The Smithsonian’s Revolutionary World View

On July 21, 2026, Anthea Hartig, the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, was called before Congress to comment on a stern report on the Smithsonian, “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (NMAH) Erases Our Heritage.” She began with a generalized defense of the NMAH that confined itself to generalities that did not answer any of the specific and hard-hitting allegations in the report, which was designed to give teeth to President Trump’s overt and conspicuous effort to refocus the NMAH from top to bottom, as originally set out in his Executive Order of March 27, 2025, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” During the course of the hearing, she was peppered with hostile questions from Republicans who claimed that she had betrayed the greatness of the Founding Period, only to be defended by Democrats, who argued that professional historians should be preferred to political actors in setting out the history. 

It is therefore critical to start with Trump’s challenge that claims that today’s Smithsonian inverts America’s history: 

Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.  

The recent report says exactly that, and it is important to know that the Report is long on specifics that cry out for specific answers. For example, on matters of race relations, the report castigates those who take the position that race relations today are pretty much where they were in the 1950s. It states “Hartig oversaw the creation of NMAH’s Reckoning with Remembrance exhibit, which argues that the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 ‘is not just part of a racist past; it reflects our ongoing present.’” The report paints a picture of an America in which the civil rights movement never took where no black person has ever been placed in charge of an urban police department, where people are still being excluded from the polls because of race, and no black individuals have been elected to Congress. Just Bizarre. 

On the Founding period, NMAH spends much time praising the various Indian tribes that influenced the basic structure of the Constitution, without showing what influence it had on its drafting in Philadelphia, including complex provisions on trading with these tribes. At the same time, the Founders most closely associated with the creation of America and the Constitution get a stilted, distorted portrayal. As the report states, 

A didactic about the Broadway musical Hamilton in NMAH’s Entertainment Nation exhibit that simply called Alexander Hamilton an “influential and flawed founding father” likely, in part, because he owned slaves while providing no information about his key roles in America’s Founding and early development. It failed to mention that he 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 [and] supported and lobbied for the “ultimate extermination” of slavery . . . . 

Benjamin Franklin gets the same treatment: 

One reference to Benjamin Franklin in the entirety of NMAH’s Many Voices, One Nation exhibit, not as one of our most important Founding Fathers, but simply as a “Philadelphian,” an alleged racist, and someone who allegedly had an “ambivalent view” of immigrants and “worried that they introduced an ‘alien’ element to the colony.” 

On the substantive hot topic of immigration, the report observes that “[t]he Smithsonian’s NMAH has extensively advocated for millions of illegal aliens to be granted U.S. citizenship and voting rights,” including by initiating educational and advocacy programs, without asking whether there is a second side to this question. The NMAH has not stopped to ask whether open borders, as opposed to less restrictive immigration requirements, especially on birthright tourism, represents the policy preference of any portion of the public NMAH purports to represent. 

And on transgender rights, the government report castigates the Smithsonian Museum for 

exhibits and educational materials present[ing] gender as fluid, treat[ing] biological males as girls or women, and fold[ing] contemporary advocacy for transgenderism into the Museum’s treatment of female childhood development, women’s history, and women’s sports.

The report notes that some of this material is situated in youth-facing exhibits and accompanying text to spread the word.  

It should come as no surprise that all the heavy hitters in the history profession rallied in defense of the Smithsonian. Lonnie Bunch, the director of the Smithsonian's Museum, joined Hartig in strongly defending the Smithsonian’s credo that an accurate history must portray the American experience as it was, warts and all. In the report, Hartig is quoted as saying that she regards a key portion of her mission as getting out of the “‘America First’ mentality” to show “the full and rich complexity of the past.” Her vision also contains a powerful geographical component whereby “the scope of U.S. history” and the term “America” should really include “the entirety of the Americas, not just our part of North America.” Bunch, for his part, has claimed that the Smithsonian is above petty politics: “At the Smithsonian, our work is driven by scholarship, accuracy, and an uncompromising commitment to tell the fullness of America’s story,” in the effort to make the museum what Hartig has called “the most accessible, inclusive, relevant and sustainable public history institution.” 

 Professional historians also offered their full-throated endorsement of the Smithsonian’s agenda. The Organization of American Historians (OAH) first insists rightly that the president should not be the arbiter of history, which is the role for “historians, archivists, educators, curators, and museum professionals.” However, the Organization then undermines its own goal by inserting politically slanted signals of its adherence to the latest trends: 

Make no mistake: the report represents an attempt to turn back the clock to a time when U.S. history was taught as the history of white Christian men who conquered a continent, U.S. military leaders who rarely lost a battle, and U.S. presidents who were single-handedly responsible for national greatness, all under the cover of “anti-DEI” and “anti-woke” crusading. 

If the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History adopts the approaches recommended in the new report, the majority of Americans, including women, workers, people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and more, will not see themselves represented. America’s rich and diverse history will be reduced to shallow and simple-minded stories and tropes. 

And Yale Professor David W. Blight, who doubles as the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, at Yale University adds his prophetic warning in the New York Times when he condemns the Trump administration and its history police for wanting to live in their “chosen bubble” and then concludes by saying “[w]hen lies by smiling propagandists become official truths advanced by those who control government budgets, democratic culture dies.”  

It is a fitting irony that the charge is better launched at the closed-minded scholars at the Smithsonian, who until this latest Trumpian broadside have exercised full control over the Smithsonian free of any political constraints. What is striking about the Smithsonian’s defenders, like Blight, is that they cast their defense in terms of glittering generalities praising, without evidence, the professional independence and intellectual expertise of the historical class, of which they have none. After all, it is worth asking whether any of the Smithsonian scholars or its determined band of experts are anywhere to the right of center. Even more telling is that none of these abstract defenses once answer any of the specific charges made in the report.  

The report also reveals a rather ugly picture of the Smithsonian as a fallen institution. Unfortunately, one of the tragedies of this situation is the serious sense that Donald Trump is the worst possible person to lead a Smithsonian reform movement. As the Democrats remind us, his highhanded ways, in their own way, have damaged so many public institutions in the United States. It is hard to excuse his relentless self-promotion with respect to the once renamed Kennedy Center, his obnoxious efforts to plaster his face first on a new $250.00 bill and more recently on a $100 bill—the first living president to do so. Then there is his gratuitous destruction of the West Wing, his collusive litigation to create a war chest of taxpayer money to pay off his cronies, and his repeated efforts to flaunt all standard procedures in seeking to starve elite universities of funds and to punish them for taking foreign students. 

Yet this current debate is not a contest about comparative incompetence or bias of the president or the UNAH. It is not, therefore, a defense to say that the Smithsonian is no worse than the Trump administration, when both are very bad. What the Smithsonian defenders must do is go through each of the specific allegations in the Report and show how they are, or at least some of them are, incorrect. They haven’t done that yet, and I suspect that the closer we look, the worse the Smithsonian and its defenders will look. The organization, sadly, needs to heal itself by starting over, and so too the academic history profession. 

Richard A. Epstein is a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute. He is also the inaugural Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU School of Law.