The Danger of Speaking Truth to the Power-Hungry

The author of History by a Hair, Richard Kurin, is the Smithsonian Institution’s Distinguished Scholar and Ambassador-at-Large. A cultural anthropologist by training, he was previously the Under Secretary overseeing all the organization’s museums and scientific centers.

Kurin’s new book includes a foreword by Lonnie G. Bunch III, the retiring Secretary of the Smithsonian. Its back-cover blurbs include praise from David M. Rubenstein, former chair of the Smithsonian Board of Regents.

Ordinarily, those connections to America’s national history museum would be assets for History by a Hair. Under the current administration, they’re complications, especially when the book presents historical information that reactionaries don’t want to hear.

The New York Times reported:

An event on Sept. 22 announcing the findings has been moved from the American history museum to a less prominent Smithsonian location, limited to descendants and closed to the news media. An online public lecture by Kurin through the institution’s educational arm set for the next day was canceled.

The Smithsonian has been treading lightly under President Donald Trump because of his festering cultural resentments and wish to leave his footprint on Washington, D.C. In July the White House issued an executive order supposedly meant to “restore trust” in the Smithsonian—actually one of the most respected and beloved institutions in American culture.

We know Donald Trump doesn’t really care about accurate U.S. history. If he did, he wouldn’t have installed a plaque on one of his golf courses marveling at a Civil War battle that never happened. He’d have recognized immediately that it would be wrong to say that Revolutionary War troops “took over the airports.”

Donald Trump wants control of the Smithsonian, just as he grabbed control of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Reflecting Pool, the Sestercentennial celebrations, and the White House’s East Wing. The scars on the D.C. landscape show us how well those moves have worked out.

Since the Smithsonian was chartered by Congress and has a robust governance system, Trump has only been able to exert pressure from the outside. The latest scheme his staff has come up with is to install signs between the empty Reflecting Pool and Smithsonian museums warning visitors of what they’ll find inside.

As Kevin M. Levin has pointed out, the federal agency tasked with writing, designing, and planting those signs is the National Park Service—another target of Trump’s hunger for power. The New York Times just reported on the damage the administration has inflicted on that agency.

In its story about History by a Hair, the Times hinted at how people feared the book could become a focus of Trump’s temper. Even though, as Karin Wulf writes, the historical findings about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings are “so far beyond a reasonable doubt we’re in planetary orbit.” Because, as I said before, Trump doesn’t really care about accurate U.S. history.

Richard Kurin will come to Boston to talk about History by a Hair on 6 October at an appearance at WBUR’s CitySpace.