployed throughout the 1980s to the coasts of Central and South America, providing surveillance of especially Nicaragua during the US's involvement in that civil war. The ship also saw some time in the Middle East, in the Gulf of Oman, the Suez Canal, and the Persian Gulf in 1988.

In all these deployments, and across decades of wars and conflicts, the Iowa inexplicably had never lost any service members. That ended on April 19, 1989, when, off the coast of Puerto Rico, an explosion in Turret Two killed 47 crew members. We discuss this event in more detail below, but one of the effects of the explosion is that the Iowa, unlike its fellow class-battleships, the USS Wisconsin and Missouri, would not be deployed for Operation Desert Storm and was shortly thereafter decommissioned again in 1990.

The process of turning the battleship into a museum and memorial site entailed several failed attempts at fundraising throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In 2011, the US Navy approved the nonprofit Pacific Battleship Center's application for Iowa to become a museum, and the ship was shortly thereafter towed from San Francisco to Southern California, and eventually San Pedro (south of Los Angeles), where it is docked today.¹¹

Battleship Iowa (figure 1) is available to tour year-round (except holidays), 7 days a week from 10am to 4pm. Like most naval museum ships, it offers a self-guided tour as the basic general admission fee, as well as a specialized guide-led add-on tours for additional fees.

The one we took was the “Presidents Tour,” which focused on FDR's time on the ship but also included vignettes regarding the other US presidents who had visited the ship during their administrations (Reagan, George HW Bush, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden).

The self-guided tour begins with a video detailing the ship's history, and then visitors can proceed around the ship to different stations and exhibits. In addition to a mobile app that helps guide visitors on their tour, and the descriptive summaries describing each display, guides are positioned around the ship in navy blue hats, available to answer any questions they field from visitors. Guides for the ship are mainly volunteers, mostly (but not solely) veterans who have some expertise in different facets of the ship or its history. They sign up through Battleship Iowa’s website and, if selected, go through an orientation session before utilizing an online system to sign up for their hours.¹² Guides are then categorized based on their expertise and prior training. These categories include radio, finance, security, and veterans’ ambassadors.¹³

USS Midway

Named after the key 1942 battle in the Pacific theater of WWII, the USS Midway was commissioned in September 1945, part of an aircraft carrier class of the same name that also included the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt and USS Coral Sea. These carriers were designed to be larger than the Essex-class carriers and to host and launch a larger number, and size, of aircraft. The ships would be utilized for the evolving United States nuclear weapons strategy throughout the Cold War. The USS Midway saw action in the Vietnam War in the Gulf of Tonkin and supported Operation Desert Storm in early 1991. It was decommissioned in 1992, and became a museum in San Diego, California, docked in the bay within walking distance of other tourist and visitor sites near the popular Gaslamp quarter.

The museum site is massive, involving three levels of exhibits (Flight, Hanger, and Below-Decks) that include over 30 aircraft across 10 acres. The most common tour is self-guided, but with handheld audio devices that each visitor receives upon boarding the ship. The devices include guide narrations at different points throughout the ship. In her analysis of the USS Midway, Reeves (2020) focused on the ship's location and setup via its “particularly militarized character” that “spatially, visually, and aurally associates 'greatness' with the US's current large military capacities, and contemporary deployments of these capacities” (2020, 7). In the past few years, especially, the Midway has further tapped into the US cultural resonance in its explicit promotion of the Top Gun film sequel, Maverick, released in 2022.¹⁴

Routines, Expertise, and Narratives

In this section, we focus on the interpretive work of guides at these sites, and especially the routines they engage in, the expertise they possess or convey, and the narratives they impart on the visitors. In the United States, guides are most often volunteers or part-time staff who work in a museum because of a personal interest or experience with the museum's subject. The role of guides is incredibly important as they are often the only person a visitor to the museum meets during their trip (Allen and Crowley 2014). Their narration, interpretation, and curation of stories have oversized importance on a visitor's experience at the museum (Modlin Jr 2008).

