“Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version IS the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”                    From “1984,” by George Orwell

In a letter sent last week to Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch, three Trump administration officials stepped up their efforts to compel the nation’s most prominent keeper of its history – one that has operated without intervention for the last 175 years - to review and revise its content in order to “reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story.”

The letter follows up an executive order signed by President Trump in late March that calls upon our nation’s history museums to revitalize cultural institutions and reverse the spread of what it referred to as “divisive ideology,” and direct Vice President Vance to essentially comb through every exhibit in every significant museum in the entire country and, with a proverbial scrub brush, wipe away any trace that signifies that United States history is anything less than pristine. 

The order is called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” and attempts to address what the current White House perceives to be a concerted effort to force the nation to adopt “a factually baseless ideology aimed at diminishing American achievement.” 

The initial phase of the project will not only target the Smithsonian American Art Museum, it will scrub its way through the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

The order compliments a continuing effort by the Trump administration to overhaul how American history and culture is taught and presented in institutions across the country that extends from colleges and universities to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. 

Singling out the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Women’s History Museum, Trump is calling for the Republican-led Congress to defund exhibits that “divide Americans by race” or “recognize men as women.”

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Hard in defiance against these dystopian edicts, one of Chester County’s greatest achievements has been and continues to be the way it honors history by telling the truth and wrapping it around a continuing conversation. At the Kennett Heritage Center, guests participate in the Center’s Speaking of History Series, a bold invitation that unearths the harsh realities of slavery, the journey of women to secure equal rights and the Native American struggle for survival against the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution and oppression.

The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway, coordinated by the Brandywine Valley Scenic Byway Commission, continues to tell the story of African Americans, freedom seekers, and the operatives of Underground Railroad in Southeastern Pennsylvania, where the manifest courage of hundreds saved the lives of thousands who sought freedom against oppression.

Voices Underground, in partnership with Lincoln University and Square Roots Collective, continues to endeavor to create racial healing through storytelling by promoting the history of the Underground Railroad in the region through scholarly research, creative partnerships, public experiences and historical memorialization.

Three of our county’s most prominent writers – Mark Bowden, Bruce Mowday and Gene Pisasale – have spent the last several decades documenting the truth of our county’s and our nation’s history, not with cutting shears but with the head-down determination of miners surveying through the dirt in order to unearth the facts.

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Even if they are to succeed, the Trump Administration’s broadbrush whitewashing of our nation’s history will not be sustainable. It cannot completely remove what has already been etched into the stone of our history. While fiction is merely the invention of an imagined reality for the purpose of telling a compelling story, truth is the cold and hardened facts, and our nation’s truth is this: We have climbed unimaginable heights in science, in technology, in the arts and in the democracy we have championed around the world, but we are also a nation whose pages are scrawled with our worst moments, our inhumanity and our most unforgivable sins.

“History can’t give us a program for the future,” wrote Robert Penn Warren, “but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, so that we can better face the future.”

As solid proof, in Germany, they still give tours at Dachau.