Continuing To Curate The Great American Narrative
The Park Service strikes again
If you were to turn to The Civil Conversations Project web page and click on our Mission Statement, here’s what you would find: Changing The Narrative About Race In America. We have some work to do on our site, because more accurately, our mission is to Change The FALSE Narrative About Race in America.
So committed to controlling and curating our National Narrative that last October 29th the Wall Street Journal reported: “America’s Top Archivist Puts a Rosy Spin on U.S. History—Pruning the Thorny Parts.
Plans for new exhibits at the National Archives Museum included swapping a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. marching for Civil Rights for former President Nixon greeting Elvis.”
“U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan and her top advisers at the National Archives and Records Administration, which operates a popular museum on the National Mall, have sought to de-emphasize negative parts of U.S. history. She has ordered the removal of prominent references to such landmark events as the government’s displacement of indigenous tribes and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II from planned exhibits.
Shogan and her senior advisers also have raised concerns that planned exhibits and educational displays expected to open next year might anger Republican lawmakers—who share control of the agency’s budget—or a potential Trump administration.
Shogan’s senior aides ordered that a proposed image of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. be cut from a planned ‘Step Into History’ photo booth in the Discovery Center. The booth will give visitors a chance to take photos of themselves superimposed alongside historic figures.
The aides proposed using instead images of former President Richard Nixon greeting Elvis Presley and former President Ronald Reagan with baseball player Cal Ripken Jr.
After reviewing plans for an exhibit about the nation’s Westward expansion, Shogan asked one staffer, ‘Why is it so much about Indians?’ Among the records Shogan ordered cut from the exhibit were several treaties signed by Native American tribes ceding their lands to the U.S. government, according to the employees and documents.
Shogan and her top advisers told employees to remove Dorothea Lange’s photos of Japanese-American incarceration camps from a planned exhibit because the images were too negative and controversial, according to documents and current and former employees. Shogan’s aides also asked staff to eliminate references about the wartime incarceration from some educational materials, other current and former employees said.
In the summer of 2023, during planning for an exhibit on coal communities featuring images by photographer Russell Lee from the 1940s, Brachman—Shogan’s senior adviser—requested changes to the accompanying text. Instead of saying that coal companies recruited workers from plantations, Brachman asked to identify the recruits as ‘Southern farmworkers’, according to former employees and documents.
Archives employees complained, and a compromise was struck. The coal workers would be identified as ‘Black sharecroppers from the American South.’
Visitors shouldn’t feel confronted, a senior official told employees, they should feel welcomed.”
Well actually, a museum should educate, challenge, and inspire. Door mats, not museums, are established to make visitors feel welcome.
Within these pages we’ve talked a fair bit about America’s false narrative (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) …the one that emphasizes the greatness of White Euro-Americans – primarily men - and portrays Black and Brown American’s as either savages or non-entities. If you’re over 30 or so, you can hark back to one of the very first pieces of American history that you learned…for example, the one where George Washington’s father, Augustine, came storming out of their home in Pope’s Creek, VA, spittle flying from his angry mouth, fist balled, and loudly confronted George. “Did you chop down my favorite cherry tree, you…you…you little runt?” We all know George’s reply, “Yes I did, pops. As the future white father of our future white country, I am unable to tell a lie. So courageous am I that I am prepared for my spanking.”
So committed are we to controlling and curating the American Narrative that we have resorted to lies when there was no need whatsoever to lie . We were taught about the cherry tree. But it was years later, usually through our own studying, that we learned that George and Martha owned some 300 slaves. But here’s the thing - we didn’t need to lie about George. Although he was an enslaver, which of course I abhor, I can still acknowledge that without question he did in fact do many great things…like voluntarily giving up the power of the presidency, setting a precedent that was followed by the next 44 presidents. We could have just been honest…and complete.
