In 2021, a poll showed that only one-third (36%) of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 were “very” proud to be Americans. Another third stated they were only slightly or not at all proud of their country. Ten years earlier, Pew Research anticipated the trend when it noted that the rate of Millennials who called themselves “very patriotic” fell from 80% in 2003 to 70% in 2011.
Part of a national museum’s job is to prevent that outcome. Preserving the historical truth is a high purpose, but so is instilling the sentiment of gratitude. America’s museums can and should do both.
Instead, as of this writing, if you visit the home page of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, the very first exhibit you see is the Greensboro lunch counter from the famous sit-in of 65 years ago. The text introducing the exhibit gives visitors to the site the first fact they are to learn about the American past: “Racial segregation was still legal in the United States on February 1, 1960.”
The curators could have chosen something else as a first impression—a triumphant fact, not a guilty one. They could have highlighted America’s victory in the Cold War or the religious freedom and economic opportunity that drew the Puritans from England, the Irish during the famine of the 1840s, and Jews from Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century. Or they could have showcased the founding documents themselves, which have inspired Democratic reformers worldwide for 250 years. But they didn’t.
Beneath the photo of the lunch counter are three other objects chosen from the Smithsonian’s collections. One is the table on which women at Seneca Falls drafted a declaration of rights in 1848. The second is the 1861 badge of a member of a volunteer African American firefighting company in Charleston, South Carolina. The third is a sign for a community center in Washington, D.C., founded in 1988 to serve pregnant Latina immigrants. The needy, the ones battling for rights and freedom, women, and minorities: the theme is clear. American history is a tale of the identity-oppressed struggling to overcome their oppression.
Again, this is what the curators select as their introduction to the institution—and to America. They have a knack for creating accusatory first impressions. If you enter the museum building from the Mall side and pass through security, immediately to your right is a huge display window with a red banner behind it: “Fight the Virus, NOT the People.” Two lines of Cantonese script run below it. Above the banner are small signs in red and white that command, “STOP Asian Hate,” “STOP Racism,” “We Want Justice,” and “STOP Asian Bashing.”
The banner comes from a movement in San Francisco’s Chinatown after the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020, which led to the community “being shunned, even targeted,” according to the accompanying text. The curators go on to regret that “Asian Americans have been subject to racist scapegoating and violence so often in the past.” Visitors from far and wide get the message as they pause in the lobby, often with kids in tow, and orient themselves to the collection: America is a place of racial danger. Even in a city as prosperous and liberal as San Francisco, Asian Americans are not safe. The story told by the display is that their shaky status in a racist polity has produced a poignant plea we should all remember. “Stop the Hate!”
This is an ongoing trend. The Smithsonian’s National Youth Summit topic for 2020 was “Teen Resistance to Systemic Racism.” For 2021, it was “Gender Equity.” The museum’s education page has a “Becoming Us” resource that offers teachers case studies and lesson plans to foster “a more accurate and inclusive migration and immigration narrative.” Until recently, we are to assume, the narrative of immigration has been narrow and distorted. Becoming Us is a correction. Among the “Key Concepts” students should absorb are:
It’s a characteristically tendentious layout: arguments about security, for instance, are employed for many other reasons besides the persecution of disfavored demographic groups. A large exhibit gives visitors further reminders of American injustice. The entrance to the section on the Revolutionary War features a 1774 quotation from a freed black writer addressed to advocates of independence: “I need not point out the absurdity of your exertions for liberty, while you have slaves in your house.” A few feet away, we learn that we shouldn’t celebrate the success of the Founding too much since “the Revolutionary promise was unclear. Women had few political rights, and girls’ education, when available, focused on domestic and social skills like needlework and dancing.” There follows much more material on slavery before we turn to religion in the 19th century.
Although the United States had extraordinary religious diversity and freedom relative to other nations in 1850, we fell short again according to a note on “Religious and Utopian Communities on the Mississippi.” It says, “Though the United States promised freedoms, those who practiced different religions and ways of life were not always accepted.” The examples cited are Mormons and the Icarians, a group of European utopians. Then come the black, Japanese American, and Mexican veterans, returning from war and “fighting for respect” at home. The Chinese were harassed in Chicago. The Mexicans were attacked in Los Angeles (ironically titled “Los Angeles–City of Promise”). And so on.
