Report: Smithsonian’s Museum of American History erases American greatness

(Daily Signal) – On Saturday, Americans celebrated the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding. Shockingly, according to a detailed new report from the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) did not.

The report, titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” was released Saturday night during America 250 commemorations. It concludes the museum has been captured by “radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”

Specifically, in regard to America’s 250th, the report stated:

“NMAH has refused to celebrate the Nation and its history. It has not created any exhibit dedicated to presenting a general narrative of American history or telling the story of any of our Founding Fathers, the Second Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolutionary War, or the achievement of independence and the establishment of the constitutional rule of law—even in the 250th anniversary of the first of those pivotal events.”

According to the investigation, part of a review of the Smithsonian mandated by a March 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump, the problem goes far beyond Independence Day.

Current leadership of the museum has “explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, posted on X that the Smithsonian museums and places like it had taught people to “hate America.”

The National Museum of American History Designed to ‘Cement America’s Progress’

In 1955, then-Smithsonian Secretary Leonard Carmichael testified to Congress that, if authorized, NMAH would “tell the story of American national progress” and “cement America’s progress for citizen and foreign visitors alike.”

“The museum we envision,” Carmichael said, “is planned to instill in each citizen a deepened faith in our country’s destiny as champion of individual dignity and enterprise.

At the museum’s opening in 1964, then-NMAH Director Remington Kellogg declared the new facility was intended “to awaken in citizen and foreigner alike a clear understanding of the inspiring story of the United States—its origins, struggles, development, traditions, strength.”

However, the current director has far different, more radical aims.

Trashing the ‘Traditional Celebratory Narrative’

According to the report, Anthea M. Hartig, NMAH’s director since 2019, has explicitly stated that she sees history as a “prime tool of social justice” and one of her roles as connecting “research and scholarship to activism and advocacy.” Hartig has also stated that “we work to reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of U.S. history for visitors.”

Hartig believed the museum profession had “to figure out” how “we’re going to” “problematize” the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026” and that “loving America is very complicated.”

As a result, the report claims, the museum now “purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the Museum’s current telling, the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.”

Five Key Findings

1. NMAH Fails to Substantively Present America’s Founders and Founding

For example, 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.

However, you will find Benjamin Franklin, chiefly because of his anti-slavery efforts.

2. NMAH Has ‘Problematized’ the 250th Anniversary of America’s Founding

The report documents how museum leadership stated that the 250th anniversary should be “problematized.” For “Critical Social Justice” theorists, this refers to the process of highlighting alleged “oppressions” within a given subject to “deconstruct, disqualify, and discredit the prevailing narrative on that subject.”

For NMAH, this means American history should be reframed away from an “America First mentality” and an “Anglo-centric” focus on its founding, including highlighting the “gaps” in the Declaration of Independence rather than its unprecedented affirmation of mankind’s unalienable rights.

3. NMAH Removed ‘American History’ From Its Mission Statement to ‘Get Out of the ‘America First’ Mentality‘

Removing the “America First mentality” included replacing “American history” and “infinite richness” in the museum’s mission statement with language about empowering people to create “a more just and compassionate future” by exploring “the complexity of our past.”

4. NMAH Has Abandoned Historical Scholarship for Political Activism

The report notes that the museum’s interpretive plan directs staff to, “whatever the topic,” tie exhibits back to a set of seven “core issues of our time”—specifically, race/identity, gender/sexuality, climate change, immigration/migrations, economic inequality, technological change, and nationalism/globalism—as part of its “commitment to relevance.”

This means reshaping, in a woke manner, any subject, be it democracy, entertainment, immigration, childhood, women’s labor, sports, or early American settlement. This is why visitors would see LGBTQ-centric displays alongside R2-D2 and Dorothy’s ruby slippers.

5. The Smithsonian Has Not Met Its Obligations to the American People

The report concludes that “the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of American History in particular, under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic.”