To see how long the right has been refining this approach, you could look back to January 1995. That month, under political pressure, the Smithsonian canceled a planned exhibit marking the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was to be held at the National Air and Space Museum. The proposed exhibit of the Enola Gay—the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber that, piloted by Paul Tibbets, dropped the atomic bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” on Hiroshima in August 1945—drew criticism starting in late 1994, when the Air Force Association, unhappy with the planners’ slant toward thoughtful and away from celebratory, released a draft script (label copy, images, an artifact list) to the media. The curators and historians who were putting together the exhibit fought their critics for a few months, before radically revising the exhibit to be much blander and more patriotic. The curator of the Smithsonian’s aeronautics department at the time said of the conflict between the two groups: “Do you want to do an exhibition intended to make veterans feel good, or do you want an exhibition that will lead our visitors to think about the consequences of the atomic bombing of Japan? I don’t think we can do both.”
Historian Edward Linenthal and editor Tom Engelhardt put together a 1996 book of essays about the exhibit’s cancellation and its aftermath, called History Wars, which argues that this 1990s fight over historical memory was the opening salvo in the American right’s use of history as a culture war. The story of how the canceled exhibit became political fodder for the ascendant right—outlined in the book in an essay by historian Mike Wallace—sounds excruciatingly familiar today.
“The United States has never had a State Ministry of Culture to dictate historical ‘lines,’ but it’s had plenty of private vigilantes patrolling cultural institutions to ensure they promoted ‘patriotic’ perspectives,” Wallace wrote, pointing to the American Legion’s 1925 declaration that history textbooks “must inspire the children with patriotism” and “speak chiefly of success.” But Wallace dates the opening of the 1990s history wars to Rush Limbaugh’s 1993 book See, I Told You So, in which Limbaugh described the tenets of the supposed historical “indoctrination” taking places in schools: “Our country is inherently evil. The whole idea of America is corrupt. The history of this nation is strewn with examples of oppression and genocide. The story of the United States is cultural imperialism—how a bunch of repressed white men imposed their will and values on peaceful indigenous people.”