Miracle on Pennsylvania Avenue
There can be no doubt that the Trump Administration has good reason to review the Smithsonian’s federal funding, critique its ideological agenda, and put pressure on it to change its ways. The Museum of American History has some wonderful installations, such as those showcasing actual battle conditions for American soldiers and the dresses of First Ladies. But the identity tales are far too many, the resentment far too thick. The curators can’t even report on the stunning success of the Broadway show Hamilton without an acerbic, identitarian edge: “Through rap and hip-hop—and non-white casting—Hamilton made this history accessible and relatable to audiences of color and gave more people a sense of ownership of American history.”
Becoming Us speaks of a better “narrative,” which is clearly a counter-narrative to American exceptionalism and American greatness, a story of broken promises, unequal rights, and too many white men. Despite the term “narrative,” the curators clearly consider it the indisputable truth. However they may protest, they’re not really relativists—they’re realists.
The spread of woke historiography in the public sphere is a 21st-century phenomenon, but if you’ve been in academia you experienced it long before Black Lives Matter came along. I watched the slow occupation of the humanities during the ’80s and ’90s, as the WWII generation of professors retired and young ones took their place with an utterly different conception of what academic labor should be and do. In a word, they added social change to disciplinary duties. Officials in the museum and library world did the same, and they guard their positions today with zeal. There is no debating these people. You can’t interact with those who think you’re lying. If you suggest a more positive vision of the American past, they peg you as an apologist, a chauvinist, or worse. They attribute selfish motives to you; they don’t believe you or trust your facts. Disagree with them and you get a condescending sneer. These are the people who have seized our cultural and educational institutions, and they’re not going to let go just because you have persuasive evidence.
Of course, a national museum can’t operate this way. It has an obligation to represent the country in an honest but appreciative light. Visitors to the Smithsonian should leave the building with warm feelings of pride, thankfulness, and patriotism. Less victimhood, with its unsettling mix of resentment and sentimentality, more heroism and celebration. The overall approach to America should be exactly what President Trump laid out in his July 4, 2020 speech at Mt. Rushmore. At the very words “Fourth of July,” he said, “every American heart should swell with pride.”
Trump positioned 1776 as the continuation of “thousands of years of Western civilization” and set his sights on an “unstoppable march of freedom” from that year forward. He cited the violence and vandalism of that dark summer and tied it to “years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions.” He elaborated:
Our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains…all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified.
The president’s response to those trends wasn’t a counter-critique. It was a barrage of counter-examples: the leadership of George Washington, the brilliance of Jefferson, the convictions of Lincoln, the courage of Teddy Roosevelt, our Judeo-Christian principles, the uplifting message of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Wright brothers, Clara Barton, the Hoover Dam, the Manhattan skyline, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Irving Berlin, Ella Fitzgerald, the Ford F-150. These are the proper ingredients of the Smithsonian collections, placed up front where they belong.
Again, parts of the Museum of American History showcase some of those very American idols. But others downplay or dismiss them. The museum’s installations and web pages are a lighter version of the woke lessons that you hear in American Studies classrooms in higher education and find in social studies learning standards in blue states. They aren’t outright anti-American—they are only critical of “greatness” and “exceptionalism.” But that’s enough to justify action.
“Americans must never lose sight of this miraculous story,” Trump concluded at Mt. Rushmore. The presentation by the museum is designed to obscure and diminish that miraculous side of things.
A nation cannot thrive if its citizens have no civic pride and patriotic devotion. They won’t defend its borders or work for the national interest. A guilty past weakens the present. People want to believe that their home is a joyful, virtuous place. The shadow of a shameful heritage blunts their confidence. They’re in a culture war without sufficient arms. It is not too cynical to think that this is one intention of the curators.
National museums have a noble purpose, one parallel to that of the military. Soldiers maintain our security; curators maintain our patrimony. If the president manages to orient the Smithsonian to American greatness, academics and journalists as well as scholarly associations will grumble and condemn. Charges of whitesplaining, bigotry, propaganda, racism, and xenophobia will follow. So what—just do it—the people will cheer.