Guides engage in a number of routines in order to both get a sense of their tour groups, as well as make those individuals more comfortable. At the warship museums we have visited, each guide introduces themselves, and in the (likely) event that they are a veteran, they disclose their time of service and, if they served on a different ship than the one being toured, which one that was and when. This is consistent with the research on museum guide training, which found that guides typically develop their expertise through both formal training and informal and incidental learning (Grenier 2009). The fact that many guides were veterans themselves is significant to the narrative that they share. In other museum contexts, guides chose this work specifically as a form of working through their traumatic wartime experience. For example, some Japanese-American guides work at the Japanese-American National Museum in Los Angeles and narrate the story of Japanese American WWII internment (Fox 2016). And some Holocaust survivors work as guides at various Holocaust museums around the world (Zembrzycki and High 2012).

Guide routines are usually rehearsed and do not change often (Allen and Crowley 2014). Depending on the size of a group, the guide will usually ask everyone where they are from, which can also lead to follow-up questions and/or volunteering by the visitors for why they have visited. Guides take special notice of children in their groups, chatting them up and making them aware of the other youth-friendly features of a ship museum site.¹⁵ And whether the tours are guided by a guide, or self-guided by the visitor, all ships have a sequence of numbered exhibits with arrows on the paths showing visitors where to proceed.

The expertise at work in ship museums is perhaps their most comprehensive feature. In the words of Christine Sylvester, “visitors come to museums as institutions of expert and trustworthy culture curated by professionals in their fields” (2019, 51). The displays and exhibits provide key historical dates, engineering specifications and features of the ships and their materiel, overviews of key battles during different theaters of war that the ships operated within, etc.¹⁶ The ship museums also provide outreach to local schools for field trips and, following the pandemic, virtual tours, and include a variety of educational materials on both their websites, and in some cases, their libraries and archives.¹⁷ They often host “expert lecturers” who either work for the museums or are academics at the local colleges and universities in the area, to give talks aboard the ships on different facets of its history or its technology and engineering. And the guides themselves have expertise in both the history of the ship and its engagements, as well as its engineering features.

Narratives—presented by exhibition displays and then interpreted by guides—proliferate at ship museums, illustrating in vivid detail the various levels of influence (individual, institutional, national, societal) at work in telling stories about the self and others. The ships are museums that reflect not only one period of time, but several, as well as particular ways of life that are still relevant in some ways today. As mentioned above, some of these ships are capital ships and as such are situated as crucial tools for the projection of US power in a command of the sea strategy. Yet the ships themselves provide a story of their own history with a series of events plotted into a narrative. The USS Iowa's broad and colorful history is captured by its large global map, detailing the routes and battles Iowa was in across several wars and eras, enabling for a number of visitors across generations a type of nostalgia politics not unlike the ones Lisle identified in her analysis of colonial/imperial and battlefield sites (Lisle 2016, chapters 1 and 2).

What we found in exploring US naval ship museums were different sets of expectations, even reaffirmations of existing narratives, routines, and notions of United States and individual ontological security at work. Visitors are seeking something new, perhaps, in attending these spaces: a new set of stories or vignettes that they can share with friends and loved ones when they return from their visits. But the trick is that they also seek a reinforcement as well, and if this clashes with the stories of guides, the displays or arrangements curated in the museum by experts, that tension reveals important implications about whose ontological security is or is not served in museums. But other assessments of museums and the role of guides examine how they generate different modes of emotions in visitors, rather than disrupting all visitors. Such studies still focus on the emotions, and comfort level, of some visitors over others, a centering of certain experiences over others exemplified in what Modlin et al. (2011) titled in the case of former slave plantation tours in the US South, “affective inequality.” This is an increasing possibility we return to in our conclusion as different foci for newer guides clash with the expectations of visitors.

In our experiences at these sites, there are reinforcing layers of narratives that establish these ships as crucial to US naval strategy throughout the period of US hegemony. But each ship also carries other stories within “their” story, ones that can and have contrasted with the prevailing narratives at work. We called these “cracks” earlier, and we focus on three examples of those below.

