Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

EDITORIAL:

Trump’s attempt to whitewash American history should not be forgotten

National

Rebecca Blackwell / AP

Workers begin to remove a display of flags on the National Mall one day after the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Thursday, Jan. 21, 2021, in Washington.

President Joe Biden made an appropriate move last week in burying the 1776 Commission report but keeping it in the federal archives. The document should live on as a permanent reminder of the Trump administration’s politics of bigotry and division.

That’s the only historical value this piece of propaganda has to offer. Served up by a group that President Donald Trump put together to spearhead “patriotic education” curriculum in classrooms — a term that brings to mind repatriation gulags in authoritarian regimes — it’s riddled with inaccuracies and information presented grossly out of context.

Historians have scorched the report, calling it a political screed masquerading as a historical document. The many critics accused the authors of cherry-picking facts and warping them to create a false narrative that glorifies the Founding Fathers, whitewashes their hypocrisy over slavery and downplays the struggles of Blacks, indigenous peoples, women and LGBTQ Americans to achieve equality. In one of its many appalling aspects, the report softens the nation’s role in maintaining slavery, characterizing it as a product of its time and contending falsely that the American Revolution led to a “dramatic sea change in moral sensibilities” that pushed slavery out of the country. You don’t need a college degree in history to know that slavery persisted for decades in this nation after the revolution, with the Jim Crow era following it and with institutionalized racism remaining as a toxic byproduct.

The report also largely served as an attack on progressivism, which it directly likened to Mussolini-era fascism in Italy and called a “challenge to American principles.” So ending child labor, reducing hazards in the workplace, adopting health standards in the food and drug industry, etc., were somehow against American principles? Better tell one of the figures on Mount Rushmore, Theodore Roosevelt, a champion of many of the progressive causes of his day.

Biden revoked the report and disbanded the commission on his first day in office, an appropriate move that will save American schoolchildren from being fed a fabricated version of U.S. history. Had Trump remained in office, his administration planned to use the commission to drive changes in history curriculum and instruction in the nation’s schools.

The American Historical Association, in a statement co-signed by 13 other academic groups, said the report sought “government indoctrination of American students.”

Tellingly, there were no professional U.S. historians on the commission, which instead was a collection of right-wing college figures, politicians, activists and commentators. And in another indication of the commission’s true agenda to indoctrinate students, its director responded to criticism of the report by saying it “wasn’t written for academic historians but for the American people.” Translation: The facts didn’t matter here.

Meanwhile, commission member Victor Davis Hanson responded to the criticism through a column in The National Review and Las Vegas Review-Journal, of course, in which he contended the report offered a “unifying message” that would not be considered controversial “in any age other than the divisive present.”

Wrong on both counts, Mr. Hanson. The generations of Americans who have fought and even died for equality would have been outraged by such a scrubbing of history, regardless of when it occurred. And the divisiveness of the report is self-evident in the outcry it generated, not just from historians but among Americans from all walks of life. Released on Martin Luther King Day, the document drew an avalanche of criticism on social media from people who saw it for exactly what it was: an affront to the truth about the nation’s past, an attempt to feed students a sanitized and hero-worshipping version of history, and a revocation of Trump’s political opponents. It’s also a testament to Trump’s authoritarian leanings: Dictatorships commonly rewrite history to glorify themselves and subvert their opponents.

The way to move forward and unite as a nation isn’t to airbrush the sins of our past, but rather to acknowledge them and discuss how they’re still affecting us.

Contrary to the characterizations in the report, the people who want to face our history, warts and all, aren’t America-haters. They’re striving for a more perfect and unified union — something Trump was never interested in doing.