(Optional Video Accompaniment to This Post)
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve been to Washington and not visited the National Archives. This goes back long before 9/11, when you could just walk up the great, gray front steps and in through the huge iron doors. Now, of course, there’s a visitors’ entrance down below and to the left, and there are now the customary metal detectors and all the other accoutrements of the modern security state. Nevertheless, I still get the same thrill I always have when I finally get upstairs and into the huge hall wherein are displayed the most remarkable political documents in human history. The hall always reminds me of the nave of a great cathedral. There, up on the wall where the crucifix would be, is the original Declaration of Independence and beneath it, spread out like a communion rail, are the pages of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Declaration is up there as the symbol of risk and sacrifice. And the Constitution is spread out below so we don’t miss the point that we are all in communion with those sacrifices.
Once, on assignment for this magazine, I went out to the Archives facility in Maryland. The Constitution was undergoing its periodic cleaning and restoration. The actual document, signed in Philadelphia in 1787, was treated rather roughly in the years after its adoption. Along with the Declaration of Independence, it was rolled up and stored in the Department of State, which moved from Philadelphia to New York to the new federal city on the Potomac. Both documents were rushed out of Washington one step ahead of the Royal Marines in 1814 and secreted away in a Leesburg, Virginia, grist mill. There, oddly, the pages of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights vanish from history. But in 1841, the Declaration of Independence was hung up in the new Patent Office, open to sunlight, dust, and Christ alone knows how much tobacco smoke. It was in such bad shape that, eventually, it couldn’t be exhibited at all. Between 1892 and 1921, it was stored carefully in the State Department library.
The Constitution and Bill of Rights did not rejoin the Declaration until the 1930s, when, after a nasty turf war between the Library of Congress and the National Archives came to a stalemate, it was decided that they would be on display in the new National Archives building. But World War II intervened, and once it was over, the three documents ended up in the Library of Congress again. Negotiations resumed and the documents finally wound up in the great rotunda of the Archives on December 15, 1952. Small wonder that they occasionally have to be shipped off to rehab in Maryland every now and again.
Seeing the Constitution up close was a moving thing. It is handled in a “clean” room by people dressed the way you would be dressed to work on the space shuttle or moon rocks. But seeing it there, its words slightly magnified by the glass top of the case in which it is restored, is to thank the generations who saved the Constitution from British torches and congressional cigars so that we could see it for ourselves and know that it’s there.
This past Thursday, The Wall Street Journal got itself a scoop that said more about the state of the nation than a hundred thousand pundits ever could. It also made me unutterably sad, because it was nothing less than a surrender to the worst of us, and in us, and the worst hadn’t even happened yet. It was a distressing example of what the excellent historian of authoritarian governments, Timothy Snyder, has called “anticipatory obedience” and what several generations of boxing managers referred to as “flinching without getting hit.” In his vital On Tyranny, Snyder writes:
Don’t obey in advance. Anticipatory obedience is one of the greatest constraints on the degrees of freedoms for employee-led change and innovation in organizations….Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
Snyder goes on to illustrate what he’s writing about with a particularly gruesome example.
In early 1938, Adolf Hitler, by then securely in power in Germany, was threatening to annex neighboring Austria. After the Austrian chancellor conceded, it was the Austrians’ anticipatory obedience that decided the fate of Austrian Jews. Local Austrian Nazis captured Jews and forced them to scrub the streets to remove symbols of independent Austria. Crucially, people who were not Nazis looked on with interest and amusement. Nazis who had kept lists of Jewish property stole what they could. Crucially, others who were not Nazis joined in the theft. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt remembered, “when German troops invaded the country and Gentile neighbors started riots at Jewish homes, Austrian Jews began to commit suicide.”
The anticipatory obedience of Austrians in March 1938 taught the high Nazi leadership what was possible. It was in Vienna that August that Adolf Eichmann established the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. In November 1938, following the Austrian example of March, German Nazis organized the national pogrom known as Kristallnacht.
Which brings us, sadly, back to the National Archives and to the current chief Archivist, Colleen Shogan. From The Wall Street Journal:
U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan and her top advisers at the National Archives and Records Administration, which operates a popular museum on the National Mall, have sought to de-emphasize negative parts of U.S. history. She has ordered the removal of prominent references to such landmark events as the government’s displacement of indigenous tribes and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II from planned exhibits.
Visitors shouldn’t feel confronted, a senior official told employees, they should feel welcomed. Shogan and her senior advisers also have raised concerns that planned exhibits and educational displays expected to open next year might anger Republican lawmakers—who share control of the agency’s budget—or a potential Trump administration.