We have a specific narrative – the one that Colleen Shogan is trying to establish - that probably still goes something like it did when I was in school. American history was taught as a series of triumphs that we have bragging rights to and that remain front and center over wrongs that were relegated to the distant, unimportant, unspeakable past. We portray that we are an honorable country always marching towards good. Slavery was evil, but the Civil War ended that evilness. Then there was segregation, but America-the-good gallantly addressed that with the Civil Rights movement - and with the help of White people ended segregation and all that had been unfair and un-American. There was no atoning for the near elimination of Native Americans, yet it somehow didn’t invalidate our National Narrative of perpetual greatness. Abroad, the U.S. had led the cause of freedom against fascism and communism. At home Japanese internment, McCarthyism, and Vietnam were mistakes but they didn’t erase the larger picture of our greatness. That’s a pretty optimistic narrative. And it’s false.
But the country had been (past tense) making progress. Schools stopped teaching about the cherry tree and replaced it with the story of the enslavement at Mount Vernon. Schools stopped promoting the feel good lie that Thomas Jefferson freed all of his slaves. Lynching has long been illegal, of course, although it took 120 years of debate and consideration before it finally became a federal hate crime in 2020. Progress.
It took a hundred years, but we finally started acknowledging the brutal massacre and property destruction in Tulsa. The 1619 Project became an over-night best seller. And the brutal, public lynchings of George Floyd and Michael Brown became cause célèbres. Progress. In the struggle for racial equality, you often hear the phrase, “Two steps forward, one step back.” But at least that’s progress. Painfully and unnecessarily slow, but progress.
But often times the movement is one step forward, two steps back. Since Trump’s first day in office, he and Musk have sought out and eliminated any vestige they could find that celebrated or acknowledged America’s diversity and the long struggle for equality by quashing all DEI initiatives as well as scrubbing all historical references to our long, national struggle with race.
The Park Service – the agency charged with keeping, storing, restoring, and interpreting America’s history - responding to Trump’s push to find and squash all history that might imply a lack of greatness within White America or the existence of greatness within non-White America, has taken it upon themselves to re-interpret some important and significant history. Last week the agency began to reinterpret, sometimes now called “White washing,” the Underground Railroad. See the article below.
Yesterday I had a long conversation with Doctor Dwight Pitcaithley, former Chief Historian for the National Park Service and my friend and mentor.
“You know the Park Service is supposed to serve the people of the United States by properly and accurately interpreting these stories. Now they’re dumbing it down so much they’re moving towards only doing happy history, as a Park Service director actually once asked me to do. Happy history doesn’t get us anywhere. By portraying only happy history we don’t know how people who came before us dealt with hard issues. And if there were no hard issues that required some hard thinking and hard decision making then we have no template how to make hard decisions now or in the future.
Accurate history allows us to study the past, and of course the National Park Service presents the past so we can make better decisions in the future. We learn how people handled these difficult things and hope that our decisions have a better chance of being right and within the context of a democracy and within the context of our constitution.
History has long been required in schools so we can learn from it and make better decisions in the future. If history is not presented correctly or critically, than our chance of learning anything from it is diminished.”
And there’s the fact that history - REAL history - is just plain interesting. That’s why people do their genealogy research. But let me point out the obvious: When we dumb down history and present it inaccurately, we deny Americans of all skin tones - Black, Brown, and Pink - the opportunity to be amazed, the opportunity to be inspired, the opportunity to learn, the opportunity to simply be an American.
Sources:
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/national-archives-history-colleen-shogan-f8512bc3
Below is the Washington Post article, lightly edited for brevity.
Amid anti-DEI push, National Park Service rewrites history of Underground Railroad
For years, a National Park Service webpage introduced the Underground Railroad with a large photograph of its most famous “conductor,” Harriet Tubman. “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage,” the page began.
Tubman’s photograph is now gone. In its place are images of Postal Service stamps that highlight “Black/White cooperation” in the secret network and that feature Tubman among abolitionists of both races.
The introductory sentence is gone, too. It has been replaced by a line that makes no mention of slavery and that describes the Underground Railroad as “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement.” The effort “bridged the divides of race,” the page now says.
