A Native American family visiting the Smithsonian Institution in the middle of the last century would have found its story told alongside rocks and fossils at the National Museum of Natural History, where the original Americans were an object of anthropological study, not subjects or actors with a culture, a past, and a unique understanding of the promise and hypocrisy of the larger story of America.
Then, in 1964, the Smithsonian opened a new franchise — the Museum of History and Technology, which eventually became the National Museum of American History — and welcomed a new leader, S. Dillon Ripley, whose 20-year tenure as secretary was transformative.
“Ripley comes in, and he immediately sees the problem,” says Professor William Walker of the Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York at Oneonta. The Smithsonian was celebrating American accomplishment in a designated museum of American history, yet the other stories of America — darker stories of exclusion, enslavement, betrayal and dispossession — were either footnotes to that history or not told at all. Walker, who has written about the history of the Smithsonian, credits Ripley with beginning a conversation that would change the institution and how American history is understood throughout the country.
That soul-searching ultimately led to the opening, decades later, of the National Museum of the American Indian in 2004 and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016. The conversation continues today, with plans for the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and the National Museum of the American Latino.
The Contemplative Court at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016. – (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post)
The National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 2004. – (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
The need for these museums — the urgent need to undo profound acts of erasure — helped shape public history throughout the country. And now it has precipitated a very public clash with the Trump administration, which has launched a systematic campaign to undermine or remake institutions that are fundamental to the arts and humanities infrastructure of America.
On March 27, President Donald Trump issued the executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which accused the Smithsonian of “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” A close reading of the executive order, however, suggests the goal isn’t just editing or censoring specific exhibitions or content. Wrapped up with the assault on the Smithsonian is a call for restoring or replacing monuments and memorials, including those taken down after the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests. And that is key to understanding the administration’s larger, more destructive agenda.
Simply put, Trump would like the actual practice of history — a complex process of research, interpretation and ongoing revision — to resemble the much more limited, and often distorted, sense of history offered by statues, monuments and memorials.
And that sets up an existential crisis for the Smithsonian and the most explicit test so far of whether American cultural institutions will succumb to authoritarian oversight. The idea that American history is polyphonic and unflinching, a warts-and-all story relevant to all Americans, is so deeply embedded in the Smithsonian that it is hard to imagine how it could comply with Trump’s demands. So, while the crisis is grave and the pressure extraordinary, this may also mark a turning point in the Trump culture wars.
Revolutionary and social justice movements that formed in the United States are explored at the National Museum of American History. – (Maansi Srivastava/For The Washington Post)
James Gardner, a former associate director and senior scholar at the National Museum of American History, has seen the confusion between history and monuments. In the weeks and months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he heard calls from the public to create some kind of memorial on or near the museum on the National Mall.
“Our response was that we don’t do memorials because they don’t tell the stories that a museum does,” he says. “It is those stories that are critical. The objects don’t speak for themselves.”
That is a pithy summary of the kind of history, sometimes called the new social history, that has taken root at the Smithsonian in the past half-century. Social history prioritizes the lives and experiences of ordinary people over political or military figures and uses narrative and oral history to give texture to the past. It led to some of the most admired exhibitions in the institution’s history, including the landmark 1987 survey “Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration, 1915-1940,” organized by Spencer Crew, now a professor of U.S. history at George Mason University.
Conservative intellectuals and activists — including William Bennett, who served as education secretary under President Ronald Reagan — pushed back against the new social history. Their arguments often resembled those used in the more recent debate about monuments and memorials: Social history decentered heroic figures, usually men, who were the focal point of history as it was commonly taught in primary and secondary schools; it invited revisionism, novel interpretations and the empowerment of voices previously deemed marginal; and it elevated narratives of hardship and struggle that stoked grievance.
James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, sees the origins of Trump’s attack in the last of these, the ongoing controversy over the more painful chapters in American history.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture tells stories about the enslavement and segregation of Black Americans. – (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post)
The history of American piracy is explored at the National Museum of American History. – (Maansi Srivastava/For The Washington Post)
“This matters because it is a part of a national attack on the way in which we think about the nation’s history that has been going on roughly three to four years and started in the state legislatures with the ‘divisive concepts’ legislation,” Grossman says. Divisive concepts bills and executive orders seek to limit discussion of historical narratives that might cause students to feel awkward or implicated in historical conflicts over race, religion, class and gender issues.
Yet social history, which takes on these questions forthrightly, has mostly triumphed in the museum world and beyond. And it was central to the development of the Smithsonian museums devoted to Native Americans and African Americans, which have proved popular with visitors.
But even as the social history approach remade American museums, most Americans cling to an understanding of history that prioritizes the very things the social historians criticized. According to a 2021 survey of attitudes to history, conducted by researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the American Historical Association, the vast majority of Americans view history fundamentally differently than historians do. History, for about 70 percent of Americans, is simply what we remember about the past, especially names, dates and other facts. It isn’t, as most professional historians believe, the interpretation of those facts that constitutes history.
