History as Mythmaking

Altering a history exhibit to erase Trump's impeachment isn't that unusual

Last week the Smithsonian removed a reference to Trump’s impeachments (temporarily and will apparently be restored) after there has been significant pressure from this administration to offer a more “positive” view of American history. There was unsurprisingly significant backlash to the blatant whitewashing of Trump’s first presidency and many people rightly noticed that such control of historical memory is fascist. The people saying this are clearly right, but they’re missing how much of the nation’s accepted historical narrative has always been more about nationalistic mythmaking than historical accuracy. The removal (however temporary) of reference to Trump’s impeachments are a stark example of “patriotic” historical control but it is far from new or unusual.

The truth about our country’s history is far more nuanced and complicated than the museum exhibit or nationalistic story would have us believe. We are raised on the notion that the United States is built on equality and freedom and that the “founding fathers” were brilliant heroes. We are told that they always wanted religious freedom and the influence of slavery is a footnote. After all, white people fought to free the slaves right? And really only a very small portion of wealthy, Southern landowners even owned slaves. So we can just pretend slavery isn’t that important to US history. The land wasn’t stolen from Native Americans, they died from disease and wouldn’t assimilate. We’ll just ignored that the Indigenous population in the US is roughly the same as the Jewish population and Native Americans are still fighting for their rights and survival.

Columbus didn’t “discover” America-he made contact with Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean. Five of the first seven presidents owned slaves (and four of the first five were from Virginia because of the electoral college). The electoral college was instituted in large part to protect slave owning interests.

There were enslaved people in the North until the Civil War. The battle at the Alamo was about American settlers wanting to protect the institution of slavery. Robert E. Lee inherited enslaved people from his father in law and a court had to force him to fulfill the will freeing them (he was also a much worse general than Grant). Lee wasn’t the principled Southern gentleman who abhorred slavery but couldn’t side against his neighbors. There were no “states rights” arguments in the secession documents for the Civil War-the states were very clear that they were seceding to protect slavery and even build a new country on the principle of white supremacy.

Racist violence during Reconstruction and Jim Crow was endemic and including many examples of actual ethnic cleansing of Black people from towns. Their homes were stolen and Black people were forced off land well into the 20th century. The Populist Movement wasn’t a utopia of interracial cooperation but rather abandoned Black sharecroppers who expected solidarity from their white counterparts. The quota system created by the 1924 Johnson Reed Act led to far more Jewish victims of the Holocaust by not allowing Jews to flee to the US during WWII. The Japanese Internment Camps were a continuation of anti-Asian racism that had existed for decades and was fueled by Immigration and Naturalization restrictions. The US didn’t enter WWII out of a desire to liberate Jews from concentration camps or any concern over the Holocaust.

The bizarre manufactured fear of Critical Race Theory and DEI of the last decade has been a targeted undermining of accurate historical inquiry and anti-racism education. Instead it has been deemed unpatriotic and anti American and anti white to discuss the real influence of slavery or harm to Indigenous peoples or the existence of LGBTQ people through out this nations history.

Anti-Blackness, anti-Indigenous racism, patriarchy, antisemitism, white Christian heteronormativity are all baked into this nations history. There might be blips of aspirational progress like the Reconstruction Amendments or the 19th Amendment Civil Rights Movement. But ultimately Trump and the current attacks on historical knowledge are a culmination of forces to push the country back to the status quo after another moment of change, not an aberration of fascist historical control.