Notebook: Monuments
History is not only written by victors, it is composed of what victors choose to preserve, and what they throw away
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On Thursday, veteran Washington correspondent April Ryan reported on efforts she had heard about from sources to transport the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s lunch counter exhibit out of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and on a letter that Dr. Amos Brown, pastor of Third Baptist Church in San Francisco, had received informing him that a Bible and a volume of an early work of African American history were being returned to him by the museum. At the end of March the Trump Administration had issued an executive order vowing “remove improper ideology” (elsewhere in the order characterized as “corrosive” and “divisive”) from all the Smithsonian Institution museums and education and research centers and the National Zoo, and to “restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage.” He charged a member of his staff, an attorney named Lindsey Halligan, who had advocated for taking on ideology in the national museums after touring a few of them on her arrival in the city, with “effectuating” these instructions, and Vice President J. D. Vance, in his capacity as regent on the Smithsonian board and President of the Senate, with overseeing budgeting and board appointments that align with the order’s goals. Although the Smithsonian is not administered by the executive branch—it receives most of its operational funding from Congressional appropriations and most of its exhibits are privately financed—as The Washington Post noted, “the order makes clear that the administration will find a way to punish the museums financially if desired changes are not enacted.”
The next day April Ryan in an update reported that she had received assurances that the Woolworth’s lunch counter, where four Black male students were beaten in Greensboro in 1963 for sitting in the whites-only area, launching the sit-in movement in the South that was formative in the nationwide civil rights movement, is not under threat (the Museum of African American History and Culture exhibits one of the two stools from the lunch counter in its holdings; the lunch counter itself is in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History). A Smithsonian representative told McClatchy news service that the museum’s loan agreement with Dr. Brown had expired and the items were being returned per standard museum practice.
So it appears for now that the Administration is holding back on removing actual physical objects from museum collections (though it’s not clear how they intend to exhibit stools from the Woolworth’s lunch counter without raising the specter of American division). The same cannot be said of digital information under federal care and influence, nor of course of books. As of early February, as reported by The New York Times, more than eight thousand web pages across more than a dozen U.S. government websites had been taken down, apparently largely in response to a January 31 deadline delivered in an Office of Personnel Management guidance on President Trump’s executive order calling for agencies to “remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.” The agencies were also responding to an inauguration day order to eliminate “DEI” “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.” The removals, according to the Times analysis, came from the websites of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Census Bureau, the Office of Justice Programs, Head Start, the Department of Justice, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the Department of the Interior, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Marshals Service. Some appeared connected with demographic identifiers, such as breaking down health studies by gender and ethnicity, or policies against harassment and discrimination, or guidelines to assure diversity in clinical trials. Some of these documents later reappeared after offending language or programs had been redacted. According to The Washington Post, agencies were also, without the compulsion of an explicit executive order, removing material addressing climate change, generally revising language where possible to refer to new goals of “resilience” and “competitiveness.”
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As we wrote last month regarding the removals from Department of Defense libraries and classrooms of books that smacked of “DEI” and “gender ideology,” a lot of the redactions seemed driven by confusion and fear of falling short. Air Force Chief of Staff General David Allvin told the Associated Press, with reference to the removal of the Tuskegee Airmen and the women WASP pilots from Air Force training materials, that the service felt obliged to show “no equivocation, no slow-rolling, no foot-dragging” in response to the executive orders from their commander-in-chief. A Department of Defense memo of February 26 entitled “Digital Content Refresh” instructed everyone under its authority to, by March 5, remove all items that “promote DEI,” defined as materials about “critical race theory, gender ideology, preferential treatment based upon sex, race or ethnicity” and also material that is “counter to merit-based or color-blind practices” or “promotes cultural awareness months.” It noted that a “blanket statement” explaining that the removals are pursuant to the President’s executive orders “may be necessary to aid user experience.” The memo poignantly exempts “customer-focused content” such as “Morale, Welfare and Recreation and Commissary operations and activities.” Notably the memo averred that material removed from websites and social media platforms “must be archived and retained.” The Associated Press wrote in February about a database of twenty-six thousand images including “war heroes and military firsts” that were slated for review because they represented women or minorities—or were even captioned with words like “gay” and “gender” in irrelevant contexts, like the Hiroshima bomber “Enola Gay” and a Marine Corps study following different sexes in a fish hatchery.
