Read the issue<\/a> \u00bb<\/p>\nOn the Fourth of July of that red-white-and-blue year, the Tall Ships\u2014a flotilla of more than two hundred vessels from more than a dozen countries\u2014sailed into New York Harbor. Three days later, Trump was in Washington, D.C., presenting to the city\u2019s redevelopment board his plan to build another gargantuan convention center, this one near the U.S. Capitol. Encountering stiff resistance, according to the Evening Star, a visibly \u201cmiffed\u201d Trump left the meeting \u201cin a huff.\u201d<\/p>\n
The paper did not report whether, before leaving D.C., Trump stopped by the Smithsonian\u2019s Museum of History and Technology to tour its thirty-five-thousand-square-foot bicentennial exhibition, \u201cA Nation of Nations.\u201d Five years in the making, it told the twinned stories of American union and disunion with five thousand objects, from a Ute flute and Muhammad Ali\u2019s boxing gloves to a Klan robe and a sign that read \u201cJaps Keep Out You Rats.\u201d The show aimed to demonstrate how people \u201ccame to America, from prehistoric times to the present,\u201d and \u201chow experiences in the new land changed them.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is also unknown whether Trump, huffy and miffed, walked along the National Mall to see the Smithsonian\u2019s Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife, the product of years of field work conducted on a scale not seen since the nineteen-thirties. One field worker, for instance, found a Cajun crawfish peeler in Louisiana, and recommended giving her a booth: \u201cShe can peel very fast.\u201d The festival featured what organizers described as a \u201ccultural sea\u201d of cooks, dancers, and artisans; musicians, from fife-and-drum bands to Ghanaian gonje players; and a truckers\u2019 \u201croadeo.\u201d Margaret Mead called it \u201ca people-to-people celebration\u201d that revealed how Americans \u201chave links\u2014through people\u2014to the whole world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Neither of Trump\u2019s lavish bicentennial projects came to pass. In September, 1976, a little more than a year after the Trump family business settled a lawsuit alleging that it had refused to rent to Black and Puerto Rican tenants in housing complexes in Brooklyn and Queens, marking their rental applications \u201cC\u201d for \u201ccolored\u201d (the company settled without admitting wrongdoing), Trump\u2019s father was arrested in Maryland and briefly jailed, having been charged with housing-code violations in apartments he rented to primarily Black tenants. (The elder Trump pleaded no contest and paid a fine.) And D.J.T., having sought tax abatements and municipal subsidies, lost out in his bids to build convention centers in New York and D.C. The Tall Ships sailed away. The moment passed.<\/p>\n
This summer, in advance of next year\u2019s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Trump White House sent a letter to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, announcing its intention to conduct an extensive review of all semiquincentennial plans. The review will require the museums to provide the President with information including \u201cinternal guidelines used in exhibition development\u201d; \u201cexhibition text, wall didactics, websites, educational materials, and digital and social media content\u201d; and \u201cproposed artwork, descriptive placards, exhibition catalogs, event themes, and lists of invited speakers and events.\u201d The Administration, deploying the same strategy that it has used in menacing and extorting universities, did not specify in the letter how it intends to review these materials, or what standards it will apply. It did say that the purpose is to \u201censure alignment with the President\u2019s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,\u201d with \u201chistorically accurate, uplifting, and inclusive portrayals of America\u2019s heritage\u201d and especially of \u201cAmericanism\u2014the people, principles, and progress that define our nation.\u201d That the President of the United States doesn\u2019t get to decide what is true and what is not is apparently no longer among those principles.<\/p>\n
Even before the White House announced the review, the Presidential purge of American cultural institutions had begun. Trump sacked the national archivist, the Librarian of Congress, and the board of the Kennedy Center, and said, on social media, that he had fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery. (He lacks the authority to do so, but she subsequently resigned.) His Administration killed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, hobbled the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, and cut federal funding to thousands of state and local programs that support arts and music education for children.<\/p>\n
The Smithsonian letter followed an executive order called \u201cRestoring Truth and Sanity to American History,\u201d one of whose directives is \u201cSaving Our Smithsonian,\u201d by \u201cseeking to remove improper ideology\u201d from its museums. The Smithsonian\u2019s twenty-one institutions, whose role in the culture of the nation is invaluable and unparalleled, have had their share of lame exhibits and programs over the years, including a few that have been torridly inflamed by ideological ardor, as is true of any museum or cultural organization. That is the nature of culture. But it\u2019s not in the nature of democracy for the government to intimidate and censor curators who have spent years preparing to do the always difficult and critical work of telling the nation\u2019s story.<\/p>\n
\u201cPerhaps our most significant achievement as a nation is the very fact that we are one people,\u201d the Smithsonian proclaimed in a press release in the spring of 1976, at the opening of \u201cA Nation of Nations.\u201d \u201cSo many ancient and modern states composed of conflicting tribes, languages, and religious factions have failed to unite and remain whole.\u201d How has this country lasted so long? the Smithsonian asked. \u201cHow is it that people representing cultures and traditions of literally every part of the world could come to think of themselves as one nation of Americans?\u201d Those questions wouldn\u2019t pass muster with this White House. They\u2019re still excellent questions, though. How has this lasted so long?\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1976, the year the United States celebrated its bicentennial, Donald\u00a0J. Trump, thirty, leonine, and three-piece-suited, was chauffeured…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":374224,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[7044,22724,18753,72982,130872,49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-374223","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-comment","9":"tag-inverted","10":"tag-magazine","11":"tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed","12":"tag-the-lede","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115093595963037043","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}