For more than a decade I have served on the board of trustees of the public library in the progressive town where I live and work. When I joined the board, our usual business was pretty straightforward; it was hardly the kind of stuff that put anyone on the frontlines of the culture wars.
That now seems like another lifetime.
Since President Donald Trump has returned to office, he has launched an ambitious assault on libraries, museums and other repositories of America’s history. Most recently, his administration has set its sights on the Smithsonian, one of the crown jewels of this country’s cultural institutions.
In an article posted on its website on Thursday, the White House targeted five of the Smithsonian’s museums for their exhibitions and content: the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of African Art and the American Art Museum. It also called out two institutions that have yet to be constructed: The National Museum of the American Latino and the American Women’s History Museum, highlighting comments by the latter’s former director Lisa Sasaki that it would include transgender women.
Much of the article’s criticism of what the administration has called the Smithsonian’s “woke” messaging centered on race, slavery, immigration, LGBTQ identity and people with disabilities. First on its list was a series at the African American History and Culture museum that, the article said, attacked whiteness and “featured content from hardcore woke activist Ibram X. Kendi.” An exhibition of the American Latino museum, it said, “characterizes U.S. history as rooted in ‘colonization.’” The National Portrait Gallery and the American History museum were heavily criticized for their LGBTQ content.
“As President Trump promised, the Trump Administration is committed to rooting out Woke and divisive ideology in our government and institutions,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Washington Post in an email. “Taxpayer money should not be used for things that pit Americans against one another. Our Smithsonian should exhibit history in an accurate, honest, and factual way.”
The article follows a series of mounting attacks on the Smithsonian from the president.
“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,’” Trump declared on Aug. 19 in a Truth Social post. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
“This Country,” he continued, “cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”
A week earlier, three Trump aides, including Russell Vought, assistant to the president and director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent a letter to the secretary of the Smithsonian, informing him that “we will be leading a comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions.”
“This initiative,” they explained, “aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”
A White House review of the content the Smithsonian offers to the public is unprecedented. It is the stuff of dystopian fiction.
A White House review of the content the Smithsonian offers to the public is unprecedented. It is the stuff of dystopian fiction.
Calling the administration “among the most intrusive in American history,” New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall observed, “Trump is seeking to redefine the boundaries of public discourse.”
With the federal takeover in Washington, D.C., and the president’s continuing pursuit of retribution against his political opponents, some may be tempted to write off the attack on the Smithsonian as a tempest in a teapot. That would be a serious mistake.
What Trump is doing at the Smithsonian is all of a piece with his efforts to destroy the independence of universities, law firms and cultural institutions like the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. As the administration’s Aug. 12 letter put it, the object is to cajole, and even force, them to all follow “the President’s directive.”
Trump’s Truth Social post linked his attack on museums with pressure tactics he has used elsewhere. It revealed that he has instructed his attorneys “to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made.”
Progress? The president’s definition of progress involves replacing an America in which independent thinking, informed criticism and an honest view of history with a whitewashed version of this country’s past and a less diverse and more compliant nation.
As the New York Times explained in June, among other things, the president is seeking to “minimize, ignore or even erase some of the experiences and history of Black people in the United States.” He is reframing “the country’s past involving racism and discrimination by de-emphasizing that history or at times denying that it happened.”
That’s why the president singled out the Smithsonian’s attention to slavery.
Trump is famously no student of history. So he likely would not have known that his attack on the nation’s collective memory recalls a heated dispute from the Smithsonian’s very founding.
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The 19th century battle to establish the institution was itself defined by the question of how the issue of slavery would be addressed. British scientist James Smithson’s bequest was intended to support “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”
But in a preview of what is now unfolding, the Smithsonian became caught up in its era’s defining political and cultural conflict: The battle between federalists and advocates of states’ rights, many of whom were vocal defenders of slavery.
South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun, an ardent defender of states’ rights and slavery, argued there was nothing in the Constitution that gave Congress the power to establish a national cultural institution. Massachusetts Rep. (and former President) John Quincy Adams described Smithson’s bequest as “one of the noblest benefactions ever made to the race of man,” and he led the fight in Congress to accept it.
Adams prevailed over Calhoun’s faction. On Aug. 10, 1846, President James K. Polk signed the legislation establishing the Smithsonian Institution. From then until now, presidents of both parties have been strong supporters of the Smithsonian’s mission. They certainly did not interfere with the content of its collections or exhibitions, and if they disagreed with its scholars and curators’ interpretations of history, they kept quiet and allowed the experts to do their work. Many of them believed that America was well served by the kind of work done under the institution’s aegis.
But no more.
Starting in the 1990s, conservatives periodically attacked the museum in terms the Trump administration has aped. As then-GOP Rep. Sam Johnson said, “We’ve got to get patriotism back in the Smithsonian…We want the Smithsonian to reflect real America and not something that a historian dreamed up.”
Despite this rhetoric, conservatives did not seek the kind of control — and outright ownership — that is being sought by Trump. The scope of his attempted review is breadth-taking in its comprehensiveness and intrusiveness. It seeks approval over the Smithsonian’s “exhibition text, wall didactics, websites, educational materials, and digital and social media content to assess tone, historical framing, and alignment with American ideals.” The takeover would also cover “current and future exhibitions, with particular attention to those planned for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence” to ensure they “highlight American achievement and progress.”
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The administration claims it wants to develop “curatorial guidelines that reflect the Smithsonian’s original mission.” But recall that the Smithsonian’s mission was and is “the increase and diffusion of knowledge” — not advancing a particular understanding of America’s racial past or even to celebrate a myopic view our founding.
You would never know that from what the Trump administration aims to do. In its view, the Smithsonian’s mission is to promote its version of “Americanism.”
In free societies, museums and libraries don’t promote “-isms,” especially when they target race. Instead, they promote inquiry.
They don’t serve the agenda of any single person, party or creed, no matter how powerful. They help everyone define and remember our collective past, and help us to learn from it — successes and failures alike.
That spirit is captured in the mission statement of the public library on whose board I serve. Our mission is to be “a community hub to a diverse population of Amherst residents, where books are celebrated and all members of the community can enhance their educational, cultural, and lifelong learning pursuits.”
That’s a version of “Americanism” the president and the MAGA crew treat as un-American. But it is a version that I, and millions of other Americans, are proud to serve.
