THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MULTICULTURALISM

As you approach, you scan the long quotations from John Adams and James Smithson carved into the wall above the doors, high minded sentiments about the diffusion of knowledge. Inside there’s a music shop that advertises jazz, folk, be-bop, and blues CDs, and you shepherd the kids past in search of history.

Straight ahead through the atrium the first thing you hit is an exhibit called “American Encounters: New Mexico History,” which describes day to day life in an Indian Pueblo. There’s a display case showing what a typical dining room table in the pueblo looks like on a feast day, with bowls of food and one can each of Pepsi, Coke, and Tetley iced tea. Then you walk into something called the “Pueblo Resistance and Self-Determination Theater” where you can watch a short movie about Native American efforts to resist European invasion. The next room is called “Faith and Definance,” on the Christianization of the natives. “The Indians survived the incursion of Catholicism by Indianizing it,” one of the signs informs.

You and the kids then pass into a room called “Hispanic Resistance and Self-Determination,” where you can see a short movie about Hispanic efforts to resist American cultural hegemony. Then there is a longer section called “Tourism: Buying and Selling Culture.” A typical display declares, “They discovered and exploited human resources, the cultural practices and products of Indians and Hispanics . . . ” The final showcase in the exhibit shows a bunch of Native American crafts. On one side are the words “Destruction” and “Domination” in big letters, and on the other side are “Self-Determination” and “Survival.” Then there’s a final short movie about old cultures being threatened by commercialism.

You know you should hang around all this stuff and read all the information, but your kids seem bored, so you move along pretty quickly. The New Mexico exhibit lets out right into the display of the first ladies’ inaugural gowns. You remember this exhibit from a trip you took to the museum years ago; it’s the only thing you remember from that visit.

The exhibit has changed a bit. It is now called “First Ladies: Political Role, Public Image.” That means before you get to any gowns there are walls and walls of pictures and signs describing various first ladies. “Some joined their husbands in the political struggles of the day,” one of the signs reads, “others championed social and political causes.” The kids recognize the display on Hillary Clinton’s health care campaign, and you look over the one on Eleanor Roosevelt’s efforts on behalf of human rights. There are also displays about more obscure first ladies. The one on Grace Goodhue Coolidge and Lou Henry Hoover is called “A Subtle Feminism.”

Finally you come to the gowns. From there, a passageway leads you to “From Parlor to Politics: Women and Reform in America 1890-1925.” This exhibit is about early feminist causes such as the suffragist movement and the National Women’s Trade Union League. It opens with a movie in which an actress reads a rousing speech. “What began individually as a tingling sense of revolt against injustice has become a wide, deep sympathy of women for one another. . . . This women’s movement is as natural, as beneficial, as irresistible as the coming of spring!” The source of the speech isn’t mentioned, so you don’t know whether it’s an authentic historical document or something one of the curators wrote.

There are some rooms showing what everyday life was like for women in the period, and a display on Jane Addams’s Hull House, but you zip through this exhibit because you’re anxious to get to the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the westward expansion, and some of the other central events in American history that your kids have been asking about.

The women’s movement exhibit leads to another called “After the Revolution: Everyday Life in America 1780-1800,” which looks promising, since it at least mentions the American Revolution. The first sign introduces the display: “They were a diverse people, white, black and red, male and female. . . . For some victory meant immediate political and economic freedom. For others it did not. . . . ” The first room shows the sort of crockery and farm implements used by a typical Delaware farm family after the Revolution. The next room shows the tools that would have been used by slaves in the Chesapeake area. Then there’s a section showing the implements, such as lacrosse sticks and farm tools, that would have been used by a family in the Seneca Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. It’s in this room that you hit your first oblique reference to the U.S. Constitution: “When the American colonies sought to unite during their war with Britain, some leaders thought the [Iroquois] confederacy might serve as a model in some respects for the new American government.”

Next comes a room devoted to the everyday life of a New England merchant family (they had nicer plates) and then another on the day to day life of working people in Philadelphia. By this time your kids are not anxious to see any more farm tools and crockery. So you speed out looking for displays on the major figures whose monuments the kids have been touring — Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln.

As you move down the hall, you pass a display called “Sitting for Justice,” which features the actual counter from the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, where African American students protested segregation. This is the coolest artifact you’ve seen so far, but you move on, drawn by a large statue of Washington at the end of the hall. When you get to the statue, which, a plaque informs you, used to sit on the grounds of the Capitol building before it was moved to the Smithsonian in 1908, you turn to your left and move straight into an exhibit called “Field to Factory: African-American Migration 1915-1940.” This exhibit shows you what everyday life was like for the African Americans who migrated from the South up North in search of opportunity. You can see the implements many of these poor migrants used to do their washing. You can see what the train compartments they rode in looked like. And there are some vivid exhibits relating to segregation, including one in which you are forced to choose between two doorways, one marked white and the other marked colored. You notice everybody goes through the colored one.

You head back to the statue of Washington, still looking for the exhibit on the Father of his Country. On the other side of the statue is an exhibit called “Communities in a Changing nation: The Promise of 19th-Century America.” The sign reads, “This exhibit explores what the promise of America meant to different communities pursuing freedom, equality and abundance . . . ” There’s a room on class struggle between owners and workers, which features the everyday implements, such as sewing machines, that were used by early industrial workers. There’s a room on Jewish immigrants. There’s a room showing the farm implements and domestic furniture that were used by African-American slaves.

