New D.C. Center Celebrates the American Dream

Steps from White House, now find Michael Milken’s “prosperity formula” and George W. Bush’s paintings of immigrants

“Beacon of Hope,” oil on stretched canvas, by George W. Bush, is on display in the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. Photo: The Editors.

For decades it seems as if almost every new museum in Washington has featured something terrible. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in 1993, tells the story of the Nazi murderous war against European Jewry and of America’s failure fully to open its doors to refugees seeking to flee the persecution. The National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 2004, tells the grim story of Indians facing disease, removal, dispossession, and poverty. The National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016, tells the “unvarnished truth” of the transatlantic slave trade in all its cruelty.

Sure, those three museums also include stories of resilience, courage, achievement and, in some cases, progress. Unlike them, though, the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, which opened to the public a few weeks ago in a former Riggs National Bank building steps from the White House and the U.S. Treasury, is not a government project. That may account in part for its thoroughly sunnier outlook.

The “hall of dreams” on the first floor of the center, along with a high-tech moving-cloud display, includes posters with quotes. Billionaire businessman Warren Buffett says, “In its brief 232 years of existence…there has been no incubator for unleashing human potential like America.” Singer Gloria Estefan says, “In the United States, if you believe yourself and you’re determined and persevere, you’re going to succeed.”

Facts and figures on display elsewhere in the museum convey a similarly upbeat story.