Philadelphia Museum Marks America’s 250th By Dwelling on Its Faults

The Philadelphia Museum of Art—in the city where the Declaration of Independence was drafted and signed—is marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of America with an exhibit that harps on our country’s flaws so obsessively that the wall labels read more like an indictment than a celebration.

Slavery and brutal treatment of Native Americans are both indefensible, and neither should be sanitized out of the American story. Yet rather than finding some sensible middle ground that acknowledges America’s imperfections while also celebrating the 250th, the Philadelphia museum’s show of American art is heavy-handedly accusatory about America.

All the guilt-mongering in the wall label text is a shame, because there are plenty of gorgeous pictures on display, many of them on loan from John S. Middleton, the owner of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team, and his wife Leigh, from what the New York Times describes as "what is regarded as one of the finest collections of American art in private hands."

The guilt-mongering begins before you even enter a gallery to start looking at the art. In a hallway on the way into the American art is a land acknowledgment. "The Philadelphia Museum of Art recognizes Philadelphia as part of Lenapehokink, the ancestral homelands of the Lenape peoples. A long history of broken treaties, forced migrations, and fraudulent agreements such as the Walking Purchase of 1737 displaced many of the Lenape from this land. This museum and our staff strive to understand our place within the legacy of colonization….by committing to build a more inclusive and equitable space for all."

Enter the gallery and a wall label asserts that "The arrival of William Penn in 1682 and the founding of the Pennsylvania colony launched an era of British colonization that dramatically increased the number of European immigrants who encroached on and stole Lenape lands."

The whole concept of "Lenape lands" is anachronistic because the concept of exclusive or permanent land ownership didn’t really exist before the Europeans arrived. And, as the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission had pointed out, but the wall label omits, "Consistent with the Society of Friends' (Quakers) belief that all people are children of God and should be considered equals, William Penn attempted to treat Native Americans (Indians) fairly. Although King Charles II had granted to Penn in 1681 the land that he called 'Pennsylvania,' a vast expanse including an enormous unexplored wilderness, Penn himself took the further step of purchasing each portion within the grant from the Native American residents before selling subdivisions within it to his colonists."

Another panel distances the museum from the use of the words "Indian Chief" on a portrait frame. "Both words betray a European, colonial outlook that collapses the individual identity of the sitters and the varied leadership roles in Lenape society into generic, stereotypic terms," the label says, engaging in precisely the same generic stereotyping and collapsing of individual identity that it is scolding about, just at different targets.

As if stealing the lands of Native Americans is not bad enough, the museum proceeds to fault Europeans for bringing slavery to America, with the sweeping accusation that "Nearly all the works of art in the American galleries bear connections to slavery."

And if Native Americans and enslaved people aren’t enough victims of America, don’t worry—there are more. A wall label about the American Revolution proclaims that "When Thomas Jefferson famously declared in 1776 that ‘all men are created equal,’ his words did not ring true for many groups in the colonies. Enslaved people, Indigenous people, women, the economically disadvantaged, and others—all tried to discern what their opportunities might be in these new United States." That’s precisely wrong; the words about being created equal did ring true, which is why all these constituencies fought so hard over the years for equal rights. The label goes on to attribute some of the support for the Revolution by "white men" to hope "that independence would bring westward expansion onto the lands of various Indigenous nations." That’s a trendy academic theory but weakly supported as a main cause of the revolution.

A four-sentence summation of the period 1740-1790 concludes by noting that artistic freedom "was not equally available to all: artists of African descent, Indigenous artists, and women artists navigated limited opportunities for independence."

A wall label about the period 1810 to 1840 follows the same pattern; it is three paragraphs. The final and concluding paragraph is a castigation: "The freedom to experience the nation’s prosperity did not extend to all, however. This moment of American expansion and opportunity relied heavily on enslaved labor and the displacement of Indigenous people."

Another label reports that President Andrew Jackson "advocated for the seizure of indigenous lands for colonial settlement, which led to the violent displacement of many native people along the brutal ‘Trail of Tears.’" This flattens and oversimplifies a story that, properly told, includes Jackson’s opponents—also Americans—arguing against Indian removal, and at least consideration of Jackson’s claim, self-serving though it was, that, as Robert Remini put it as quoted in a New York Times review, removal "was meant to prevent annihilation, not cause it."

The period 1850 to 1880 is handled with a description of "Manifest Destiny," a vision in which "indigenous people were dismissed, dislocated, or destroyed."

Part of the problem here is structural. This is an art museum, not a history museum or American Indian Museum or museum of slavery. While some history is necessary to put the art in proper historical context, the limited length of a wall label doesn’t particularly lend itself to nuance.

Even with those constraints, though, this is over the top. What’s being delivered here reads like it was written at the peak of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter era. No one revised it to adjust to the changing national mood. These are the sorts of crude messages that generate backlash rather than build bridges. It winds up being insulting even to the minority groups, who are largely depicted as lacking agency, helpless dupes and victims of the European colonizers, and without any humanizing flaws of their own.

Wander into another wing of the museum, devoted to European art, and the curators have somehow managed to display it without a lot of broad-brush editorial denunciation of the culture that created it, even though the evils of Communism and Nazism dwarf anything seen in America. I sent the museum an email asking for a response on that point and the overall concern and got no reply.

So it’s hard to escape the conclusion that part of the problem, also, is political. Maybe the curators figure any country that elected Donald Trump president must be irredeemable; they hate the president so much that they hate the country that elected him. The same spirit animates New York Times headlines like "America Is Anxious About Its 250th Birthday. So Are Historians."

For such a terrible country, America sure has managed to produce some gorgeous art. It’s worth going to see in Philadelphia; just ignore the wall labels and concentrate on the paintings. The best of them convey what’s missing from the text that goes along with them: confidence, pride, and patriotic optimism that for all of America’s flaws, 250 years in, it remains humanity’s best hope.

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