Site Visit: Five Sullivans Iowa Veterans Museum

Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum, Waterloo, IA

Waterloo, Iowa, has a number of local museums in their downtown area. I decided to go to the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum as a site visit for this month's blog post. The "Five Sullivans" were brothers from Waterloo who joined the Navy after the bombing at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. In spite of Navy policy to break up family members from service together, they did serve together on the USS Juneau. On November 13, 1942, as part of the Battle of Guadalcanal, Japanese torpedoes sunk the Juneau and all five brothers died as a result.

More information about the Sullivan brothers

The brothers' namesake museum opened in 2008 and is dedicated to preserving the memories and experiences of Iowan soldiers stretching back to the American Civil War (since Iowa became a state in 1846). It is a large complex and has several events throughout the year.

We started down on the ground level because it was the location of the oldest things, pioneer life and the Civil War through to 1920s. Even though I had a map, the flow of the museum confused me. Should I go this way or that way around an exhibit? I ended up going in spiraling clover leaf pathway pattern that saw everything in some sort of order but did a lot of backtracking. There were lots of displays and lots of quick brief placards. High tech interactive touch screen display panels as well as old fashioned glass case displays stood only feet apart from each other, each doing their part of telling the story. There was a mock up of a WWI trench line that had a periscope built in with voice overs and combat sounds. The lower level also incorporated the home front and covered supporting military roles for combat troops, rather than just focusing on the rank-and-file soldiers. Along the back end of the museum was an exhibit on manufacturing and industry in the Cedar Valley area.

Upstairs were the exhibits on WWII to modern conflicts. The upstairs was better designed but flowed

Interactive Mock-ups

in the opposite direction of the downstairs' path of movement. There was a lot more put into this section than down below, I thought. The Second World War area had a large map with laser show overlay that described the military movements of the conflict, and mentioned the sinking of the Juneau and the Sullivans. Besides more interactive placards, recorded video presentations of veterans of the conflicts as well as military support roles and home front memories told their stories of what the war was like. The upper section had mock ups of the "Juneau" bow, a Sherman tank, a jet cockpit, and a Huey helicopter hull that allowed visitors to interact them them. Throughout the entire museum were opportunities to infrared scan a plastic dog tag and learn about how a particular ethnicity reacted to the conflict and how these reactions and involvement changed over time. The upper level ended with the modern day conflicts of Afghanistan and Iraq and raised the issues with veterans' experiences today.

We also visited two traveling exhibits, the first of which was on Mail Call. This exhibit highlighted how the military and postal services worked to improve morale, communication, and mental well-being of soldiers and how it changed over the years. It was a Smithsonian exhibit and was very well done, but I think due to space constraints had to be located in two parts on separate floors, which made it difficult for continuity's sake.The other traveling exhibit from the National Holocaust Museum was about Germany's concerns for creating a genetically superior race. It described the popularity of eugenics and policies that lead to euthanasia and other similar practiced in the 1930s-40s Germany. It was expansive and thorough and utterly depressing. It was also unfortunately the final stop on the way through the museum so it left my wife and me with bitter last thoughts before leaving. Since these were travelling exhibits that the museum hosted, I will exclude them from my analysis of the museum as a whole, but felt I needed to mention them because it was part of my experience.

Home front exhibit on the left, Civil War exhibit on the right

Since my previous site visit to the John Deere Tractor Factory last year, I have been wondering how to properly evaluate a site. The solution I chose to use was compare the museum to Freeman's six interpretive principles and visitor experience considerations. I realize this approach is flawed and probably overlooks a few other factors, but it is a framework that I choose to use, at least for now. I will be paraphrasing the principles.

