The director of the country's premier American history museum faced intense questioning from lawmakers about a recent exhibit that some have deemed "shocking."
During two Capitol Hill hearings this week, Smithsonian National Museum of American History Director Anthea Hartig was grilled about the museum's exhibits under her tenure. The hearings followed a report accusing the museum of using taxpayer dollars to advance a "radical activist ideology."
A Heritage Foundation expert testified that a multiyear special exhibit on Benjamin Franklin included a display suggesting that the founding father may have performed electrical experiments on indentured servants or slaves. The expert called this suggestion "shocking" and "without producing any evidence whatsoever."
Rep. Brian Jack, R-Ga., confronted Hartig immediately after the expert's testimony, asking if she had any regrets about the exhibits displayed during her tenure. Hartig responded that she was "incredibly proud" of the work done, but acknowledged that the museum was "imperfect" and had made mistakes.
When Jack pressed for specifics on the mistakes made, Hartig mentioned a factual error in the American Presidency exhibit that involved mislabeling a coin. She stated that the mistake was corrected after a volunteer pointed it out.
The exhibit in question, "The Electric Dr. Franklin," opened to the public in 2021 and remained on display through 2025. The museum currently has a webpage containing expanded material from the exhibit, which states that researchers used people as conductors to determine how far an electrical charge might travel and that Franklin wrote about experiments involving his family and friends.
A recent White House report concluded that the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History has become a taxpayer-backed institution of "ideological capture" and "extreme political activism." The report accused the museum of treating the American story as a political tool rather than a shared national inheritance.
Hartig responded to the criticism by stating that there is always room for improvement, but that she is proud of the museum's work and believes in the value of its collections, exhibits, and programming.
