On the logo for the Smith­son­ian Nation­al Muse­um of Amer­i­can History’s new 45,000-squarefoot wing devot­ed to busi­ness his­to­ry, the descrip­tor ​“Amer­i­ca inno­vates” is capped with a giant excla­ma­tion point. This flour­ish catch­es the casu­al tourist a bit off-guard. It’s as though some hap­less intern had walked into a har­ried mar­ket­ing manager’s office to ask, sheep­ish­ly, ​“What is it that Amer­i­ca does again?”

Corporate funders from Intel to Monsanto to Mars Inc. pooled their deductible foundation dosh to help underwrite this $63 million, Ken Burns-style paean to their own market-conquering genius.

Cor­po­rate fun­ders from Intel to Mon­san­to to Mars Inc. pooled their deductible foun­da­tion dosh to help under­write this $63 mil­lion, Ken Burns-style paean to their own mar­ket-con­quer­ing genius. Hec­tic inter­ac­tive dis­plays about every­thing from the cot­ton gin to the iPod ren­der Amer­i­ca a land of man­ic entre­pre­neur­ial invention.

But the man­date to cel­e­brate Amer­i­ca busi­ness inno­va­tion clear­ly ran afoul of a direc­tive to max­i­mize mul­ti­cul­tur­al inclu­sion, with unset­tling results. One files past a pre­dictable gee-whiz bank of dis­plays about Sil­i­con Val­ley into the impov­er­ished Bronx ghet­to of the 1970s, pre­sent­ed as an equal­ly entre­pre­neur­ial won­der­land. The Bronx, you see, was just ​“the right envi­ron­ment for the inven­tion of hip-hop … the urban land­scape pro­vid­ed the raw mate­ri­als.” As if this weren’t con­de­scend­ing enough, a video instal­la­tion fea­tures one Art Molel­la, the emer­i­tus direc­tor of the Lemel­son Cen­ter (the foun­da­tion bankrolling the dis­play) cheer­ful­ly explain­ing that ​“some­times being deprived of mate­ri­als dri­ves you to invent even more strenuously.”

This same decon­tex­tu­al­ized busi­ness boos­t­er­ism dom­i­nates the main attrac­tion, the Amer­i­can Enter­prise exhib­it in the Mars Hall of Amer­i­can Busi­ness. The Whig­gish nar­ra­tive of busi­ness tri­umph makes no allowance for the con­sid­er­able hid­den costs. Take this gnom­ic thumb­nail for the 19th-cen­tu­ry monop­o­list John Jacob Astor: ​“Though he nev­er set a trap for beavers, Astor became America’s rich­est man by sell­ing their fur.” Vis­i­tors won­der­ing just how that​’s sup­posed to work learn noth­ing of Astor’s sweet­heart pro­tec­tion­ist deals with Con­gress or his detours into drug smug­gling. He was just real­ly, real­ly inno­v­a­tive, all right?

Near­by, a hum­ble grass-woven bas­ket bears this bizarre leg­end: ​“Jem­my, about 1825-unknown. Enslaved entre­pre­neur. Jem­my learned bas­ket-weav­ing from his elders while enslaved in South Car­oli­na. Most of his sweet­grass bas­kets were used on the plan­ta­tion, but he secret­ly pad­dled the low-coun­try water­ways to take oth­ers to mar­ket.” The clear sub­text is that had only poor Jem­my, whose labor val­ue was bru­tal­ly expro­pri­at­ed, been grant­ed more sus­tained access to those invit­ing low-coun­try mar­kets — or, you know, per­haps had worked a lit­tle hard­er to earn it—this whole awk­ward slav­ery thing might have been pro­duc­tive­ly side­stepped. Despite much atten­tion lav­ished on Eli Whitney’s cot­ton gin, there’s no overt acknowl­edg­ment that slav­ery oper­at­ed hand in hand with Amer­i­can enter­prise for three centuries.

There are a few clum­sy efforts to note that our nation’s enter­pris­ing his­to­ry has not been with­out its moments of work­er out­rage and out­right polit­i­cal con­fronta­tion. But over and over again, we’re remind­ed that soli­tary mar­ket genius­es come along at just the right time to make it all bet­ter. There’s Sam Wal­ton, ​“Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Retail­er” (not ​“union-bust­ing destroy­er of small com­peti­tors”), and Hen­ry Paul­son, ​“Recov­ery Agent” (not ​“the Gold­man Sachs chair­man-turned-Trea­sury sec­re­tary who safe­guard­ed the bonus­es of his invest­ment-bank­ing brethren after the finan­cial cri­sis”).

Also unspec­i­fied is just who was respon­si­ble for that cri­sis. Cue the unfor­tu­nate mis­be­hav­ior of unspec­i­fied bad apples: ​“Dereg­u­la­tion in the finan­cial sec­tor opened new oppor­tu­ni­ty to many, but by the ear­ly 2000s some lenders became greedy and ignored risk. Gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tors also became lax.” Cer­tain­ly it had noth­ing to do with an indus­try-cap­tured reg­u­la­to­ry state that stretched back to the Carter years.

The only thing in this saga that doesn’t oper­ate in a free-float­ing state of cause­less­ness is the method­ol­o­gy of the exhib­it itself. Over at ​“The Con­sumer Era (1940−1970),” vis­i­tors encounter this approv­ing­ly word­ed nota­tion: ​“Cold War busi­ness mag­a­zines and pro­pa­gan­da illus­trat­ed the ben­e­fits of cap­i­tal­ism to Amer­i­can con­sumers and tied con­sumerism to demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues.” Now that deserves an excla­ma­tion point.