The Wall Street Journal has an incredible story today. The National Archives museum, under Biden-appointed U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan, has been working to reshape its narrative of American history in order to make white conservatives more comfortable. The Journal describes a pattern of efforts to shape its newest upcoming exhibits to better fit right-wing narratives of U.S. history. The museum has removed references to Martin Luther King Jr., Japanese internment, Native Americans, union organizers, and birth control, because presenting American history honestly would make Republicans upset. 

The explicit justification here was that the facts would hurt the feelings of guests who didn’t want to hear about union organizers and Native Americans. Visitors shouldn’t “feel confronted,” the Archivist said, but rather “welcomed.” Of course, Japanese Americans or Native Americans are unlikely to feel “confronted” by exhibits on their history, so the archivist was clearly referring to making white conservatives feel more at ease. In fact, an employee was specifically “told to look for success stories about white people.” And, looking over an exhibit about westward expansion, Shogan asked a staffer “Why is it so much about Indians?”

Essentially, the National Archives museum is becoming a tribute to (supposed) American greatness, rather than an honest account of all aspects of our history. It might be surprising that this is occurring under a Biden appointee, but it’s clear that Shogan is intensely worried about being accused of partisanship. When she was appointed, Josh Hawley called her an “extreme partisan,” and Republicans “warned that they would be watching closely for signs that she was pulling the independent agency to the left.” Here we see an example of Republicans “working the ref.” As Pete Davis has explained, in sports this concept refers to the tactic of accusing the referee of being biased toward your opponent, in the hope that the referee will start being biased toward you to make up for it and disprove the accusation. As Davis wrote in 2018: 

In institutional politics, the right-wing establishment has honed working the ref into an art form. It’s a two-part dance. First, they take institutions that see themselves as “neutral referees” and accuse them of having a “left-wing bias.”  Then, they repeat themselves over and over and over again — no matter what the truth of the matter is — until the institution is so rattled by being called biased that it, in an attempt to affirm its neutrality, starts doing whatever the right-wing wants. Dozens of institutions that see themselves as referees have been worked. PBS has long been accused of being left-wing, so it finally gave in this year and launched its own conservative talk show. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic editorial boards got accused of being left-wing so much that they just went on a hiring spree for conservative columnists. The Obama administration so internalized the accusation of being left-wing that  it started implementing conservative agenda items, like cutting entitlements and deporting thousands of American families, to prove its neutral bona fides.

The case of the National Archives is similar. Alarmed about the possibility of being seen as “woke” or partisan, Shogan is purging the museum of everything that could substantiate such an allegation, such as exhibits that treat Native Americans, Japanese Americans, and civil rights activists as human beings with valuable and important stories. Of course, trying to appease the right is a fool’s errand, because the right is never going to say “oh, actually, the Biden-appointed archivist is quite good at her job and very fair-minded.” They consider anything that doesn’t fully support their agenda to be pernicious leftism, so Trump will likely still want to replace Shogan with a full-blown MAGA Archivist who puts up exhibits honoring the great contributions of real estate developers to American history, and builds a shrine to the memory of Ronald Reagan. The correct stance for an archivist is to be committed to telling a truthful story that reflects what actually happened, even if this makes some people uncomfortable because there are truths they would rather block out of their understanding of the country’s past.

At the National Archives, it’s not just that a story more favorable to white people is being told. It’s that dark subjects are being avoided. Even the Holocaust has been downplayed. A gallery exhibit on how the National Archives have been used included, as an example, “how public records had been used to return assets to Jews after the Holocaust.” Employees were told that “the Holocaust story needed to go,” as part of the effort “to focus on lighter moments in U.S. history.” I was struck by something similar when I visited the National World War II Museum, which also de-emphasizes the Holocaust, as well as declining to show its visitors anything gruesome. That museum also sells a triumphant and cheerful story about America, one that won’t cause visitors to have to experience much discomfort. (The World War II Museum does, to its credit, include an exhibit on Japanese internment.) 

It is a constant struggle to get stories of oppression and injustice to public attention, because these stories are depressing and unsettling. Sometimes they raise harsh questions that many people would rather not have to answer, such as: if this is how it was, doesn’t that make you the beneficiary of a terrible injustice? The backlash to the 1619 Project, for instance, went far beyond a mere scholarly critique of the project’s findings. The right launched an entire presidential commission, the 1776 Commission, with the aim of producing a counter-narrative that could keep Americans from having to feel troubled by the history of racism. The resulting 1776 Report carefully sanitized American history in exactly the way the National Archives is doing, for instance by falsely portraying Martin Luther King Jr. as an exponent of color-blind politics, and declining to tell readers what his real views were. (Others have similarly misrepresented King. But hey, at least they didn’t just replace him with a picture of Elvis!) 

Since the 1960s, there has been a heroic effort by scholars and activists to get Black Americans, women, Native Americans, LGBTQ+ people, and workers included in “mainstream” historical narratives. That effort has been partly successful, although many liberal historians still have major blindspots. Books like A People’s History of the United States aim to keep the ugly side of our history in view, to prevent us from lapsing into cheerful mythology. (That’s also what Noam Chomsky and I have tried to do in The Myth of American Idealism, which forces readers into a confrontation with the disturbing realities of U.S. foreign policy.) There will always be backlash to these efforts. There will be attempts at banning books, at pressuring museum curators to dial back the “woke” stuff. There is no guarantee that historical knowledge will survive or be widely understood. Librarians, archivists, curators, and historians all have essential work to do in guarding the truth, and making sure it is not replaced with mythology. The National Archives story shows how little we can count on liberals to maintain their commitment to this mission in the face of right-wing pressure. 

Update: Ellis Brachman, Senior Advisor to the Archivist—who is accused in the Journal story of having complained about excessive wokeness, spiked the mention of the Holocaust, and cut references to environmental damage—emailed me to say that the Wall Street Journal's story is inaccurate. While not providing any evidence to refute any of the Journal's reporting, Brachman told me that "balance was missing in the early planning of some of the new galleries here, and we have had to make some difficult decisions during the planning process." "Unfortunately," he writes, "some did not appreciate that process and didn’t want to do the hard work to address the nuanced and many layered facts of American history." He also argued that I had not sufficiently emphasized that the exhibits in question have not been opened to the public yet, so I have updated the wording above to emphasize that these are the newest planned exhibits rather than preexisting ones. He told me that the National Archives is willing to confront "hard truths," assured me that there is still a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. elsewhere in the museum, and cited the fact that they are "adding the Emancipation Proclamation and the 19th Amendment to the Archives Rotunda, alongside the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights - to tell a more complete story of American history." The Journal has thus far not retracted any of its reporting.