William Callaghan, the USS Missouri and Honoring a Kamikaze Pilot

The USS Missouri was the site of the formal Japanese surrender to Allied forces on September 2, 1945. The Battleship Missouri Memorial is situated perpendicular to the USS Arizona memorial (thus juxtaposing the start of the war with its termination) at Pearl Harbor. The Battleship Missouri Memorial marks the spot on the deck of the official surrender, and this specific site has been the main exhibit for visitors in the decades that the ship has served as a museum and memorial (Greenberg 2020).

Yet, as one of the four Iowa-class battleships constructed and commissioned during the Second World War, and having seen action in a number of United States conflicts throughout the twentieth century, the Missouri has a variety of additional stories to tell. One of them stems from an April 11, 1945, kamikaze attack during one of the final engagements in the Pacific, the Battle of Okinawa. A Japanese Zero plane crashed into the ship during the attack. Its bomb fell into the ocean, failing to detonate, and the plane caused minimal damage to the Missouri with no casualties amongst its crew. The pilot of the plane was killed, and his body was found in the wreckage. The crew prepared to toss the remains overboard, but the ship's Captain, William Callaghan, ordered that the pilot should have a formal military burial the next day. The body was taken to sick bay, and the following day the pilot was given a three-volley rifle salute and was sent to sea wrapped in a Japanese Rising Sun flag (“New Exhibit,” Battleship Missouri, 2015).

The decision by Captain Callaghan, who had lost his own brother, Admiral Daniel Callaghan to the Japanese in the Battle of Guadalcanal earlier in the war, generated some controversy amongst the crew. Many crewmembers were reluctant to serve in the ceremony. Ahead of a reunion on the ship in 2001 that brought together former Missouri crewmen and family members of the pilot, Setsuo Ishino, some Missouri crewmen who served on the ship still viewed the burial ceremony as a mistake. One called it “a kick in the pants,” another viewed it as “honoring somebody who was trying to kill you” (Struck 2001). It is one thing to disagree with the decision. It is another way to deny the burial ever happened, which was also some crewmembers’ reaction, as we describe below.

On the 70th anniversary of the ceremony, Battleship Missouri Memorial opened a new exhibit on the deck exploring kamikaze attacks,¹⁸ including Ishino's crash (the dents are still visible on the side of the ship). The exhibit also details Callaghan's decision to honor the fallen Japanese pilot. One subject we spoke to had been a guide on the Battleship Missouri. She recalled the palpable discomfort of many visitors with the (then) new exhibit. Some visitors expressed their concerns regarding why the burial occurred in 1945, others voiced discomfort with having any exhibit “dedicated” to kamikaze pilots. In one instance, one visitor denied that the funeral even took place, and then after acknowledging it had, denied that the flag the pilot was buried with was Japanese and not American. Despite the guide pulling up a picture of the ceremony on their phone that clearly showed the Rising Sun flag, the visitor would not relent. Eventually, the guide just moved on with the tour.¹⁹

As Susan Crane (1997) noted in an early study of museum politics, a museum “is a cultural institution where individuals’ expectations and institutional, academic intentions interact, and the result is far from a one-way street” (46). The challenge here regards expectations that often become “distorted” in Crane's words, or perhaps, in ontological security terms, disrupted. What happened here was that the ontological security routines, narratives, and expertise of museum specialists and veteran crewmembers clashed, opening a narrative crack.

Buang-Ly, Lawrence Chambers and Operation Frequent Wind

Although it had withdrawn all major combat forces from Vietnam in 1973 following the Paris Peace Accords, the United States maintained a naval presence off the coast of Vietnam through 1975. Vietnamese communist forces, in a major final offense in 1974–75 took over the rest of the country, toppling the Republic of Vietnam and its leader, Nguyen Van Thieu. The Fall of Saigon in April 1975 was the final act in the unification of the country under Vietnamese control.

