History not meant to be nice and comforting

History is messy. On one hand, it offers uplifting stories of success, courage, human achievement, invention, ingenuity, compassion and kindness. Think of Dr. Jonas Salk and his development of the first successful polio vaccine. Or Viola Desmond, who asserted her civil rights against racial segregation in Nova Scotia.

On the other hand, history is also dark, ugly, mean-spirited and a catalogue of hardships, tragedy and brutality. Consider slavery, the Holocaust, the First and Second World Wars and residential schools — to list only a very few examples of the bloodshed, cruelty, death and depravity that has frequently defined history.

Anyone who has extensively studied history or read a history book knows that the past is complex and rarely black and white; that men and women, whether they are politicians, activists, businessmen, journalists, lawyers and judges, have their good and bad sides. Human perfection is elusive and there are few saints.

Most of us understand this except, it seems, U.S. President Donald Trump and his White House officials. They don’t like presentations of U.S. history, for example, that highlight slavery and the slaughter of Indigenous peoples, key elements of the American past for hundreds of years.

To this end, they are demanding that the various exhibits of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., are upbeat, with no references to prejudice and discrimination, human rights abuses and political corruption.

In short, visitors to the museum should experience a sanitized version of American history, with lots of stories about successful, kindly white men.

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Trump posted on Truth Social a year ago.

A few months before that rant, Trump had signed an executive order titled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” This recently led to the release of a 162-page report by Trump’s office entitled Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage.

The report, which focuses on the National Museum of American History, accuses historian and museum curator Lonnie Bunch III, the current head of the Smithsonian, and the first African American to lead the institution (which includes 21 museums and galleries, along with the National Zoological Park) and his officials of moving the history museum “away from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.” The museum, the report adds, does not tell the story of “‘the victory of freedom and genius of our country’ but one of regret, tragedy, and shame.”

In the past few weeks, Trump has demanded that the history museum post signs at its entrance cautioning visitors about “inaccurate information” that is presented inside.

The problem for Trump is that the executive branch does not have direct control over the Smithsonian. Since 1846, it has operated as a semi-independent institution, though the White House can urge Congress to cut the Smithsonian’s budget.

So far, Bunch has stood his ground. The Smithsonian’s mission, Bunch said in a recent interview on CNN, is to “give you questions and answers that will make you understand the complexity of who we are as a nation (using) the best non-partisan scholarship we have.”

At the moment, at least, there are no signs posted in front of the history museum, though in the future they could be installed by the National Park Service on government-owned property in front of the museum.

Predictably, Trump’s narrow and ideologically foolish interpretation of history has been vehemently criticized by museum officials, historians and politicians who do not support his MAGA policies.

The “Saving America’s Story” report “is not a document about history,” Yale University history professor David Blight wrote in the New York Times in mid-July, “it is the product of a racial and political ideology in search of a history that no longer bears scrutiny. People often joke about how Trumpism would like to return us to some version of the 1950s, when America supposedly was ‘great’ … The report would prefer that nothing had ever happened since the ’50s to mar the White House’s polished, superficial, puerile version of America’s past.”

What Trump and his acolytes are advocating, even if they would never admit it, is a distorted and manipulated type of history that was imposed by such brutal and authoritarian regimes headed by Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and the Chinese Communist Party. It is the way dictators spread propaganda and brainwash large segments of the populations. As George Orwell put it in his novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Despite the concerted effort, the odds are Trump will fail; there are likely too many obstacles to fully implement his revisionist plans. Count on the history museum and the other Smithsonian museums to continue to present the complexities of U.S. history, warts and all — now, in the near future, and long after Trump is gone from the political scene.

» Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context. His most recent book is The Dollar-A-Year Men: How the Best Business Brains in Canada Helped to Win the Second World War. This column first appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press.