No nation, particularly a democratic republic as large and diverse as ours, can survive without a common understanding of its history and values. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History was explicitly created to help preserve and communicate our shared narrative. Unfortunately, as a new White House report shows, it has failed in this mission. It has, indeed, betrayed it.
When the Smithsonian’s leaders were lobbying Congress to authorize the American History Museum in 1953, they argued that one of the “main reasons” the museum was needed was to “place before millions who visit the Nation’s Capital each year a stimulating permanent exposition that commemorates our heritage of freedom and highlights the basic elements of our way of life.” The Smithsonian’s secretary at the time, Leon Carmichael, testified to Congress that, if authorized, the museum “planned to instill in each citizen a deepened faith in our country’s destiny as champion of individual dignity and enterprise.”
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The White House’s Domestic Policy Council details in a 162-page report released on the Fourth of July that the history museum has failed to live up to this promise. “Our central finding,” the report concludes, “is that Museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”
The examples are damning. According to the report, a visitor to the National Museum of American History today will find no major exhibit dedicated to the Founding era, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the Continental Congress, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or Washington crossing the Delaware. The founders who do appear are often presented not as the men who built the republic, but chiefly through the lens of slavery, exclusion, and oppression. Benjamin Franklin, for example, is reduced in one exhibit to his “ambivalent” view of immigrants, while another exhibit on Franklin’s electrical experiments devotes a major share of its attention to the enslaved people and servants whose labor supposedly enabled his scientific work.
The same pattern appears in the museum’s treatment of the nation’s deeper cultural inheritance. The Pilgrims are framed mainly as “colonizers,” Thanksgiving is portrayed through the lens of a “National Day of Mourning,” and European settlement is described as an “unsettling” of the continent.
Christianity, which helped shape the language of natural rights, the abolitionist movement, the Civil Rights movement, and countless schools, hospitals, charities, and voluntary associations, is instead presented chiefly as an instrument of conquest, exclusion, or cultural erasure.
Some of this disgraceful and enraging stuff has been written about for decades. It is known, for example, that museum curators got together in the early 1970s to discuss how they could use the museum as a political counterweight to the election of President Richard Nixon. The Smithsonian’s tendentious presentation of America and its history has thus been exerting its malignant influence for decades.
Its Many Voices, One Nation exhibit is built on the premise that “there is no single American culture, language, or narrative.” Rather than telling the story of how many people became one nation, the exhibit pieces together examples of Americans oppressing immigrants and other groups while reducing E Pluribus Unum from a unifying civic ideal into another occasion for grievance.
The motives behind these decisions are not a secret. The museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, has been explicit about her agenda. Shortly after taking over the museum, Hartig explained that one of her roles was “connecting that research and scholarship to activism and advocacy.” In a 2020 statement after George Floyd’s death, she described the nation as founded on “the supremacy of white, landed men and the institution of chattel slavery,” adding that the museum’s job was to “reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of U.S. history.” Later, in a 2022 presentation, she said the museum was working with the other Smithsonian institutions to “dismantle” the “narrative lockdown that many of us have inherited.”
By 2024, Hartig had put the matter even more bluntly: “History as a practice,” she said, “is for me a prime tool of social justice.” She later explained that the museum needed to help people “get out of the ‘America First’ mentality,” calling that task “a big challenge” as the country approached the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. She also argued that the scope of “U.S. history,” and even the word “America” itself, should include “the entirety of the Americas, not just our part of North America.”
Hartig and her academic allies are why a growing percentage of the public, including a majority of Democrats, is no longer proud to be an American. Too many schools no longer teach about how truly revolutionary and brave our Founding Fathers were. These were not perfect men — no men are — but judging them by today’s standards is itself a historical lie. They took on an empire at immense risk to themselves, created the world’s first sustainable democratic republic, and set it on a path to becoming the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation.
The American History Museum should tell that story. It should give visitors an honest account of the nation’s triumphs and failures, and of the remarkable Americans from every walk of life who shaped its course. It should not conceal America’s sins, but neither should it treat them as the whole story or even as the main one. They should be presented as part of a larger national drama: a people struggling, sometimes failing, but again and again reaching toward the founding promises of liberty, equality, and self-government.
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Above all, it should teach the history of an American nation worthy of affection, capable of commanding loyalty, and essential to a shared historical narrative passed on to future generations. It should do so not least because it is the truth, but also because its purpose and the nation’s need is for a robust shared culture and history, not a constant diet of divisive internecine grievances.
That mission cannot be restored under leadership that sees U.S. history chiefly as a tool for activism and sabotage. The Smithsonian needs new leadership at the National Museum of American History committed to telling the whole truth about the U.S. without abandoning the story of liberty, self-government, and progress. Congress and the Smithsonian Board of Regents should insist on nothing less.
