For most of the nation’s history, the Smithsonian has served as symbol of national unity, receiving praise from members of both political parties and the public at large. Intermittent efforts to challenge the museum, such as Christian radio host Dale Crowley Jr.’s 1978 federal lawsuit demanding the Smithsonian cancel an exhibition on human evolution, have largely failed to materialize. That all changed in 1994, when veterans’ groups and conservative politicians, including Patrick J. Buchanan, vocally criticized the National Air and Space Museum for highlighting the Japanese casualties of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in a proposed exhibit tied to the fiftieth anniversary of the Enola Gay. They considered any questioning of the decision to drop the A-bomb as dishonoring veterans, and thus anti-American. It was, in Buchanan’s words, “a sleepless campaign to inculcate in American youth a revulsion toward America’s past.”
“We’ve got to get patriotism back in the Smithsonian,” conservative Texas Congressman Sam Johnson said, on being appointed to the museum’s Board of Regents shortly afterward to provide so-called ideological “balance.” “We want the Smithsonian to reflect real America and not something that a historian dreamed up.”
The year-long media and political firestorm, and the attacks on historians as unpatriotic fantasists, helped fuel the politicization of the Smithsonian, but they did so in tandem with a development occurring on the nascent internet.
A year before the Enola Gay controversy, in 1993, future Ancient Aliens star David Childress, then a self-described “world explorer,” introduced the world to his new conspiracy theory, that the Smithsonian was actively trying to suppress the “truth” about various lost races of white giants, ancient Egyptians, and assorted what-have-you that allegedly occupied prehistoric America. He wrote about this in his self-published magazine, World Explorer, and in the New Age Nexus New Times that year. He dubbed the conspiracy with the not-so-original moniker “Smithsonian Gate.”
Childress gathered a passel of unconvincing evidence and wrapped it up in a sort of homage to the 1981 Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark, whose final scene showed the U.S. government secreting away the fabled Ark of the Covenant in a warehouse, never to be seen again. “To those who investigate allegations of archaeological cover-ups,” he wrote, “there are disturbing indications that the most important archaeological institute in the United States, the Smithsonian Institute [sic], an independent federal agency, has been actively suppressing some of the most interesting and important archaeological discoveries made in the Americas.”