A visitor looks at art at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, on March 28, in Washington.Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Donald Trump is reshaping contemporary American life. Can he also reshape the American past?
The history skirmishes – fights over colonialism, the role of slavery, the virtue or venality of the patriot founders, even questions about whether Woodrow Wilson was a hero of idealism or a hardened racist – didn’t start with Mr. Trump. He merely escalated the battle over American history from a peripheral academic conflict into a far-reaching war, taking the disputes from the faculty lounge to the lines of tourists in front of the massive museums in Washington’s grassy Mall.
That escalation occurred when he ordered Vice-President JD Vance to begin a systematic effort to assure that, to adapt a lyric from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s favourite song, never is seen a discouraging word about the American story in the capital’s signature museums. No special attention to race or transgender people. Especially no “anti-American ideology.”
The Trump executive order, titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, is aimed in part at what the President considers “the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” that he believes has infected the nearly two dozen museums of the Smithsonian Institution, which was created in 1846 with a founding grant from British scientist James Smithson. The institution, which technically is an independent entity – the legal phrase is a “trust instrumentality” of the United States – receives about three-fifths of its funding from the federal government and has government officials, including Mr. Vance, on its board.
In an era of contention over race, gender, colonialism and the treatment of Indigenous peoples, figures on both the left and right have sought to shape the American historical narrative to their ideological leanings. The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs is now the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. In the Joe Biden years, Fort Bragg in North Carolina (named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg), was renamed Fort Liberty, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth restored the Bragg name on March 7. In Canada, there has been continuing controversy about institutions bearing the name of John A. Macdonald and other figures owing to their connections with, or views of, Indigenous peoples.
The White House statement cited several recent examples of what it described as the promotion of an ideology that “portray[s] American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive,” including an exhibit that addresses how “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and claims that the United States has “used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” Another target was a National Museum of African American History and Culture presentation that said that “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” are aspects of “White culture.”
President Dwight Eisenhower’s landmark 1953 commencement speech at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire is remembered for a single sentence: “Don’t join the book burners.” But it is the notion in the sentence that followed that – now, as in the middle of the McCarthy period during the middle of the last century – is at the heart of the battle over history: “Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.”
The Trump initiative, published on Thursday, spawned immediate reaction from historians who believe that the President wants to sanitize the Smithsonian.
“It is an effort to whitewash the American story, to excise what is uncomfortable or disreputable about aspects of the American experience,” said Michael Birkner, a Gettysburg College historian. “Trump’s edict is anti-history, since history is about assembling all relevant source material and making sense of it. Trump is promoting a national propaganda campaign.”
Amy Dru Stanley, a University of Chicago historian, said the Trump order was a violation of the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment. “It is a violation of free inquiry,” she said. “It is a punitive, coercive blow at the teaching of American history that wields the power of government to restrict public knowledge of the fullness and complexity of our history and aspirations to realize the rights of freedom.”
From the start of his second administration, Mr. Trump has taken aim at what he calls the “woke” view of American history. As a result, he has targeted the views of some historians that slavery was at the heart of the country’s founding, or historians’ emphasis on whether women have been denied equal opportunities for economic and social advancement, or the extent to which the expansion of the United States across the continent came at great cost to Native Americans, in part because of racist views about Indigenous peoples.
“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” the executive order says. “This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”
The Trump offensive against special treatment for discrete groups of Americans, including Black, women, and transgender people, adds enormous complexity to the work of the Smithsonian. The institution maintains several institutions whose very existence are at odds with Mr. Trump’s effort to erase special attention from specific slices of the American population.
The result is an unusual dilemma for institutions that do just that, such as the National Museum of African American History, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of the American Latino, and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. The women’s museum, which exists only as an online resource until a physical structure is created, is specifically targeted; the White House statement on Mr. Trump’s order makes it clear the President wants treatments that “celebrate women’s achievements in the American Women’s History Museum and do not recognize men as women.”
When Thomas Putnam, the former director of the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, said that when he was in Germany to mark the 50th anniversary of Mr. Kennedy’s famous speech at the Berlin Wall in 1963, he was struck by the museums and public memorials that reckoned “with dark moments from the country’s past and did not attempt to erase them from public memory,” adding, “It seems to me a hallmark of a mature nation to endeavour to do the same.”