By admin 
Earlier this year, I visited a “Freedom Truck,” one of the patriotic mobile museums that the Trump administration is sending around the country for the nation’s 250 birthday. There, I had a wide-ranging conversation with a visitor who complained that the U.S. education system is not teaching what she called true history. But when I mentioned the Smithsonian, her disposition changed entirely. She’d heard rumors about “a lot of liberalism going through the Smithsonian now,” she told me, but added, “I love the Smithsonian. I don’t have a problem with it.”
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I hear this a lot, actually. Even now, as the museum complex continues to face a pressure campaign from the White House, public fondness for the Smithsonian—for its free entry and eclectic collections—is hard to break among those otherwise receptive to President Trump’s anti-institutionalism.
Attacks on the credibility of institutions, especially those that disseminate information—universities, public schools, media organizations—have become commonplace in this so-called post-truth age. Recent data from Gallup, published last month, suggested that confidence in the majority of institutions asked about in the survey, including newspapers, public schools, and TV news, is at or near historic lows. Pollsters, meanwhile, don’t even include museums in the Gallup surveys. Although museums have certainly faced some criticism from the left and right, until now, they’ve been largely immune to the most deleterious effects of the culture wars.
This may be because most Americans, unlike the president, seem to trust these entities to do their thing. A YouGov survey last week found that 57 percent of Americans said that the amount of influence the president should have over exhibits and programming at federally funded museums should be “none” or “not much.” Just 17 percent of Republicans seemed to take the president’s position: that he should have a “great deal” of influence. Coming after a history museum may not be the base-galvanizing issue the White House hopes it is.
Industry data support these findings. In a survey this year, Wilkening Consulting, in partnership with the American Alliance of Museums, found that when people were asked whether museums, faced with pressure, should remove content on topics such as slavery and climate change, the majority of conservatives (63 percent) and liberals (83 percent) disagreed. An oft-cited statistic from the same pair of organizations places museums among the most trusted sources of information in American life, falling just behind public libraries and family and friends. It suggests that museums occupy a rare and cozy place in the collective imagination.
At a time of high mistrust in not just institutions but also observable reality, people seem to still find a sense of stability in these keepers of public memory. Perhaps it makes sense that Americans would put their last bits of trust in the very places that show them what is physically, tangibly real.
For more than a year, the White House has threatened and criticized the Smithsonian, accusing it of spreading divisive narratives and failing to adequately celebrate American history. In recent weeks, the administration has zeroed in on the National Museum of American History, publishing a lengthy report last month decrying exhibits, calling out staff members, and that the museum has fallen victim to “ideological capture” at the hands of a “radical, activist cohort.” During a pair of congressional hearings, the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, attested to her love of this country some half a dozen times while maintaining that telling the American story in all of its complexity is a form of respect for its people.
Two days later, Trump announced an executive order that would effectively plaster untrustworthy on signs outside the National Museum of American History, like an explicit content label on a CD. The administration ordered the National Park Service to put up the signage in front of the museum to correct what it claims is “inaccurate information” and to share the findings of its report, which claims that the current leadership of the Smithsonian and the history museum cannot be trusted to tell the American story.
Right-wing media organizations have echoed this messaging, and since the hearings, Fox News has published dozens of clips and articles criticizing the Smithsonian and scrutinizing its leadership’s pay, highlighting months-old proposed budget cuts, and tallying the number of “liberal items” in a recent exhibit.
The Smithsonian, which is partially government-funded, has faced partisan flare-ups over the years. A controversy over how to display the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima compelled a museum director to resign in 1995. In 2010, Smithsonian leadership removed from the walls of the National Portrait Gallery an artwork showing a crucifix with ants crawling on it after a right-wing outcry. But these incidents involved single exhibits. Now the White House is making a much more comprehensive case against an entire museum and the institution to which it belongs. With the ordered signs, which will direct visitors to Trump-preferred sources of information, the White House is stepping between visitors and historic objects as though to say: Don’t trust what you see inside. Choose us instead.
