109. The Rise and Fall of Enterprise Square, USA

For the last few decades of the 20th century, if you visited Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, you could have been serenaded by a barbershop quartet of audio-animatronic portraits of America's founders, as framed on U.S. currency. This was one of the many exhibits at Enterprise Square, USA, a high-tech museum dedicated to teaching children about Free Market Economics. The museum, which found itself out of money almost before it opened, shut down in 1999.

Barrett Huddleston first encountered these exhibits as a wide-eyed elementary school student in the 1980s, mesmerized by the talking puppets, giant electronic heads, and interactive displays that taught how regulation stifled freedom. Years later, he returned as a tour guide during the museum's final days, maintaining those same animatronics with duct tape and wire cutters, and occasionally being squeezed inside the two-dollar bill to repair Thomas Jefferson.

He joins us to explore this collision of education, ideology, and visitor experience, and how the former museum shapes his own approach to teaching children today.

Cover Image: Children watch audio-animatronic portraits of America's founders, as framed on U.S. currency, sing a song about freedom. [Photograph 2012.201.B0957.0912] hosted by The Gateway to Oklahoma History

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 Buzludzha Again
• 00:46 Enterprise Square, USA
• 01:32  Barrett Huddleston
• 02:05 The Origins and Purpose of Enterprise Square
• 03:09 The Boom and Bust of Oklahoma's Economy
• 05:47 The Disney Connection and Animatronics
• 07:54 The Decline of Enterprise Square
• 11:42 Huddleston's Reflections on Education
• 13:41 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 109. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started.

Buzludzha comes up a lot on Museum Archipelago. The monument was built in 1981 to look like a futuristic flying saucer parched high on Bulgarian mountains. Every detail of the visitor experience was designed to impress, to show how Bulgarian communism was the way of the future. Once inside, visitors were treated to an immersive light show, where the mosaics of Marx and Lenin and Bulgarian partisan battles were illuminated at dramatic moments during a pre-recorded narration.

But within a year of Buzludzha welcoming its first guests, all the way across the world in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, another museum opened to promote the exact opposite message. And it even had its own flying saucer connection.

Barrett Huddleston: The framing device of the museum is you have these two alien puppets that crash down in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and they need to get fuel for their spaceship so they can go back.  I saw these animatronic puppets and I was like, oh, well this is just like Disney World, except they're talking about having to commodify their space technology so they can buy gold to put in their spaceship so they can get back to their planet or whatever.

This is Barrett Huddleston, who first visited Enterprise Square, USA as an elementary school student in the mid-1980s, and later worked there as a tour guide.

Barrett Huddleston: Hi, my name is Barrett Huddleston. I am an educational enrichment provider. I own a business called Mad Science of Central Oklahoma and Finer Arts of Oklahoma. I travel all over my state and a few others, delivering STEAM based workshops and assemblies to elementary school students. But In this instance, I also worked as a tour guide for Enterprise Square USA for over two years.

The story of Enterprise Square, USA begins in a boom, actually a few overlapping booms. In the late 1970s, oil had been found in the nearby Anadarko Basin and energy companies and money were rushing into Oklahoma City. As Sam Anderson puts it in his excellent book Boom Town, which is also where I first learned about this museum:

Excerpt from Boom Town: “Capitalism had blessed Oklahoma City, and the city wanted to express its thanks. At the height of the boom, local businessmen pooled their money to create a brand-new attraction that, even by the standards of Oklahoma City, was spectacularly strange. It was an interactive museum, a kind of secular shrine to free enterprise, designed to help local children appreciate the sanctity of capitalism.”

Barrett Huddleston:  And I think at that point in the state of Oklahoma, it was one out of every six or eight people were either directly or indirectly employed by big energy in one respect. Now it's way, way, way lower than that. And we've got a much more diversified economy. But Enterprise Square was also attached to an evangelical Christian university at a time where there was a lot of deregulation in education because of the Reagan administration. So if you were evangelical. And if you were pro laissez faire capitalism then you were definitely going to get the kind of funding that it would take from the donor class to build a museum for children that was pro free market.

