Trump wants to censor the semiquincentennial – but museums have other ideas
Despite concerted pressure from the White House to only present “a positive view of American history”, curators are responding to the nation’s 250th anniversary by letting the past speak for itself.
On the walk from the Metro to Washington’s National Mall, preparations for the US’s 250th independence anniversary are everywhere. Fences plastered with posters promising that the government is “making DC safe & beautiful” obscure historical sights. The Washington Monument peers through the buildings, beneath which its serene reflecting pool is currently being coated in a garish shade of beach-resort blue. Indeed, US president Donald Trump is painting the town red, white and blue.
At Freedom Plaza, workers are busy putting the finishing touches on a statue of founding father (and slave owner) Caesar Rodney, resurrected by the White House after being taken down in Delaware during the racial justice protests of 2020. Trump has a very specific vision of US history that he wants to celebrate this 4 July – one in which founders will be portrayed as saints and any moral complexity will be airbrushed from proceedings.
It makes for a challenging time to be a historian or curator in Washington. Grappling with the ambiguity of historical memory runs up against a president who insists that history’s role is to “remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage… not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history”. But how does one interpret that, when the US’s shared history is like that of all young nations: messy, chaotic and fraught with conflict, division and prejudice? “Our job is to create a space for reflection and to tell the truth about history, to tell the truth about where we’ve been as a country,” says Theodore Gonzalves, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “Within truth telling, there will be some uncomfortable aspects but it’s in the reckoning of it that people find the lessons,” he adds.
About four years ago, Gonzalves and a large team started sifting through the more than 1.7 million objects in the museum’s collection, searching for 250 items that represent key moments in US history. The result is In Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness, an exhibition that opened on 14 May as part of the US’s semiquincentennial celebrations. But about halfway through preparations for the exhibition, Trump came into office and history suddenly became a lot more controversial. In March last year, Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, which laid out his complaints against museums – the Smithsonian in particular – for being too woke and promoting a “distorted narrative” of US history.
In Trump’s view, history should be a celebration of the past rather than an examination of it, contradicting the commonly held belief that we should learn from past mistakes to lessen the risk of repeating them. In December the White House wrote a letter demanding that the Smithsonian, which runs 21 museums, send it the details of every exhibition planned for the 250th anniversary, insisting that they all convey “a positive view of American history”.
However, the curators behind the new exhibition insist that their work has been unaffected. “We have a review process for exhibitions at the Smithsonian. This went through that review process as always and there were no changes,” says the chair of the museum’s 250th co-ordinating committee, Megan Howell Smith.
Gonzalves also insists that his vision was unaltered. “I didn’t feel affected and I don’t believe that our committee was in choosing the objects,” he says. Indeed, browsing the 250 items that Gonzalves and his team selected, there is little sign of Trump’s shadow. They run from the predictable (the portable desk upon which Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence; George Washington’s military uniform) to the whimsical (an electric Coney Island hotdog cooker from 1904; the first frozen-margarita machine).
Political objects appear carefully selected to reflect both sides of the divide – we have a red Maga hat and Nancy Pelosi’s gavel – although Gonzalves denies intentional bipartisanship. But there are plenty of objects that reflect collective struggles against the US’s historical prejudices: a dress worn by pioneering transgender actress Alexandra Billings, a wedding cake topper from a gay marriage and artefacts from the long battle for civil rights and racial justice.
For all Trump’s bluster, so far there have only been a few concrete examples of changes to exhibitions at the behest of the White House. Perhaps the president hoped that his threats would provoke collective self-censorship from the custodians of the nation’s history. But instead, he has unleashed a wave of creative thinking around the nature of reflection – exactly the birthday gift that the US needs.
Charlotte McDonald-Gibson is a Washington-based journalist and regular Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
