Two days after he sent a letter directing the Smithsonian to ensure its vast array of museums and exhibits "reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story,” Donald Trump reflected on the problem his order seeks to correct:
We want the museums to treat our country fairly. We want their museums to talk about the history of our country in a fair manner, not in a woke manner or in a racist manner, which is what many of them, not all of them, but many of them are doing.
….he continued…
Our museums have an obligation to represent what happened in our country over the years. Good and bad. But what happened over the years in an accurate way.
Although it sounds entirely reasonable to ask the Smithsonian to show the “good and bad’ in “an accurate way,” what Trump thinks is “good” or “bad” is, of course, entirely subjective. If given the chance, some Americans might use an exhibit to characterize the Civil and Voting Rights Acts as setbacks for a once-great nation. The leader of a growing Christian sect recently told CNN’s Pamela Brown that women shouldn’t have the right to vote. He and his devotees would like the 19th Amendment repealed. Their exhibit on the Women’s Suffrage Movement would certainly differ from the exhibit most historians would curate.
Imagine a Trump-curated exhibit on any of the last three Presidential elections. Would it show the “good” and the “bad” and tell the complete story? Imagine what would pass for “accurate” if Trump controlled the content of a deep dive into the 2024 Election. It’s not “accurate” to call his win a landslide. He would, however, demand it be labeled a landslide. And why not? No one challenges the wildly inflated pricetag he puts on US aid to Ukraine. He’s effectively replaced accuracy with assertion. He need only say it to make it so.
That’s the standard he’s demanding the Smithsonian apply to its 21 museums and one zoo. If it doesn’t align with his take on history, it will be realigned. History will be replaced by hagiography. Revision will fall victim to revenge.
In his comments on the letter, Trump singled-out “unfair” museums that portray US History in “a woke manner” or a “racist manner.” That’s code-talk for “reverse racism.” During the campaign he promised to, as USA TODAY put it, “crush anti-white racism” and he told TIME:
If you look right now, there’s absolutely a bias against white (people) and that’s a problem.
…and…
I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed.
He’s long made a direct appeal to White Americans who believe they’ve become America’s most persecuted community. Less than year before his interview with TIME, a YouGov poll found 62% of 2020 Trump voters “say that racism against Black Americans is a problem today — while 73% say that racism against white Americans is a problem.”
Trump is their champion and, as he often said, “their retribution.”
It began in the Pentagon with former FOX infotainer and current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. His implementation of Trump’s anti-woke/anti-DEI agenda portends a lot of revenge for ‘reverse racism’ and very little accuracy. Hegseth, who also happens to be a devotee of the aforementioned Christian sect, targeted the Defense Department’s “woke” take on its own history and its celebration of “diverse” historical figures … which included treating Jackie Robinson as the historical equivalent of a “diversity hire” and flagging Enola Gay-related material for removal simply because it matched the keyword “gay.”
Within weeks, the purge identified “tens of thousands of photos and online posts” that somehow ran afoul of Trump’s order. The Defense Department marked the offending posts and over 26,000 images for deletion. Hegseth also reversed the recent re-renaming of military bases and he rechristened ships not named in honor of heterosexual White males. He also fired a number of non-heterosexual White males in leadership positions.
Now the Smithsonian is embarking on a similar journey that could ultimately turn it into something more like an amusement park than a scholarly institution. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s animatronic enthusiasm gave away the game :
[A]ctivists have obscenely defaced this beloved institution. The Trump Administration will proudly and diligently restore the patriotic glory of America and ensure the Smithsonian is a place that once more inspires love and devotion to this nation, especially among our youngest citizens.
“Patriotic glory” and “love and devotion” are incompatible with “good and bad” and “accurate.” Squaring that circle requires the good to be sanitized and mythologized … the bad to be muted or removed ... and uncooperative facts conformed to the preferred narrative. Truly stubborn facts will just be replaced with alternative facts or disappeared into a warehouse.
In fact, the Smithsonian is already contorting itself to Trump’s preferred version of reality. In what amounts to a tacit mea culpa, they recently restored his name to an exhibit on impeachment after The Washington Post found it’d been conspicuously removed for the display. That’s the story of impeachment told without two instances of impeachment.
How’s that for accurate?
More alarming is the fact that, according to USA TODAY, it wasn’t at anyone’s behest. If true, it means the Smithsonian may have pre-emptively censored itself. And if the fudged impeachment exhibit is any guide, it’s reasonable to ask if Trump-inspired self-censorship also accounts for the Smithsonian’s conspicuous avoidance of the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Per USA TODAY:
The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, despite holding the Enola Gay in its collections, is not hosting any events or special exhibits to mark the anniversary on Aug. 6, a spokesperson confirmed to USA TODAY. The museum will instead share information and existing web content about the bombings on social media.
