Lawmakers wanted contrition. What they got instead was defiance.
Anthea Hartig, who runs the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, spent two separate sessions on Capitol Hill this week fielding pointed questions from members of Congress.
At the center of the storm: a years-long exhibit that suggested Benjamin Franklin may have used enslaved people and indentured servants as subjects in electrical shock experiments.
Tuesday’s House hearing set the tone.
Heritage Foundation expert Mike Gonzalez took aim at the exhibit, called “The Electric Dr. Franklin,” telling committee members it “pondered whether he had ever done experiments, electrical electroshock on indentured servants or slaves.”
According to Gonzalez, the museum offered this theory “without producing any evidence whatsoever.”
He didn’t hold back his assessment. “Why smear a Founding Father such as Ben Franklin by pondering such a really bizarre thing,” Gonzalez asked the committee.
The exchange set up a direct confrontation. Rep. Brian Jack, R-Ga., turned to Hartig almost immediately after Gonzalez finished speaking.
“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 that have been displayed? Do you regret any of the exhibits and, if so, which?” Jack asked.
Hartig’s answer offered no ground. “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,” she said.
Unsatisfied, Jack tried again, asking her point-blank, “Which mistakes would you say you’ve made?”
What followed surprised many in the room. Rather than pointing to any content-related controversy, Hartig cited a minor cataloging slip.
“There are always factual errors,” she said, adding that “one of my favorite, currently, 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.”
Context matters here. Hartig took the reins of the museum back in February 2019.
The Franklin exhibit she now defends debuted two years later, in 2021, and remained open to the public for four years before closing in 2025.
The museum hasn’t scrubbed the material from its records.
A webpage tied to the exhibit remains active, describing how “researchers also used people as conductors to determine how far an electrical charge might travel, and if electrical effects would fade with distance.”
That same page delves deeper into Franklin’s documented experiments, noting that “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.”
It then extends the theory to his household staff, stating that “indentured servants and enslaved people in his household could also have been used, although we may never know for certain.”
The Franklin exhibit is just one thread in a much bigger tapestry of grievances.
A newly issued White House report, running 162 pages and titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” lays out sweeping accusations against the museum, timed for release around America’s 250th birthday.
Its authors, the White House Domestic Policy Council, argue that the museum has drifted from its mission of shared national storytelling into something far more divisive.
The report doesn’t stop at implication — it states outright 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.”
The council’s language grows sharper still.
It alleges 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.”
Hartig pushed back on these findings during her testimony.
She told lawmakers 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 closed her defense on a note of institutional pride, saying “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 programming.”
Neither the Smithsonian Institution nor the National Museum of American History has issued additional comment beyond what was stated during testimony.
Gonzalez has likewise not offered further remarks. Fox News Digital reached out to all three for elaboration.
For now, the standoff between congressional Republicans and one of the nation’s most visible cultural institutions shows no sign of cooling.
