I Spent 25 Years in Historical Museums. The Smithsonian Should Speak of America's Greatness
The Smithsonian Institution, on the eve of its 250th anniversary, faces a fundamental debate over how to balance America's achievements and shortcomings.
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The Smithsonian Institution is sometimes called the nation's attic. This description is inadequate. An attic stores things. The Smithsonian does something far more important: it helps Americans understand who we are.
This responsibility carries special weight as the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary and the Smithsonian prepares for new leadership. The transition comes amid fierce debate over how the Smithsonian should present American history. A White House review criticized the National Museum of American History, arguing that ideological concerns have replaced the understanding of history as a shared national heritage.
Smithsonian leaders and historians have defended the institution's scientific independence and warned against allowing political power to dictate how history is told. The answer cannot be to choose one of those impulses and ignore the other.
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Outgoing Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Butch recently said that the Smithsonian should represent both light and darkness. He also described America as an ideal place - an ideal of freedom, fairness, justice and equality.
But has the Smithsonian told the story of America fairly?
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The harder question is one of proportion: How should America's national museums juxtapose light and darkness in an honest account of the country?
I have spent much of the last quarter century helping to run museums and historical institutions in Virginia. That experience has convinced me that historical integrity requires more than factual accuracy. It needs fit, context and perspective.
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America's national museums must honestly tell our history, including the shortcomings, contradictions, and instances where Americans failed to live up to the principles proclaimed at the founding of the nation.
But these failures should not become the organizing principle through which the American experience is understood.
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In retrospect, the American story is wonderful.
A series of colonies declared that human beings have rights that governments do not grant them. Americans then established a republic with a stable constitution based on representative government, individual liberty, and the rule of law. Those ideas changed human history.
Their nation survived civil war, expanded freedom and political participation, welcomed generations of immigrants, became an industrial and scientific power, defeated fascism and Soviet communism, and put men on the moon.
When America fell short of its fundamental principles, subsequent generations returned to these principles many times to ask the nation to do better.
There is an important distinction between critically examining America and teaching Americans to be pessimistic about their country. A great national museum should be able to have the former without succumbing to the latter.
Museums inevitably make choices: which objects to display, which stories to emphasize, and which context to receive visitors from. Individual facts can be accurate while their cumulative presentation leaves a distorted impression.
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The Smithsonian must resist any interpretive approach that begins with contemporary political or ideological categories and works through history to validate them. History should inform today's debates, but the past deserves to be faced on its own terms.
Nor can the answer be to replace one political orthodoxy with another.
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The Smithsonian has endured presidents and congresses of both parties. Its credibility is based on scholarship, independence and public trust. Americans should never believe that their national museum exhibits are rewritten whenever political power changes hands.
James Smithson envisioned an institution dedicated to the "increase and diffusion of knowledge."
Two centuries later, the Smithsonian holds an object that belongs to us all: General George Washington's uniform. President Abraham Lincoln's star-spangled banner hat. Write brochure. Harriet Tubman's hymn. Greensboro lunch counter stool. Apollo 11 command module.
They tell a remarkable story of aspiration, struggle, success and progress.
No curator owns that story. Neither does a president, a political party, an academic movement—or a generation. We keep it temporarily in trust. This principle is especially important in America's 250th anniversary. This turning point should invite reflection. But reflection is not national self-blame.
Our sesquicentennial must not become a 250th anniversary devoted mostly to cataloging America's shortcomings while treating its achievements as evidence or praise.
Visitors should leave the Smithsonian and learn more about American history. They must understand our shortcomings and contradictions as well as our achievements. They should be moved by what Americans built, moved by what Americans sacrificed, grateful for what they inherited—and challenged to preserve and improve it.
Pride is not an enemy in the country. Historical understanding, if properly based on truth, can be one of its products.
The Smithsonian does not need to tell Americans what to think about America. It should give them the artifacts, knowledge, context and perspective necessary to understand the heritage that belongs to them.
Tell hard stories. Tell the elders to trust the Americans in both cases.
After 250 years, the American story remains unfinished. It is the Smithsonian's responsibility to preserve it faithfully, to interpret it faithfully—and to ensure that the next generation understands why it is a story worth celebrating.
David Botkins is a former president of the Virginia Museum of Science and a current trustee of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. He has more than 25 years of museum and historic preservation management experience and is the founder and CEO of Botkins Strategies, LLC.
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