Trump Orders Smithsonian Institution to Promote ‘American Greatness’ Headline in New York Times, March 28, 2025
America's true greatness has always lain in its ability to acknowledge and then mend its own defects. The ideals we prize - liberty, equality, justice for all - have always been aspirational, more prescriptive than descriptive. Facing the dark chapters of our history is what enables us to overcome our own shortcomings and do better.
To end the robber capitalism of the Gilded Age, for instance, it took muck racking journalists to expose the horrors of the sweatshops and slaughterhouses where immigrant workers, many of them youngsters, toiled long hours at starvation wages. Read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It's not a flattering picture of life in the Chicago slums. But by exposing the grim reality of American urban life at the turn of the twentieth century, a movement arose to end child labor, to create a minimum wage, to insure the cleanliness and safety of factories that had previously churned out tainted meat and disease-ridden food.
America has always improved when it's been willing to see its ugly underbelly.
In the town of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I grew up, there are now memorials and museums and cultural centers dedicated to telling the story of the Greenwood Massacre, the worst race riot in U.S. history. In 1921, over three hundred residents of the prosperous section of the north end known as "Black Wall Street" were murdered by white vigilantes, while law enforcement collaborated or, at best, did nothing. Shops and churches and homes were torched. Yet for decades, this atrocity was concealed by town fathers, considered unmentionable, censored from textbooks that I read in high school. Only seventy-five years after the fact did a Truth and Reconciliation commission finally emerge to interview living witnesses and consider the question of reparations.
When I returned to my home town not long ago for a fiftieth high school reunion, it seemed to me that Tulsa was a much healthier city than the one I remembered from adolescence. Segregation was gone. Soon after my visit, Tulsa elected its first black mayor. No monetary reparations were ever made. But the city had moved forward - not by cloaking its past, as had once been the case, but by confronting its history head on.
Through his executive orders, Mr, Trump would like our museums and historical monuments "to focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people," rather than dwelling on the painful episodes of the past. Similarly, our national parks should showcase "the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.” (Never mind that his other executive orders slash funding for these parks and open protected public lands to mining, logging and drilling.)
Owning up to our society's failures is essential to our common progress. In prayerful words written by Katherine Lee Bates over a century ago, "America, America, God mend thine every flaw." In that work of repair and mending, God needs our help, and we need an honest reckoning of how far we've come, and how far we have yet to go.
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