Ever since I was in grade school, I loved visiting the National Museum of American History in Washington, one of the many Smithsonian museums scattered across the city.
As a homeschooled student growing up within easy driving distance of Washington, visiting museums was a regular part of my education, to the point where I had the layout of most of the major Smithsonian museums just about memorized. I could spend hours, days even, wandering each one, but the war and transportation exhibits at the American History Museum have always been my favorite sites to visit.
Now one of the most prominent buildings on the National Mall, the museum opened in 1964 after President Dwight Eisenhower signed legislation in 1955 authorizing its construction. Aside from a two-year closure in the 2000s for a major renovation, it has welcomed millions of visitors each year.
While the stream of visitors has remained steady over the years, the contents of the museum are constantly changing. In the years since I visited the museum as a wide-eyed youngster who was fascinated by the trains and cars from bygone eras and the heroic exploits of America’s servicemen, a new emphasis has creeped in, one that has enslaved the museum to the cultural fads of the far Left rather than serving as a place that celebrates the history and culture of the United States.
I had not visited the museum in nearly a decade until a few weeks ago, shortly after President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which was a shot across the bow at the Smithsonian’s standard operation.
“Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” the order reads. “This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
The order charges Vice President JD Vance, in his capacity as a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents and in consultation with various advisers in the administration, to “remove improper ideology from such properties, and shall recommend to the President any additional actions necessary to fully effectuate such policies.”
“We will restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness,” according to the order, “igniting the imagination of young minds, honoring the richness of American history and innovation, and instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans.”
While it is certainly possible that the insidious ideologies and historical revisionism that have poisoned much of modern education were present in the museum when I was young, during my recent self-guided tour, I was stunned by the degree to which the place had been so thoroughly handed over to the political Left’s accounting of history.
The first clue that much had changed was, in all places, in an exhibit about the food people consumed throughout the last 250 years.
Emblazoned at the entrance of the exhibit is a graphic that invites visitors in to view the display and features a series of bubbles with quotes such as, “Bagged lettuce — the best thing since sliced bread?” or, “My grandmother cooked three meals a day. Most of mine come from the freezer.” But there were two messages, one that reads, “Can we stop calling it ethnic food already?” and another, “I like to share abuelita’s recetas with friends,” that caught my eye.
On its face, these are harmless. But these two quotes, next to an array of messages that had more to do with what or how we eat, were out of place. Both challenged the notion that the American diet is something born out of our unique cultural development that unified peoples from Britain, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Mexico, and the Far East, to name a few.
Within the exhibit, the messaging was far less subtle and parroted the Left’s approach, not only to race and culture, but also diet and health. For example, one panel of text that focused on dieting seemed to downplay the notion that physical activity is necessary for health, with the quote, “As attitudes about food, nutrition, and the body continue to change, many eaters have embraced the idea that good health also requires attending to mental and physical fitness.” Next to it was a graphic on the body mass index, which contained one of the most astounding quotes in the entire museum, directly challenging the relation between weight and health: “Many people question the validity of BMI as a measure of overall health because it does not consider different body types and lifestyles.”
Its health revisionism aside, the food exhibit, much like the rest of the museum, has become a shrine to the immigrants and the cultures of each nation that populated the U.S. in the latter half of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century and a mea culpa for slavery. But even there, subtle omissions advance a narrative.
A display about “The Migrants’ Table” features information about Asian and Latino food but entirely omits the Italian and Irish immigrant experience, two groups that today find themselves lumped together as “white.” In fact, in another exhibit about immigration at large, there is not one mention of the experience of immigrants from several European countries, including Italy, who populated large areas of the northeast.
But the most egregious racial identitarianism was reserved for the exhibit about the “American Latino,” which decried colonialism and the Spanish conquest of Latin America, while making no mention of the barbaric actions, including human sacrifice, of the native populations. At the same time, the Monroe Doctrine, a principle that Europe should stay out of the Western Hemisphere and informed much of U.S. engagement with Latin America, was trivialized as a policy that was “used to justify future U.S. military invasions.”
The whole exhibit reads like a call for a revolution against oppressors. At a time when Hispanics in the U.S. are increasingly shifting toward conservatives, the museum is selling a narrative that is a deliberate attempt to tie the Latin American experience to revolutionary action and the same principles that animate the Black Lives Matter movement. There is even an explicit call for American Latinos to become a monolithic political force.
“The idea of Latina/o as an identity including everyone with Latin American and Caribbean roots remains hotly debated. Latina/o is an umbrella label that coexists with other identities. It offers the possibility of greater political power for diverse Latino groups acting as a collective.” That quote is accompanied by a group of young activists from Puerto Rico raising their fists in support of Black Lives Matter.
The racial and indeed anticonservative narrative can even be found in a small exhibit about currency. In it, a $20 bill with the face of President Andrew Jackson has a silhouette of Harriet Tubman superimposed on it with an accompanying caption that excoriates the first Trump administration for reversing the decision to replace Jackson with Tubman.
But implementing Trump’s order to reform this ideologically captured institution is a complicated task. The Smithsonian Institution was established in 1846 by congressional statute and is governed by the Board of Regents, which appoints a secretary. The vice president and the chief justice of the Supreme Court are two ex-officio members of the board, and three senators and three representatives fill out the remaining positions held by government officials, four of which Democrats currently hold. Nine other seats are filled by private citizens who are nominated by the board itself and then appointed through an act of Congress that requires the president’s signature. Of the nine private citizen members, six will see their terms expire at some point before the Trump administration ends in January 2029.
The current secretary is Lonnie Bunch, who has held the position since 2019. The year he took the job, he was quoted on record praising the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which attempted to frame the founding of the U.S. around the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619, rather than with the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
PURGING DEI FROM THE SMITHSONIAN IS NO EASY TASK
“Everybody that thought about the 1619 Project, whether they liked it or disagreed with it, saw that the Smithsonian had fingerprints on it, and that, to me, was a great victory,” Bunch said at the time. He also espoused support for Black Lives Matter and said he wanted “the Smithsonian to make diversity and inclusion so central that it’s no longer talked about.”
At the National Museum of American History, “diversity and inclusion” and its emphasis on race and class politics are not only talked about but shoehorned into every corner of the museum, even in places that strain credulity. Today, the museum is a caricature display of far-left identity politics. Changing that and reforming the Smithsonian Institution as a whole will be no easy task.