“We live in a country with an unpredictable past.” This was a saying among the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union when I was growing up. We never knew which part of our history would be obliterated next.
Now Americans, too, live in a country with an unpredictable past. Two months into his second term, President Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, in which he directed officials to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums, to cut funding to “programs that degrade shared American values” and to reinstate some monuments removed following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. A very incomplete list of things that have happened since that order was issued: The National Park Service has been removing signs about slavery; the statue of a Confederate general has been reinstalled in Washington; a scathing report by the White House Domestic Policy Council accused the Smithsonian of using history “as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens”; and on July 24, Trump issued a new executive order mandating that signs be installed outside the Smithsonian “warning visitors about the ideological capture at the National Museum of American History.”
Re-evaluating history has the potential to change a people’s future by changing its self-understanding. It can unite people in a genuinely new project. And then there is the rewriting of history, which is crazy-making. The Soviet Union repeatedly forced the whole country to unlearn what was already widely known. In the 1950s, after Joseph Stalin died, the Communist Party denounced his “cult of personality” and some of the extent of his terror. A decade later, it reversed itself, exiling or imprisoning authors who wrote about the crimes of Stalinism. The same process was repeated when the Soviet Union collapsed. Vast amounts of information about Soviet terror emerged; under Vladimir Putin that knowledge has been forced back into oblivion.
Trump wants Americans to unlearn what they have come to know about the history and legacy of enslavement. What his executive orders really promise to restore is a sense of comfort contained in the most reductive and sanitized stories about the United States — the bliss of ignorance. Trump appears to believe that the job of museums and memorials is to instill “pride in the hearts of all Americans,” as one of the executive orders put it. The report from Trump’s Domestic Policy Council faulted the National Museum of American History for failing in this precise mission.
A couple of months ago, I visited Montgomery, Ala., where an organization called the Equal Justice Initiative is undertaking a very different project. It is telling the story of Black Americans. The E.J.I. has so far built a lynching memorial, a Legacy Museum, a vast sculpture garden and a public square with a permanent exhibit on the civil rights movement. Each element of the complex, which is still growing, is as powerful as any museum or memorial I have visited.
Bryan Stevenson, who leads the E.J.I., is a litigator whose clients have included Black men on death row and children tried as adults and sentenced to life in prison. He came to feel, however, that the change he could achieve in the courts was not enough. “The real evil,” he told me — the enduring evil — “was the narrative we created to justify enslavement.” It’s a striking statement. Can stories really do as much harm as a vast infrastructure of violence and cages? His point is that the stories underlie the violence. Stories that systematically rendered Black people as less than human enabled enslavement and segregation. Stories that rendered Black people as dangerous and predatory fueled lynching and mass incarceration. Unless we create new stories, the abuse will never stop.
Stevenson, too, talks about pride. “States like Alabama have very little to be proud about,” he told me. Montgomery’s days of wealth and glory are in the past. It’s a city with dozens of monuments to the Confederacy, a city where one in five people lives in poverty, in a state with one of the highest incarceration rates in the country.
But the E.J.I.’s museums and memorials have made Montgomery a tourist destination, and that has direct economic benefits for the city. Most important, these institutions have helped to make Montgomery a center for engagement with American history. Stevenson believes that the conversations they foster can and should make people proud. He cites as one of his inspirations the German Holocaust memorials and museums that make the promise of “Never again,” a profoundly hopeful message.
My traveling companions couldn’t help noticing that when Stevenson described actions the United States had taken to oppress Black people, he said “we” instead of “the government” or “racist lawmakers.” We asked him why. “I refuse to give America to anyone else,” Stevenson explained. That is one way to interpret the word “inclusion” in D.E.I.: a story in which your ancestors aren’t elided.
Stevenson has not received any federal or state funding for his sites. The Trump administration, therefore, cannot target them for defunding. But Montgomery exemplifies the conflict at the root of Trumpian memory politics.
I went to Montgomery with my wife, Lynne, and four of my former colleagues from Russia who now live in exile. After a few days there, we drove to Charlottesville, Va., the site of the 2017 Unite the Right rally, during which white supremacists flooded into town, ostensibly to defend a monument to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and counterprotesters showed up in droves to oppose their message. Trump — then in the first year of his first term — remarked that there had been “very fine people on both sides.” Today, a bald rectangular patch in an otherwise green lawn downtown is all that remains of the statue, which was removed four years after the rally. The city plans to install a sculpture of a baobab tree there, created from the melted bronze of Lee’s statue. But when I was there, I didn’t see any marker indicating what had happened. The result is a sort of memorial visible only to those who know what to look for, a perfect symbol of both what was and was not accomplished in the nation’s last attempt at a racial reckoning.
Another such symbol is Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s residence and plantation just outside Charlottesville. All visitors of the house are required to sign up for a tour, a tightly scripted affair that, if you listen closely, bears the signs of numerous edits made over the years. The original narrative is one of progress — precisely the narrative that the Trump executive orders demand. Jefferson was a man of science and a lover of art; he brought progressive political ideas and maps and clocks and advanced engineering and neoclassical architecture and French food to Monticello. But this story is now interrupted repeatedly by inconvenient facts that used to be elided. Jefferson was a slave owner who fathered at least six children of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman with whom he had a sexual relationship when she was a teenager and he was a middle-aged widower. There’s a separate tour about slavery at Monticello, but the main tour did not acknowledge the tension between the core story and these additional facts. Here is a juxtaposition that stayed with me: Jefferson’s daughter by his late wife lived in the house with him, as did her 11 children, whom she educated in keeping with Enlightenment ideals. The children Jefferson had with Hemings lived in the slave quarters and were put to work on the estate from a young age.
While my fellow exiles and I were traveling in the American South, the campaign against memory continued back in our homeland. Putin’s government had long since shuttered Memorial, an organization devoted to preserving the memory of Stalinist terror; in April of this year, the Russian Supreme Court declared Memorial an “extremist” organization. Two years ago, the government closed the Gulag Museum in Moscow. In June, it was reopened as the Memory Museum, telling the story of Nazi crimes against the Soviet people. The memory of Stalinist terror has once again been ordered obliterated.
Ilya Venyavkin, one of my traveling companions, is a historian of Stalinism. He observed that Stevenson’s project is, in a way, more ambitious than anything Russian memory activists had tried to do: It draws a direct narrative line from the past to the present. It makes the argument that the way we live now is shaped by the way our forebears organized society. This is exactly what can make the project of revisiting the past so vital: It’s not about the past. It’s about choosing our future. Do we want a future that challenges us to reckon with the truth and find ways — genuinely new and inventive ways — to deliver on the American promise, or a future that forecloses the possibility of conversation and change? I suppose there is a third option, too: a future of unease and confusion, of muddled stories like the one I heard at Monticello, of facts half known and truths half said.
I remember a line from a satirical underground novel I read as a teenager. A boy asks his father, “Did the year 1937 ever happen? I don’t know whom to believe?” That year was the height of Stalin’s Great Terror. “It hasn’t happened yet,” the father responds. “It hasn’t, my son. But it will.” It’s still the funniest and most haunting way I’ve encountered of saying that those who do not face history are doomed to repeat it.
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