Philip Kennicott writes:

Lost in this new effort [by Trump] to rewrite American history scrubbed of its invigorating, infuriating, thrilling complexity, is the emotional toll it takes on people who serve the institution. I am sorry that the scholars, curators, volunteers, security guards and the rest of the loyal staff will have to pass signs that demean the integrity of their work. The contents of the museum, the history it explicates, will prepare them for this attack, which is yet another ugly facet of America’s long history of denialism. But it will be dispiriting to encounter this unwarranted criticism on a daily basis.

I am also sorry that the rank-and-file staff of the National Park Service, the agency that Trump has tasked with placing these signs, are being dragged into this. As part of the Department of the Interior, the Park Service is directly under Trump’s control, and he has used it to rewrite history to his own liking, most recently in Philadelphia, with new signage outside the remains of the house where George Washington lived as president. Advocates are angry at interpretive elements that now emphasize abolitionist sentiments among the Founding Fathers, and inform visitors that the people enslaved by Washington could “even attend the theater,” with the president buying them tickets. Other park sites have been censored, too, including the Stonewall Inn, where references to transgender people were eliminated from the discussion of one of the founding moments of the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement. References to slavery, including an infamous image of a formerly enslaved man with a scourged back, were targeted at other Park Service sites.

The National Park Service has now been enlisted in an attack on the Smithsonian, and that is the saddest part of these orders. Americans love and trust the Park Service and the Smithsonian, where they encounter history through the mediation of rangers, curators, interpreters and guides. Both organizations greet visitors with a human face, and that is essential to the faith we place in them. In “Rhetoric,” Aristotle observed that our trust in a speaker is grounded on their knowledge or common sense, but also on their integrity and benevolence. Americans encounter this on a daily basis in the cheerful, knowledgeable, decent people who serve both these organizations. [Continue reading…]