September 17, 2026 E-Alert by Elaine Gross, Founder and President Emerita. Click here to view the e-alert in your browser.
Lonnie Bunch, the first African American and first historian to lead the Smithsonian, announced his retirement on September 8. His resignation came, in the words of The New York Times, “In the face of escalating White House attacks about how museums present American history.” According to the Associated Press, the resignation came “following a tumultuous year in which President Donald Trump tried to remake the portrayal of U.S. history by the Smithsonian museums and other cultural entities.”
President Trump’s views on the portrayal of American history, and the Smithsonian, are formally presented in an Executive Order, issued on March 27, 2025, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In it he writes in part: “Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive. For example, the Smithsonian American Art Museum today features “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibit representing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”
Here is the President of the United States objecting to the idea that race would be described as having been used in the United States to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement. Centuries of American slavery are presumably meant to be forgotten.
In the Executive Order, President Trump continues: “It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”
With these actions to rewrite history, the president is embracing and perpetuating a tactic long advanced by white supremacists. It dates back to just after the Civil War and the emergence in 1866 of a book by Southern journalist Edward Pollard titled The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.
As the Atlanta History Center states: “The Lost Cause is an interpretation of the Civil War created by Southern whites, many of them former Confederate leaders. The ideology of the Lost Cause converts the harsh truths of slaveholding culture into a pro-Confederate mythology of life in the Old South and the valiant fight to preserve that way of life.”
As the Southern Poverty Law Center states: “So successful was the Lost Cause propaganda campaign that many Americans forgot the true meaning of the Civil War. In the decades following the war, the cause of emancipation disappeared from speeches commemorating the dead, school curricula included the lie that the Confederacy had fought for ‘states’ rights’ rather than slavery, and Northern politicians spoke more about reconciliation with former Confederates than about the unfinished business of civil rights. Thousands of Confederate memorials littering the American landscape from California to Maryland signified the extent of the Lost Cause distortion of Civil War history.”
The Trump administration’s perpetuation of the Lost Cause is not focused solely on museums. On June 10, 2025, the U.S. Army announced that seven bases whose names had been changed in 2023 because they honored Confederate leaders would have their original names restored. As The Washington Post reported about President Trump on September 7, 2026, “The president has decried efforts to remove Confederate statues and worked to reinstall them in his second term.”
Those Confederate statues and memorials remain a prominent feature of the American landscape. The Southern Poverty Law Center released last year a map of all existing Confederate memorials in the United States. Notably, four states have more than 200: Georgia, 296; Virginia, 276; Texas, 245, and South Carolina, 225.
As we ponder the resignation of Lonnie Bunch, it is essential to recognize the relentless assault from the White House that preceded it and the historical context in which it takes place. White supremacists understand it well.
The author is Founder and President Emerita of ERASE Racism, the New York-based civil rights organization.