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This is where museums and friends and family actually share something in common. Culture wars thrive on the unknown. But museums are an in-person activity. “It’s you directly with that artwork or you directly with that specimen, whatever it is. That object feels like it’s speaking directly to you as a trustworthy thing from the past. That in and of itself lends a lot of credibility,” Susie Wilkening, who runs the American Alliance of Museums’ research about museums and trust, told me. Max van Balgooy, a professor of museum studies at the George Washington University, had similar thoughts: “If you see the gun that John Wilkes Booth used or the chair sat in by John Hancock, you’re sort of faced with the truth,” he told me. “You can’t argue with the real stuff.”
Museums weren’t always the hubs of knowledge they are today. They had to both differentiate themselves from the likes of P. T. Barnum’s “museum” as serious scholarly enterprises, devoid of exaggeration and fakes, and invite in ordinary visitors.
At the National Museum of History and Technology, which opened in 1964 and went on to become the National Museum of American History, curators strived not just to show objects but also to tell stories, enhanced with well-designed spaces. In the early days, these stories largely celebrated technological progress: When Daniel Boorstin started as the history museum’s director, in 1969, he nodded to the political ruptures of the era and said, “Here, we emphasize the positive. Without denying our failures, we underline and dramatize our successes.” But as more academics joined the museum, they began to stress questions of who, exactly, benefited from American progress, and worked other critical themes into exhibits. The trend—moving from the rah-rah to the sober—was exemplified by a 1987 exhibition that commemorated the bicentennial of the American Constitution and detailed the abuses of Japanese American internment camps.
Unlike with other kinds of institutions, such as news sites, naysayers can’t easily form museum alternatives aligned with their perspective. (Partisan museums often struggle to compete with mainstream institutions in terms of historical artifacts.) Part of a museum’s trustworthiness may simply come down to the basic fact that it owns these objects and shows them in an authoritative-looking building. Darryl Hart, a history professor at Hillsdale College, an institution that has worked with the Trump administration on education topics, suggested that museumgoers typically don’t think to critique what they see. “For some people, it’s simply part of what they do on a vacation, and I think they check a box,” he told me. “My sense is, people really are going there fairly innocently, not looking for an agenda.”
The data concur. “On the whole, museums are not believed by the American public to have a political agenda,” Colleen Dilenschneider, the founder of Impacts Experience, a market-research firm that examines perceptions of cultural institutions, told me. Her research, which relies on data from the National Awareness, Attitudes, and Usage Study, found that as of July 1, fewer than a quarter of Americans surveyed believed that museums had political agendas—compared with well over half who believed the same of news sources. Liberals and conservatives both overwhelmingly agreed with the statement that museums are “welcoming to people like me.”
Dilenschneider said that “the most shared characteristic of any person in the United States who’s visited a museum in the last year is that they self-identify as a white, non-Hispanic individual” and added that “there are people who are used to hearing their story and they trust that they will continue to hear their story.” Where the story comes from, though, is less clear. Museums contain an essential paradox: They feel transparent because you can walk in and see the work they do. At the same time, the hand behind that work is less visible: As van Balgooy put it, creditless wall texts can read like “the voice of God.”
This impersonal feeling is nearly a definitional feature of institutional trust, Oliver Schilke, the director of the Center for Trust Studies at the University of Arizona, told me. “It’s more a trust in a category of things rather than in specific individuals or counterparts,” he said. This slight distance allows us to form an idealized view on an institution. Putting the spotlight on real people behind it can degrade that trust if they’re being attacked or discredited, as happened during the often-acrimonious Smithsonian hearings last month. At times, lawmakers seemed to be speaking directly to their supporters online, such as when Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina demanded that the history museum’s director tell her whether she believes that men can become women.
When Victoria Cain, a professor at Northeastern University who studies the history of museums and education, described museums’ role in life today, she made them sound like a tonic to the most charged parts of contemporary discourse. Akin to secular churches, museums have taken on a ritualistic quality, she told me: “You can go be in a common space with other people in an act of appreciation.”
In this regard, museums aren’t just a last bastion of public faith—they’re a rare, shared, bipartisan cultural space. These days, many people lament the ways that we have retreated into information silos, full of others who agree with us. But you can’t chop up Thomas Jefferson’s desk and give half of it to the right and half to the left. If we all want to see the desk where the Declaration of Independence was written, we’re going to have to learn, first, to be in the same room.
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