In March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” To my knowledge no historians were consulted on this sweeping attempt to rewrite the past.
The presidential action complained, “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” Most writers of American history, especially textbooks, continue to praise the ideals of our Founding Fathers (and Founding Mothers) while also describing those mistakes we have made as a nation that violate an individual’s constitutional rights.
One size does not fit all for American history. We are not now, nor have we ever been, a melting pot. Instead, the best metaphor for America is as a mosaic of different cultural groups, ethnicities and religions sharing a common belief that the land of opportunity exists for all who work hard and follow the rule of law. We began as a nation of protesters dumping tea into Boston harbor and complaining about excessive British taxes. Protest, dissent, free speech and opposition to tyranny sparked the American Revolution. The first person to die in the Boston Massacre in 1770 was Crispus Attucks, of African and Native American descent.
Trump has demanded that the U.S. Secretary of the Interior ensure “that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living … and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people …”
The Secretary of the Interior administers the National Park Service. So, does Trump’s order mean that the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site here in Colorado, championed by our Republican U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, of Northern Cheyenne descent, must close its gates? Are we no longer able to teach American failures of justice? What do we do at Amache National Historical Site in eastern Colorado, where Japanese-Americans were unconstitutionally rounded up and imprisoned? Republican President Ronald Reagan formally apologized for that racist Word War II action and Congress legislated reparations.
Writing in The New York Times, David Blight argues that Trump’s “order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom – in the form of curious minds – of anyone who seeks to understand our country by visiting museums or historic sites.”
Whitewashing history does not work. Truth has a way of being remembered and retold. For decades, Western historians mythologized Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s valiant “last stand” at the battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876. Lakota oral histories, however, reiterated that Custer’s men died “in the time it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner.” When a grass fire burned over the battlefield near Last Stand Hill, archaeologists found dozens of localized bullet shell casings in small clusters that confirmed there was no last stand – just plenty of fierce fighting and hand-to-hand combat.
History is never over. Our tales of the past always evolve, as they should. We now study women’s history, Native American history, social history, environmental history, public history, and family histories – which help us to know who we are as Americans and why we live as we do. Trump needs to understand that American greatness is all of us, not just some of us.
Andrew Gulliford is an award-winning author and editor and a professor of history at Fort Lewis College. He can be reached at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.