This is the latest major defeat in the battle against those whitewashing nuisances who seek to bury the unpleasant parts of our common history that we are only beginning to acknowledge properly. It’s being fought through Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s magnificent efforts at reckoning with the crimes of the Indian boarding schools. It’s being fought at school-board meetings and in middle school libraries. It’s being fought by teachers and librarians beset by roving cabals organized by wingnut welfare and occasionally led by people with exotic taste in sexytime. And the latter just scored a huge victory without lifting a finger.
Shogan’s senior aides ordered that a proposed image of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. be cut from a planned “Step Into History” photo booth in the Discovery Center. The booth will give visitors a chance to take photos of themselves superimposed alongside historic figures. The aides also ordered the removal of labor-union pioneer Dolores Huerta and Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, from the photo booth, according to current and former employees and agency documents.
The aides proposed using instead images of former President Richard Nixon greeting Elvis Presley and former President Ronald Reagan with baseball player Cal Ripken Jr.
After reviewing plans for an exhibit about the nation’s Westward expansion, Shogan asked one staffer, “Why is it so much about Indians?” according to current and former employees. Among the records Shogan ordered cut from the exhibit were several treaties signed by Native American tribes ceding their lands to the U.S. government, according to the employees and documents.
For an exhibit about patents that had changed the world, Shogan directed that the patent for the contraceptive pill be replaced. Aides substituted the patent for television. During discussions about what to use instead of the birth-control pill, an aide to Shogan suggested a patent for the bump stock, a device that allows a semiautomatic weapon to operate as a machine gun, according to two former employees.
Replacing Dr. King with Nixon and Reagan? Replacing The Pill as a world-changing patent with the preferred accessory of dozens of mass murderers? Who are these “senior aides,” and when did they stop working for Newsmax?
Shogan and her top advisers told employees to remove Dorothea Lange’s photos of Japanese-American incarceration camps from a planned exhibit because the images were too negative and controversial, according to documents and current and former employees. Shogan’s aides also asked staff to eliminate references about the wartime incarceration from some educational materials, other current and former employees said. Ellis Brachman, a senior adviser to Shogan, complained to some employees that they were too woke, according to current and former employees.
Brachman has an interesting history. He had been a congressional aide and led various Beltway institutions before landing at the Archives. He also has been no stranger to controversies. From The Jerusalem Post:
Now, almost eight years later, Brachman is embroiled in another controversy involving both Trump and Holocaust remembrance. As the senior advisor to the archivist of the United States at the National Archives and Records Administration, Brachman was cited in a recent Wall Street Journal investigation of how the federal agency’s leadership has shrunk or nixed public exhibits on difficult historical topics. Brachman, according to the article, asked that at least three portions of the archive’s galleries tone down unsavory chapters of history. One of his reported requests: to quash an exhibit about the Holocaust.
Brachman also complained that some employees were, in the words of the article, “too woke.” The Journal also reported that in an exhibit on 1940s coal mining communities, Brachman pushed to identify Black sharecroppers who were recruited by coal companies as “Southern farmworkers.” He also reportedly asked to delete references to the environmental harms caused by coal mining.
But this surrender belongs entirely to Shogan, a Biden appointee whose tenure as head of the Archives has been the rough equivalent of having a hurricane crop up in a Norwegian fjord. She was the Archives point person in the endless wrestling match with the former president* over the Pool Shed Papers down at Mar-a-Lago, and that fight almost denied her the job entirely. It took the Biden administration two tries to get her confirmed. During her hearings, along with endless questioning regarding the Pool Shed Papers, Shogun found herself at odds with the inexcusable Sen. Josh Hawley over an article she’d once written concerning anti-intellectualism in Republican politics. From ABC News:
"You wrote an article saying basically that Republican voters are stupid, that Republican presidents deliberately appeal to anti-intellectualism," [Hawley] said.
Yes, and your point is?
Yet Shogan stood by her writing. She also repeatedly vowed before the panel to be nonpartisan. Hawley was not convinced. He said Monday that he'll likely vote against Shogan again this time around. "What you want in this role is somebody who is just an archivist, who is just nonpartisan, wants to do the job. The archives has become hugely political," Hawley said. "That agency needs to be depoliticized, they just need to be able to do their job."
It is possible that Shogan has made this most recent decision out of some sort of historian’s PTSD. (Hawley has that effect on people.) But that doesn’t make this whitewashing any less embarrassing. And this anticipatory surrender to the reign of morons that threatens to follow behind at Trump restoration hurts us all. The children from the Indian boarding schools cry out from their unmarked graves, and any nation that would trade Dr. King for Richard Nixon has played false with its historical memory.
This article originally appeared in the Last Call with Charles P. Pierce newsletter on November 2, 2024.