A National Park Service webpage titled ‘What is the Underground Railroad?’ changed substantially after Trump took office. The text and photograph in red were deleted, and the portions in green depicting the stamps were added. (NPS.org/Internet Archive)
The executive order that President Donald Trump issued late last month directing the Smithsonian Institution to eliminate “divisive narratives” stirred fears that the president aimed to whitewash the stories the nation tells about itself. But a Washington Post review of websites operated by the National Park Service — among the key agencies charged with the preservation of American history — found that edits on dozens of pages since Trump’s inauguration have already softened descriptions of some of the most shameful moments of the nation’s past.
Some were edited to remove references to slavery. On other pages, statements on the historic struggle of Black Americans for their rights were cut or softened, as were references to present-day echoes of racial division. The Post compared webpages as of late March to earlier versions preserved online by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Changes in images, descriptions and even individual words have subtly reshaped the meaning of notable moments and key figures dating to the nation’s founding — abolitionist John Brown’s doomed raid, the battle at Appomattox and school integration by the Little Rock Nine.
An educational page on Benjamin Franklin, which examined his views on slavery and his ownership of enslaved people, was taken offline last month, the review found. Mentions of Thomas Stone, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, owning enslaved people were removed from several pages on the website of the Stone National Historic site in Southern Maryland.
A reference to other “enslaved African Americans” in that region was changed to “enslaved workers.”
THOMAS STONE NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE, MARYLAND
Stone’s tenant farmers and enslaved population pressed some of the fruit into cider, brandy, or vinegar.
After Trump took office, the words struck through here were deleted from a Thomas Stone National Historic Site webpage. (NPS.org/Internet Archive)
Trump has pursued broad executive orders and other measures aimed at dismantling “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs across the public and private sectors. His Inauguration Day order targeting DEI programs in government did not explicitly call for websites to be edited. But it has been interpreted aggressively by some officials, most notably at the Defense Department, which purged many pages that celebrated notable minority veterans. After an outcry, some were later restored.
Asked about the website changes, a Park Service spokesperson offered a statement but didn’t address specific edits. “The National Park Service has been entrusted with preserving local history, celebrating local heritage, safeguarding special places and sharing stories of American experiences,” the statement said. “We take this role seriously and can point to many examples of how we tell nuanced and difficult stories about American history.”
On the website of Minute Man National Historical Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, a passage about the lack of recognition for Black soldiers who fought for American independence was removed.
“Why don’t we hear more about this part of the American Revolution,” the passage began, according to archived versions of the site. “Unfortunately, systemic racism and historical bias have erased or buried many records of Black and Indigenous people who played a prominent role in the founding of the United States.”
A statement about the legacy of John Brown, who hoped to start a revolt by enslaved people in the run-up to the Civil War, was removed from a page on the website of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia.
“John Brown’s complex legacy remains a powerful symbol in America’s ongoing dialogue on race, justice, and the fight against oppression,” the line said.
Other changes appear on the website of Appomattox Court House National Historical Park in Virginia, where Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union forces in April 1865, leading to the Civil War’s end. Some mentions of slavery were cut, along with details of how White hostility in the area thwarted the efforts of freed Black people to enter their society.
A page about the Niagara Movement, a group founded in 1905 by the African American civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, was changed to remove two references to the struggle for “equality.” For example, a description of the group’s “renewed sense of resolve in the struggle for freedom and equality” became simply its “renewed sense of resolve.”
The organization continued until 1911, when almost all of its members became the backbone of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). There, the men and women of the Niagara Movement recommitted themselves to the ongoing call for justice and the struggle for equality.
The organization continued until 1911, when almost all of its members became the backbone of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Similar amendments were made to the website of the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site in Arkansas, which marks the place where nine young African American students braved a racist mob and military resistance from state authorities to integrate a previously White-only school in 1957.
Proclamations that the students “opened doors” for others pursuing “equality and education around the world” were edited on at least six pages to remove the word “equality.”
One of the surviving members of the Little Rock Nine, Elizabeth Eckford, told The Post that the edits masked the fact that the group had explicitly fought for equality of opportunity.
“They’re trying to rewrite history,” Eckford said. “We can never have true racial reconciliation until we honestly acknowledge our painful but shared past.”
Lucy Naland contributed to this report.