Interior letter, executive order cited in Smithsonian history dispute
Lonnie G. Bunch III, the Smithsonian Institution’s 14th secretary and the first historian and first African American to lead the museum complex, announced Tuesday he will step down. The announcement was reported in a Friday Guardian opinion piece by scholars Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley, who wrote that Bunch’s exit “is a blow to democracy” and tied the departure to the Trump administration’s pressure on the Smithsonian to adopt what they called an agenda of “patriotic” education.
Crenshaw, the author of “Backtalker: An American Memoir,” and Stanley, the author of “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” framed the retirement in their essay as part of a broader Trump administration effort to reshape how the Smithsonian presents American history. Bunch’s exit, they wrote, comes as the administration has “pressured the Smithsonian to adopt its agenda of ‘patriotic’ education.”
The administration’s pressure on the Smithsonian has included both executive orders and correspondence from federal agencies. On August 28, the Department of the Interior wrote to the Smithsonian declaring “action must be taken” against what it called “a radical institutional ideology” that threatens “to permeate … the operations” of the National Museum of American History, according to Crenshaw and Stanley. The letter, the authors wrote, challenges the museum’s longstanding commitment to tying the presentation of American history to “the core issues of our time.”
A July 24 executive order titled “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution” directs the institution to “present American history as a shared national inheritance to be taught and celebrated,” according to the Guardian essay. An earlier executive order on K-12 education, also cited by Crenshaw and Stanley, described the purpose of American history in museums and schools as creating a shared American identity grounded in “a patriotic admiration for our incredible nation.”
By those measures, Crenshaw and Stanley wrote, the Smithsonian — and Bunch in particular — exist in a state of “non-compliance.” They pointed to exhibits that acknowledge Benjamin Franklin enslaved African Americans and that describe Europeans as having “originally moved to the United States as a colonizing force” as examples that, in their reading, “don’t feel good enough to inspire patriotic admiration either for the great men who created the nation, or its current ideology.”
The authors went further in their argument, invoking passages from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to support their claim that demands for “patriotic education” historically came from “democracy’s enemies.” They noted that Hitler criticizes the historical education of Weimar democracy as failing to provide “a real national enthusiasm.” In its place, Hitler called for history to be replaced by education that would make “the really significant men of our people appear as outstanding heroes in the eyes of the present, to concentrate the general attention upon them, and thus create a unified mood.” Hitler complained that education under Weimar was “not able to raise what was glorious for the nation … above the level of objective presentation, and fire the national pride by such gleaming examples.”
“It should worry us all that the educational goals of fascism so clearly overlap with the agenda of the Trump administration,” Crenshaw and Stanley wrote. “It should worry us all that the accusation of ‘indoctrination’ is so readily deployed against a more inclusive American story, and that this is not immediately seen for what it is: a force-fed and blinkered vision of how we’ve come to be, the only terms available to be a true American.”
The same administration, Crenshaw and Stanley wrote, is “aggressively restoring decidedly traitorous white supremacists (Confederates) to places of honor.” “What exactly is the American identity to which such an education is asking us to be beholden?” they asked.
Underlying the muted response to the rewriting of the historical record, the authors wrote, is “an ill-defined understanding of the role of government-supported institutions such as the Smithsonian in safeguarding democracy.” “Democracy is based on political equality,” they wrote, and “political equality means everyone’s perspectives are given equal recognition.” Central to that democratic ideal, they argued, is a system of education that exposes all citizens to the perspectives, experiences and histories of the different groups who make up the polity. “The purpose of democratic institutions such as the museums and universities is to defend history in all of its difficult complexity,” Crenshaw and Stanley wrote. In the case of NMAH and the other historical museums of the Smithsonian, the goal should be to present an accurate version of the histories of all the peoples of the United States, without erasure, they wrote. Without such an education, the authors argued, “there is no hope for the political equality that is the basis of democracy. Citizens will fear each other, rather than understand each other, and their votes will be based on this fear.”
The administration, Crenshaw and Stanley wrote, “is stoking this fear” while “also attacking democracy head-on with some of the very practices that it seeks to diminish and even erase from its version of patriotic education.” They pointed to “the rich pro-democracy history of the battle over voting rights,” which they described as “a history worthy of celebratory reflection,” but warned that the record of disenfranchisement and the racial tyranny it unleashed is being “sanitized out of historical memory, with the help of the supreme court.”
The scholars also referenced W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction,” specifically its final chapter, “The Propaganda of History,” in which Du Bois argued that the rewriting of history to make “pleasant reading for Americans” was central to a counterrevolution against democracy that dismantled Reconstruction and “restored white supremacy in the south with the acquiescence of the federal government.” Du Bois’s point, the authors wrote, was that so-called patriotic education that erased and distorted Black history was central to the justification of the transition from freedom “back towards slavery.”
Closing their essay, Crenshaw and Stanley wrote that “central to the point of education for both countries and individuals is to carry forward the lessons of the past to help us better navigate challenges in the present and future,” and that an educated citizenry is essential to a fully functioning democracy. “Which is precisely why the Trump administration’s attack on history and our democracy are different fronts of the same war,” they wrote.
“It is often said that those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it,” the authors wrote. “But for those who refuse to teach that history accurately, repetition is precisely the point.”