Hi everyone!
The White House sent a letter to Secretary Lonnie Bunch of the Smithsonian yesterday, letting the educator and historian know that the administration "will be leading a comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions." That review "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."
What I find concerning is not so much an interest by the White House in celebrating American culture and history—for that is the impulse in which this initiative is rooted— but the idea that every four years, under every next administration, laws can be rewritten by fiat through executive orders while history and culture are re-litigated by dueling curatorial and historical perspectives. We are one nation, and the leader of that nation must serve the nation, we the people do not serve government—and we can never forget it.
This review is in service to President Trump's executive order in March on "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History." That order read that "Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation's history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth." The EO blames the Biden administration for "advanc[ing] this corrosive ideology," and takes specific aim at the curatorship of the most recent Smithsonian museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
"The National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that 'hard work,' 'individualism,' and 'the nuclear family' are aspects of 'White culture.' The forthcoming Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports. These are just a few examples," the EO reads.
The letter sent yesterday said that the "review is a constructive and collaborative effort," and that the "goal is not to interfere with day-to-day operations of curators or staff..." The first museums to be addressed are the National Museum of American History, National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of African American History and Culture, National Museum of the American Indian, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
The review will focus on these 5 areas: public-facing content, curatorial process, exhibition planning, collection use, and narrative standards.
The whole exercise is an experiment in history itself. Is history written by the victors alone? Does might make right? What about when the victors took their wins in cultural legacy and not military might? A lesson of the Boomer generation is that it is the cultural victory that is more meaningful and lasting than any other win.
History was rewritten to suit a narrative of American decline. Concepts of government were remade to allow for diminishing capitalism. Culture itself, from architecture, to novels, to paintings, to fashion, were all made substantially less beautiful. There are gorgeous examples of post-modernism in architecture, bright spaces full of light and flow, and of course there are exceptions to all of this—but the trends have been toward shock value, a diminishment of beauty, the degradation of humanity and not the elevation of it.
I hope this new initiative reverses that trend in terms of our federal cultural holdings, and I further hope that federal grip on culture loosens. We ought not need it.