It was made all-the-more conspicuous by the unusual amount of attention the bombings have received nearly everywhere else. A steady stream of stories and op-eds have kept it in the newscycle for nearly three weeks. It’s still going strong nearly a week after the anniversary of the second bomb.
Among the main storylines of this year’s coverage you’ll find a related anniversary … the thirty year anniversary of the controversial Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian.
At issue then was the inclusion of Japanese perspectives and experiences in one of the exhibit’s displays, along with an examination of the still-ongoing debate about the necessity of the bombings. A contemporaneous article published in the The Journal of American History—and since summarized by the Smithsonian Institution Archives—sets the stage:
The museum began planning for the exhibition, and by 1993 a planning document was drafted. It stated that the exhibition's primary goal was to encourage the public to re-examine the bombings in view of the political and military factors which led to the decision to use the bombs, actions which brought suffering to Japanese civilians and had long-term implications. Even though {Smithsonian] Secretary [Robert] Adams was concerned about how veterans would react to such a possibly contentious presentation, and Tom Crouch, Chairman of the Aeronautics Department, stated that it would probably be impossible to make veterans feel good at the same time as the public was being encouraged to think about the consequences of the bombings, [Director of the National Air and Space Museum] Martin Harwit insisted that the museum could do both scholarship and commemoration.
In pursuit of Harwit’s contradictory goals, the Smithsonian invited Stanford History Professor Barton Bernstein to participate in the exhibition. He did not write a commemoration. Instead, he introduced museum-goers to a long-ignored debate over the decision to use the bomb. That, in turn, raised questions about the moral implications of Truman’s decision. And yes, the controversial material was ultimately dropped after a loud chorus objected to anything that didn’t frame the bombings as justified and necessary. The exhibit was pruned until only the plane’s fuselage and an informational video remained.
In a subsequent op-ed response to the Smithsonian and his critics, Bernstein cited a few of the forbidden facts, including this excerpt from the diary of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson:
"I told him (Truman) that I was busy considering our conduct of the war against Japan and I told him how I was trying to hold the Air Force down to precision bombing but with the Japanese method of scattering its manufacture it was rather difficult to prevent area bombing (which massively killed noncombatants). I told him I was anxious about this feature of the war for two reasons: first, because I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities; and second, I was a little fearful that before we could get ready (with the A-bomb) the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength. He laughed and said he understood."
…and this one from an August 11, 1945 letter penned by President Truman…
"I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast."
Therein lies the rub.
At the time, the loudest objections came from veterans and specifically from the Air Force Association (AFA) and the American Legion. Many were veterans of that war. Many may have fought in the Pacific. They expected commemoration, not scholarship that spurs reconsideration. They certainly didn’t want Stimson or Truman muddying-up the morality of the bombings with their own words.
Simply put, they did not want to give up “The Good War.”
It is understandable.
But it’s also not “accurate.”
Let’s just pull the Band-Aid off … the United States was not above reproach in WWII. Yes, it, along with Russia’s Red Army, defeated fascism. And the camps were liberated. But war crimes were committed, too.
It is not “either/or.”
We can marvel at the heroic effort of D-Day and ponder the moral implications of the firebombing of Dresden and the firebombing of Tokyo. In Dresden, “more than 3,400 tons of explosives” killed an estimated 25,000 people on February 13, 1945 … and the city left in ruins. On March 9, 1945, the US began dropping incendiary bombs on Tokyo’s highly-inflammable, densely-packed wooden homes. Over the course of 48 hours the firestorm incinerated 16 square miles, killed approximately 110,000 and left 1 million homeless. General Curtis LeMay famously told his then-assistant Robert McNamara they’d be tried as war criminals … if they’d been on the losing end of the war.
But they weren’t.
Victors don’t get tried for war crimes.
Instead, they write the history.
At least, they try to write it … like Trump is trying now.
To be fair, Trump and the anti-woke culture warriors claim they are trying to end what they see as the distortion of history. For them, if it is not completely colorblind, it’s inherently racist against White Americans. The problem is that American society has never been colorblind. To the contrary, White colonists and White Founders entwined race into the culture, into the economy and, with the 3/5ths clause, into the Constitution.
Now, though, it is “woke” to point it out.