Cuts to the budgets of climate science through National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, driven by DOGE “efficiencies” as well as aversion to any study of climate, eliminated publicly available data that not only enables Americans to predict the weather but also to study historic weather records. 404 Media found that two thousand data sets disappeared from the government aggregator data.gov on the day Donald Trump was inaugurated, mostly from the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Kansas City meteorologist Jacob Lanier, among many, committed to personally sifting through available records to try and save Kansas City weather data.
A broad swath of public health data has been withdrawn and its collection discontinued, apparently because it used demographic markers to identify health risks, for example, to LGBTQ+ and minority populations. On Thursday the US Department of Health and Human Services reversed a decision of three days prior to cancel a multi-decade longitudinal study of women’s health that had yielded many treatment-altering discoveries. The National Park Service removed and then restored a page about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad; it removed references to transgender people from the website of the Stonewall Monument in Greenwich Village, the first US national monument dedicated to LGBTQ+ history, long sought by community residents and activists, and commemorating a protest helmed by a trans woman, Marsha P. Jackson. The Washington Post reported that the words “diversity, equity, and inclusion” were even removed from years-old documents, like proceedings from a conference in 2021 and a 2022 letter from the secretaries of education and of health and human services about children at risk from pandemic-related health impacts.
In February a federal judge ordered websites from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration to be restored in response to a suit by the advocacy group Doctors for America. The ACLU joined with two medical researchers to sue the Department of Health and Human services for removing their articles, about suicide risk assessment and endometriosis, from the Patient Safety Network because they referenced trans patients. Farmers sued the Department of Agriculture over the deletion of climate data. Three rulings this week halted implementation of the President’s anti-DEI directives in public schools on the grounds that the directives are “unconstitutionally vague”; perhaps this logic will extend to other implementations of the order. Meanwhile Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility has called for an investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General and the Archivist of the United States into the DOJ’s deletion of its public webpages and case summaries of January 6 prosecutions; the group has also charged that shutting down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database was a violation of federal law.
A number of groups are, like the Kansas City meteorologist, scrambling to preserve information threatened by this mass extinction. The Internet Archive, whose “Wayback Machine” archives historic web pages, homed in on capturing the web pages of the Centers for Disease Control. The “End of Term” archive has since 2008 catalogued web-based US government public information between presidential terms. Harvard announced an initiative to archive data.gov datasets. The National Security Archive, which provides access to declassified documents and combats government secrecy, published deleted climate change material under its “Climate Change Transparency Project.” A group of climate researchers, remembering mass deletions during the previous Trump administration, formed the Public Environmental Data Project before the election to begin to preserve climate data. The Kaiser Family Foundation and the public health blogger Charles Gaba have captured public health information. Jessica Valenti’s Substack preserved CDC website documents on reproductive rights, sexual health, intimate partner violence. But, as Vox’s Dylan Scott noted, a large part of the value of these materials depends on their continually being updated.