“We were always trying to get people to think, ‘What is history?’” Gardner says. “The goal was to think about meaning and perspectives.”
So, there is a paradox: Americans consume and enjoy social history on a daily basis, in museums, books and documentaries, but if asked to define history, they would give an account that sounds more like the rote lessons and recitations of fact that their grandparents and great-grandparents found tedious and boring decades ago.
Which may be why monuments and memorials have been swept up into the executive order about the Smithsonian. Even as museums were transformed, the monumental landscape of America remains largely unchanged, with thousands of sculptures and other works honoring generals, presidents and, in many cases, leaders of the Confederacy.
“There is at some level this imagination that monuments equal history, when we know that a monument is not a set of facts on a pedestal,” says Paul Farber, director of Monument Lab, a nonprofit public art organization that has compiled a comprehensive catalogue of American monuments and memorials. Museums, including the Smithsonian, he says, have become places of “multi-vocality where multiple people’s voices coexist together, as a chorus, not a zero-sum game.” Meanwhile, the memorial landscape stands as a kind of last, rearguard battle of the old history, the history made by men on horses and colonizers who travel by land and sea, where monuments are “facts on the ground” that need no particular interpretation.
A sculptural U.S. flag at the National Museum of American History. – (Maansi Srivastava/For The Washington Post)
Will the Trump administration be able to remake the Smithsonian such that its exhibits resemble the old history, the celebration of great leaders and epic battles, without the troubling chorus of voices that speak to conflict, oppression and struggle?
It won’t be easy. In a March 28 memo sent to Smithsonian staff, Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III recommitted the institution to its core values: “As always, our work will be shaped by the best scholarship, free of partisanship, to help the American public better understand our nation’s history, challenges, and triumphs.” For now, with many of the board of regents appointed by Congress, the Smithsonian is also somewhat better insulated against a direct takeover, as Trump engineered at the Kennedy Center.
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III in his office in 2023. – (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Trump has also picked a fight with a beloved institution, with approval ratings consistently near 70 percent, according to a YouGov poll, which reflects the institution’s own consumer satisfaction surveys. That figure reflects a broader faith in museums nationally.
“Apart from family and friends, museums and libraries are, in fact, the most trusted sources of information in this country,” Marilyn Jackson, president and CEO of the American Alliance of Museums, said in a statement to The Washington Post.
The Fairleigh Dickinson survey of attitudes toward history also points to another fact: that the majority of Americans don’t want their museums to stick just to happy narratives of American triumph and unity. Overwhelmingly, and with little deviation by age, gender or political party, Americans said it is “acceptable to teach history about harm done to others even if it causes discomfort.” And fully 90 percent said these subjects need more, rather than less, investigation.
So, Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian might not just fail. It could be a turning point in his larger attack on cultural infrastructure, including the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Kennedy Center, the National Gallery of Art, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Although Bunch quickly complied with an earlier Trump executive order aimed at eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs, he has name recognition and gravitas that eclipse the leaders of some of these other groups, and while the Smithsonian has caved in the past to congressional pressure, its name brand is still stellar with the general public.
None of the current or former Smithsonian leaders interviewed for this article would hazard a prediction about what comes next. But the coming clash, especially one that involves direct censorship of Smithsonian content or budget cuts that impact exhibitions or opening hours, could set up a classic crisis of conscience for the American people, reminiscent of key historical moments like the resistance to McCarthyism in the 1950s or the widespread disgust over brutal police tactics during the civil rights protests of the 1960s. Even if Americans don’t understand the nuts and bolts of social history, they are in deep sympathy with the basic ideas behind it: Talk to people, listen, dig deeper, consult new voices, include differing perspectives, acknowledge criticism, synthesize competing viewpoints. These are the pragmatics of basic decency that help people navigate a complex world.
Inside the Kennedy Center, which President Donald Trump is set on changing. – (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post)
Cherry blossoms in peak bloom draw admirers outside the National Museum of African American History and Culture just days after Trump issued an executive order on the Smithsonian Institution. – (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post)
And so, one can imagine various scenarios. Perhaps the administration compels some locality to reerect a statue to a Confederate leader, a nauseating spectacle that forces people to ask the questions they should have asked when most of these monuments were created, during the height of the Jim Crow era. Why are we honoring this man, this enslaver, this traitor?
Perhaps the public will encounter Smithsonian exhibitions that make the president’s effort to censor obvious, with empty display cases or blacked-out wall texts, pointing explicitly to damning silences, omissions and elisions. And they will have questions.
Or perhaps the Smithsonian will, as Bunch has indicated, simply keep to the path it has been on for decades, introducing the American people to themselves and the world, with museums and exhibitions that reflect the broad consensus that American history is complex, fraught and often full of pain. That has proved an enormously successful strategy so far, and it may be one that helps turn the tide in the ongoing battle between democratic curiosity and authoritarian certainty.