It’s not that there aren’t plenty examples of “woke” overcorrection and virtue signaling in education and entertainment over the last 10 years. But does a decade of often good-intentioned, but badly-executed overcompensation suddenly nullify centuries of political, economic and social historical fact?
More to the point Trump has turned “woke” and “DEI” into broadly-applicable epithets he can use to shut down debate. Once he calls anything “woke” or “DEI,” that person, idea or thing is headed for exile with the wave of a wagging tongue.
To mention Jim Crow or the Firebombing of Tokyo is “unfair” to the country. In fact, it might be subversive. And it leads to a conclusion Trump reaches nearly every day about a growing list of fellow Americans—“they hate this country.”
With us. Or against us. History reduced to a professional wrestling match. But unlike wrestling, historians don’t have a prewritten script. If they do, they are not historians like Bernstein, who, writing in The San Jose Mercury News in 2014, continued his long effort to shed light on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by shining it on the overlooked conservative opposition to the bombings. One such critic was the architect of the Firebombing of Tokyo, Gen. Curtis LeMay:
In mid-September 1945, for example, he publicly declared that it had been unnecessary and that Japan would have speedily surrendered without it. [T]he bomb, he asserted, “had nothing to do with the end of the war.”
Bernstein found a surprising number of Conservative critics of the bombings. Some were journalists, some ex-diplomats and some ex-military leaders. And they were asking questions:
William Castle, a close associate of Herbert Hoover who had served as Hoover’s Under Secretary of State when Stimson was secretary. Castle complained that Stimson’s postwar, widely publicized A-bomb defense “was consciously dishonest.” Japan, Castle believed, had been near surrender before the atomic bomb was used. He even suspected that Stimson and others had prolonged the war in order to use the A-bomb on Japan.
That’s the same Stimson who worried that widespread, city-leveling bombing (like LeMay’s incendiary attack on Tokyo) imperiled the “fair background” he felt was needed “show [the first nuclear bomb’s] strength.” Simply put, Stimson was thinking about “the optics” of the bomb, not the battlefield outcome. And that opens the door to reasons that have little to do with forcing Japan to surrender. Was it was a demonstration of power to Russia? Or to the world? Were the cities used as de facto laboratories and Japanese civilians as guinea pigs — much like Marshallese islanders during the Castle Bravo nuclear test on Bikini Atoll in 1954?
Do Americans even know about the radioactive falllout inflicted on Marshallese islanders or about the long-term impact of dropping nuclear bombs where they live?
It’s safe to assume most Americans don’t know about the thinly-veiled use of the Marshallese as “guinea pigs.”
Unlike the bombs dropped on Japan, there is no viable justification for treating the Marshallese like “mice.” They still seek an apology and compensation. But being American means never having to say “I’m sorry.”
That’s other theme of the 80th Anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Unlike the bomb dropped on Bikini Atoll, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were quickly sanctified as fundamentally moral actions in spite of the unthinkable brutality it inflicted on tens of thousands of non-combatants. The official story reassured Americans that the bombs ended the war … that made invasion unnecessary … and that saved a half-million lives (it’s the most common among a range of estimates).
That’s the justification that ultimately crashed the 50th Anniversary Enola Gay exhibit before it ever took off. That’s also the justification that’s been crashing in public opinion polls in the years since the controversy.
A Pew Research Center survey in June of this year found that just 35% of Americans polled believe the bombs were justified. Thirty-one see no justification and 33% are “not sure.” That’s down from 53% who approved in a 2015 Pew survey. Gallup found 85% approved immediately after the bombs were dropped in 1945. By 1990, it had dropped to 53%. That’s just a few years before the Smithsonian censored the Enola Gay exhibit. It was also decades before “woke” was even a thing.
Standing against that shift, Josh Hammer argued in Newsweek that America Must Never Apologize for Dropping the Bombs on Japan and Richard B. Frank assured the National Review’s readers The Atomic Bombing of Japan Was Justified. Pro-Trump/Anti-Woke Historian Victor Davis Hanson took a nuanced path in American Greatness before reaching a familiar conclusion.
He, like many, ultimately defaults to the “admittedly brutal calculus” argument. While admitting the bombs were horrific instruments of mass death and suffering, that fact is obviated by the greater number of lives the bombs saved. It’s a counterfactual trick that assumes a long, bloody invasion was the only other alternative. That logic eventually leads to the conclusion that America had to kill Japanese civilians not just to save US soldiers, but also to save perhaps hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
It’s an argument that tells me the person making it has yet to read R.J.C. Butow’s Japan’s Decision To Surrender. Published in 1954, it’s the baseline for anyone who wishes to make a truly informed assessment of the bombings. Per a book review in The New York Times circa 1954:
MOST of the books about the war in the Pacific, naturally, view its closing phases through the eyes of the victors. Robert Butow, who was with the Civil Intelligence Section of the Army in Japan immediately after World War II, has reversed this viewpoint and has presented those phases through the eyes of the Japanese. As the result of a monumental re- search job, including hundreds of interviews with the Japanese themselves….