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Beyond the overt removal of material and data from the public internet, other recent moves by the administration have corroded the public’s access to information. The elimination of the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) threatens inter-library loan, local digital library access and public wifi, digitization of local historical records, collection of data on local services, and the preservation of local historical artifacts. Library analyst Guy LeCharles Gonzalez told Jane Friedman that he was worried that future IMLS funding would bind library collections to the administration’s restrictions on gender and race. “Will a library be faced with the choice of abandoning key programs for underserved patrons or removing targeted books from their collections to preserve funding?,” he asked. Cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities have caused projects to digitize small-town newspapers and bring Smithsonian exhibits to rural and remote communities to be defunded. The Endowment has historically underwrittten much historic documentation, such as the records of the voyage of Lewis and Clark and multivolume editions of the papers of Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ernest Hemingway, and twelve presidents. One thinks also of the Library of Congress’s role in collecting slave narratives and recording folk music. The Nieman Lab has reported that the evisceration of the Voice of America, which, though a government-funded news outlet, has historically held to independent journalistic standards and was reaching 427 million people weekly in over sixty-three languages and more than a hundred countries, has led to an expansion of Russian and Chinese information agencies’ influence around the world. In January Harvard, like all universities threatened with defunding over conformity with the Administration’s priorities, laid of the staff of its Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program. Google Calendar, following the lead of government agencies, has removed Pride and Black History Month, among other observances, from its default settings (and Google Maps has adopted the President’s name for the Gulf of Mexico). The National Transportation Safety Board announced that it would release information about accidents and disasters on X/Twitter rather than in official announcements to the press.
Children are note being spared. Last week Texas, the last major Republic state to do so, adopted a statewide school choice funding program, paving the way for the introduction of national school choice, which would draw funds away from public school libraries (among other consequences). In February Library Futures delivered a report on growing restriction to student access to school library databases because of “parent” charges of inappropriate content (school library databases are already screened for age-appropriateness as a result of a Clinton-era law). The Alabama public library system voted in March to defund an entire library after some constituents complained that its review processes for their objections to books did not arrive that the correct conclusions.
Read Book Post on attacks on libraries
Stanford library researcher James Jacobs told 404 Media, for their story about removals from data.gov, that “before the internet, government documents were printed and were archived by being distributed among many different libraries as part of the ‘Federal Depository Library Program.’ The internet has made a lot of government information more accessible, but it has also made it a lot more fragile.” Where does information live? Who cares for its longevity? Amidst all this, Americans are losing trust in legacy news operations and there has been a persistent decline in the sale of nonfiction books. E-book readers have learned that even a “book” that comes in an electronic form is actually malleable. History, it emerges, is not only written by victors, it is composed of what victors choose to preserve, the way they preserve it. Those rushing to archive vanishing information are demonstrating that saving what a society needs is an important form of witness.
Writing in The Washington Post, their art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott observed that President Trump’s Smithsonian order to “restore Federal sites dedicated to history … to solemn and uplifting public monuments” is not only about changing what these sites display. The order’s reference to “monuments” is not accidental: it yokes this new vision for the Smithsonian to an effort to restore monuments removed (“since January 1, 2020”) “to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures.” The dog-whistling reference is to monuments to the Confederacy. Philip Kennicott writes that the order seeks to wind back changes to the curatorship of the Smithsonian and other museums that have been underway since the sixties, toward a vision that “prioritizes the lives and experiences of ordinary people over political or military figures and uses narrative and oral history to give texture to the past.” He quotes curator and historian Paul Ferber, who argues that museums, including the Smithsonian, have become places of “multi-vocality where multiple people’s voices coexist together, as a chorus, not a zero-sum game.” The removals from government websites, and the defunding of supports to history-preserving projects like the National Endowment for the Humanities, silences this multi-vocal chorus, particularly the participation of people who are not in a position to dictate history’s outcomes. Robbing the populace of access to the reality of their shared lived experience hands over to those in power the capacity to remake memory on their terms. Philip Kennicott continues, “meanwhile, the memorial landscape stands as a kind of last, rearguard battle of the old history, the history made by men on horses and colonizers who travel by land and sea, where monuments are ‘facts on the ground’ that need no particular interpretation.” This moment of digital book-burning is explicitly directed at subduing the nation’s multi-vocality, quelling competing testimony that asks to be weighed in the balance of the whole, leaving one unchallengeable man on his pedestal, looming and unresponsive as a monument.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post.