What history should our museums teach?

www.americanthinker.com

On the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a 162-page review titled Saving America’s Story, evaluating the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and concluding that the institution has moved away from its original charge through explicit choices by leadership that treat the American past primarily as material for social critique rather than as a shared inheritance worth understanding on its own terms.

The museum’s founders were clear about its purpose. In the early 1950s, Smithsonian officials told Congress that one of the main reasons for building what would become the National Museum of American History was to present “a stimulating permanent exposition that commemorates our heritage of freedom and highlights the basic elements of our way of life.” Secretary Leonard Carmichael testified in 1955 that the museum would “tell the story of American national progress” and help “cement America’s faith in the future.” Congress responded with a $36-million appropriation, a commitment now worth almost half a billion dollars adjusted for inflation. When the building opened in January 1964 as the Museum of History and Technology (renamed the National Museum of American History in 1980), President Lyndon Johnson expressed the hope that visitors, especially children, would see “the ripe fruit of America’s historical harvest” and grasp “the victory of freedom and the genius of the country.”

The recent White House review argues that this balance has been lost. It documents the absence of major exhibits devoted to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the Second Continental Congress, the Mayflower and Pilgrims, and signature events such as Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. It notes the lack of dedicated programming around Independence Day in 2025 and 2026, even as the museum remained open. These decisions represent an acknowledged pattern in which the founding era and its principal figures receive selective or marginal treatment while modern controversies regarding race and identity, gender and sexuality, immigration, and economic inequality dominate.

Museum director Anthea Hartig, who has led the institution since 2019, has been candid about the shift. In presentations and interviews, she has described history as “a prime tool of social justice” and spoken of the need to “reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of U.S. history for visitors.” She has stated that she and her colleagues must “figure out” how to “problematize” the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The museum’s own materials have echoed this approach, directing staff to connect exhibits, whatever their subject, to a set of present-day concerns that include nationalism versus globalism and climate change. The institution’s updated mission statement now emphasizes empowering visitors “to create a more just and compassionate future” rather than foregrounding the study and presentation of American history itself.

Is the only alternative to grievance-centered interpretation uncritical boosterism? The report itself says no. It calls for the museum to present the nation’s failures alongside its achievements, to document the costs of the Civil War and the long struggle against Jim Crow, and to show how Americans repeatedly appealed to founding principles to correct injustices. The disagreement is not whether difficult history belongs in a national museum. It is whether that difficult history should be presented as the dominant or defining story, or whether it should sit within a broader account that also conveys the improbable and hard fought success of a constitutional republic built on individual rights and self-government.

The Smithsonian receives more than a billion dollars in annual federal appropriations. The National Museum of American History is not a private gallery whose curators answer only to donors or professional peers. It is a trust and an instrumentality of the United States. When its leadership adopts an interpretive framework that treats the nation’s founding documents and central figures primarily as objects of deconstruction, derision, and ideological condemnation rather than as enduring sources of national identity, aspiration, and ordered liberty, the institution drifts from its congressional mandate and public trust. It ceases to function as a steward of America’s full historical inheritance and instead becomes a platform for selective critique that prioritizes present-day grievances over the complex, improbable achievement of the American experiment.”

The museum has opened a new exhibition for the semiquincentennial titled “In Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness.” It features 250 objects and explores the ideals of the Declaration across American experience. Such efforts can illuminate enduring principles and the ways Americans have contested and expanded them. They do not, however, by themselves, restore the institutional balance the White House review finds missing.

A national history museum can and should examine power, exclusion, and conflict. It can do so fairly, while still conveying that the American experiment produced unprecedented liberty and prosperity worth bequeathing to the next generation. The two tasks are not contradictory; treating them as such flattens both history and the institution’s public role.

Stewardship of a public trust does not require micromanaging individual labels or exhibits. It does require that the governing board, congressional overseers, and ultimately the taxpayers who fund the institution insist that its central purpose remain the illumination of American history rather than its systematic reframing through a single ideological lens. The White House report supplies a factual record of how far that purpose has slipped.

A nation that cannot explain its story to its children without first teaching them to hold it in contempt will eventually raise citizens who feel no obligation to preserve what they never learned to value. The museum was founded to prevent just such an outcome. Restoring its original mandate is not an act of political interference, but a restoration of public accountability. It is the first requirement of responsible public governance.

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