As we approach the 250th anniversary next year of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War that ensued, many Americans will look to the past, eager to understand how fewer than 3 million people residing in 13 colonies along the East Coast would, in two and a half centuries, become a vibrant and thriving nation of more than 330 million people in 50 far-flung states.
In accumulating knowledge of our past, which historic episodes and people provide us with a deeper understanding of what it means to be an American in the 21st century? What are the most significant events in our nation’s complex history?
In March, President Donald Trump mandated a prescription for what should and should not be essential to comprehending the American past when he issued Executive Order 14253: “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” He explained and complained that recent historical accounts created a “distorted narrative” that is “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive or otherwise irredeemably flawed” and “fosters a sense of national shame.”
Trump directed the National Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution to make changes to exhibits, monuments, statues and markers that depict “divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” He insisted that historical content “that inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” should be revised or removed. History should, the president proclaimed, instill “pride in the hearts of all Americans.”
Trump and his supporters prefer a happy history, a pleasant history that arouses patriotism by overlooking disagreeable people and despicable events that sully the nation’s reputation and mar the magnificence of the American story.
What are the implications of the president’s order? Can history be sanitized and still offer an accurate and authentic account of what has transpired on this continent since the 17th century? By excising or substantially revising episodes of cruelty and brutality, acts of terror, violence, and intolerance, will we gain a better understanding of our past?
For example, should the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African-American History and Culture keep Chuck Berry’s red Cadillac on display but remove the cabin from South Carolina’s Edisto Island that housed generations of enslaved people under inhumane conditions? Should the museum maintain the case showing football great Jim Brown’s No. 32 jersey but dismantle the exhibit depicting the horrors of the Middle Passage that brought millions of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to endure centuries of enslavement in the Western Hemisphere?
How should the National Park Service implement the president’s order? Will the NPS continue to welcome visitors to the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor that greeted millions of immigrants and thousands of service men and women returning from Europe after World Wars I and II? At the same time, the Park Service closes the Stonewall Historic Monument that marks the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York’s Greenwich Village that helped instigate the Gay Liberation movement? Will the Park Service shut down the site of the 1848 Women’s Rights convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., as overtly sexist?
Should the NPS maintain the Vicksburg National Military Park in Mississippi, where Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Union army laid siege to a Confederate army that finally surrendered on July 4, 1863, while the NPS abandons the Emmett Till National Monument in Mississippi that is devoted to the brutal lynching of a 14-year-old boy in 1955?
What about Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence containing Thomas Jefferson’s eloquent words that “all men are created equal” and that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? Should mention also be made that Jefferson was an avid slave owner who had children by an enslaved woman, who happened to be the half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife?
Surely, we want to maintain the Pearl Harbor National Memorial and the sunken USS Arizona, dedicated to the loss of 2,300 service people and civilians on December 7, 1941. Should the NPS also keep open California’s Manzanar National site, one of the locations where more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans (most of them American citizens) were forcibly relocated to concentration-like conditions during World War II?
One of the most popular National Park Service locations is Fort Sumter in the Charleston, S.C., harbor, where Confederate artillery opened fire on the federal government’s military post in April 1861 and began a bloody Civil War that cost 700,000 lives before Union forces reclaimed the fort in April 1865. If Fort Sumter is important to our history, what about the nearby Mother Emanuel AME Church, where nine African-Americans were murdered by a white racist in 2015?
The list of significant sites and exhibits is a long one. These places and the people they represent are our history. This nation did not become great because it was perfect; it became great because Americans recognized their imperfections as they sought to overcome the many instances of violence and intolerance.
We will continue to become a better country if we come to a more complete reckoning with our past rather than trying to fabricate a one-sided, Pollyannish view of our history.
William C. Hine is a professor emeritus of history at South Carolina State University and author of “South Carolina State University: A Black Land-Grant College in Jim Crow America.” He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
