A Biden-appointed archivist overseeing the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC, reportedly cut mentions of negative events in United States history from planned displays over the past year, including references to the government’s mass displacement of Native American communities and the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans.
According to an October 29 report by the Wall Street Journal, interviews with nearly a dozen former and current museum staffers and internal documents revealed that Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan and her top aides directed employees to remove certain objects and details over the past year in order to avoid angering Republican legislators and making visitors feel “confronted.”
The newspaper also reported that at least six senior staffers have resigned in recent months, some citing Shogan’s leadership.
In an October 30 statement published on her blog on the National Archives website, Shogan said she “strongly disagree[d] with the misinformed perspective presented in the article.”
“The Wall Street Journal has published an article based on anonymous complaints about that work and my leadership of the agency,” her statement read in part. “As federal employees, we are not here to promote or share our personal interpretation of the records. That is for others to do. We are here to preserve, protect, and share the records with all Americans.”
Shogan’s archivist tenure has been heavily scrutinized by Republican legislators since her appointment in 2022, which came just days before federal investigators probed former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for classified documents following a criminal referral by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the agency which oversees the namesake museum. During her Senate confirmation hearings, Republican legislators repeatedly questioned her social media presence and past academic work, alleging that she had a liberal bias. Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri called her an “extreme partisan,” which she denied, replying, “I stand by my record of nonpartisan service.”
Since swearing into the archivist position in May 2023, Shogan has been in charge of a slew of transformational programming changes at the National Archives Museum as part of a massive renovation slated to be completed by next fall. The project consists of a major redesign of the museum’s permanent exhibit galleries, education space, and theater in advance of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.
While this project was planned years before Shogan’s tenure, former employees told the Wall Street Journal that, last fall, Shogan wanted to implement changes to the plans and told senior staffers that she wanted to make sure the exhibits weren’t promoting a partisan narrative.
As a result, employees have accused the archivist of deliberately sanitizing and reframing proposed displays, including ones about Indigenous land displacement during White settlers’ westward expansion in the 19th century. In another case, documents and employee testimonies revealed that Shogan and her advisors ordered staffers to remove Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Japanese-American concentration camps because they were “too negative and controversial,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Staffers also told the newspaper that a planned exhibit referencing changes to the constitution, like the 13th and 19th amendments abolishing slavery and giving women the right to vote, was shortened because it framed the Founding Fathers in a negative light.
In response to Hyperallergic’s inquiry, a National Archives spokesperson pointed out that Shogan incorporated the 19th Amendment and the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed enslaved Black people in the Confederate states during the Civil War before the 13th Amendment made emancipation a national policy, into the currently open National Archives Rotunda.
Shogan’s programming decisions have also allegedly extended to the scrubbing of historical figures from public displays, according to employee testimonies and agency documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.
During planning for an interactive photo booth, Shogan’s senior staffers reportedly asked for proposed images of Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Dolores Huerta to be switched out with photos of former President Richard Nixon meeting Elvis Presley and former President Ronald Reagan talking to former baseball shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. (Shogan’s team reasoned that they were reluctant to feature activists and that visitors would not recognize King).
While these changes have reportedly obscured negative events in US history, they have also delayed the opening of the new exhibits (originally slated for this coming summer) and are expected to pile on upwards of $332,000 in costs, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“The overall goal of redoing our signature galleries is to expand our storytelling and our ability to share our holdings with our visitors so that all Americans can find their stories reflected in our spaces,” a National Archives spokesperson told Hyperallergic.
“With more than 13 billion records in our care, necessary curatorial decisions must always be made carefully — we can never display more than a tiny percentage of our collection,” the spokesperson added.