Operation Frequent Wind involved the evacuation of all US personnel from Vietnam, as well as any Vietnamese allies who were considered “at risk.” The USS Midway was anchored off the coast of Vietnam to receive Air America helicopter transports from Saigon and the surrounding areas as they fell to communist control. Throughout Operation Task Force 76, so many helicopters landed on the ships, including especially the USS Midway and the other aircraft carrier in the group, USS Hancock, that a number of choppers had to be pushed overboard into the ocean to make room for subsequent landings.

This was the context for the Cessna “Bird Dog” landing on the USS Midway on April 30, 1975. A South Vietnamese Air Force officer, Major Buang-Ly, flew himself, his wife, and their five children out to the Midway. While he and his wife were strapped in, the children were in the fuselage, making an ocean landing impossible. Major Buang circled the Midway and dropped notes, which kept falling off the side of the carrier into the ocean. After attaching his last one to a gun holster for weight, the crew read the note and took it to the Captain of the ship, Lawrence Chambers. The note read, “Can you move these helicopters to the other side, I can land on your runway, I can fly 1 hour more, we have enough time to move. Please rescue me. Major Buang, Wife and 5 child.” Captain Chambers then ordered four Huey helicopters and one Chinook (over $100 million in today's value) to be pushed over into the ocean to make room for the landing (Tampa Bay Times 2015). Buang landed the plane on his third pass, slowing the flight down enough to stop 200 feet short of the end of the deck. In the words of Air Boss Vernon Jumper, who was coordinating his team on the landing area, Buang's “wife crawled out of the cockpit, baby in her arms, and they had four toddlers, and my flight deck crew just exploded in joy.”²⁰

The Hanger Deck of the USS Midway Museum includes a replica of the Bird Dog plane that Buang-Ly flew.²¹ Listening through the hand-held audio device, Stephanie Dinh narrates the story of the landing. Dinh was 15 when she and her family fled Saigon. She tells both the story of her family's escape from Saigon and of flying on a Chinook to the Midway, as well as Buang-Ly's Bird Dog landing on the carrier. The narrative is emotional, with Dinh crying while recalling the experience she had. But it is also hopeful and uplifting, as she describes how the sailors on the Midway gave up their bunks for the children on board. It concludes with how she became a guide at the USS Midway Museum to show her gratitude for the life she has had since that escape.²² Captain Chambers's decision, and his background as the first African-American naval graduate to attain flag rank (he would be promoted to Rear Admiral in 1977), is also displayed at the Midway Museum (“The Pathfinder”).²³ In a series of reunions over the past decade, Chambers has met many of the former refugees the Midway rescued in 1975.

Turret Two and Gunner's Mate Second Class Clayton Hartwig

The Iowa-class of battleships were distinguished from previous dreadnaughts by their slightly increased speed, and the increase from 14 to 16-inch guns made possible by the “escalator clause” invocation by the Allied powers following Japan's breaking of the Second London Naval treaty. The result for the Iowa-class battleships was that the main battery turrets, which included three 16-inch guns (left, center, and right), required up to 60 crewmen per turret to operate.

On April 19, 1989, there was an explosion in Turret 2, originating in the center gun, and 47 crewmen were killed. To explain how this disaster could have occurred, a number of Navy investigations took place over the course of several years. From what we know now, the most likely cause was an accident, result of the combustion of gunpowder that was packed too tightly into the gun, or “overrammed.” Yet it was the first few investigations and their media coverage, conducted first by the Navy and then with the assistance of the Naval Intelligence Service (NIS, later renamed NCIS), which generated much controversy, and a prevailing narrative regarding the explosion's cause that continues to emerge in naval ship museum contexts through this day.

