American Insights: What Could Be More American?
The room was dim, filled with the smell of boiled cabbage and old rags. Winston, the protagonist in George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984, sat alone in his London flat at Victory Mansions, the gritty dust of the city lingering everywhere.
He had been drinking harsh Victory Gin, a beverage that left a burning trail down his throat and a dull heaviness in his stomach—a poor salve for the heaviness of his own soul and mind. Winston had already begun the dangerous act of writing in his diary. As someone who works at the Ministry of Truth, altering newspapers and historical records, he understands more clearly than most how thoroughly the Party rewrites reality itself.
He knows firsthand that documents are destroyed, statistics adjusted, and the past fundamentally altered. The past is not merely forgotten—that would be easier. Instead, it is systematically and deliberately replaced.
Winston possessed a grasp, if only partial, of true history. “But where did that knowledge exist?” Orwell asked. “Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated.” History in the year 1984 was a construct, an illusion serving partisan ends. To think was to deny the Party; to be conscious was to be free, and to be free was to be a threat.
The Party slogan made clear that “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” As Orwell wrote, “Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.” It was nothing less than “reality control,” and all were obliged to bend not only the knee but the architecture of lived experience to the will of the Party.
Forty-two years later, in a different reality, National Park staff at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia—the birthplace of American independence and constitutionalism—removed the Freedom and Slavery in the Making of the Nation exhibit, yet another attempt in a long line of efforts to purge history that, as Interior Secretary Order 3431 states, “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living.”
The efforts of the Trump administration are guided by Executive Order 14253, one of the more troubling orders signed by a modern American president. The order admonishes historical sites that have “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
Trump stated flatly: “It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”
“Museums in our Nation’s capital,” the order continued, “should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.”
Trump’s assault on history, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) lamented, “undermines historical integrity” and “public trust.” The organization stated: “The exhibit removal must be understood in the context of a broader and deeply troubling and dangerous pattern. Throughout the past year, the Trump administration has pursued an agenda of interference in the public presentation of American history, including through federal websites, cultural institutions like the Smithsonian, and the National Park Service.
“It has routinely politicized and taken steps to distort or erase entirely from public view evidence-based historical information. At stake is the core democratic principle that the public has a right to an honest, accurate account of its nation’s history, free from political censorship or manipulation. Historical knowledge is a shared civic resource and a bedrock of accountability. Government suppression of the facts of history for political and ideological ends is a practice of authoritarianism.”
Back in 1984, in that other “fictional” reality, Winston sat with his Victory Gin, worn down—owned, even—by a Party whose task was to control every aspect of reality. “Every record has been destroyed or falsified,” Orwell wrote, “every book rewritten, every picture repainted, every statue and street and building renamed, every date altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
The current administration has cut funding to numerous historical sites and ordered exhibits taken down, claiming—as the federal termination letter to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana stated—that such places and exhibits “no longer serve the interest of the United States.”
At 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 7, 2015, President Obama, speaking on the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, said of the marchers that day: “What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this? What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished—that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?”
Such is the reality of American history: we are imperfect and have always been imperfect. And to move forward to the place we know we can reach, we must live self-critically, for there is no better patriotism than bridging the gap between the ideal and the real.
In that spirit of national pride as well as principle, in reverence as well as honesty, we ought to join the call of the OAH and “continue to push back against efforts to erase, sanitize, or distort history, and stand with all those committed to preserving, protecting, and telling the nation’s story fully, honestly, and without political interference.” Lest we become like Winston—alone in a room, monitored by the Party, questioning whether what we know even happened at all.
This is America, and its history belongs to us—not to any pitiful man who would claim the power to rewrite it to serve himself. To such self-aggrandizing men, we Americans typically say, “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”