On Thursday President Trump issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
In Mr. Trump’s customary bluster, the order bursts with accusations against unnamed persons who are presumably my fellow historians and museum curators for our “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history.”
The order’s repeated invocation of the Smithsonian Institution echoes now-familiar right-wing goals outlined in Project 2025 and elsewhere: ending the alleged “woke” agendas on race and gender, creating “parents’ rights” and school choices and promoting history aligned with founders’ “values.”
According to the president, “objective facts” have been replaced with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology.” And then comes that penetrating epithet, the order’s organizing logic: the desire to end the “revisionist movement” carried out by unnamed historians.
I recall that a great historian, Prof. James Horton, used to have a poignant answer to this label: “Would you want your doctors not to be revisionists?” Any field of study must innovate to maintain relevance. The assumption that there is a standard, agreed-upon truth about the country’s past is a fantasy. But when declared by a sitting American president, it becomes a provocation and an insult.
The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom — in the form of curious minds — of anyone who seeks to understand our country by visiting museums or historic sites.
Writing in 1980, in what may have seemed a more placid and hopeful time, the historian John Hope Franklin observed the “transformation” of scholarship on American history into many new, robust fields, as well as an explosion of popular interest in proliferating historical societies, sites and museums.
State and local archives had emerged across the country, and the massive 1976 observance of the U.S. bicentennial built a thriving audience for all things historical. Movies and documentary films had also become arbiters and purveyors of history, for better and worse. Amateur genealogists took over archives seeking their family histories, and historical tourism had never seen such enthusiasm.
Many Americans do care about the country’s past; they can handle the truth:conflicts, tragedies, redemptions and all. They actually prefer complexity to patriotic straitjackets. World War II, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the women’s and gay rights movements and the struggle to learn Native American history have changed America forever. With searing and unresolved memories, nearly everyone understood the gravity of American history.
In this naïve effort to control how the past is recorded and interpreted, the Trump administration has stepped into a minefield. While it remains unclear how much will change as a result of the executive order, it is already evident that the administration has started a war it cannot win in the long run.
Even if you agree with some of the executive order’s positions, do we want our cultural centers and repositories of America’s history to be subjected to a litmus test that requires history to be presented in the most positive terms? The administration is engaging in the same behavior it claims to stand against. By attempting to put its own stamp on the past, Mr. Trump is himself a revisionist.
The strategy of the president’s plans to change the way the Smithsonian operates is clear: to trumpet a claim — that American historians peddle a narrative counter to the president’s aim to emphasize “American greatness” — widely and often enough that people will begin to believe it.
Big lies move like viruses in the culture, and though we do have evidence, facts and ethics on our side, there are no vaccines. The crude intent of this order is to further break institutions and to silence historians.
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