In the last several days, the country has been making difficult history. In the past year, its government has been warping history.
The forced removal of Japanese Americans during World War II has disappeared. The support of the Equal Rights Amendment by first lady Betty Ford has vanished. The invention of the birth-control pill has passed from sight. The work of Martin Luther King Jr. is played down.
These are some of the developments inside the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., endowed with the trusteeship of the history of the country. Instead, the agency has been acting more as a cleanser of the nation’s history than a curator of it.
Let it be said, too, that this has occurred under the Joe Biden administration, not as part of a conservative-propelled effort to rewrite the country’s past in blazing red, white and blue ink.
History is not an inert gas, immune from reactions in the body politic or from discoveries and fresh perspectives among scholars. It is an irony of language that the past isn’t static but that it constantly undergoes dramatic changes. What once was certain becomes uncertain. What once was assumed becomes rejected. Who once was heroic can become demonized.
These transformations can become abused when a country seeks to assert its virtue by erasing its heritage, or when a people searches for a past it considers worthy of the present, or when current values are applied to historical figures or events.
But the fact that the past is in transition is one of the immutable laws of scholarship.
George Washington was the subject of fawning biographies and an apocryphal story about truthfulness and a cherry tree. We still remember him as a figure of dignity and honor, but the modern view of the first president is more nuanced. We remember Theodore Roosevelt as a swashbuckling American hero and, until recently, turned a blind eye to his racial views, startling when considered in a letter he wrote in 1902. (“As a race and in the mass they are altogether inferior to the whites,” he told a friend.) The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. considered Woodrow Wilson one of only six “great” American presidents. This month, the former Republican Rep. Christopher Cox of California published a biography of the 28th president that portrayed him as racist, sexist and opportunist.
Harold Macmillan (British prime minister, 1957-1963) once was asked about the forces that made for politics. “Events, my dear boy, events,” he sometimes is quoted as having replied. Pose the question today, and the best answer might be “Context, my dear girl, context.”
But whatever the context, there can be little question that a picture of President Richard Nixon greeting Elvis Presley might be appropriate for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and that an image of President Ronald Reagan with baseball icon Cal Ripken Jr. is a natural entry for the National Baseball Hall of Fame. But these events, though memorable moments in the country’s culture, are not important turning points in our national passage.
Yet these were offered as substitutes for Archives displays of images of King and labor-union pioneer Dolores Huerta and Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, according to The Wall Street Journal, which revealed the efforts to present an anodyne view of American history under Archivist Colleen Shogan.
“The notion that confronting our past is a problem to be avoided is disturbing,” said John Savagian, an emeritus professor of history at Wisconsin’s Alverno College. “Shogan’s ham-handed censorship illustrates how subjective bias subverts the basic freedoms scholars need to inform an honest, authentic understanding of how America came to be.”
These sorts of controversies are not new.
Seven decades ago, the Consensus School historians emphasized national unity over civic conflict. “That school and its arguments were mostly discredited during the 1960s and afterwards by scholarship showing that U.S. history was actually full of conflicts over race, class, land, labor, migration and myriad other things,” said Edward Miller, a Dartmouth College historian. “Now, however, the recent politicization of the U.S. National Archives [displays] suggests that Consensus History may be making a comeback, albeit in more heavy-handed form.”
Exactly 30 years ago, when the phrase “culture wars” was being introduced, controversy flared over whether and how to include in a National Air and Space Museum exhibit on World War II a refurbished Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan; historians objected to the proposed Disney history theme park in Virginia; and a contretemps erupted over the contents of the National Standards for United States History.
Now — to adopt and adapt a familiar phrase — history is repeating itself.
“The National Archives of the U.S. is America’s memory,” said Michael Birkner, a Gettysburg College historian. “Do we want our memories to be merely soft and gauzy, or are we going to grapple with the tough stuff of American history and learn from that history? To deny visitors to the Archives a chance to see American history whole — including examples of unfairnesses and bad policies that have since given way to something better — is a disservice to the American people. It’s certainly not balanced history.”
This battle is a reminder of the stakes of studying history and of confronting what happened in our national past — an endeavor worthy in its own right, but also a step toward a national reckoning and a debate about how we shape the country’s future.
“History maps out the terrain of the possible and the foreseeable, the doable and the preferable,” said Jason Opal, an Ohio State historian. “Shogan’s efforts to make our visible past more welcoming — at least for some — has some agreeable elements. Too often, academic history looks to deconstruct and criticize our past, overlooking or even denying the contexts in which past Americans have lived and the great progress that American society has made. But it’s not ‘woke’ to confront the fact that settler expansion, while hardly an American-only phenomenon, resulted in the displacement and devastation of most Indigenous nations. That’s just true.”
True — and consequential.
“The attempts by the Archives’ leadership to censor the ‘negative’ aspects of U.S. history is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with the public history practices of authoritarian regimes,” said Miller. “For autocrats, the denial of conflict in the past is a strategy for suppressing dissent in the present.” It can happen here. It has.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