The controversy centered on Gunner's Mate Second Class Clayton Hartwig, who was in charge of packing the center gun on the morning of the accident. Hartwig had indicated to his friend Kendall Truitt two years earlier that he had taken out a life insurance policy, common practice among servicemen at the time. Yet Hartwig had made Truitt, and not his own family, the beneficiary in the event of his death.²⁴ Truitt disclosed this to Hartwig's family at the memorial service following the accident, and pledged to give the money to Hartwig's parents. Once the Navy discovered this in the early stages of the investigation, Hartwig and Truitt became suspects in the explosion, with a motive being an alleged romantic relationship between the two. In the weeks following the accident, NIS extensively questioned Hartwig's family, Truitt's wife and high school friends, and Hartwig's fellow crewmen on the ship. In each case, the NIS attempted to push each subject towards disclosing Hartwig's sexuality and a romantic interest in men generally, and Truitt specifically.

As Josh Cerretti characterized it in his study of the US military's targeting of LGBTQ members (2019), “for men suspected of homosexuality, the postmortem defamation of navy sailor Clayton Hartwig … provided a vivid example of the innuendo, shaming, and homophobia of military policy and practice” (64). The first media accounts of the investigation included information provided by unnamed sources who turned out to be NIS agents. They engaged “in a parade of stereotypes about overly emotional damaged gay men who pine for the affections of straight men,” and depicted Hartwig as someone driven to suicide (Cerretti 2019, 64–65). The Navy's report was issued in September that year, and while it backed away from the accusation of a romantic relationship gone awry, it asserted that Hartwig was a troubled individual driven to suicide and thus intentionally detonated a device in the center gun, killing himself and 46 fellow crewmen.

The report was very quickly challenged by surviving crewmen, the families of the deceased, including Hartwig's family, media accounts,²⁵ and a Congressional investigation by both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. The latter resulted in reports in early 1990 that criticized the Navy's investigation, especially its conduct regarding Hartwig, and the technical tests and investigations of the explosion itself (US House 1990). Shortly thereafter, Sandia National Laboratories (within the US Department of Energy) conducted its own tests. The “drop” tests produced explosions on every occasion and, in several instances, destroyed the test mechanisms. The results of the tests led the Navy to immediately stop the use of 16-inch guns on the other Iowa-class battleships that were still in operation. Eventually, in a second investigation, the US Navy would express “regrets” to the Hartwig family and issue a report that found that the explosion was not the result of an intentional act.

When looking at the evidence and the ways in which the Navy attempted to pin the cause to an intentional act rather than the many other deep and proximate candidate causes, as well as the tests conducted by Sandia Labs, the accidental nature of the explosion emerges quite clearly. And yet, the “jilted lover” hypothesis that the Navy first issued, and some in the US media perpetuated, re-emerges at US naval ship museum sites. During the President's Tour of Battleship Iowa we joined in September 2022 in San Pedro, the now debunked story was brought up by an older visitor in this tour group. Our subsequent interview with a former tour guide revealed that not only is this story a prevalent issue at Battleship Iowa, but it is regularly brought up by visitors to other Iowa-class battleship museums where this guide worked, such as the Wisconsin (in Norfolk, where a memorial to the Iowa explosion can be found), and the USS Missouri at Pearl Harbor.

The organization that operates the museum, Pacific Battleship, has posted two videos regarding the explosion. One from 2019 is an extended lecture detailing (in often esoteric engineering terms and concepts) the analysis by both Sandia and the Navy's labs. A second, shorter video, posted in 2022, honored Turret 2 and those who perished in it. The first video presents the “institutional view” of the nonprofit museum governing body, and it sees the families of the 47 killed sailors as the primary audience. The second video is narrated by the director of the museum, who himself was serving on the USS Iowa during the 1989 explosion. The narration in both videos emphasizes that “nobody knows with certainty what happened inside the turret that day.” Both narrators state towards the end of each video that there is no evidence of intentionality, with the second video somewhat more clearly suggesting that Hartwig (who is not named) was not at fault. That narrator then focuses on their own emotional challenges in visiting Turret 2 having survived the explosion.²⁶

This equivocating message was in contrast to our own visitor experience on Battleship Iowa during that tour in September of 2022. Towards the end of the tour, the guide led their group to the memorial to the explosion, which is on the outside of Turret 2 (see figure 2).²⁷

