Censoring museums risks diminishing American exceptionalism, experts warn

By Rebekah Riess, CNN

(CNN) — As museums across the country face pressures to scale back a purported “overemphasis” on difficult subjects like slavery, experts warn such moves could diminish American exceptionalism and limit national progress while sidestepping the full historical picture visitors want.

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been,” President Donald Trump posted online in August as he directed his attorneys to review the non-profit that runs the nation’s flagship, federally funded public museums.

“Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” he added, comparing the review to his crackdown on elite US universities.

Trump’s post came weeks after the Smithsonian began its own review to affirm its “nonpartisan stature” and on the heels of the launch of a sweeping White House probe to ensure its “alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” his aides wrote.

That order, though, may be misaligned with what American museum-goers have told researchers: that they want a variety of perspectives and a complete picture of their shared past – without evident omissions or sugarcoating.

Beyond that, minimizing or cutting out so-called “bad” history risks sucking the truth out of America’s story and losing compelling pieces of a collective identity, experts told CNN. It could also sideline key knowledge that drives civic advancement and elevates US standing on the world stage, they said.

With leaders of the Smithsonian vowing to “continue to collaborate constructively” with the Trump administration, experts in the museum field are keeping a close eye on how their peers in Washington, DC, meet this critical moment – while standing their ground against threats of censorship trickling down from the White House.

“I have great confidence,” US museums pioneer Bryan Stevenson said, “that this nation is great enough to learn the truth of its history and still succeed.”

The dangers of censoring the ‘bad’

The White House’s efforts to recast the focus of the Smithsonian – with its 21 museums and National Zoo -– reflect Trump’s opposition to what he described in a March executive order as a “revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States.”

“Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” states the order titled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

Minimizing parts of history deemed “bad,” however, does a disservice to America’s central underdog narrative and lessens national-level achievements, experts warned.

“It’s just not the same story without the backdrop,” said Stevenson, executive director of the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, which runs The Legacy Museum, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park that address the US history of slavery, lynching and racial segregation.

Stevenson points to exhibits at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture that focus on the accomplishments of NBA legend Michael Jordan and “King of Pop” Michael Jackson, as well as the extraordinary achievements of former President Barack Obama and other African Americans who reached the pinnacles of success in business, politics, sports and entertainment.

Similar figures – from Revolutionary era hero Crispus Attucks to flight trailblazer Amelia Earhart – would be honored in a “National Garden of American Heroes” Trump has championed.

“But you won’t appreciate the success of the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo Code Breakers or other people of color who’ve done great things if you don’t understand the burdens and the barriers and the obstacles they had to overcome,” Stevenson said.

“We all like stories about people who suffer injuries but recover and go on and achieve great things, people who fall down but get back up,” he went on. “But you don’t skip the part about how they were unfairly targeted, unfairly injured, unfairly held back. You have to emphasize that to appreciate their achievement.”

US standing in the world is at risk

Key in the Trump administration’s review of the Smithsonian is the notion that deep historical rifts continue to impact the country in a negative way, the White House aide leading the process told Fox News last month.

“There’s a lot of history to our country – both positive and negative – but we need to keep moving forward,” Lindsey Halligan said. “We can’t just keep focusing on the negative. All it does is divide us.”

But minimizing difficult or harmful parts of the nation’s history could pose a broader potential consequence of “diminishing our stature as a nation on the international stage,” said John Chrastka, executive director of EveryLibrary, a nonpartisan organization working toward “sustaining libraries as they evolve and grow in the 21st century.”

Most countries have history that is difficult, he said. Owning it, especially alongside steps to try to make up for systemic injustice, has become a global mark of distinction from the Netherlands to Japan to Australia.

“I don’t think that we can be a country that’s world-class,” Chrastka said, “I don’t think we can be a nation that’s mature, I don’t think we can be a nation that leads amongst other nations, if we bury our own truths.”

People also need to understand the fulsome truth to make informed decisions on a range of issues affecting daily life, Stevenson said.

