The Trump Administration’s Efforts to Reshape America’s Past
In 1976, the year the United States celebrated its bicentennial, Donald J. Trump, thirty, Léonine, and three rooms, were heated around Manhattan by a copy-armed copy cop with “DJT” plates, while speaking on his hot car phone and doing business. “He could sell sand to the Arabs and refrigerators to the Eskimos,” an architect told Times. This architect developed plans for a congress center that Trump hoped to build in Midtown. Trump described it as a “miracle on the 34th street”, promising a cultural centerpiece, with fountains, swimming pools, a giant cinema, half a million square feet of exhibition space and solar panels on the roof.
Cultural industry: a centenary problem
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On July 4 of this red -white and blue year, the big ships – a flotilla of more than two hundred ships of more than a dozen countries – led to the port of New York. Three days later, Trump was in Washington, DC, presenting himself to the city’s redevelopment board of the construction of another Gargantuan congress center, this near the American Capitol. Encountering rigid resistance, according to the Evening starA trump visibly “at the spotlight” left the meeting “in a breath”.
The newspaper did not point out if, before leaving DC, Trump stopped by the Smithsonian History and Technology Museum to visit its bicentennial exhibition of thirty-five thousand square feet, “A Nation of Nations”. Five years in preparation, he told the twin stories of the American Union and the disunity with five thousand objects, of a ute flute and the boxing gloves of Muhammad Ali to a Klan dress and a sign that said “Japs prevent rats.” The show was intended to demonstrate how people “came to America, from prehistoric to the time to the present day” and “how experiences in the new land have changed them”.
We also do not know if Trump, Huffy and Miffed, walked along the National Mall to see the bicentennial festival of the Smithsonian of American folk life, the product of years of work on the field carried out on a scale not seen since the nineteen thirty. A field worker, for example, found a peeler of Sréppeds Cajun in Louisiana and recommended giving him a stand: “She can peel very quickly.” The festival presented what the organizers have described as a “cultural sea” of cooks, dancers and craftsmen; Musicians, Fife-And-Drum groups to Ghanée players from Gonje; And a “road” of truckers. Margaret Mead called it “a celebration of people -aux people” who revealed how Americans “have links – among people – around the world”.
None of Trump’s sumptuous bicentennial projects took place. In September, 1976, a Little More Than a Year After the Trump Family Business Settled A Lawsuit Alleging that it had refused to back to black and puerto rican tenants in housing complexes in Brooklyn and Queens, Marking their Rental Applications “C” for “colored” (The Company Sett Wrongdoing), Trump’s Father was arrested in Maryland and Briefly Jaled, Having Been loaded with housing-code violations in apartments he rented to mainly black tenants. (The elder Trump did not argue any competition and paid for a fine.) And the DJT, after asking for tax reductions and municipal subsidies, lost in his offers to build congress centers in New York and DC, the big ships have sailed. The moment has passed.
This summer, before the two hundred years and fifty anniversary of the declaration of independence of next year, the Trump’s White House sent a letter to the secretary of the institution of the Smithsonian, announcing his intention to carry out an in-depth examination of all the semi-fatty plans. The examination will require museums to provide the president with information including “the internal guidelines used in the development of exhibitions”; “Exhibition text, wall didactics, websites, educational materials and digital and social content”; And “works of art proposed, descriptive signs, catalogs of exhibitions, themes of events and lists of speakers and invited events”. The administration, the deployment of the same strategy it used in threatening and extorted universities, did not specify in the letter how it intends to review these documents, or what standards it will apply. He said that the objective was to “guarantee the alignment with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, eliminate division or supporter accounts, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions”, with “historically exact, uplifting and inclusive of the representations of our country in America” and in particular “the American – the people, the principles and the progress that define our nation”. The fact that the President of the United States does not decide what is true and what is not apparently no longer among these principles.
Even before the White House announced the examination, the presidential purge of American cultural institutions had started. Trump dismissed the National Archivist, the Congress Librarian and the Kennedy Center board of directors, and said on social networks that he had dismissed the director of the National Portrait Gallery. (He did not have the authority to do so, but she then resigned.) His administration killed the public distribution company, hampered the national allocation for the humanities and the national allocation for the arts and reduces federal funding to thousands of state and premises programs that support artistic and musical education for children.
The letter from the Smithsonian followed a decree called “restoring the truth and the reason for American history”, one of the directives of which is “Saving Our Smithsonian”, “seeking to suppress an incorrect ideology” of its museums. The twenty-one institutions of the Smithsonian, whose role in the culture of the nation is invaluable and unrivaled, have had their share of exhibitions and lame programs over the years, including some which have been torrid by ideological ardor, as is true for any museum or cultural organization. It is the nature of culture. But it is not the nature of democracy for the government to intimidate and censor conservatives who have spent years preparing to do the always difficult and critical work to tell the story of the nation.
“Perhaps our most important achievement as a nation is the very fact that we are a people,” proclaimed the Smithsonian in a press release in the spring of 1976, at the opening of “A Nation of Nations”. “Many ancient and modern states made up of conflicting tribes, languages and religious factions have failed to unite and stay whole.” How did this country last for so long? Asked the Smithsonian. “How is it that people representing cultures and traditions of literally each part of the world can consider themselves one nation of Americans?” These questions would not go from a gathering with this white house. These are always excellent questions. How has Did it last so long? ♦
