Late last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to restore “truth and sanity to American history.” Understandably, this order has not attracted as much attention as subsequent Trump actions establishing a new global trade regime by executive fiat.
But historians did not miss Trump’s order. And they have reacted to the news with the calm sense of perspective one would expect from that learned profession. “It’s what the Nazis did,” declared Yale historian David Blight, who described the order as “a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession.” “It is so chilling,” Raymond Arsenault, a biographer of the civil-rights leader John Lewis, commented. “It’s like the barbarian sack of Rome … It’s totalitarian.”
For those not steeped in the culture wars of the past decade, such reactions might seem hyperbolic. The order includes multiple references to the nation’s history of “progress toward becoming a more perfect Union.” And it takes aim at what it calls “a widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history” in a way that “deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.” It thus pits an older liberal narrative of American history as a heroic struggle to fulfill the nation’s founding ideals against the type of popular revisionist history exemplified above all by The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project.
The order directs the vice president, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board, “to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian.” It announces that the Administration will work with Congress to prohibit funding of presentations that “degrade shared American values” and to appoint new members to the Smithsonian Board who are committed to “the celebration of America’s extraordinary heritage and progress.” And it directs the secretary of the interior to restore memorials and statues that have been “improperly” removed or changed “to perpetuate a false revision of history.”
Beginning in the early 2010s, and accelerating during Trump’s first term in the White House, there has been a concerted effort across an array of elite institutions to turn the patriotic version of American history on its head, elevating slavery and white supremacy as the defining features of our past and dismissing the founding ideals as a hypocritical sham. Whether this interpretation is correct depends on value judgments that historical expertise by itself cannot resolve. But it is not surprising that Donald Trump, elected in part in reaction to “wokeness,” would insist that government-run parks and museums present a more uplifting version of American history.
Those who think they agree with President Trump in principle have occasionally found themselves astonished and mortified at the way this supposed principle is translated into concrete policies. Perhaps that will happen here. But nothing in the order itself provides grounds for objection or alarm.
The order probably exaggerates the extent to which federal parks and museums like the Smithsonian have departed from the older patriotic narrative. Unlike The New York Times and elite universities, their audience is not composed of an ideologically homogeneous elite, and unlike public schools, these institutions do not have a captive audience to work on: The sweetly impressionable children who visit are usually accompanied by their stubbornly opinionated parents, who are free to leave any exhibit that irks them. The order itself only cites a few silly examples of what it’s targeting, some already dropped in embarrassment. The only future program marked for cancellation is a planned exhibition at the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum that celebrates the achievements of biological males in women’s sports.
“Both versions erase the boundary between past and present.”
As with many culture-war battles, the fight over American history has grown more intense as the ground between the conflicting sides has narrowed. Older debates that presented vastly different ways of conceptualizing our history have been replaced by an unedifying conflict between two competing melodramas: the nation progressing ever upward toward a more perfect union, and the grim nightmare of the nation conceived in slavery and dedicated to white supremacy. Both versions erase the boundary between past and present, degrading history into an extension of politics.
The decline in overt racial prejudice constitutes by far the most significant cultural change in recent history. Almost all Americans (96 percent) disapproved of interracial marriage in 1958. Eleven years later, 83 percent of whites disapproved, compared to 44 percent of nonwhites. A majority of whites still disapproved of interracial marriage as recently as 1997. But over the past two decades, that disapproval has vanished, and now stands around 6 percent, an almost perfect reversal of a universal moral consensus. There is no longer a statistically significant difference between the attitudes of whites and nonwhites on this question.
“The New Deal era was about as far removed from the Civil War as we are from the Civil Rights era.”
The emphasis on the struggle for racial equality has increased steadily, in both scholarly and popular histories, as each subsequent generation becomes more removed from the assumptions and beliefs that legitimated, excused, or tolerated the systems of violent racial subordination that once prevailed. The moral urgency of this history has intensified with our historical distance from those who lived it. The attacks of 9/11 have receded into history, and we all intuitively recognize our emotional distance from that shocking event. But Emmett Till’s murder in 1955 has a visceral immediacy.
Over the past decade, progressives have accorded the history of racial oppression an almost mystical significance as the defining fact of our national existence—the key to understanding our entire history and perhaps escaping it. Activists have become antiquarians in the pursuit of justice, and historians have become activists in the pursuit of truth. After the president of the American Historical Association, James Sweet, published an essay lamenting this trend within his profession in 2022, he felt compelled to issue a groveling apology.
Every contemporary predicament has a history, and that history can be useful in explaining how things got to be the way they are. But looking to history for solutions to contemporary dilemmas is like driving with your eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror. Partisans and activists inevitably try to bend history to their own purposes. There is nothing new in that. But what is new is the extent to which all of American history has become consumed by politics.
Of course, the past, and particularly our national past, does not belong to historians alone. At the foundation of any collective identity is a shared sense of its history, what Abraham Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory.” In a nonpejorative sense, historical memory is composed of myths, the collection of stories and images we use to make our ideals and aspirations intelligible to ourselves and, most importantly, to our children. It is not possible for a free society to exist without the cohesion of common beliefs; those beliefs are bound to be expressed in the stories that define a society’s common past.
