National Archives getting heat for whitewashing thorny episodes in U.S. history, not wanting to hurt people's feelings
Seems like somebody in D.C. is trying to sanitize American history by turning one of our country’s great museums, the National Archives, into a hall where people don’t feel — get this — uncomfortable or unwelcome. Offending people by presenting history as it was just isn’t appropriate these days, at least according the curator of The National Archives, whose management of the museum’s displays reflects this “let’s not hurt anybody’s feelings” attitude.
As you can imagine, there’s been some pushback. The issue is the way in which the uglier episodes in our country’s past – including those involving Native Americans – are being presented at the National Archives. A recent Wall Street Journal article about it is titled “America’s Top Archivist Puts a Rosy Spin on U.S. History — Pruning the Thorny Parts.”
I don’t get how spinning history has anything to do with the museum’s mandate. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C., calls itself “the nation’s record keeper.” The person in charge of NARA is titled the Archivist of the United States, a position now held by Colleen Shogan, who is “responsible for preserving, protecting, and sharing the history of the United States.”
That’s pretty heady stuff, considering the awesomeness of the responsibility involved. Her qualifications are certainly in order and no doubt there was much optimism at the beginning of her tenure in 2022. Lately, though, Shogan has come under some high-profile criticism, mainly because, as she says in the NARA organizational blog, her aim is the “importance of ensuring all Americans feel welcomed to our spaces and find their experiences represented in our programming and exhibits.”
Well, I suppose I get that, but in pursuit of making “all Americans feel welcomed,” Shogan in one exhibit replaced images of Martin Luther King Jr., labor activist Dolores Huerta, and Minnie Spotted Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, with pictures of Richard Nixon greeting Elvis Presley, and Ronald Reagan with baseball star Cal Ripken Jr.
Critics are understandably riled up by the switch.
Not that there isn’t a place for pop culture. There’s certainly room for the Nixon/Elvis and Reagan/Ripken likenesses. They say much about our country. What they don’t do is represent the profound changes in American life that the original figures did. Museums are really the only repository for displays like that. We’re bombarded with pictures of celebrities and sports stars meeting important people every day. Where else would we see images of Huerta and Spotted Wolf except in a museum? Unfortunately, Archivist Shogan is having none of that.
In an artnet story that drew on the WSJ article, writer Brian Boucher notes that photographs of Japanese-American internment camps were removed for being too negative and controversial. To that I say . . . what!? Yes, the story of those camps is both negative and controversial. Does that mean photos of them deserve banishment from a museum? Apparently Archivist Shogan, in her quest to make sure no one is uncomfortable by seeing the truth, thinks so.
As to NARA’s treatment of Native Americans, Boucher writes that “an exhibit concerning the Westward expansion by the U.S. government reportedly met with criticism from Shogan . . . among the artifacts removed were treaties by which Native Americans handed over land to the government.” Treaties like that are priceless. They need to be exposed so that people can see what happened during this country’s often heartless forays into “manifest destiny,” which in too many cases turned into “manifest extermination,” a characterization that comes to mind as I sit here just a two hour drive from Wounded Knee.
Shogan, who was appointed by President Biden, believes that “to be successful, it is imperative that the National Archives welcomes—and feels welcoming to—all Americans.”
That’s a manifesto that may work for Epcot, but for a museum that purports to be a storehouse of our nation’s history? Mmm, not quite. Successful museums didn’t get that way by keeping unpleasantries hidden away.
John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.
Photo: Statue at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., public domain, wikimedia commons