Principle 1: The interpretation should be personal to the audience. Yes, the content was personal to a large extent, particularly by presenting the content in the forms of eyewitness accounts in interactive panels starting with letters. These letters were rewritten on these panels as a legible handwritten type script accompanied by the actual scanned letters. A recording of a voice actor read the letters aloud made it easier to read and would be beneficial to a person who is blind. A visitor could choose to view none, one, several, or all these options at various interpretive interactive panels using a trackball and a 'click' button. I liked those panels because you chose what you wanted to know more about. Upstairs had the addition of recorded experiences of real people recollecting their stories. This made the material less about the conflict, troop movements, and battles, and more about human stories of tragedy, trial, adversity, and humor.

Principle 2: Information is not interpretation. This museum had a lot of information.

Exhibit on the Spanish-American War. A station on learning

how to salute and whom to salute.

It was everywhere. But as far as I know they do not have interpretive staff. There were two people at the desk when we paid our tickets, but I didn't see any going around explaining their exhibits. It was all self guided. There were placards for an audio tour, but we were not informed of any audio tour at booking, so maybe we missed an opportunity. There were activities, interactive panels, tangibles and placards, but I felt that the information did not translate into interpretation. What did these things mean? How does this relate to my life if I was not a soldier? The activities were fun, challenging, and informative, but they fell just short of stimulating a response that had meaning or understanding of what this activity meant for the people who did this as a part of their lives. I would suggest that a visit to the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum is an informational visit rather than an interpretive experience.

Principle 3: Interpretation is an art, which combines many arts. Since no person was there to make an interpretive presentation, I decided to take some liberty in answering this category. I viewed the exhibits themselves as the interpreters and I decided to view the displays and presentation from an artistic point of view rather than having material explained meaningfully for this principle. The displays were easy to use, well designed, and of high quality, but gave a lot of information that simply did not interpret things for me.

Principle 4: Interpretation is not instruction but provocation. This is a hard one to determine. Was it engaging? Yes. Did it provoke me? A little. To be honest, the traveling exhibit on Eugenics provoked me more than the regular museum. I did not want to rush out and hug a veteran, join the military, join an anti-war movement, or try to do something better. It was all good information, but it did not spur me into action.

This interactive panel showed the individual troop movements 

of every Iowa regiment throughout the course of the war. A

selected regiment's movements were also documented in

relation to the larger war. So, for example, even though a

regiment was in Louisiana during the time of a major battle

elsewhere, that battle showed up on the map along with

the battle engagements that regiment took part in. Parts to a

whole.

Principle 5: Interpretation should aim to present the whole and not the part. Taking a long view of Iowa's participation in American conflicts certainly was the whole and each section presented the parts to that whole. It took those parts toward the whole of Iowan military service but I think didn't take a crucial step into conclusion or a final thought. Still, the museum addressed Iowans in military service for nearly every conflict the United States in all many aspects of military life, duties, and roles.

Principle 6. Interpretation addressed to children should not be a dilution of presentation to adults. The focus of the activities was children's participation, but a child or an adult could have used the interpretive panels. The information wasn't 'dumbed down' or made sterile by word usage, but utilized a 4th to 6th grade reading level that did not have a lot of technical jargon, acronyms, or any gory images. I think kids would enjoy themselves here.
                                
From a visitor perspective: a suggested direction of flow would have been helpful to understanding in what general order I should go to see everything. It should not be so rigid as to force the direction of people by only providing one way out, like some museums do. Discovering that there could have been an audio tour was a little disappointing, because I may have missed something important about each area. The extra areas of the museum that did not pertain to conflicts or veterans seemed out of place in a veterans museum. The history of the Rath meat packing plant? I'm all for it, but not something I was expecting to see in a veterans museum. A display case on the bone structures of a bird? Why is this here? Did I wander into a different museum? Besides these out of context, yet otherwise fine museum pieces, we both enjoyed our time.

Was it worth the price of admission? Absolutely. We could have arrived earlier and stayed later and really digested every panel and every display case, but there was so much to see we felt we had to try to see it all. So if you get a chance to come to Waterloo and see it, I think it will be worth your while.