For many on the right, among the better causes of the 2nd Trump Administration is its effort to purge the progressive political takeover of America’s national cultural institutions. A case in point is the new White House report on the bad historical turn taken by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
According to the editorial board of the WSJ, the Smithsonian Museum has lost America’s plot by offering a one-sided and negative view of the US.
The media is attacking the report, accusing it of attempting to censor independent museum curation. The WSJ thinks otherwise.
In “Saving America’s Story,” produced by the White House Domestic Policy Council, the 162-page report lays out in detail how the museum offers a largely critical view of American history that “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated.”
Instead, one exhibit promotes that when early leaders founded the U.S., they “envisioned a country that promised opportunity and freedom—but only for some.”
The WSJ’s editorial board does not view the report a cheerleading document published to hide warts and ugliness. Instead, what it seeks to do is capture history in one exhibit, that when they founded the U.S., “early leaders envisioned a country that promised opportunity and freedom that doesn’t resemble the 1619 Project in its partisan bias.”
The report also shows the degree to which progressives have captured the history of our country. By using the word “nationalism” to describe the Pledge of Allegiance, gives an unnecessary pejorative edge, writes the WSJ. Would not “patriotism” also have worked?
Benjamin Franklin is called “racist and anti-immigrant.” Alexander Hamilton, also owned slaves, which, the report “downplayed or completely excluded facts about their abolitionist efforts.”
Describing Alexader Hamilton as “influential and flawed” without noting that he was a leading drafter of the Federalist Papers and helped George Washington win the Revolutionary War, seems disingenuous at best. Hamilton (not noted by the museum) “was a vocal critic of slavery and helped found the anti-slavery New York Manumission Society in 1785, which worked to end the slave trade.”
Whiteness
The Smithsonian American Art Museum and Smithsonian Learning Lab created a poster reading, “Whiteness as a concept is foundational to the history of the United States, actively shaping this country’s social, cultural, political and economic structures.”
Whiteness? This is today’s leftwing identity politics imposed on the past.
Are not critics of the museum imposing their own biased approach to America’s history? But given how deeply connected to the federal government the museum is and the fact that it claims to be a national museum that tells the American story, it should not be the plaything of today’s dominant progressive academics.
According to the WSJ, the feds fund 62% of the Smithsonian budget, or some $1.1 billion in fiscal 2026. The Smithsonian Board of Regents includes six members of Congress, the Vice President, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and nine citizens.
The report under the Trump administration is not trying to whitewash America’s history. Rather it is attempting to tell the whole story of a nation, “including the good and the bad, so Museum visitors can understand the development that led our nation to where it is today.”
That, says the WSJ, is not whitewashing history, it is embracing it.
