Congressional hearings have been rough the last couple of weeks. We’ve had to endure Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth asking for billions of dollars more for a war-of-choice in Iran that already has cost us in lives taken, money wasted, international respect and prices at the pump.
Meanwhile, both the nominee for U.S. Attorney General, Acting AG Todd Blanche, and the newly-confirmed Director of National Intelligence, lawyer Jay Clayton, could not say simply that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, lest they offend their deranged boss — President Donald Trump.
Thus, few people paid attention to the theater of Trump delusions that played out July 21 in Room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building, with U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, taking the lead role. Burchett chairs a “Delivering on Government Efficiency Committee” that took as its task the curiously asserted topic “Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian’s Efforts to Reshape the Past.”
For the record, the Smithsonian Institution has been around since 1846 when Congress decided what to do with money and artifacts from the estate of British scientist James Smithson, which the U.S. government had received almost a decade earlier. The resulting museum and research center grew into the world’s largest museum, education and research complex. It includes not only nine research facilities but also 21 museums and the National Zoo. The monthly magazine “Smithsonian” features intriguing articles and photographs about history, exploration and the natural world.
Burchett, operating as a Trump sock puppet, took aim at the National Museum of American History. That museum’s mission statement includes the phrase “empowering people to create a just and compassionate future by exploring, preserving, and sharing the complexity of our past.”
Burchett opened the hearing by declaring that museum had fallen victim to a “woke ideology” and no longer highlights America’s “singular story as a beacon of freedom and opportunity.” Translation: you can find references to slavery, immigrant bashing and rough treatment of Native Americans. Apparently, Burchett and Trump prefer a patriotic narrative of American progress while being vague and incomplete on what flaws we were moving away from.
Ranking committee member U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, a New Mexico Democrat, immediately saw through Burchett’s charade. She declared, “The [Smithsonian] mission has never depended on whether history is convenient, whether it’s comfortable, or whether you like it or not…When politicians begin deciding what facts are acceptable, scholarship ceases to be scholarship; it becomes propaganda.”
The Republicans on the committee largely extrapolated on a White House report released earlier in the month. U.S. Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, lent a hand by grilling the museum director about justice and compassion for the “tens of millions of aborted babies.” Director Anthea Hartig calmly explained to Boebert and others that the museum rigorously follows a non-partisan peer-review process, striving to be truthful and comprehensive in all facets of our past and the full richness of the American experience.
The experts for Burchett’s panel were Mike Gonzales, a senior fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation and Dr. Matthew Spalding, dean at Hillsdale College, a private Christian college tied to conservative activism. Committee Democrats invited Dr. David Blight, a Yale historian who views the Trump report as a war on history and historians.
Questioning from Burchett and other Republicans amounted to a bizarre game of whack-a-mole where out-of-context quotes about everything from Mickey Mouse to books sold in the Smithsonian store were assessed as some sort of proof that can be congealed into what Spalding bloviated was “national self-loathing.”
Time and again, Hartig would return to the self-correcting mechanisms of non-partisan historical examination and review. It fell to Blight to note the broader agenda. “Triumphalist history cannot tolerate nuance, ambiguity, complexity, but they are lifeblood for real historians,” he said. “We do not write ‘woke’ history, whatever that is, but we do try to awaken citizens.”
Somehow with Trump devotees every accusation seems more like a confession. Take this claim of Smithsonian historical revisionism. U.S. Rep.James Walkinshaw, Democrat from Virginia, pointed out the bogus accusations against the Smithsonian read more like the historical revisionism of Trump’s war against diversity, equity and inclusion. He listed the Defense Department’s removal from its website (and returning after public outrage) pages on some black veterans, including baseball barrier breaker Jackie Robinson; the Tuskegee Airmen; and the Navajo code talkers. The Administration’s deletion of other pages about diverse members of our military history went forward.
What went unstated at the hearings was the question of precedent. If this administration gets away with bludgeoning Smithsonian history into a Trumpian world view, what is next? Will the Air and Space Museum be compelled to strike all artifacts from other nations’ space programs? Will the Museum of Natural History be obliged to relabel the age of rocks that do not fit the age of Earth believed by biblical literalists? This way leads to madness, and Burchett played the role of Mad Hatter.
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