The Smithsonian is again in President Donald Trump’s crosshairs. Last Friday, he ordered signs be posted outside the National Museum of American History falsely warning visitors that it contains inaccurate information and making them aware of the White House report “Saving America’s Story,” which smears the museum’s leadership — including its Executive Director Dr. Andrea Hartig — as radical activists with an unpatriotic, anti-white agenda.
Such signs are needed, the White House claims, “because the Museum has failed to appropriately honor the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence during this 250th anniversary year of the founding of our country.” Although Trump has been targeting the Smithsonian his entire second term (and even before then), his ordering signs disparaging the museum feels like retaliation for the White House semiquincentennial celebrations flopping.
His ordering signs disparaging the museum feels like retaliation for the White House semiquincentennial celebrations flopping.
The National Mall is a highly visible symbol of the nation that took years to transform from a chaotic site with open sewer lines, a slaughterhouse and train tracks into the open lawn flanked by the State Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. Presidents have long focused on designing the site, debated whether it should be grandiose or modest and how to expand the museums’ vast collections, but Trump is the first to demand overhauls of content and the firings of directors.
The National Museum of American History, one of the 21 museums that make up the Smithsonian, is a wildly popular stop for the 36 million tourists who visit the National Mall every year. Since it opened in 1964 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and as the Vietnam War was escalating, Americans have always debated its existence. Unlike a history book, a national history museum is meant to move us literally from one installation to the next and empathetically by making us feel something as we learn.
How the American history museum moves visitors is at the heart of Trump’s dissatisfaction with it and other Smithsonian properties such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The White House report and executive orders criticize these museums for instilling negative feelings like guilt, resentment and suspicion above patriotism. Yet the National Museum of American History says it wants to “tell the full history” of this country in the most inclusive way possible. Can national history be celebratory and accurate? Can it make us feel good and acknowledge injustices?
Trump and his MAGA supporters want to feel good when they visit the National Museum of American History but accuse it of being anti-Christian, anti-white men and anti-American. But the museum doesn’t exist to make us feel good. Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie Bunch, the first professional historian to lead the institution, says the museum exists to help us understand who we are. That’s an important distinction. Regardless of our feelings, we need to know something about how this country was founded, how it expanded and how its visions have been articulated, challenged and enacted. We might feel good about some of that but not all of it, but we ought to understand and accept it if we ever have any hopes of being happy with one another.
There is not just one approach to producing historical knowledge. The way we understand and present history changes, and this is especially true for public historians whose work happens in the museum: a unique space situated between the academy, politics, heritage and tourism. Historians have often criticized the simplified ways museums sometimes present the past for mass audiences, but they have also staunchly defended the Smithsonian as Trump pressures it to revise its content.
I have studied history museums, including those at the Smithsonian, for more than a decade.
I have studied history museums, including those at the Smithsonian, for more than a decade. The National Museum of American History is not my favorite. It is dimly lit and almost always super crowded, its content jumps from period to period and it randomly spotlights items such as Dorothy’s ruby slippers from the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz” and costumes from “Star Wars.”But the White House’s fixation with the museum has made me appreciate it more.
Some of its panels, the ones that “Saving America’s Story” call out highlight that “loving America is very complicated” because of histories of genocide, enslavement and xenophobia. It’s complicated, but not impossible. It just looks messier than the simpler celebratory narratives the White House prefers about “American Greatness” or the massive flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The museum is sort of a hodgepodge that reflects various, and often competing, political and intellectual interests, economic constraints and tourist expectations. It’s disjointed because American society is disjointed and always has been. We don’t have to pretend otherwise.
We all may want to feel good, but we don’t need simplified histories that whitewash the past. Whenever I visit the National Mall, I stop by the National Museum of African American History and Culture even if it’s just to grab lunch or check out the gift shop. It’s a neat museum, and I do feel good when I’m there, but not exactly because of any of its specific content. I feel good about the place existing and feel good being there with other interested people. It’s a public space, the sort of “third space” between work and home where we gather and encounter people we wouldn’t otherwise, even sharing an occasional laugh. This is about community and civil society not political wrangling and government regulations. The White House wants to control not just what’s on the walls but how we come together in these spaces (and maybe discourage some of us from making the trip in the first place).
Museums are not neutral — they reflect the biases of those who curate and fund them — but Americans still trust them for information about the past more than any other sources after family and friends. That’s why it’s important that academics, reporters and Democrats keep calling out the White House on its politicization of the Smithsonian. Despite what “Saving America’s Story” says, there has been no “ideological capture” at the National Museum of American History. Such ideological capture is what the White House is after.
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