When the provocation regarding the jilted lover hypothesis was proposed by the tour visitor, the guide quickly remarked “there was no truth to that whatsoever, that was a result of a whitewash report by a Naval Commander who was trying to do a CYA for the Navy.” At this juncture, the guide then pointed to Hartwig's name on the plaque, “they investigated his background and there was no truth to that assertion, they were looking for a scapegoat and this poor guy got the blame.” The guide then described the additional investigations conducted by the Congressional committees and Sandia laboratories. Because of their expertise regarding the battleship's guns and the powder utilized to launch the munitions, the guide then articulated in detail how the powder had to normally be handled and what, instead, may have happened leading up to and during the April 1989 exercise.

In short, what started as an opportunity to reinforce a prevailing, and marginalizing semi-“official” account, instead became a moment where a guide whose trust had been earned by a group utilized that knowledge to provide a more credible narrative. The guide's expertise, therefore, created a space for what Jack Amoureux called a “critical rationality” involving “alternative ways of thinking and acting in response to ethical challenges” (2015, 9). It is to these alternatives, and what they imply for the politics of US naval ship museums, that we now turn.

Concluding Reflections On the Politics of US Naval Ship Museums

In this concluding section, we attempt to make sense of these three illustrations found within US naval museum ships. There are at least three ways in which one might interpret the politics at work here.

The first acknowledges some problematic ontological security politics found throughout each situation, where biographical narratives collide and are never resolved. The experience of the USS Missouri guide in facing a denialist tour member begs the question of why, in a broader US biographical narrative, that detail over the national identity of the flag was so important. Whose ontological security was being disrupted by that fact? And what did the guide do when faced with an individual confronting them with “alternative facts”? They “just let it go” and moved on to the next exhibit.

Operation Frequent Wind's rendering by the Midway Museum is an attempt at a redemptive story to suture what is a defeat and source of ontological insecurity for the United States since the 1970s (Browning et al. 2021; Hall 2022, chapter 3; Subotic and Steele 2018). It helps render the United States in American exceptionalist terms—that even in defeat, the United States and especially its military can be humanitarian and magnanimous. A video by the museum “presenting” Operation Frequent Wind illustrates this. In one quote, Rear Admiral Chambers towards the end of the video reflects on his memory of the crew as they took on more and more refugees:

I saw those old bosuns down there; I thought they were the meanest, toughest guys on earth. When I saw them running around holding little babies in their hands and the compassion they showed the refugees when they came aboard, that's when I suddenly realized the American Sailor, Soldier, and Marine is just different from the rest of the world. (“USS Midway Presents Operation Frequent Wind”).

Battleship Iowa's official narrative that “nobody knows with certainty what happened” in Turret 2 avoids holding the Navy accountable for what can only be considered an immoral act of blaming someone who, because of their death, cannot speak for themselves. It also excludes the voices of the surviving sailors, like Truitt and others, who spoke out with skepticism and anger over the Navy and the NIS's treatment of Hartwig, and the smokescreen created, which obfuscated the Navy's negligence in the matter. It furthermore avoids the challenging consideration of whether it was a prudent, or necessary, decision by the Reagan administration in the early 1980s to have a “600-ship Navy” and recommission antiquated ships like the Iowa.

This critical reading is an important one, and in line with what we expected when we started investigating these sites as ones where national biographical narratives are reproduced, much like the mnemonical securitizing that happens at memorials studied by Subotić (2019), Mälksoo (2021), and others. Nor is it at odds with Reeves’ (2020) interpretation discussed earlier. Yet this critical reading is perhaps not wrong, as much as it is incomplete. It does not acknowledge the disruptive potential of the guides themselves, as well as directors and curators, and the transformations occurring at the level of maritime museums more broadly. The latter involves tensions between curators and directors, on the one hand, and the more conservative boards that consult the museums, on the other, and even further, the transformations occurring within the US military.²⁸

Thus, a second interpretation that follows from this acknowledgment of the role of the guide, is that the twenty-first century representations of each—the USS Missouri's funeral honoring an enemy Japanese pilot, the USS Midway's Bird Dog Cessna exhibit, and Battleship Iowa’s rendering of the 1989 explosion—can be read through a progressive lens. This lens would perhaps be hopeful for even some otherwise critically focused scholars. Indeed, scholarship on museums and guide training has already identified a shift in expectation of narration of historical events, a shift that follows a broader societal interest in antiracist or decolonial interpretation of the past (Benjamin and Alderman 2018; Anderson and Keenlyside 2021).

