Who Gets to Tell America's Story?

Last week, under the cover of night, National Park Service contractors quietly replaced the interpretive panels at the site in Philadelphia where George Washington lived as President in the 1790s.

The former texts at the President’s House Exhibit described what one panel termed “The Dirty Business of Slavery”. They identified the enslaved people who lived and worked there. They showed the routes that brought over 300,000 enslaved Africans to America in a trade that lasted for almost as long as the United States has been a nation. And they described how Washington himself ensured that none of his family’s 300-plus slaves were freed in his lifetime. In fact, this history lesson was the principal purpose of the exhibit when it opened in 2010.

All that has now gone and The Trump administration has replaced those panels with a new presentation. One that still acknowledges slavery, but in language that is less direct; certainly more flattering to the memory of America’s first president. And material that confronted the brutality of the institution has disappeared entirely.

The change followed a five-month-long legal battle and a recent federal appeals-court ruling that waived through the alterations. Effectively, the judge ruled that as the federal government owns the site it can tell whatever version of history it likes there. Critics say the new interpretation sanitizes Washington’s role as an enslaver. The administration says it is restoring historical balance and telling the full story of America.

Meanwhile, the site now has an extraordinary new visual feature. Armed Park Police are required around the clock to protect this new, federally approved version of American history.

“Restoring Truth and Sanity”

On March 27, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order entitled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. The order declared that a “concerted and widespread effort” had rewritten the nation’s past, and accused unnamed ideologues of presenting America as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed”.

It instructed the Vice President, as a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to work towards eliminating “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums, research centres and National Zoo. The order instructed the Interior Secretary to review federal monuments, memorials, markers and similar sites for material that “inappropriately disparage[s] Americans past or living”. Such sites, it declared, should instead focus on “the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people”.

The question is not whether America has achieved great things. It plainly has. It is whether a government should be allowed to determine that historical interpretation is acceptable only when it leaves Americans feeling sufficiently good about themselves.

The President’s House site offers the perfect test of this question. George Washington was the commander who led the American Revolution and the first President of the United States. He was the national hero. He was also an enslaver. Those facts are not competing versions of history. They are history.

The point of the President’s House Exhibit was never to prove that Washington was either a saint or a monster. It was to confront the extraordinary contradiction at the heart of the early republic. A nation founded on the language of liberty was governed by men who owned human beings. That contradiction does not make the American Revolution meaningless. It makes the Revolution more complicated and more historically intelligible. The new administration seems to believe that the contradiction itself is so unpalatable as to be politically dangerous.

Trump did not invent this argument

It would be tempting to regard the current assault on museums and national parks as a product of Donald Trump’s peculiar temperament. That would be a mistake. Trump is not its original thinker. He is simply the most flamboyant and unashamed front man this revisionist movement has yet produced.

The broader conservative campaign against America’s institutional establishment has a much longer history. On January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan stood on the steps of the Capitol and declared: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” That sentence became one of the great political slogans of modern conservatism. Reagan was speaking primarily about government, taxation and bureaucracy. But the larger conservative movement soon extended the argument.

The problem was not merely that government was too large. It was that the institutions of American life were supposedly controlled by the wrong people: by universities, the media, Hollywood, the arts, public broadcasting, schools, museums, historians, the National Park Service.

In the four decades since I first observed Washington DC at close hand in Reagan’s first term, the characters may have changed but the conservative movement’s underlying accusation has remained remarkably the same. Essentially: “the institutions entrusted with educating Americans about America have become hostile to America.”

The Heritage Foundation understood the value of turning that argument into a practical programme. Its 1981 Mandate for Leadership (in 3,000 pages and 20 volumes) helped provide the Reagan administration with a conservative policy blueprint for change. Project 2025consciously revived that model for a new Republican administration, combining an ideological programme with a personnel network and a plan for executive action.

So, the infrastructure for change, and the tactical planning to effect it, were being developed long before Trump returned to the White House in 2025. He supplies the grievance, the theatrical instinct, and the willingness to say openly what more conventional Republicans express more cautiously. The movement supplies the intellectual scaffolding.

The argument is older still

To understand where this may lead, we can look further back than Reagan, to the American Civil War, and the Lost Cause mythology that emerged from it. The Lost Cause wasn’t simply a mistaken interpretation of the conflict. It was a political and cultural project.

The Confederacy had seceded to protect a society built upon slavery but, after its defeat, former Confederates and their sympathisers gradually developed a different explanation. The Civil War became a noble tragedy. The Confederacy became a civilisation rather than a slave society. Robert E Lee became a model of honour, while the War itself became a dispute over states’ rights rather than a struggle over slavery; and the Reconstruction Era that followed: a regrettable “period of corruption and disorder”. The emancipation of four million enslaved people became, in effect, a footnote to the suffering of white Southerners.

The Lost Cause did not emerge from one man’s retrospection, let alone a single presidential order. It was built by a network involving veterans, politicians, writers, teachers, historical societies, monument committees, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The movement understood something that every successful political movement understands. If you control the story of the past, you help determine what seems possible in the present. So, the Lost Cause found its way into monuments, textbooks, museums and public ceremonies. It became part of the curriculum. The Lost Cause was not merely an argument about what had happened. It was an argument about who deserved sympathy. The formerly enslaved were marginalized; the defeated white South moved front and centre.

