Museums and Democracy

Canada's Ingenium Center takes stewardship of the public trust seriously

As might be expected, there has been a flurry of activity in the professional public history community following the most recent presidential edict demanding White House "internal reviews" of Smithsonian museum content and threatening to broaden this demand to encompass other museums across the country. 

Aside from objections put out by the American Council of Learned Societies condemning the move by the executive branch as "authoritarian censorship," much of the public conversation around this recent move and other actions related to EO 14253 has focused on the content of the accusations rather than the importance of independent historical and cultural agencies for the maintenance of robust democratic institutions. A history of striving to maintaining and improve such institutions is the only real "exceptionalism" that the United States can rightfully claim. 

Ironically, it is in taking on the mantle of a study of American history focused on its people's attempts to achieve the democratic ideals of the nation that the Smithsonian and other prominent American museums began to turn toward more democratic processes at the turn of the 21st century, criticizing their own elitist histories.  Museums took stock of their relationships to broad sets of constituents and assessed their strengths and weaknesses.  They largely determined that it was their obligation to turn both inward and outward, identifying narrative and representational needs in their communities and striving to better engage their workforce to realize their educational objectives. The result was a large relative advantage in trustworthiness over similar educational and informational entities (such as schools, governments, and media outlets) in poll after poll for more than twenty years.  

In a cogent critique published that same year, historian and longtime Smithsonian curator James Gardner argued that public trust in museums was predicated on a mistaken belief in their "neutrality." To truly earn the public trust, museums needed to do better. They needed to "show their work" and make it clear how they were attempting to engage constituents as they made curatorial decisions. Such a critique took an orientation toward democratic processes as a given, arguing that notions of "objectivity" or "neutrality" embedded in the survey results continued to place too much emphasis on museums' authority and an imagined infallibility in their processes. Gardner felt that it would be better to more fully acknowledge that museums were continuously revising their interpretations as new evidence emerged and as new community priorities arose.

Ironically, the executive branch of 2025 has no qualms about asserting that there can be different historical interpretations. What it does shamelessly and without compromise is to claim an exclusive right to speak for the American people, essentially reducing all democratic expression to a single majority vote that took place in November of 2024. Coupled with a penchant for ignoring or denying inconvenient evidence (i.e. lying), the administration's attempts to seize soft power from cultural institutions denies the democratic processes that made those institutions worthy of the public trust. It wasn't that museums were "neutral" or perfectly "objective." It was that they were committed to listening to the people and evolving to meet their needs while insisting on supporting that evolution with sophisticated methods rooted in evidence-seeking and justified interpretation.

So yes, museums should insist on their autonomy so that they can continue to do the work that people have trusted them to do. And the people should insist on museums' autonomy so that places can remain that are worthy of the public trust.