The United States doesn’t need a museum that apologizes for existing. That’s the real argument buried inside the White House’s new 162-page report on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and it’s one worth making loudly.
Released July 4 under the title “Saving America’s Story,” the report accuses the museum of “ideological capture” and “extreme political activism.” Strip away the bureaucratic packaging and the finding is simple: a taxpayer-funded institution built to tell the U.S.’s story has decided that story is mostly one of oppression, theft, and shame. The report says visitors will find no major exhibit dedicated to the founding era, Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the Continental Congress, or the Revolution, even as the country marks its 250th birthday. Call it a curatorial choice, not an oversight.
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I’ve spent my life around institutions that claim neutrality while practicing advocacy, and I know the tell when I see it. The report quotes museum director Anthea Hartig describing history as a “prime tool of social justice.” Nobody disputes her scholarship. But a director isn’t hired to organize a cause, she’s hired to curate a record. Once the mission shifts from teaching what happened to shaping what visitors should feel, an institution has traded history for politics.
Look at what the report flags. “Many Voices, One Nation” tells America’s story through waves of arrivals joining the peoples already here, but the exhibit leans so hard into forced removal, land seized under the Homestead Act, and the 1846 war with Mexico that it reads as a case for a country founded on stolen ground. None of that is illegitimate subject matter. Slavery happened. Indigenous nations were dispossessed, often brutally. I trace part of my own family lineage to the Algonquin, on my mother’s French-Canadian side, and I don’t need a plaque to tell me dispossession was real. A museum that leads with the wound and buries the founding has swapped balance for a verdict.
The report even flags the label on the museum’s 1840 Greenough statue of Washington, which describes “the perceived courage of the American people.” It objects to the word “perceived.” Small complaint, right kind. A caption can explain the classical iconography and still state plainly that American courage was real, not merely perceived.
Here’s my dividing line with people who want the pendulum to swing just as hard the other way, toward a sanitized founding where nobody owned another human being and nobody got pushed off their land. That’s hagiography, just as dishonest as the version the report criticizes. Victor Davis Hanson made the point better than I can: civilizations that stop teaching their founding stories with any reverence don’t become more honest. They become unmoored, and unmoored people are easy to manipulate. The fix isn’t erasing the hard chapters: it’s proportion. Tell the truth about slavery and dispossession, then tell the rest of it: the same country wrote a Constitution capable of amending itself, fought a war to end slavery, expanded suffrage, passed civil rights law, and built the most durable framework for self-government in history.
I’ve coached youth sports for years. You don’t build character in a kid by telling him he’s worthless, and you don’t build it by telling him he’s perfect. You tell him the truth about where he’s fallen short and what he’s capable of, and both truths push him forward. A nation’s civic education works the same way. Kids touring that museum should leave understanding their country did wrong and then corrected it, repeatedly, through its own constitutional design.
THE SMITHSONIAN HAS FAILED IN ITS MISSION AND MUST BE REFORMED
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch calls the report “not a fair characterization” and points to nearly 180 years of scholarship and nonpartisanship. Fine. Then open the archives, put the founding era back on the wall in proportion to its weight in the American story, and let the work speak for itself. The Smithsonian’s charter calls for independence from the federal government. That independence comes with an obligation, and trust runs both ways.
Equal rights and equal opportunity aren’t slogans here. They’re the reason immigrants from every continent still show up wanting in, not out. Saving the U.S.’s story doesn’t mean prettying it up. It means telling it straight, founding and flaws together, and trusting the public to handle the truth like adults.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
