On Tuesday, Lonnie G Bunch III announced he would step down as the 14th secretary of the Smithsonian. Bunch was the first historian to lead the august institution, as well as the first African American. His retirement comes as the Trump administration has pressured the Smithsonian to adopt its agenda of “patriotic” education.
On 28 August, the Department of Interior issued a threatening letter to the Smithsonian, declaring that “action must be taken” against “a radical institutional ideology” that threatens “to permeate … the operations” of the National Museum of American History (NMAH). The letter challenges NMAH’s longstanding commitment to demonstrating history’s relevance by tying the presentation of American history to “the core issues of our time”. The administration’s attack on the Smithsonian is far more than a conflict over imbalance.
It is an effort to weaponize history to undercut the very terms of our democratic existence. According to the 24 July executive order “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution”, its role should be to “present American history as a shared national inheritance to be taught and celebrated”. In the language of an earlier executive order (on K-12 education), the administration declared that the purpose of American history in museums and schools should be to create a shared American identity, one grounded in “a patriotic admiration for our incredible nation” and praise for the great men who founded it.
By this measure, the Smithsonian – and Bunch in particular – exist in a state of non-compliance. The historical record that one encounters in its collections – ranging from acknowledging the fact that founders such as Benjamin Franklin enslaved African Americans to the fact that Europeans originally moved to the United States as a colonizing force – doesn’t feel good enough to inspire patriotic admiration either for the great men who created the nation, or its current ideology. But the belief that history and the institutions responsible for curating it must be beholden to a feelgood narrative is not a feature of a democratic system but its opposite.
Historically, it is democracy’s enemies who have called for a “patriotic education” that focuses on lauding the great leaders and founders of the country. For example, in Mein Kampf, Hitler criticizes the historical education of Weimar democracy as failing to provide “a real national enthusiasm”. In its place, Hitler calls for history to be replaced by a system of education that makes “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” The education under Weimar, Hitler complains, 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. 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. It is of course also hard to take seriously even the demand for “patriotic education” from an administration that is aggressively restoring decidedly traitorous white supremacists (Confederates) to places of honor.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
