On Wednesday, I discussed how the White House Domestic Policy Council’s Saving America’s Story report makes a number of false claims about what’s missing from the National Museum of American History. Today, I want to discuss what the report finds objectionable that’s actually there—starting with the person who oversees it all.
Surprisingly little of the report, which was released July 4, finds fault with what a visitor will encounter when visiting NMAH today. A huge chunk of it is devoted to the character assassination of Anthea Hartig, the museum’s director since 2019. The word “Hartig” appears 229 times, compared to 81 mentions for “visitor,” 73 mentions for “United States,“ 61 mentions for “National Museum of American History,” 49 mentions for “founder,” 49 mentions for “president,” 38 mentions for “race,” 31 mentions for “Congress,” 18 mentions for “ideology,” seven mentions for “bias,” five mentions for “ethnic,” and six mentions for “patriotism.” Firing Hartig is clearly Job One for this report. The Domestic Policy Council condemns Hartig for everything from identifying her pronouns as “she/her/hers” to saying she would like to “problematize” the semiquincentennial. As Philip Kennicott notes in an excellent essay about all this for The Washington Post, “Problematizing is the essence of historical thinking.”
I can’t defend Hartig’s public comments against 229 petty complaints because that won’t leave time for anything else, and anyway it’s a distraction from the topic at had, which is her museum. So let’s stick to the report’s criticisms of how NMAH presents the materials on display in what the museum world, annoyingly, calls “didactics,” meaning those posters and cards that explain what you’re looking at. My method here is to search the document for the word “didactic.” There are 160 of these, so obviously I can’t field all these, either. But to give you some flavor, here are the first four.
- “A didactic in NMAH’s American Democracy exhibit entitled ‘Abraham Lincoln in the Classroom’ … provides no information about the accomplishments of the two great American heroes it cites—Lincoln and Washington—noting only that both were presidents and that Americans have used images of them in an attempt to ‘instill patriotic values and reinforce the idea of a shared national heritage.’”
I did not see this particular didactic when I visited the museum earlier this week. But it would appear its subject is not the life of America’s beloved Railsplitter but rather how Lincoln is, you know, taught in the classroom. If the Domestic Policy Council is trying to suggest that biographical information about Lincoln is hard to find at the NMAH, let me assure you it is not. For example, a permanent exhibit titled “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War” contains a large section about the Civil War and, inevitably, much discussion of Abraham Lincoln. If anything, the didactics here tilt rightward. Here’s one:
Lincoln hoped that the nation could be reunited without rancor, but he found himself at odds with Republicans in Congress. They wanted to punish the South for seceding and wanted Southern states to guarantee the freedom and rights of African Americans.
Lincoln’s assassination, and the ineffectual leadership of his successor, Andrew Johnson, enabled the Congress to control Reconstruction. They divided the South into military districts, withholding statehood from some former Confederate states until 1870s.
This approximates the pro-South narrative still taught when I attended high school in the 1970s, all about Northern carpetbaggers, Northern scalawags, wild-eyed Radical Republicans, and ex-slaves unready for citizenship rights in dear old Dixie. I know that the Domestic Policy Council is aware of the Reconstruction revisionist Eric Foner, who called bullshit on all this in 1988, because he’s quoted favorably elsewhere in the report. (It’s probably heard, too, of W.E.B. DuBois, who made a similar case in his 1935 text Black Reconstruction.) But peddling a Gone With the Wind story about Reconstruction’s tragic overreach is never going to raise any hackles in the Trump White House.
- “One didactic about the Broadway musical Hamilton in ‘Entertainment Nation’ simply called Alexander Hamilton an ‘influential and flawed founding father’ likely, in part, because he may have owned slaves.”
Any child who’s seen Hamilton knows that the man’s most conspicuous character flaw was not that he “may have owned slaves” (he also may not have; the historical record on this point is inconclusive and I don’t think the matter comes up in Hamilton at all). Rather, it is that Hamilton had an extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds that, when made public, destroyed his chance of becoming president. In the age of Trump, is it now “woke” to look askance at a politician who cheats on his wife?
- In the “Many Voices, One Nation” exhibit, according to the report, a didactic presents ours as “a fundamentally oppressive nation” in saying European settlement was “a profound unsettling of the American continent” because its “population actually declined … as Old World diseases swept through Native populations that lacked immunity.”
For starters, during the period described here our nation couldn’t have been “oppressive” because it didn’t yet exist. To say that European settlement spread disease “through Native populations that lacked immunity,” and that the North American population therefore declined, is merely true. To describe all this as “a profound unsettling” is offensive only to those who question the value of human life.
- In the same exhibit, the following sentence appears in a didactic: “In creating the new nation, early leaders envisioned a country that promised opportunity and freedom—but only for some.” This, the report states, is a “slander of America.”
A slander by definition is untrue. Where’s the untrue part in that sentence? Early leaders granted the vote only to white male property owners. Women were excluded. Blacks were excluded, and anyway most of them were slaves, and slavery is the precise opposite of freedom.
As I stated Wednesday, even when judged by the standards of the form, the White House’s anti-woke polemic is a shoddy piece of workmanship not unlike the peeling blue sealant in the $15 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool. No honest conservative could argue otherwise. I wonder whether that matters. I hope it does.
