You can sort of tell the White House’s Domestic Policy Council knew it had a dud when it released its condemnation of the National Museum of American History over a holiday weekend. “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage” is a failure even when judged against the standards of the genre. It lacks the bitchy grandeur of a Joseph Epstein hit piece and the wacky verve of a Donald Wildmon sermon. More fundamentally, the report doesn’t have the goods. It’s the fruit of a “monthslong investigation,” according to the executive summary, but like much of President Donald Trump’s commemoration of the nation’s semiquincentennial—the blue sealant peeling from the $15 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool, that hunk of the Freedom 250 stage that fell and nearly killed rehearsing dancers on the National Mall—it’s a work of shoddy craftsmanship.
Happily for the report’s authors, it was nearly impossible in the immediate aftermath of the report’s release to check its findings against the reality of the museum itself. It took me nearly an hour after I got off the subway on July 6 to get inside the building because Trump’s Great American State Fair, it turns out, runs through July 10. Not that many people were making their way into it, but the Mall itself was surrounded by fencing and Army trucks—this state fair looks more like an internment camp—and National Guard personnel patrolling the perimeter gave contradictory information about how to get around it.
When finally I staggered into the National Museum of American History, I remembered my mixed feelings about the place. These objections have nothing to do with any evangelical leftism that the White House claims to have found there. Rather, I can’t square the museum’s mishmash of genuinely stirring artifacts (the Star-Spangled Banner, Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, the short-handled hoe that wrecked the backs of generations of California farmworkers until Cesar Chavez got it banned) with its pop-culture kitsch (Judy Garland’s ruby slippers, R2DT from Star Wars). The latter items really belong in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles or the Paley Center for Media in New York (though let’s keep Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet). Plus there’s all those terminally boring First Lady gowns. For as long as I can remember, NMAH has been over-anxiousness to please the masses. The masses are not pleased by lefty virtue-signaling, so you won’t find much there.
Reading the White House report, one realizes as early as Page 2 that the authors’ evidence-gathering will fall short. The sentence announcing this is: “One of the most significant findings in this report concerns what is missing.” No self-respecting polemicist ever begins this way; you save the null-set argument for last, after you’ve flattened your opposition with devastating particulars. In this philippic, though, “what’s missing” is the very first item listed under the heading, “Key Findings.” You can practically hear Domestic Policy Council director Vince Haley—a former speechwriter to Newt Gingrich—shout from his rostrum, “I got nothing.”
What exactly “is missing” from the National Museum of American History? The Founding Fathers! The report explains:
[A] visitor to the Museum today will find no major exhibit dedicated to America’s Founding era, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, other Founding Fathers, the Continental Congress, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or major moments of the American Revolution, such as Washington’s crossing of the Delaware.
I’m going to spend the rest of this essay demonstrating how very untrue that is.
As we enter NMAH the very first thing to catch our eye is a monumental Horatio Greenough statue of a bare-chested and toga-clad George Washington. The work’s homoeroticism embarrassed many people at its unveiling at the U.S. Capitol in 1841 (Charles Bullfinch: “I fear this statue will only give the idea of entering or leaving a bath”), prompting its eventual removal to the Smithsonian. But Haley and his coauthors know that a bathhouse-dwelling George Washington can’t be blamed on today’s LGBTQ lobby, so they leave Greenough alone.
Instead, the White House gripes about a “didactic” (i.e., a text panel accompanying an artwork; I thought Haley was being snide but that’s what museums actually call these) describing a frieze on Washington’s chair that shows Hercules battling a snake. This symbolizes, the didactic says, “the perceived courage of the American people.” If you can’t see what’s wrong with that phrasing, congratulate yourself for being sane. The offending word is “perceived.” Such distancing, the report complains, “refuses to affirm the exceptional courage of the American people.”
Are the American people courageous? Some are, certainly. But to me, the great revelation over the past 18 months has been discovering how many of our leaders are not.
When the first thing you see on entering the National Museum of American History is a gigantic half-naked George Washington, in what sense does that give short shrift to the Founders? Well, Haley might reply, a statue is not a “major exhibit.” So let’s step around our first president and enter “American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith,” an exhibit on permanent display since 2017. “More than just waging a war of independence, American revolutionaries took a great leap of faith,” reads a wall text, “and established a new government based on the sovereignty of the people. It was truly a radical idea that entrusted the power of the nation not in a monarchy but in its citizens. Each generation since continues to question how to form ‘a more perfect union’ around this radical idea.”
Inside the exhibit, what I first notice is an original copy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Okay, Paine’s not the right’s favorite Founder (too left), but they like Thomas Jefferson, right? Here’s a handsome reproduction of Jefferson’s portable desk (the real one is on loan to the Smithsonian Castle, across the once-traversable National Mall), which (of course) Jefferson designed himself. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence on that desk. And here’s a print of the Declaration of Independence made from a copper-plate facsimile commissioned in 1823 by John Quincy Adams, when he was secretary of state. And here’s the document box that George Washington used at the Constitutional Convention, which may be the single most exciting object in NMAH’s collection. Incidentally, I see here no didactics that tattle on Washington for being an enslaver (though probably there’s one someplace around here because—sorry Parson Weems—he was). What I see instead is the following, which I quote in its entirety:
“Father of His Country”
Admired in his time for courage, integrity, and leadership, George Washington became an icon after his death—a man to be emulated and venerated in monuments, celebrations, and epic stories, both real and myth. While Washington can seem a distant figure to 21st-century Americans, and modern scholarship focuses on the fallible man rather than the marble hero, his image is still used for inspiration, patriotism, and commercial gain. Now joined by modern heroic figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington continues to hold a place for many as a symbolic “father” of the country.
Note that we see here no hedging on Washington’s courage (unlike that of the American people, it’s indisputable). I’m not crazy about the word “icon” (more here), and I suppose Haley might work up a head of steam over putting the word father inside quotation marks, but that’s too weak a complaint even for the White House report. Another didactic similarly omits Washington’s slaveholding and says he “spent his life in service to the nation.” Not perceived service to the nation. Service to the nation.
Continental Congress? Check. Pilgrims? Check. Puritans? Check. Revolutionary War? Check. I didn’t see anything about Washington crossing the Delaware, but it’s possible I missed it (and anyway, who gives a shit; if you want to see the Emanuel Leutze painting visit the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
I did glimpse the gunboat Philadelphia, “part of a small fleet that against all odds stalled a British invasion intent on ending the American Revolution,” per the didactic. “Today conservators are preserving this iconic vessel, stabilizing its timbers and iron fittings. And historians are making new discoveries about the people who built it and fought aboard it.”
Hooray. Let’s hope White House budget chief Russell Vought doesn’t cut their funding.
