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A lot happened on the Fourth of July this year. It was the nation’s 250th birthday, after all.
So you may have missed the report the White House dropped on Independence Day.
The document is called “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage.”
It claims the Smithsonian Museum of American History’s mission has “shifted from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”
Notice the accusation.
Before, when America was great, the museum had “straightforward” history.
Now that the leftists have taken over, the institution has shifted to “extreme political activism.”
The White House claims that the Smithsonian was once objective and has since become subjective. It used to be neutral; now it is driven by an ideological agenda.
The accusation rests on a premise no serious historian accepts.
Purely objective history is a myth. It is not possible when human beings are involved. It’s not even desirable.
This does not mean that there is no objective data.
Facts are objective. What happened, on what date, and who was there is information that is often ascertainable and beyond dispute.
But facts do not interpret themselves.
They require interpretation, and interpretation is where subjectivity enters.
Subjective interpretation is not a defect in the discipline of history. That is the discipline.
Consider the most basic act of scholarship: choosing a subject.
There are endless topics to explore—from the rise of the Religious Right to the lives of widows after the Civil War.
But someone has to decide which stories to explore, what questions should be asked, what information to include, and how to make meaning of that information.
These are subjective decisions.
The White House’s report argues the Smithsonian museum once had an objective rendering of the past. But that idea of historical objectivity is the true myth.
There is a parallel myth of objectivity in the religious world.
Fundamentalists insist they are simply offering “the plain reading of Scripture,” the “obvious meaning of the text.”
Then Black and Latin American liberation theologians approach the text with different questions and priorities.
Suddenly, those interpreters are accused of being subjective and corrupting the objective readings of the Bible that other (usually white men) scholars once considered normative.
“The plain reading of Scripture” and “straightforward historical scholarship” are the same claim in different disciplines—one in theology and the other in history.
Each asserts that there is one honest way to read the text, and that it happens to be theirs.
But the myth of objectivity holds in any academic field.
Wherever a human being interprets, pure objectivity is impossible. There is always a vantage point.
What the accusation misunderstands is the nature of the craft itself. Historians do not catalog facts and recite dates.
We construct arguments, as every scholarly discipline does.
An argument is advanced with evidence and answered with better evidence. It is interpretive, but interpretation, in itself, does not make it inaccurate.
The White House is right on one front.
The historians tend to lean left, and many scholars at the Smithsonian would fairly be described as liberal. That tilt does not make their history false.
If any party should be labeled “subjective” in a negative way, it is the White House.
Their actions have rendered them utterly untrustworthy in matters of historical interpretation.
They have frequently partnered with PragerU (not an actual university), which asserted in a children’s video on Columbus: “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.”
The “Saving America’s History” report spurred two Congressional hearings on the Smithsonian museum.
In one of the hearings, a representative of Hillsdale College testified.
Hillsdale produced the “1776 Curriculum”—a rebuttal to the 1619 Project that downplayed the role of race, gender, and class in U.S. history.
That is not objectivity. That is ideology.
When this regime says “objective,” they mean “agrees with our conclusions.” When they say “activist history,” they mean “telling a story and including people they would prefer to whitewash.”
This is the reality beneath the fight over the Smithsonian. They are not defending objective history. They are defending their version of history, and calling it objective.
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