Examples we have identified point towards ways in which narratives have become more inclusive of otherwise excluded accounts, and in recognizing an ontological “other” in the process. The narratives also increasingly acknowledge the agency of those previously marginalized from the US military's biographical narratives. These could be read as counter-examples of autobiographical narratives, which are largely seen, in ontological security studies, as exclusive and marginalizing (Eberle 2019; Kazharski  2020), narratives that are “enclosed” rather than opened (Rossdale 2015). Future study as part of this research agenda will seek to center a guide's, curator's, and director's agency vis-à-vis the various institutions (national, nonprofit, military) that are invested in the naval ship museum.

For instance, the case of Buang-Ly's flight, and how it is represented at the USS Midway, is the notable example reinforcing this progressive interpretation. At the location of the Bird Dog exhibit, there is a pyramid-shaped series of descriptive panels about the Operation Frequent Wind. One, titled “From Refugee to Citizen” with an upper-right caption of “the American dream realized,” narrates specifically the experiences of children who were welcomed aboard and treated (“Midway's Crew Offers Solace for both Body and Soul”), which complements Dinh's audio description of how the crew offered their bunks to the children for the duration of their trip. The Midway crew's hospitality is therefore a fairly obvious metaphor for the United States's (admittedly self-serving and quite selective) humanitarian acceptance of refugees in the past, and perhaps a statement provoking a reckoning with how to treat refugees in the present and future. A picture at the bottom right of the panel concludes the message of “refugee to citizen” with a juxtaposed picture of the children in 1975 when on the Midway, next to a modern-day reunion group picture of them as adults.

A progressive interpretation also highlights the attention the US military's increasing diversity has gained both in an affirmative way, by liberal commentators like Paul Krugman, and in a critical and even despondent way by their right-wing counterparts (Roberts, Williams and Schilling 2023; Miller 2022). In a 2022 column, Krugman observed, “the U.S. military is sort of woke, in the sense that it is highly diverse and inclusive, encourages independent thinking and initiative on the part of junior officers and is, at the higher levels, quite intellectual” (Krugman 2022).²⁹

Another, more Gramscian-inspired interpretation of the ontological security politics at work here is that the “cracks” introduced earlier actually reinforce US ontological security precisely because they co-opt counter-narratives and others’ ontological securities in service of a more performatively “inclusive” US hegemonic subject. Such a co-optation entails reforming routines and narratives so that they are more inclusive and critically recognitive. It entails recruiting experts who are not only knowledgeable but open and even empathetic to correcting past marginalizing narratives.³⁰ Here again, the diversification of the US military has been represented in hegemonic terms. Even before the stories detailing the strength of the diverse Ukrainian army (see Slavinska 2022), Jason Lyall (2020) detailed how diverse armies fare better in war ,³¹ and Krugman in his aforementioned column succinctly captured the reasoning behind such performative supremacy: “The import of all these factors should be obvious. Modern war is like the modern economy (with an additional element of sheer terror, but still): Success depends more on skill, knowledge and openness to ideas than on muscle power” (Krugman 2022).