“No one goes to the doctor and tells their doctor, ‘If I have high blood pressure, if I have diabetes – don’t tell me! I forbid you from telling me! I don’t want to know about it!’ Because that’s a recipe for poor health, for early death,” Stevenson explained. “The way we get better, the way we stay healthy, is by learning the truth about our history, about our health, about our society, about what’s a threat, what’s not a threat, and then confronting it and then overcoming it.”

Taking a position that facets of US history weren’t “‘that bad,’ even though it’s empirically proven to be ‘that bad’ … really makes it much more difficult for us to have honest conversations with each other as neighbors,” Chrastka added.

CNN has reached out to Halligan and the White House for further comment.

Americans want a range of perspectives

Data from an annual survey of museum-goers, done over the past year in partnership with the American Alliance of Museums, shows the majority of participants supported and wanted museums to share inclusive programming that tells multiple perspectives and gives a full picture of the country’s history.

While there were significant differences in the responses of conservative and liberal survey respondents, even then, the majority of conservatives – in step with liberals – favored inclusive programming, the survey conducted by Wilkening Consulting shows.

Additionally, a lot of written-in survey comments, along with qualitative field work, indicated Americans and frequent museum visitors recognized – and disliked – omissions in curation, said Susie Wilkening, principal of Wilkening Consulting.

“They want to know what happened in the past, and they don’t want it to be erased. They don’t want it to be sugarcoated. They don’t want it to be glossed over. And when it does happen like that, they get angry,” she said.

“When we omit parts or tell lies of a mission and not tell that complete story, the public’s aware of it.”

When it came to historical facts, survey-takers tended to find respondents who were less open to newly uncovered historical perspectives had narrower parameters for what they considered “credible facts,” while those who leaned toward more inclusive museum programming had broader parameters.

“But historians and the people who are doing the work at museums are in the business of making sure that the things that they’re presenting in museums are backed up by evidence,” Wilkening noted, making the case for an expanded view.

“People trust museums because they rely on independent scholarship and research, uphold high professional standards, and embrace open inquiry,” the American Alliance of Museums, which represents 35,000 museums and professionals, said in a statement responding to growing threats of censorship at US museums.

US museum leaders refuse to retreat

Federal action like the pending White House reviews could also have ripple effects at state and local levels, EveryLibrary wrote last month.

“If the Smithsonian, a prestigious institution known for its historical independence, can be compelled to align its content with political agendas, smaller organizations such as local history museums and public libraries will likely face increased pressure to modify their collections, exhibitions, and programs to fit these prevailing narratives,” its statement reads.

“These pressures can create a chilling effect across the entire museum sector,” the American Alliance of Museums said in a statement.

In short, “it sets the national tone,” Chrastka told CNN.

Still, Chrastka is optimistic most museums will hold their own, he said. During the Nazi regime and the Communist era, some German librarians – and even the national library – collected so-called “decadent books,” Western books and books considered outside the official philosophy, he learned recently from a German colleague.

“I don’t think we’re at that point yet in the United States,” Chrastka said. “But I’d like to hope that individual libraries, individual museums and individual archives, taken collectively together in states and regions, can continue to do their jobs, to do what would they look at as being a statutory obligation to serve the public or an obligation based on their mission, vision and values to serve the public despite that kind of pressure that’s coming from the top.”

“We’re just going to continue doing public history work,” the director of Two Mississippi Museums told reporters in August at an event announcing a display of the gun used to lynch 14-year-old Emmett Till 70 years ago in the United States.

“One of the reasons why the Civil Rights Museum was created is to tell the unvarnished truth about what happened in terms of the Civil Rights Movement here in Mississippi, and that’s our mission,” Michael Morris. “For us, you know, we’re just doing our jobs.”

Stevenson also has no intention of walking back any of what’s on display the Legacy Sites: “We will not retreat one inch,” he said, “from talking honestly about history, presenting honestly about history.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter, Kit Maher, and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn contributed to this report.

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