The strange order from the president to post warning signs outside the Smithsonian’s American History museum has been met with abhorrence in many parts of the country. The White House says it wants to warn the public that the Smithsonian’s exhibits are designed to reduce the public’s love of the United States. The Washington Post had an examination of this issue today. The article was written by Pultizer Prize winning author Philip Kennicott, a critic at the Post. Here are some excerpts of what he wrote:
We don’t know exactly what these signs will say, but the July 4 report hints at the possible language: “It would benefit most Americans,” reads the executive summary, “if the Smithsonian’s flagship history museum had a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.’”
Visitors who pass these signs on the way into the museum may find them concerning; when they pass them on the way out, they will probably find them laughably at odds with what they have just experienced. I’ve visited the Smithsonian hundreds of times over the past 25 years, and I always make an effort to listen to how people engage with and talk about what they see. I can’t think of a single time in which I’ve seen visitors react angrily or dismissively to an exhibition, even controversial ones like the 2010 “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” which surveyed the history of LGBTQ+ portraiture.
I’ve heard expressions of awe, and sometimes shock, and a lot of quiet murmuring. For a museum that is so relentlessly negative in Trump’s eyes, I’ve witnessed a surprising amount of joy among the crowds who flock there.
I have no doubt there are people who keep their discomfort to themselves. If your religious beliefs lead you to prefer creationism to evolution, there are exhibitions in the National Museum of Natural History that will be painful. But if these museums were full of genuinely misleading history, shockingly wrong or tendentious claims, there would be outrage, and I’ve never heard that. Visitors may not always be comfortable at the American history museum, but I don’t believe they find its pluralistic view of America discordant or dissonant with lived reality. Polling, including an Economist/YouGov survey from last year, shows broad support for the Smithsonian and its independence, especially among Americans who have actually visited a Smithsonian museum.
Lost in this new effort to rewrite American history scrubbed of its invigorating, infuriating, thrilling complexity, is the emotional toll it takes on people who serve the institution. I am sorry that the scholars, curators, volunteers, security guards and the rest of the loyal staff will have to pass signs that demean the integrity of their work. The contents of the museum, the history it explicates, will prepare them for this attack, which is yet another ugly facet of America’s long history of denialism. But it will be dispiriting to encounter this unwarranted criticism on a daily basis.
I am also sorry that the rank-and-file staff of the National Park Service, the agency that Trump has tasked with placing these signs, are being dragged into this. As part of the Department of the Interior, the Park Service is directly under Trump’s control, and he has used it to rewrite history to his own liking, most recently in Philadelphia, with new signage outside the remains of the house where George Washington lived as president. Advocates are angry at interpretive elements that now emphasize abolitionist sentiments among the Founding Fathers, and inform visitors that the people enslaved by Washington could “even attend the theater,” with the president buying them tickets. Other park sites have been censored, too, including the Stonewall Inn, where references to transgender people were eliminated from the discussion of one of the founding moments of the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement. References to slavery, including an infamous image of a formerly enslaved man with a scourged back, were targeted at other Park Service sites.
The National Park Service has now been enlisted in an attack on the Smithsonian, and that is the saddest part of these orders. Americans love and trust the Park Service and the Smithsonian, where they encounter history through the mediation of rangers, curators, interpreters and guides. Both organizations greet visitors with a human face, and that is essential to the faith we place in them. In “Rhetoric,” Aristotle observed that our trust in a speaker is grounded on their knowledge or common sense, but also on their integrity and benevolence. Americans encounter this on a daily basis in the cheerful, knowledgeable, decent people who serve both these organizations.
Now, one group is compelled to attack the other. Unable to actually divide Americans in how they experience the Smithsonian, the administration enacts a drama of division, with two of the most beloved cultural institutions as the unwitting and unwilling actors. Over time, the administration may eventually erode the trust Americans place in the Smithsonian. But faith in the Park Service, drafted to play the aggressor, could be destroyed more quickly and disastrously.
Unless, of course, benevolence and decency hold the line. If these signs go up, they need to be interpreted, perhaps by volunteers who support the Smithsonian and the Park Service, or members of the public. With the same good cheer and equanimity that Park Service and Smithsonian employees display every day at historic sites, and in the halls of the nation’s attic, they should let people know what they are looking at. These are the markers of authoritarianism, the signs of a culture war. We’ve been there before, and someday, these signs will be in the Smithsonian.