Huddleston also turned me on to a different kind of boom – the baby boomer’s children were beginning to go to college around this time too. Echo booms are always more diffuse than the original boom, since people choose to have children at different times. But pretty much any college or university in the country, including Oklahoma Christian University, which hosted the museum on their campus, could expect increasing enrollment year after year no matter what they did.

Barrett Huddleston:  Enterprise Square opened in 1982, and I believe as early as first, second, or third grade, school trips were being taken there, and I must have been about seven or eight years old. So much of my childhood education was, sort of, that curriculum that was created between the Great Society and the Reagan administration. So a lot of the education that I got as hand me down education from the previous generation was very pro regulation, very pro safe market approaches, et cetera, et cetera.

And I think that by the time that Enterprise Square came along, it was like, well no, we need to, we need to unlearn what these kids have learned in school and then retrain them about how bad regulation can be and how wonderful a free market can be and how they need to really pay attention to the weather forecast if they're going to make their own lemonade stands and that kind of thing.

And it’s clear from the contemporary news coverage, like this one from Action 4 in Oklahoma City, that Enterprise Square, USA represented something different.

Contemporary News Coverage: This is the first group to tour the nation's only museum devoted solely to free enterprise. The 15 million Enterprise Square, USA has been six years in the making. Every penny and minute of time spent shows up in a big way on the inside. It's an economic learning experience. And with a touch of animation. It's Disneyland in a classroom. But there’s more.  These digital readouts update all sorts of nationwide figures, minute by minute, on employment, taxes, traffic deaths, and so on. Dan Slocum, Action 4 at Enterprise Square.

Disney comes up a lot in these discussions about Enterprise Square, USA. Epcot, Disney’s second park in Florida, opened just one month before Enterprise Square in October 1982.

Barrett Huddleston: I think at that point, one of the mechanics that designed Enterprise Square was an Imagineer from Epcot Center.

Even the museum’s name evokes “Main Street, USA”, a Disney themed area that’s an amalgamation of feelings or memory or history rather than a specific place. In the late 1950s, eyeing expansion of his Disneyland park, Walt Disney developed -- but never built -- a spur off of Main Street, USA that was to be called Edison Square, dedicated to all things progress and industry. It’s hard not to see the connection.

Another connection is the audio-animatronics. Reading from Boom Town again:

Excerpt from Boom Town: “Next to the world's largest cash register, four enormous paper bills hung on the wall, and their giant Founding Father heads sang a barbershop quartet about freedom, the animatronic faces jerking around like figures in a Chuck E. Cheese band.”

[Singing barbershop quartet]

Barrett Huddleston:  You've got a barbershop quartet of sort of the hall of president's heads of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, singing about freedom, freedom, freedom.  they're inside the paper currency. It's hollowed out. When I was, and. a tour guide. I remember on several occasions Thomas Jefferson had a tendency to just break down by that time because it had been 15 or 20 years. So because I was the smallest tour guide, they would remove his head and shove me through his 2 bill and have me get back there with a pair of needle nose pliers.

Ian Elsner: Oh my god.

Barrett Huddleston: Cut the blue wire so that Thomas Jefferson could sing about freedom again. Yeah

Ian Elsner: That's amazing. I thought they were going to say they replaced the animatronic with you.

The reason why these animatronics were in such rough shape has to do with the opposite of the boom: the bust. Even by the time Enterprise Square opened in November 1982, the bust had already begun. That July, one of Oklahoma's major banks collapsed.

Barrett Huddleston:   Because of either oil sanctions or deregulation of oil in the Middle East. So all of our petroleum business in the state kind of went belly up. And after spending five years and I don't know how many millions of dollars putting Enterprise Square together, the museum suddenly kind of found itself in a situation where nobody could afford to go there.

And the university that had established it really couldn't afford to keep it up.

