I visited the National Museum of American History for the first time 25 years ago and was appalled. Its displays were shallow and tendentious, revealing a clear, carping anti-American bias.
Particularly memorable was an exhibit dedicated to George Washington, which scrimped on discussion of his indispensable leadership in the Revolutionary War and as president but went into detail about how many trees this environmentally unsound fellow chopped down on his Virginia farm.
A retired curator friend told me the Smithsonian Institution had been taken over by Lefties in the 1970s and that the tripe giving me the horrors was their doing.
To illuminate their thinking, he mentioned that they’d got together soon after President Richard Nixon’s reelection to discuss what they might do to counter that baneful political event, and they proceeded to add ideology to their daily work.
From then on, artifacts of genuine beauty and workmanship, such as fine American silver, were deemed elitist and removed from display, and precedence was given to bric-a-brac such as Dorothy’s red shoes from The Wizard of Oz.
This comes to mind because the public is finally waking up to the destruction of American museums, galleries, and other institutions founded to preserve our cultural patrimony. Woke barbarians are not at the gate but inside it. They have burst through and taken over as surely as they have overrun colleges and universities. For people who hate colonialism, they sure do a lot of colonizing.
Eric Gibson, the Wall Street Journal’s Arts in Review editor, wrote recently about the politicization of art galleries destroying something “precious and irreplaceable.” His headline was “When Connoisseurs Yield to Commissars.”
Connoisseurs have capitulated to bullying by commissars, also, at Montpelier, the estate of founding father James Madison. As Quin Hillyer writes, in the Washington Examiner’s magazine cover story, “James Madison’s foundation, destroyed from within,” humane and culturally serious people who documented the lives of enslaved people, as well as the owners at Montpelier, have been ousted by a gang of race hustlers.
Descendants of Montpelier’s slaves are being ignored by militant new bosses who believe the estate should “unpack and interrogate white privilege and supremacy and systemic racism.” Despite running an estate of interest to Americans because it was the home of the father of the Constitution, these ideologues disdain honoring a “dead white president and a dead white president’s Constitution.”
The coup’s particulars are at once fascinating in that they reveal a single case and drearily familiar in that they involve maneuvers in which left-wing bigots traduce and then displace decent people who were doing good and effective work.
Such dismal stories are crucial, for the public must be made to understand and care about the damage being wrought on their history. To resist the destruction, it is vital to recognize that self-avowed “termites” are working always and everywhere. Their goal is not fairness and justice nor the displacement of myth by searing truth. The aim of their undermining is, rather, to turn this great and once-self-confident nation into a tottering ruin.
