by Marcus Howley ’28 on February 27, 2026
Opinion - Society
This past week in Philadelphia, PA, a federal judge ordered the return of a plaque detailing the lives of slaves owned by George Washington. This plaque had been removed by the Trump administration under an executive order titled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The title of the order alone raises serious concern about the actual objective of it, especially when issues of slavery, colonization, and discrimination have fallen straight into its crosshairs.
From the very beginning, the field of public history—that being the remembrance of the past through monuments, museums, memorials, signs, and other public-facing displays of history—has been an ideological battle zone. Organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy used the creation of monuments honoring Confederate generals and leaders to advance the myth of the Lost Cause after the Civil War and through Reconstruction and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. The Lost Cause is the myth of the antebellum South as being all Southern belles and slavery as just lemonade picnics. In this context, the Civil War is framed as a Southern fight for states’ rights against an oppressive Northern aggressor. This myth obviously ignores the realities of the horrors of slavery and the politics that caused Southern secession.
The Lost Cause is relevant to today because the idea of reshaping the past through public memory is the exact objective of this executive order. The specific targeting of issues that pertain to race and discrimination suggests an attempt by the Trump administration to erase or cover up the darker elements of America’s past. The order states that it seeks to eliminate displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” with the intention of emphasizing the “greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” The first half of the order on disparaging Americans past or present should bring about genuine concern. While figures such as Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and others are commemorated as national heroes, they are not infallible. If we want to understand the whole picture of who these people were, we need to include the ugly elements,like, for example, the plaque in Philadelphia detailing the lives of slaves under Washington. Our national heroes are not gods to be worshiped, but real people who deserve both praise and criticism.
The second segment on celebrating the achievements and progress of Americans will initially appear to make perfect sense. Many of our public history displays celebrate great progress made in American history, yet the actions of the current administration raise the question of what or whose progress we are celebrating. This is highlighted by the Trump administration’s removal of the LGBTQ+ pride flag from the Stonewall Monument, the monument celebrating the moment that jumpstarted the LGBTQ+ rights movement. The administration seems keen on not celebrating this kind of progress. The removal of signs about the exploitation and removal of Native Americans at Grand Canyon National Park shows what the actual progress being celebrated is. That progress is the idea of Manifest Destiny, the expansion and domination of white Christian Americans across the entire continent. Progress is not the hard-fought battles of civil or workers rights, but instead the mythical travels of horse drawn wagons into a supposed savage wilderness in need of Christian civilization. Progress is the rise of true domination and superiority of white America over the rest.
The very slogan of Trump’s campaigns shows this ideal. “Make America Great Again” implies the need for the country to go back to how things were in some other time: a time when America was supposedly great. A perfect past of white picket fences and the nuclear family. A time of peace and unity among all Americans, free of the division and so-called anti-patriotism of the modern day. This past very clearly did not happen and never existed. The real past, regardless of attempts to cover it up, still exists and still happened. You cannot change history, no matter how hard you try.
Organizations like The Heritage Foundation, Turning Point USA, and Prager U have all helped push this false mythical narrative of the past into education. Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, even told reporters, “Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots.” Teaching history does not mean turning people into patriotic robots who dare not consider the wrongs of their country. It should instead encompass an understanding of the whole picture of what the country itself is, the highs and lows. To quote famed civil rights activist Frederick Douglass, “The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful and virtuous.” We must be honest as to what our history actually is, or we risk falling into ignorance of the lessons it teaches.