The museum that was meant to celebrate capitalism's triumph found itself out of money almost from the jump. Enterprise Square, USA was kept in its original form, with only a few small changes to the exhibits, until it finally closed in 1999. In that way, it outlived Buzludzha, which became a ruin when the Bulgarian communist government collapsed in 1989.

Barrett Huddleston:   And it wasn't just that they weren't changed, but that they weren't maintained. So it was constantly putting duct tape on top of band aids, on top of string, you know, to get things to work. And by the end, we were having to manually change all of the statistics every day in the hall of statistics because, for example, the population rate was actually growing greater than what it said on the little ticker, uh, in the United States.

It would add a person about every six seconds, and I think by the time that I was a tour guide, a person was being born about every four and a half seconds or something like that or

It was during the last two years of operation that Huddleston started working at the museum.

Barrett Huddleston: It was a work study position, and as far as work study positions go, you know, you weren't scrubbing toilets. it was, It's very rare that a school group would come in, so really you were just sitting behind a desk and reading Stephen King novels. I would say that on average, I had a two or three hour shift every day, and I would say I had about three tours that I would give every day. And my specialty was the donut shop, uh, because I could play off of the,animatronic donut shop ro donut shop robot pretty well.

Ian Elsner: So this was the supply and demand donut shop?

Barrett Huddleston: you go into the donut shop, it's just a series of small desks in which you're pressing buttons. It's kind of a lot like who wants to be a millionaire, you know, where you, you press buttons and all of the information that the audience presses goes up on this big board. If you're the tour guide, you're asking them questions about, you know, how many donuts should we make? You know, sugar costs this much and milk is costing this much, you know, we want to get this much profit. And then this robot comes out with a little chef's hat and he's about an eight foot robot. His name's doc. And you. You have a script in front of you, but, you know, after about four or five times, you memorize the script just out of habit. And, uh, you talk to Doc, Doc talks to you.

What do you remember about the way visitors reacted?

Barrett Huddleston:  There was definitely an age threshold. Like, if you were under 9 years old. Man, this is great. You know, there's talking puppets and I shot a turkey with a dollar bill and, you know, like that kind of stuff because, you know, it's, it's like Chuck E. Cheese and it's a day off from school. But if you were older than that, and I should say that. All of the students at Oklahoma Christian got quote unquote free admission to Enterprise Square. So, you know, if you're a kid who's being sent to Enterprise Square because you're in a freshman level business econ class, you can imagine [laughter].

For Huddleston, his time maintaining talking presidents and bantering with robot chefs has influenced how he thinks about education and authority. Today, Huddleston works as an educational enrichment provider, running workshops for elementary school students.

Barrett Huddleston: My character name is called Professor Bungle Botch, and my shtick is that I do everything wrong so that the kids catch me and go, 'That's not right!  You're about to light something on fire. And so, I think that that probably began gestating as part of that disillusionment of, I want the kids to think as critically as possible. I want the kids to think as critically as possible. If they are put in front of an adult and suddenly they realize this adult doesn't know what they're doing, we might be in trouble. Not only does it make it more engaging for them, but now they've learned that they can do this with every adult.

This inversion of authority feels particularly pointed given Enterprise Square's conviction in its message. But as my mother, who grew up in communist Bulgaria, often reminds me: people are pretty good at filtering through propaganda—particularly when it feels like propaganda.

Barrett Huddleston: The smell test for me is always, are you expecting everybody to have an identical response to this? I think critical thinking begins with—and maybe that's why Brecht talks about alienation so much—is that if I'm performing, if I'm mad, then the audience is glad. If I'm glad, then they're afraid because I'm about to do something dangerous that I don't know what I'm doing.

Today, both Enterprise Square and Buzludzha stand empty - twin monuments to competing economic visions. Where one used mosaics of Marx and Lenin to show the inevitable march of communism, the other used singing founding fathers to celebrate free market capitalism. Each was proud to share their simplified vision of the world outside their walls, and confidently used the latest in visitor experience design to deliver it. I'm willing to bet that the builders of each never came across the other except in their own imaginations.