WHY HISTORICAL MUSEUMS MATTER AND WHY HE'S SEEKING TO CONTROL THEM

Protect the truth-tellers or the liars will prevail

Slave shackles exhibited at the National Museum of African American History

I visited the African American History Museum in D.C. last weekend, and it’s brilliant.

The museum is a magnificent feat of both design and content. Of course it doesn’t whitewash our history, nor should it. But neither does it ignore the heroism of those who have led us away from the evils of race-based cruelties over the last four hundred years.

Funding for the museum’s creation was signed into law by George W. Bush in 2003, as he praised America for “not hiding its history.” Barack Obama shed tears as he spoke at its opening in 2016, ruminating on the day when he would bring his own grandchildren there. That’s how our Presidents are supposed to behave….with dignity and respect toward the triumphs and tragedies of American history.

As with so many things, however, Donald Trump has decided to forge his own way. He is less interested in the flowering of American cultural institutions than he is in controlling them. In March he issued an Executive Order No. 14253 to eliminate what he calls “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums. That might sound innocent enough, but it is not. From now on, every exhibit item at 19 national museums will be under the oversight of a political team led by J.D. Vance, there to make sure that every exhibit expresses the “unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story.” Each museum was given thirty days to present its labeling and digital content for review, to be vetted by people who know nothing about museum curation but everything about a particular vision of America’s past, present, and future now deemed a “correct” one by the President.

An attack on historical museums is an attack on the truth, an attack on culture, an attack on freedom, and an attack on us. The reason Donald Trump wants oversight over our historical museums is not because they fail to celebrate the American spirit, but because they do. America at times has displayed the best as well as the worst of what humanity has to offer, yet throughout our history it has been people’s dedication to the possibilities of freedom that have ultimately had the last word. Nothing today could be a more important lesson for us to teach, or to learn, than this.

Learning history isn’t always comfortable, but it’s critical. You don’t go to the African American History Museum expecting to come out all happy, any more than you go to the Holocaust Museum expecting to come out all happy. In both cases, if you leave the museum anything less than heartbroken then the museum didn’t do its job. But any tears we cried while there are cleansing, even illuminating, as they deepen us as people.

Historical museums are where people who aren’t even alive anymore get to tell their story. Erasing or rewriting any person’s, or any people’s, history is an egregious transgression for that reason. The freedom of any people to share their own story, in their own way, should be considered sacrosanct. I saw many visitors at the Black History Museum who were there with their children - and indeed, that’s the point. Learning your history is part of learning who you are. You might even come out of such a place a better person. And is that not the point of culture?

In any museum, there might be valid criticisms of this or that particular exhibit; that’s normal. But the ability of cultural institutions to tell their stories free of government influence or control is a fundamental hallmark of a free society. Historical museums are particularly important, for in showing us where we’ve been they inform us where we need to go.

An American President, any American President, telling the Smithsonian he wants our story told the way he wants it told in order to align itself with his vision, is not curation - it’s authoritarianism. It’s a totalitarian tactic practiced by dictators ranging from Mussolini to Hitler to Stalin, to bring culture under State control. In Germany in the 1930’s, bringing culture brought into alignment with the Nazi view of German history was called “Gleichschaltung,” a process by which the Ministry for Public Engagement and Propaganda would ultimate control all national media, film, theatre, arts, and culture. The Germans sought the forcible co-ordination of all cultural life in Germany to ensure that all corners of German society would be advocating Nazi ideas.

In the words of author Melissa Dalton Bradford, “The Smithsonian was founded…’to increase and diffuse knowledge.’ That's its charter, and that mission is apolitical by design. When the state insists which knowledge must align with its own vision, history is no longer a record of the past. It becomes statspropoganda, and once a democracy accepts Staatspropoganda is history. It's already stepped onto the same road that Berlin took in 1933 so the danger is not that dictatorship arrives overnight… it's that we stop noticing the small erasures, the subtle rewrites, the quiet um da Geschichte, the rewriting of history till one day the real past is unrecoverable.

She continues. “To anyone versed in the history of totalitarianism, this is the opening move in a familiar playbook…. The method is always under a bureaucratic guise, review boards, corrections, official deadlines, but the real target is our collective memory. When the state defines which past is permissible, it narrows the public's imagination until citizens can no longer really remember what they've lost.”

The totalitarian rampage of the Trump administration is like a forest fire starting to burn out of control, but it can still be stopped if enough of us pick up a hose. What we must not do, however, is deny what’s happening. They are marching toward total control. Universities: check. Law firms: check. Media companies: check. Museums: check. And no one should think museums are a less significant target, because they are not. Culture is the heartbeat of any society, and nothing is more important than that we refuse to surrender the people’s control of it. It started with the Kennedy Center, then went to the Smithsonian, and if Broadway and Hollywood don’t think they’re on the list they’re kidding themselves (remember, he’s not even one year in).

America, wake up please. None of this has to do with promoting American ideals. All of it has to do with undermining them. It was Barbarians who sacked Rome, remember. Not a bunch of museum curators, historians, or artists.

Protect the truth-tellers, or the liars will prevail.