It’s not new, this scrubbing of history to make America look like how Donald Trump imagines it should look.
In just the first few months of his second term in office, Trump and his administration have attacked diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at the Pentagon, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Smithsonian museums and across government as a whole.
The latest casualty, anti-slavery icon Harriet Tubman, had her image and biography taken down from the U.S. Park Service website where she had proclaimed, “I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say—I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
Following a predictable outcry from scholars and civil rights organizations, her image and bio were restored Monday night. But has the damage been done?
American grade-schoolers across the country are taught to honor Tubman’s legacy as part of their heritage. There are songs written about her, postage stamps that bear her likeness, countless schools, streets and highways with her name. There’s an ongoing effort to add her portrait to the front of the twenty-dollar bill, relegating former President Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder, to the back of the bill. (Though I wouldn’t count on that happening while Trump is in office.)
But there are broader right-wing efforts to “reframe” slavery as a practice as old as time, a simple (and unassailable) fact of life when viewed in historical context—but one that has no bearing on America today.
Tubman now joins an already-too-long list of distinguished Americans in having her story restored once its erasure was publicized: Jackie Robinson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the Tuskegee Airmen among them.
In Tubman’s case, it was apparently overzealous underlings at the Park Service that took up the ‘white-washing’ initiative. A spokesperson told CNN, “Changes to the Underground Railroad page on the National Park Service’s website were made without approval from NPS leadership nor Department leadership. The webpage was immediately restored to its original content.”
The Park Service had earlier made changes to reflect Trump’s insistence there are only two genders, striking the “T” and the “Q” from the LGBTQ community acronym in its website honoring the Stonewall uprising in New York, and the signage at the Greenwich Village park site where it occurred. Trump has also unilaterally renamed Denali, the highest mountain peak in north America, back as Mount McKinley—after the president whose love of tariffs he’s now emulating.
The Washington Post originally uncovered the changes to Tubman’s page as part of an extensive review of Trump’s anti-DEI purges. The changes were made in February, and the altered language does not mention slavery in Tubman’s story—not her own escape from slavery, nor her subsequent journeys to free her family and at least 70 other enslaved people—at all. Rather, it asserted, the Underground Railroad “bridged the divides of race, religion, sectional differences, and nationality; spanned State lines and international borders; and joined the American ideals of liberty and freedom expressed in the… extraordinary actions of ordinary men and women working in common purpose to free a people.”
“This isn’t some kind of woke remake of Abraham Lincoln being gay, this is history,” said Jack Pitney, professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College. “Downplaying her role in history is not correcting wokeness, it’s destroying traditional old-fashioned history.”
Pitney told the Daily Beast that the way Trump and Elon Musk are going about their remake of government reminds him of the line in All the President’s Men explaining the burgeoning Watergate scandal: “Forget the myths the media’s created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
That would be the most benign explanation for an administration whose train is off the tracks and losing passengers left, right and center.
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