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The director of the country’s premier American history museum said she has no regrets about any of the museum’s exhibits under her tenure after an expert confronted her with a “shocking” display that he said smeared founding father Benjamin Franklin.
Smithsonian National Museum of American History Director Anthea Hartig faced intense questioning from lawmakers during two Capitol Hill hearings this week. The hearings followed a White House Domestic Policy Council report accusing the museum of using taxpayer dollars and its status as a world-renowned institution to advance a “radical activist ideology.”
During a House hearing on Tuesday, Heritage Foundation expert Mike Gonzalez testified that a multiyear special exhibit titled “The Electric Dr. Franklin” included a display that “pondered whether he had ever done experiments, electrical electroshock on indentured servants or slaves.” Gonzalez testified that the display included this suggestion “without producing any evidence whatsoever,” which he called “shocking.”
“Why smear a founding father such as Ben Franklin by pondering such a really bizarre thing,” asked Gonzalez.
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Immediately after Gonzalez’s testimony, Rep. Brian Jack, R-Ga., confronted Hartig, saying, “We’ve heard a lot of concerning examples as just referenced. Do you have any regrets in your tenure thus far [about] some of the exhibits have been displayed? Do you regret any of the exhibits and if so, which?”
Hartig answered, “I am incredibly proud of the work we’ve done, but we are imperfect and we surely have made mistakes. But I don’t have any regrets.”
Jack pressed further, asking, “Which mistakes would you say you’ve made?”
To which Hartig responded, “There are always factual errors.”
“One of my favorite, currently,” she went on, “is that one of our volunteers has pointed out that we’ve been mislabeling a coin in the American Presidency exhibit for years, and we were, of course, you know, slightly embarrassed about that, but we fixed it.”
Hartig became director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in February 2019. The Benjamin Franklin exhibit opened to the public in 2021 and remained on display through 2025.
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The museum currently has a webpage containing expanded material from the exhibit. The site states that “researchers also used people as conductors to determine how far an electrical charge might travel, and if electrical effects would fade with distance. Franklin wrote about experiments in which he took shocks and used family and friends in these ways, although he seldom identified who in particular assisted him. Indentured servants and enslaved people in his household could also have been used, although we may never know for certain.”
A sweeping new 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.”
According to the 162-page “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” report, delivered on America’s 250th birthday, NMAH treats the American story as a political tool rather than a shared national inheritance.
The White House Domestic Policy Council wrote that the “Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of American History in particular, under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic.”
Further, the report said that “by the intention and at the direction of current Museum and Smithsonian leadership, NMAH has become subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”
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During her testimony Tuesday, Hartig said that “the Smithsonian takes the concerns raised in the White House Domestic Policy Counsel’s report seriously, and as we continue to fact check the report, we unwaveringly attest that it does not fairly or accurately characterize the full body of work at the museum.”
She added that “there is always room for improvement, but I also know the beauty and the inspiration and the expertise that lies in our collections, our exhibits, and our programing.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of American History, and Gonzalez for additional comment.
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