The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has unveiled a refurbished exhibit on George Washington, and it is a masterclass in curatorial cowardice. Under the soft lighting and interactive touchscreens, visitors are treated to a sanitized Founding Father: the stoic general, the reluctant president, the marble monument. What they are not told, in any meaningful way, is that the man who built the American presidency also built his wealth on the backs of enslaved human beings—and that his famous dentures were not made of wood but of teeth pulled from those he owned.
This is not a minor omission. It is a willful erasure, and it says far more about our present moment than it does about the eighteenth century.
The exhibit, titled “The First President,” opened to polite reviews and a flurry of social media posts showing children posing next to a life-sized Washington mannequin. According to the museum’s own press release, the goal is to “humanize” Washington by focusing on his “personal struggles” and “political courage.” Humanize. That word is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Because the actual human being—the one who signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, who rotated his enslaved workers between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon to evade Pennsylvania’s gradual emancipation law, who pursued Ona Judge for years after she escaped—that man is nowhere to be found.
Instead, we get a wall of quotes about liberty, a replica of his inaugural Bible, and a looping video of historians praising his decision to step down after two terms. All true. All admirable. And all beside the point when presented without context.
This is the Smithsonian, not a partisan think tank. It receives federal funding. It holds the nation’s most trusted historical collections. When it chooses comfort over truth, it doesn’t just fail scholars—it fails every school group that walks through those doors expecting to learn something real.
Critics of the exhibit, including several prominent historians who spoke to me on background, say the curators were terrified of political backlash. A museum spokesperson declined to comment on internal deliberations but noted that the exhibit “meets the highest standards of historical accuracy.” Accuracy, perhaps. Honesty, no. There is a difference between what happened and what we choose to display.
And here is why this matters beyond one exhibit. We are living through a moment when American history is being fought over in school boards, state legislatures, and cable news chyrons. Every year, more teachers report self-censoring when discussing slavery and its legacies. Every year, more parents demand “patriotic” education. The Smithsonian was supposed to be a refuge from that—a place where the full, messy, morally complicated story could be told without fear.
Instead, it has become a follower, not a leader. The new Washington exhibit doesn’t just soft-pedal the past; it sends a signal to every curator, teacher, and student that the safest version of history is the one that makes us feel good about ourselves. That is not education. That is propaganda with a gift shop.
I am not asking for a Washington exhibit that is nothing but a catalog of sins. I am asking for one that trusts visitors—including children—to handle complexity. Show the dentures and say where the teeth came from. Show the ledger of enslaved workers alongside the inauguration. Show the escape of Ona Judge not as a footnote but as a central American story. That would be a real humanization. That would be courage.
Instead, the Smithsonian has given us a saint in a glass case. And saints, as any honest historian knows, have never been the point.
*The real scandal isn’t that Washington owned slaves—we all know that. The scandal is that our most prestigious museum still thinks we can’t handle it. Until we can look at the founders clearly, warts and all, we’re not teaching history. We’re curating a bedtime story.*