That’s right. Butow actually talked to the people who were there. The people who saw it and participated in it. It’s an epic piece of reporting that has doubled as source material for future historians. But Butow was no stenographer. Here’s what he concluded, via the NY Times review article:
From the outset he destroys two widespread misconceptions. one frequently voiced in the United States, the other popular in Communist propaganda. The first is that Japan's defeat was brought about by the atomic bomb. The second is that the defeat was the product of the Soviet Union's intervention. Mr. Butow demonstrates that Japan was thoroughly defeated (that is, had completely lost the capacity to make effective war) long before the tests at Los Alamos and long before the Yalta Conference.
…and…
Mr. Butow believes that the United States was inept and ill-advised in not taking advantage of Japanese peace feelers long before the end and concluding a peace before there was a chance for the Russians to come in. He believes that if the United States had made it clear that there was no intention of destroying the institution of the throne such a peace would have been possible.
Oddly enough, the US actually wanted the Emperor to retain the throne as part of the surrender. Why the US didn’t assure the Japanese earlier when it might’ve expedited surrender is a curiosity that also raises questions about the timing of the bombs.
Ultimately, that’s what was at stake thirty years ago when Bernstein used the exhibit as an opportunity to introduce museum-goers to these questions:
Why were the A-bombs used? Why did some scientists oppose their use on Japan? Why were cities and noncombatants chosen as targets, and not simply military targets? Were there plausible ways, without the use of the A-bomb, of ending the Pacific war before November, thereby obviating the U.S. invasion? Why were many of the possible alternatives not pursued? Does it seem likely, based upon current knowledge, that some of these alternatives, perhaps taken together, would have succeeded? Did anti-Soviet motives influence the U.S. decision? What were the high-level pre-Hiroshima estimates by the U.S. for the number of American casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) if the first invasion (at Kyushu on November 1, 1945) had occurred, and also if the second (at Honshu in March 1946) had also been launched?
As the aforementioned 1990 Gallup poll revealed, Americans were already asking some, if not most, of Bernstein's questions. BY torty-seven percent of Americans did not approve or were unsure.
Five years later, though, the Smithsonian relented to pressure and instead of giving Americans more access to more information and more details. Instead, they got something Bernstein couldn’t abide:
The planned exhibit will constitute what might be called "gee whiz" history: Admire the plane, celebrate the use of the A-bomb, don't learn any history, and neither ask critical questions nor even recognize that they exist. Thus, the Smithsonian has chosen celebration, not education, and is promoting ignorance, not enlightenment.
Now, thirty years have passed and while the American people have moved closer to Bernstein and Butow on dropping the bombs, Trump has ordered the Smithsonian to chose celebration over education, and promote ignorance over enlightenment.
Coincidentally, his Smithsonian letter was just a month after he cited Hiroshima and Nagasaki to justify the bombs he dropped on Iran. Said Trump:
That hit ended the war. I don't want to use an example of Hiroshima, I don't want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing.
It was an idea Ambassador Mike Huckabee planted in Trump’s mind with a personal text message the White House then (of course) posted on social media. In it, Huckabee advocated the bombing of Iran by comparing Trump to Truman:
No president in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945. I don’t reach out to persuade you. Only to encourage you.
By casting Trump in the role of Truman and Iran in the role of Japan, Huckabee was building a moral case for preemptively attacking Iran.
He essentially used history to justify war.
More importantly, he was using a sanitized, question-averse version of history to justify dropping bombs on a sovereign nation. It’s a version that doesn’t ponder Truman’s reference to the Japanese as “beasts” or examine ubiquitous depictions of Japanese as insects and monkeys and vermin. It doesn’t look at LIFE magazine’s photos of young women posing with the bleached skulls of Japanese soldiers. It ensures that the enemy remains two-dimensional and dehumanized. Sympathy and empathy and even curiosity become betrayal. Circumspection is collaboration. History becomes a litmus test. And the moral high ground is claimed regardless of where we stand.
It’s exactly the type of history Trump demands and the Smithsonian will be forced to deliver.