Smithsonian American History Museum Ideologically ‘Captured’

What do you get when you cross erasure of the Founding Fathers, disdain for white Christian men, and the bourgeoisie? Why, American history, of course! At least, that’s what the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) apparently believes.

On the same day the NMAH ignored our nation’s semiquincentennial, the Trump administration’s Domestic Policy Council released a new report detailing how the museum is erasing American heritage.

Smithsonian Treachery

Amid an ongoing review of the Smithsonian Institution at the request of President Donald Trump, the Domestic Policy Council found that leadership at the NMAH “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 NMAH doesn’t have a single major exhibit on America’s Founding, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, other Founding Fathers, the Continental Congress, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or major moments of the American Revolution, according to the council’s findings.

Don’t worry, it gets worse. The Founders who are mentioned, such as Benjamin Franklin, are featured for their connections to slavery, rather than their roles in forming the United States. The Founders’ anti-slavery efforts are also “minimized or ignored.”

The museum selectively quotes the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution in order to “mute their claims about equality, ordered liberty, natural rights, and the divine source of those inalienable rights.” Materials created by the NMAH “repeatedly suggest that Christianity functioned principally as an instrument of conquest, exclusion, or cultural erasure” and ignore the faith’s role in America’s founding.

The NMAH presents the pilgrims as “colonial oppressors,” Thanksgiving as a “National Day of Mourning” and European settlement as “unsettling.” The cherry on top of this anti-American sundae: “White, male, and Christian Americans are regularly denigrated as the alleged embodiment of oppressive power structures,” the council’s report states.

Semiquincentennial ‘Problematized’

The council argues that the museum’s “ideological capture” has shifted the institution’s mission “away from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.” Nowhere was this claim clearer than in the museum’s approach to the semiquincentennial.

Documents allegedly show that NMAH leadership brazenly stated that America’s 250th birthday should be “problematized.” In social justice circles, “problematizing” is part of a process that highlights “‘oppressions’ within a given subject to ‘deconstruct,’ disqualify, and discredit the prevailing narrative on that subject.”

NMAH leadership sought to remove the “Anglo-centric” focus from America’s founding, the report stated, and the “America First mentality” from American history. They even went so far as to remove “American History” from the museum’s mission statement in an effort to “Get Out of the ‘America First’ Mentality.” Instead, leadership wants to focus on creating “a more just and compassionate future” by examining “the complexity of our past.”

You read that right. The National Museum of American History removed the phrase “American history” from its mission statement. That alone may be the clearest evidence that the institution has been ideologically captured.

Who’s In Charge?

The council found Anthea Hartig, who has been director of NMAH since 2019, previously stated that history is a “prime tool of social justice” and said that one of her responsibilities is linking “research and scholarship to activism and advocacy.” One of her alleged goals is to “reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of US history for visitors.”

She also believes, according to the report, that she had a head start in life because she was “propped up…by the cushions of whiteness and the pillows of the bourgeoisie.” Ah yes, that classic American belief about the bourgeoisie, right up there with liberty, self-government, and the pursuit of happiness. Who among us hasn’t wrestled with the “cushions of whiteness?”

The report summarized Hartig’s leadership well: “These are not the words of an objective historian, but rather those of an activist advancing an ideological agenda contradictory to the Museum’s founding purpose of fostering patriotism.”

The council asserts that “the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of American History in particular, under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic.” Maybe when Trump is done with the White House ballroom, he can get going on a true American history museum.