The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History recently unveiled a refreshed exhibit on George Washington, and the reviews are in. Not from critics—from ordinary Americans who walked through the doors expecting history and got something closer to hagiography with a body count.
The exhibit, titled "Becoming Washington," traces the first president's life from Virginia surveyor to revolutionary general to reluctant statesman. What it doesn't trace, according to visitors and historians alike, is the 317 human beings he enslaved at Mount Vernon. Or rather, it mentions them—in a single panel, tucked near a display case of his dentures, as if bondage were a fun fact rather than the economic foundation of his entire world.
This isn't a new complaint. The Smithsonian has been fending off criticism about Washington exhibits for years. But the timing feels different now. In an era when school boards are banning books about slavery and politicians are calling it "a job training program," the nation's premier history museum choosing to soft-pedal the obvious raises a question: Who is this exhibit actually for?
The answer, apparently, is tourists who want to feel good about America while eating a $14 sandwich in the cafeteria.
Let's be precise. Washington enslaved people. He pursued escaped enslaved people. He signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. He rotated his enslaved workers between his plantations to avoid them establishing legal residency in Pennsylvania, where they might have claimed freedom. His will famously freed his enslaved people upon his death—a fact the exhibit highlights with what can only be described as unseemly pride. Martha Washington freed none of hers. The exhibit doesn't mention that.
What we have here is a museum doing the cultural equivalent of a corporate apology video: acknowledging just enough to seem aware, while carefully avoiding anything that might make the donor class uncomfortable. The Smithsonian, after all, relies on private funding. And private funding in this country tends to come with strings attached—strings that often look a lot like the ones Washington used to tether his human property.
This is not about canceling George Washington. The man was indispensable to the American experiment. He could have been king and chose not to be. That matters. But so does the fact that he built his fortune on the backs of people who could not choose anything at all.
The real scandal isn't that Washington owned slaves. Everyone knows that. The scandal is that in 2024, a taxpayer-funded museum in the nation's capital is still treating that fact as a footnote rather than a framework. If you can't tell the truth about George Washington in Washington, D.C., what hope is there for the rest of us?
We are a country that prefers comfortable lies to uncomfortable truths. The Smithsonian just made that official.
**Closing opinion:** A museum that flinches from history isn't educating anyone—it's curating a national mood board. If we can't look squarely at the men who built this country and the people they crushed to do it, we're not preserving history. We're practicing avoidance with a gift shop.