There is some evidence, then, that what Gramscian scholars call “trasformismo” is under way at these sites.³² One conversation with a subject (a former guide and director) disclosed how new exhibits, and demographic changes within the guide pool, may shift understandings of these ships and their depiction of US hegemony. This was also evident during presentations at the CAMM meeting in 2023, which showcased via a “Salute to Service” panel the US military as a multicultural force not only for the United States but the local communities where the naval ship museums partnered with the US Navy.³³

This leads us, finally, to the two implications our research may have for the field of Ontological Security Studies. The first regards the potential emerging co-optation of narratives. This is both a theoretical opportunity, as well as a possible political implication. Theoretically, it may open the way for sustained fusions between Gramscian IR and OSS. This might include, for instance, an OSS-focused area of International Political Economy that could draw on the move from Fordist to Post-Fordist insights highlighted in Gramsci and Gramscian scholarship. In a research community that is increasingly focused on status (Bilgic and Pilcher 2023) and hegemony (Adısönmez et al. 2023), OSS could also deepen its understanding of these concepts to explore the nuanced ways in which they relate to legitimation of authority. Politically, the possibility of co-optation suggests that it may not be enough for critical scholars and counter-movements to “refine our capacity not only to critique, but also creatively reimagine, aesthetics and affect at sites of memory,” in order to “play a more informed and proactive role in the curation of conflict” (Reeves 2020, 14). Vernaculars may savvily reposition institutional and national biographical narratives at these sites along the lines of a seemingly new value system (e.g., diversity), that at the core still only, if more “legitimately,” bolsters US exceptionalism.

This is all the more likely if one considers the changing pool of experts working in these ship museums. It has been well established that humanities and particularly history graduates have had fewer opportunities for employment in academia in the United States, and elsewhere (see Schmidt 2018; Harper 2023).³⁴ Where have all those highly educated graduates gone, and where will the current and future ones go? Our interactions with guides, directors and curators found that each of our interlocutors had a graduate degree in history, museum studies, or a related humanities field. This included a few PhDs who had gone back for a degree in Public History. The sensibilities that accompany the pool of directors and curators were, to some degree, suggested by the CAMM conference we attended, which included sessions on “Welcoming to All: Planning for an Inclusive Guest Experience” and “Collections and Reaching New Audiences.” Tracing the relationship between the graduate training this incoming generation has received, and the narratives and exhibits they integrate into naval ship museums will be a core part of our research going forward.

Second, scholars within and beyond Ontological Security Studies should continue to explore the dynamics of guide relationships with visitors in the context of a once central (Mitzen 2006; Croft 2012), but now somewhat underexplored theme within OSS—trust. Here one would monitor how trust relates to, fosters from, or is upended by experts and particular kinds of narratives. More recent work in OSS has focused on the revolt against experts and expertise (Steele and Homolar 2019), especially as a key feature of populism within late modernity. However, it may also depend on the expert, the visitor, and the narratives shared between them. We thought of this via the contrast between the relative acceptance among the guided tour group on Battleship Iowa of their guide's clarification (regarding the improper blame placed on Hartwig), and the resistance that the guide on the USS Missouri faced.³⁵ As visitors continue to tour these sites every day, it is obvious that individuals still value certain forms of everyday authority to ground their knowledge of the past and present and, in the context of naval ship museums, an aspirational future for their political communities within global politics.

Acknowledgments

This project has evolved over several years thanks to the feedback and support of a number of individuals, groups, and institutions. Previous versions were presented at the University of Gothenburg in February 2023, the New School for Social Research in April 2023, Koç University in Istanbul in October 2023, and the London School of Economics and International Relations in February 2024. The authors thank all the participants for their suggestions and feedback at these seminars, in particular Ann Towns and Lisbeth Aggestom (Gothenburg), Rafi Youatt, Orsolya Lehotai, and Lydia Nobbs (New School), Xymena Kurowska, Amir Lupovici, and Tara Zammit at the Koç conference, and Martin Bayly, Chris Brown, Chris Deacon, Jonny Hall, Elle Humphrey, and Woohyeok Seo (LSE). The authors’ research travel was supported by the Francis D. Wormuth Presidential Chair at the University of Utah and the Center for Human Rights and Democracy at Georgia State University. We especially thank all the guides, directors, curators, and staff we met at museum sites and the Council of American Maritime Museums meeting, who generously shared their time, perspectives, and insights on these ships and their curation.

Footnotes

References