Jeffrey H. Anderson Trump Is Right to Fight Wokeness at the Smithsonian As mostly federally funded institutions, the museums owe Americans a faithful account of their history.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-smithsonian-review-woke-america
The White House announced plans last month to conduct an “internal review” of Smithsonian museums to determine whether they “reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story.” A chorus of left-wing critics claimed that the Trump administration was trying to stifle free speech and whitewash history. New York Times culture reporter Robin Pogrebin, for example, characterized the efforts as part of “a wholesale attack on the arts” that could have “lasting, chilling effects,” as Trump attempts to “impose his vision of American history.”
In truth, it is the Left that has imposed its idiosyncratic vision of American history on the Smithsonian museums. Rather than a misguided attempt to control these museums, the Trump administration’s review is a necessary step to reclaim for the American people institutions that have long been controlled by the Left.
Consider, for example, one of the Smithsonian’s recent depictions of “American history.” In 2020, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History opened an exhibit called Girlhood (It’s Complicated). Per its chief curator, this 5,000-square-foot display partially reflects the curatorial team’s thoughts “about how intersex and transgender stories illuminate and complicate ideas about girlhood and what it means to grow up female in the United States.”
This is the kind of “history” Smithsonian visitors have come to expect. But according to Pogrebin, it is Trump who wants “a simplified version of America, a story with kind of less nuance and complexity.” In fact, however, the Left has pressured these museums to present a one-dimensional story of oppression, denying the splendor of a nation whose creation British author Paul Johnson describes as “the greatest of all human adventures.”
Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch responded to the White House initiative with a letter to staff, declaring, “Our independence is paramount.” This defiance, while understandable, is a bit rich. The most prominent Smithsonian museums are located on prime federal land. The institution receives 62 percent of its revenues from the federal government—that is, from taxpayers. Having the Smithsonian assert its “independence” is reminiscent of a 30-year-old who lives with his parents, rent-free, and receives most of his income from them, yet claims that he’s his own man and beholden to no one.
Bunch’s avuncular, smiling nature obscures his radical designs. He has expressed his commitment “to legitimiz[ing] important issues, whether it’s 1619 or climate change” and to using the “trust” that people place in museums to “inspire new generations of activists.” Speaking of his time as a museum head, Bunch says, “I always felt that the African American Museum was 1619 before the project, and critical race theory before critical race theory was popular.”
The secretary’s own words contradict Pogrebin’s claim that the Smithsonian has been “walking [a] moderate, centrist line.” Its museums are increasingly disconnected from everyday Americans and instead are beholden to academic obsessions.
On a podcast earlier this month, Pogrebin lamented how the Trump administration’s actions are already having an effect. She discussed a “troubling” development: the National Portrait Gallery had pulled from a planned exhibition a painting called Trans Forming Liberty, which, in Pogrebin’s words, depicts “a proud black trans woman holding the torch.”
On that same podcast, Pogrebin opined that we’ve “seen this happen in other countries under authoritarian regimes, where propaganda infects almost everything.” Leaving aside the fact that we don’t live under an authoritarian regime, who, exactly, is supplying the propaganda—those who would have displayed Trans Forming Liberty, or those who would spare Americans from a plainly politicized work that lacks broad appeal?
As we approach the 250th anniversary of American independence next year, the debate over how to portray the nation’s history boils down to fundamental questions. Is America a nation conceived in liberty, or in slavery? Does liberty mark our nation’s core, and slavery the aberration—or is slavery the core, and liberty the aberration, with references to “liberty” in our founding documents serving as proof of our hypocrisy? Lincoln and the Founders maintained the former; the woke Left maintains the latter.
The men depicted on our coins and bills had it right. The United States is a land of freedom, not oppression. Slavery’s gross violation of liberty was paid for with some 600,000 lives, mostly those of free white men whose ultimate sacrifice secured the freedom of their black countrymen.
To ensure that citizens and foreign visitors see that truth reflected in our national museums, we must reclaim the Smithsonian from those who see little good in America or its Founding, little virtue in its overcoming of the injustices that contradicted its revolutionary ideals, and little to celebrate in what they view as a history of oppression.
On the cusp of the nation’s quarter-millennial celebrations, our museums should remind Americans of the greatness of our nation’s heroes, who, while imperfect, stand among the great men of history.
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