By now, you’ve been wandering around for an hour or so. You’ve seen almost everything on the main floor, and your kids are getting tired. At this point, they are just wandering through, not even pretending to read all the signs, or look at yet another display case of plates and carpentry tools. You figure you had better get a map to find out where the exhibits are on the subjects that most interest you. On your way over to the information desk you formulate a mental list of a few of the topics you had hoped to see addressed in a museum of American history: The exploration of the American continent by people like Columbus, Henry Hudson, and Lewis and Clark, the British colonial system, the Puritans, the role of rebels like John Adams and Patrick Henry, the American Revolution and why it was fought, the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, the lives of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton, the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the Civil War, the pioneers, Teddy Roosevelt, big city political machines and the Progressive reform movement, World War I, the rise of Broadway, Hollywood, and American popular culture, the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, Vietnam, Watergate, the Cold War.

But when you get to the map and scan it, you realize the truth about the National Museum of American History. It ignores or virtually ignores most of the major events in American history. This is a museum of multicultural grievance, which simply passes over any subject, individual, or idea, no matter how vital to American history, that does not have to do with the oppression of some ethnic outgroup or disfavored gender. If you start adding up the space devoted to different subjects, you discover the museum has allocated its space in all sorts of absurd ways. For example, up on the top floor there is a section on the armed forces. Six times more space is devoted to the internment of and prejudice against Japanese Americans than to the entire rest of World War II. There is no mention of Eisenhower, Patton, Marshall, or MacArthur, leaders who weren’t exactly incidental to American conduct of the war. Similarly, there is but one showcase devoted to World War I. And that showcase is devoted to the role of women in the war. If you judged by the national Museum of American History, men had no role in World War I. Nor would you have any idea why World War I was fought, who was on which side, or how America came to be involved.

Likewise, if you measure by display space, the culture of Puerto Rico, about which there is a separate exhibit, is vastly more important to American history than the Civil War. There are 7 showcases devoted to the war between the states. The first has a picture of John Brown. Another contains General Sheridan’s horse, Rienzi, now stuffed, but next to no information on who General Sheridan’s was, what he did in the war, why the war was fought, how it was fought, or who won it.

But the museum doesn’t distort history only in the way it allocates attention. There is also the kind of attention it pays. The curators of the American history museum are fixated on everyday life, on the conditions of the common people. Wherever you go in this museum, whatever subject is being addressed, you will see a lot of dishes and farm implements. The small World War II section shows what a barracks looked like, with authentic foot lockers, shovels, and plates. This obsessive focus on the quotidian means that the museum virtually ignores any larger issues, like what role fascism and democracy played in the war.

Similarly, the American Founders held certain ideas about government, about inalienable rights about America’s destiny. But since those ideas didn’t revolve around hoes and butter churns, they are neglected here. Hamilton and Jefferson had contrasting visions of what sort of country America should be, a debate that was not trivial, but because Hamilton and Jefferson were members of the elite, their dispute is beyond the pale. If the curators of the Smithsonian’s American history museum were asked to do an exhibit on the Book of Exodus, they would devote room after room to Israelite walking sticks and totally ignore the Ten Commandments.

The museum systematically shortchanges political history. There is a room on the top floor devoted to politics. It has an Al Smith banner, some Clinton-Gore and Bush-Quayle posters, and the two lecterns used in the 1976 presidential debates. These are the implements of campaigning. But you will not learn that some elections in America were fought over ideas. You will not learn what the major parties have stood for over the course of their histories. There is nothing in the museum to explain the evolution of national power. How did it grow? What institutions are important to it? How has power shifted from one branch of government to another? Is there such a thing as foreign affairs? These issues, part political and part intellectual history, are apparently irrelevant to the parochial concerns of the Smithsonian curators.

Their approach leaves individuals with almost no role in shaping history. The museum devotes lavish attention to ethnic communities, and sometimes an individual is mentioned as a spokesperson for a group or gender. But personal greatness is simply excluded. So while the museum devotes huge space to African-American history, it makes little or no mention of Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, or any other history-shaping individual. And if it ignores these figures, needless to say, the museum makes no effort to explain figures like Washington, Lincoln, TR, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Truman, or Reagan.

In short, anybody who came to this museum to learn about American history would find a dour and distorted view of the nation’s past. But it’s doubtful that many visitors leave with anything at all. They seem to just wander through, noticing a rake here, a printing press there. Most people’s imaginations, especially kids’, are fired by the deeds of great heroes. But there is little inspiring in that way here. Have you ever heard visitors just back from Washington say that what they really liked about their trip was the National Museum of American History?

The curators are not incompetent. Though their displays are somewhat dry–filled with lifeless showcases and endless signs that require a lot of standing around reading — there are nonetheless some effective presentations. The exhibit on the African-American migration is well put together. The bottom floor is devoted to technology, and some of the displays there, notably on the evolution of information technology, are quite interesting. The problem with the museum is narrow-mindedness. The curators are absorbed with one type of history, one multicultural dogma. Everything that doesn’t fit into that approach is simply repressed and excluded. There is no spirit of curiosity. Just a handful of consciousness-raising cliches, repeated in room after room.

This pure brand of multiculturalism has been under assault of late from both right and left. But it is here as if preserved in amber. Perhaps we should just retitle this the National Museum of Multiculturalism and keep all its exhibits intact, so that future generations can learn about an ideological fad that swept through certain circles in the late 1980s.

Or, alternatively, we could fix this museum. The National Air and Space Museum gives a straightforward account of its subject. The National Gallery of Art presents its treasures in a balanced and openminded fashion. There is no reason this museum couldn’t cover American history honestly and offer a few exciting displays illuminating the major themes of our experience.

But until visitors show they actually care how American history is presented, the museum will undoubtedly go on as it has, quietly distorting the country’s past and stifling the enthusiasm of the unsuspecting parents and kids who wander in.

David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.