Outside of an exhibit at the National Archives, a 49-by-69-inch photograph depicted the 2017 Women’s March.
The photo showed thousands of protesters gathered outside the Capitol bearing signs with phrases such as “God hates Trump,” “Trump & GOP — Hands Off Women,” and some vulgar signs about female anatomy.
One reporter noticed that some of the signs had been altered. The various references to female genitalia were erased or obscured. More surprisingly, the word “Trump” was blurred out in two signs.
The photograph from the Women’s March had been sanitized.
“As a non-partisan, non-political federal agency, we blurred references to the President’s name on some posters, so as not to engage in current political controversy,” Archives spokeswoman Miriam Kleiman told the Washington Post. “Our mission is to safeguard and provide access to the nation’s most important federal records, and our exhibits are one way in which we connect the American people to those records. Modifying the image was an attempt on our part to keep the focus on the records.”
After the story broke, however, the Archives quickly changed its position on the alteration of history. “We made a mistake,” it tweeted. “As the National Archives of the United States, we are and have always been completely committed to preserving our archival holdings, without alteration.”
The museum removed the photo and promised to replace it with an unaltered image. The photograph was merely a promotional photo for the exhibit, not a part of the collection. However, it’s still out of character for “the nation’s record keeper” to sanitize history, whether to avoid controversy, protect President Trump, or maintain propriety.
If it aims to depict the women’s movement in its entirety, the taxpayer-funded museum ought to tell the whole truth, vulgarities, partisanship, and all.
Even the museum’s apology wasn’t enough for the ACLU, though. “The government can’t airbrush history or erase women’s bodies from it,” the organization tweeted. “It is the job of the National Archives to document history, not alter it to serve the president’s ego.”
It didn’t matter that David Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, was an Obama appointee. According to one writer at the New Yorker, that makes the censorship even worse: “This is indeed an important point because it provides a measure of how far we, as a society, have drifted under President Donald Trump.”
The small edits to the photo, while wrong, are far from Orwellian. The U.S. is not under the threat of tyranny when the National Archives feels compelled to utter the four words you seldom hear from the government: “We made a mistake.”