No sensible historian would indiscriminately attack the myths that bind a people together, unless he or she wishes to destroy them as a united people. A society that has no faith in the ideals exemplified and transmitted by its past cannot long exist, let alone hope to achieve anything on behalf of those ideals in the future. At the same time, a society that is too confident in its own ideals, as either universally true or as the basis of its own superiority, is sure to misunderstand outsiders’ hostility and may blindly provoke their wrath.
The historian who dissects his society’s collective myths with the clinical detachment of one dissecting a frog will only end up hated or ignored. One who merely reinforces those myths with a careful and scrupulous selection of facts will not have contributed anything useful to the broader public’s understanding of itself. To be both useful and influential, historians must be judicious in selecting which myths should be demolished as pernicious half-truths, which should be tolerated as harmless, and which should be defended and celebrated as sources of solidarity and strength. But this determination depends on the historian’s temperament and values more than on his expertise.
In a nation as complex and heterogenous as the United States, historical memory is also blended into the collective identities of countless subgroups. The more defensive, vulnerable or marginalized a particular group feels, the more it will insist upon a self-flattering version of its past as a simplistic combination of virtuous achievements and underserved suffering. And since these subgroups often do not get along, myths that flatter and comfort some can be weaponized to traduce and villainize others. Historians are often tempted to serve as soldiers in a culture war, vindicating some citizens’ myths or pulling the stuffing out of those cherished by others. Polarized societies inevitably produce polarizing histories. And historical revisionists often reflect recent shifts in the conflicts organizing national politics.
What is most striking about the ongoing history war today is how stale and familiar it has become. The only change is toward a steady intensification of arguments and moral judgments that have saturated Americans’ understanding of their history for more than half a century. In his address as President of the Organization for American Historians in 1972, for example, Edmund Morgan observed that historians interested “in tracing the rise of liberty, democracy, and the common man have been challenged in the past two decades by other historians, interested in tracing the history of oppression, exploitation, and racism.” Morgan welcomed this challenge in forcing historians to confront the significance of institutions and practices that earlier generations had dismissed as exceptions to the predominant narrative. But he warned that this challenge would not be productive if it merely resulted in the tendency “already apparent” of presenting “slavery and oppression as the dominant features of American history and…efforts to advance liberty and equality [as] the exception.”
Morgan’s interpretation of these contradictory elements in American history relied on irony and paradox rather than hypocrisy and criminality. Slavery and democracy emerged together in early America through a process that made it impossible to disentangle one from the other. The American Revolution, and all that flowed from it, was indeed a product of American slavery, in Morgan’s skillful and stimulating account, but the point is not made in a spirit of cheap moral posturing. It is history in the best sense. But the dichotomies Morgan identified as fundamental—liberty and slavery, equality and racism—have not changed a whit in the decades since.
Earlier revisionist histories relied on categories that would seem almost unrecognizable today. For progressive and New Deal historians, the defining conflict in American history was the common man versus the capitalist. In this version, slaveholders were usually heroic leaders of the common man’s rise in dignity and equality; Northern “reactionaries” like Alexander Hamilton were the villains opposed to democracy and equality. These historians disapproved of slavery itself, but they tended to view the South as an agrarian society in conflict with the industrial order that emerged in the North and came to dominate nationally during the Civil War. “The most striking products of [the Civil War],” the renowned historian Kenneth Stampp wrote, “were the shoddy aristocracy of the North and the ragged children of the South.”
This interpretation reflected the political context of the early 20th century, in which the Jim Crow South, by far the most impoverished region, was the stronghold of support for progressive economic politics. Historians in this tradition often sympathized with black Americans as part of the poor underclass but not with their distinctive history as an oppressed race. The New Deal era was about as far removed from the Civil War as we are from the Civil Rights era. Republicans then still boasted of emancipation as their own achievement, but these boasts increasingly rang hollow. Black Americans in the North followed their economic interests into the party that had been their worst enemies within living memory. The racial realignment that began well before the Civil Rights movement accelerated into a total transformation of national politics.
Historians’ sympathies have changed with the composition of the political coalition to which they overwhelmingly belong. Labor history was once the most fashionable subfield among American historians. Today, it scarcely exists. In the 1970s and 1980s, historians combined sympathies with the working-class white majorities with sympathies for racial and ethnic minorities oppressed by that same majority. The uneasy combination reflected the Democratic coalition of the same era. This balance of sympathies shifted with the composition of the two parties. And now here we are.
Trump’s intervention to restore “sanity and truth to American history” is sure to be less significant than the indirect influence of his earth-shaking career in American politics. His first term provoked a drastic escalation of a culture war that pitted the deplorable (white) common man against egalitarian elites and minorities. In their fury and horror, elite institutions adopted a racial reckoning to exorcise the nation of the evil impulses that produced Trump. The hope was delusional, but it had the advantage of placing Trump and his supporters alongside the most loathsome archetypes in our cultural memory, Bull Connor and Simon Legree.
Trump’s second term has upended the political realignment process that began in the 1960s. Perhaps Trump will confirm the harshest judgments of his critics and the worst fears of his supporters. Or perhaps the Republican party today, like the Democratic party in the early 20th century, will successfully transition from populist rage to offer a more sophisticated, constructive and broadly appealing alternative to the existing order. Whatever happens, American politics is likely to remain fixed on a different trajectory. Historians can either double down once again on the same familiar cliches or begin to replace the increasingly predictable and shrill revisionism of the past several decades with something more lively, unpredictable, and interesting.