Then came the movies

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind was published in 1936, when the Lost Cause was already embedded in American culture. But the novel made the mythology vivid. The reader was invited to mourn a vanished Southern civilisation.The Civil War destroyed Tara. The white South lost its wealth, social order and status. Reconstruction brought humiliation, poverty and political disorder.

Central to the story was the question “What happened to white Southerners when their world disappeared?” rather than “What happened to the people whom slavery had enslaved?”

The 1939 film made the effect even more powerful.The Old South became a visual spectacle: plantations, ballrooms, magnificent costumes, gallant Confederate officers, the burning of Atlanta, the ruins of Reconstruction. Millions of people with no personal connection to the South were invited to feel nostalgia for a society built on slavery. Gone with the Wind did not create the Lost Cause, but it did make it unforgettable. The myth became not just an argument but a mood — and moods are often more durable than facts.

The continuum

The Lost Cause was a post-war attempt to restore the dignity of a defeated white social order. The current campaign against so-called woke versions of American history is not the same thing. The United States in 2026 isn’t the Confederacy of 1861, and Donald Trump is not Jefferson Davis. The Heritage Foundation is not the United Daughters of the Confederacy. But there is an undeniable continuum of political and emotional responses.

Frequently in history, a society or movement has confronted an uncomfortable historical fact and asked “How do we tell this story without damaging our sense of ourselves?”* The Lost Cause answered it by changing the story. Sound familiar? The language and political circumstances are different, but the underlying anxiety and the responses to it are much the same.

It’s not all about Trump

It would be a mistake to imagine that the 77 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 are all committed to a single historical interpretation. They are not. Many of those voters were motivated by immigration, others by inflation, abortion, foreign policy, hostility to Democrats, or by a belief that the federal government has become too powerful. Some were motivated by racial resentment, by religious conviction, or a desire to return to a more familiar and reassuring America. The coalition was broad.

But neither should the scale of that vote be ignored. The administration’s historical revisionism is not taking place in a political vacuum. It’s being pursued by a president who won an enormous popular vote. So, the question is not simply “Why is Donald Trump doing this?” but “Why does this message resonate with so many Americans?”

Part of the answer, as a recent Pew survey underlined, is that many people genuinely feel that their country has been turned into a morality play in which they have been assigned the role of villain. They may not be historians. They may not all know the details of the debates over slavery, Reconstruction or the Lost Cause, but they understand the emotional accusation. They hear that the America they were taught to admire was built on oppression, that the founding fathers were hypocrites; even that the flag, the Constitution, the family, the nation and the Western tradition are all objects of suspicion.

Some Americans conclude that the historical profession has become hostile to them. That perception is not necessarily accurate, but politics is frequently driven by perception, and the conservative movement has been remarkably successful in converting that perception into political energy.

Making history a loyalty test

The problem deepens when historical interpretation becomes a test of patriotism. A museum is not supposed to make visitors feel good, nor make them feel bad. Its first obligation is to tell the truth, as accurately as possible. Sometimes the truth is inspiring, sometimes it is shameful. Often, it is both at once.

America’s founders created a political system that transformed the modern world. Many of them owned enslaved people. The United States fought a civil war that destroyed slavery. It then tolerated a century of racial segregation and disenfranchisement. The country has repeatedly expanded its definition of liberty. It has also repeatedly denied liberty to millions of people. Those are not mutually exclusive facts. They are the story. To remove one half of it is not to restore balance. It is to distort the whole.

Living history

The photograph of armed Park Police guarding the new panels at the President’s House today leaves me with a final thought. History is often presented as something dead. It is not. The past is still politically alive because people use it to decide who they are. The Lost Cause survived because it gave millions of white Americans a story in which their ancestors were not the villains of history. Gone with the Wind helped make that story beautiful.

The modern conservative movement has developed a new version of the same political challenge. It argues that the institutions telling America’s story have become hostile to the country. It demands that the state restore a more uplifting account. Project 2025 has helped provide the administrative machinery. Donald Trump has supplied the presidential voice. And nearly 45% of eligible voters voted for him. So, the battle over American history cannot be dismissed as the eccentric obsession of one president. Nor can it be dismissed as the work of a handful of ideologues. It is a genuine political struggle over national identity.

Whole truths or half-truths?

But there is a difference between telling an uplifting history and telling a sanitized one. A country does not become greater by pretending that its founders were better than they were. George Washington does not become less important because he enslaved people. The American Revolution does not become less extraordinary because its leaders failed to apply its principles universally. The United States does not necessarily become less admirable because it has committed grave injustices.

Indeed, the opposite may be true. A nation that can confront its own contradictions is stronger than one that requires its museums to flatter it. The danger is not that Americans will learn too much about slavery, racism, dispossession, or presidential failings. The danger is that they will be taught that a country can only love itself by forgetting what it has done.

The Lost Cause showed how powerful such forgetting can become. The President’s House Exhibit shows that the argument is not over. And the bevy of armed officers standing guard over its new panels is currently the most vivid proof.