The Smithsonian belongs to the public, not to any president. For 180 years it has told the American story through independent scholarship, the proud parts and the hard parts alike. On July 4, the White House released a 162-page report calling the Smithsonian's leaders "radical activists" who "cannot be trusted" to tell that story. It is the latest step under an executive order that directs the vice president to strip "improper ideology" from its museums.
Deciding what counts as improper is the whole problem. When a president's office, and not historians and curators, gets to rule which parts of the past are allowed on the wall, a museum stops teaching history and starts delivering a message. We have already seen where this leads. A federal judge had to order the administration to restore exhibits on slavery and civil rights that it stripped from national parks under the same order, finding the removals unlawful.
Historians are not neutral about this. The American Historical Association and hundreds of scholars warn that government control of public history is what authoritarian governments do, not democracies. A country confident in itself can face its whole record, including slavery and Indigenous removal and the long fights for rights that followed.
Congress funds the Smithsonian and appoints members of its Board of Regents, which gives you both the duty and the power to protect it. I am asking you to publicly oppose the politically directed review of Smithsonian content, to reject any funding conditions that would force it, and to defend the institution's independent, nonpartisan scholarship.
