Government websites have erased references to American heroes like Harriet Tubman and Jackie Robinson in order to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI push. But America is no stranger to revisionist history. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Jackie Robinson, who integrated Major League Baseball in 1947, posing in his batting stance. Photo credit Bettmann/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What executive order sparked the removal of DEI content on government websites?
Chapter 2: How was Jackie Robinson's legacy affected by the Pentagon's website changes?
Mr. Jackie Robinson, number 42, integrated baseball, not because DEI, but because he was so good that to paraphrase his manager, I don't care if the guy is yellow or black or if he has stripes like a fucking zebra, he can make us all rich.
Jackie Robinson steps in against Ford. Deep in the left center, Irv Noren races after Robinson's blast. Jackie really teed off on Ford.
He also served in the military, during which time he was court-martialed after peacefully refusing to move to the back of an army bus. He was acquitted. The Department of Defense website featured Robinson in a section called Sports Heroes Who Served until March 19th, when his page disappeared and the URL redirected to one that had the letters DEI in front of Sports Heroes.
A Pentagon spokesman defended the removal, but about 90 minutes later, the page was restored. That spokesman resigned last week. Ahead on Today Explained, the Trump administration tries to rewrite history.
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It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with John Swain, who's an investigative reporter at The Washington Post. John, the mess that we're here to discuss today started with an executive order from President Trump. What was the order and how did it lead to the reporting that you've been doing?
That's right. On President Trump's first day back in office, he issued an order titled Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing. And basically, this order reversed something that Joe Biden had ordered very early in his term, which was the Biden administration made it government policy to pursue equity.
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Chapter 3: What historical figures and events were targeted in the government website revisions?
On February 23, 1945, the Marines raised the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi as a signal to the troops below that the mountain was won. That flag was seen around the world.
One of the Marines was a Pima Indian. His name was Ira Hayes. And a page on the Defense Department's website celebrated the fact that he had been a Native American and that he had taken part in this sort of emblematic, iconic moment in U.S. military history. And it was just a page that talked about his life. You know, his life actually had ended quite sadly.
He wasn't really supported after the war and he had problems with alcohol and he died relatively young without a family. But this page was just a sort of small tribute to the small role he played in a big part of American history. And it was just taken down because it had focused on his ethnicity, basically.
So they kept the iconic picture up, but they removed the information about Mr. Hayes being American Indian. What other kinds of changes did you uncover in your reporting?
So when we turned our attention to the National Park Service, we found quite quickly, actually, that several themes kept coming up. Pages that dealt with women's rights, pages that dealt with civil rights and the sort of struggle for racial equality in the 20th century, and pages that looked at the Civil War and even earlier, sometimes the founding and the Revolutionary War,
and slavery around that time in the 18th and 19th centuries, there were changes being made.
And we noticed that in the most part, they were going one way, which was to soften the accounts and to remove some of the references to enslavement, to slaves, to the pursuit of equality by civil rights advocates, and to remove mentions of some of the struggles that women in the Park Service, for example, had had when they were working there.
One of the cases that really leapt out was the Little Rock Nine. So people may remember in the 1950s, nine brave young African-American students walked through an angry mob to integrate their high school in Arkansas.
This girl here was the first Negro apparently of high school age. She showed up at Central High School the day that the federal court ordered it integrated. She was followed in front of the school by an angry crowd. Many of them shouting epithets at her.
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Chapter 4: Why were National Park Service pages about civil rights and women's struggles altered?
And so some people, without even being told, were making these changes off their own back.
So we've talked about the Park Service. We've talked about the Department of Defense. Is this something happening elsewhere to either other agencies, other websites?
I think the next thing to look for is the Smithsonian Institution. While we were reporting on the National Park Service, President Trump issued another executive order saying, specifically targeting the Interior Department and the Smithsonian on what he called a sort of liberal rewriting of history that had happened prior to him coming back to office.
And so he has directed the Smithsonian and the Park Service to make sure that exhibitions, monuments and statues and markers at historical sites do not do what he calls sort of unfair traducing of Americans past and present. I think, well, it's clear that lots of historians are very worried about this because we all know that historic figures are complicated.
The founding fathers, many of them held slaves. There are these parts of history that are uncomfortable and unpleasant that have to be reconciled. I think most people agree with the good and the heroic. And I think a lot of historians are concerned that President Trump wants to get rid of the uncomfortable and the unpleasant.
And we're going to have more with a deeply concerned historian when we come back. John Swain of The Washington Post investigative reporter. Thanks to him. Support for Today Explained comes from Delete.me. Your data is a commodity and it has already been stolen. That can lead to identity theft, phishing attempts, harassment. Now you can protect your privacy with Delete.me.
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Chapter 5: How did employees of the National Park Service respond to the directive to remove content?
This is where, you know, having the savings account helps him. He sees it and he knows how much he can spend. But he also can be very deliberate in how he's saving his money versus spending it.
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This is Today Explained. We're back with historian and Yale professor David W. Blight.
I study slavery, abolition, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and African American history over time.
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Chapter 6: Are other federal agencies like the Smithsonian affected by these historical content changes?
Okay, so nothing that's ever been contested.
What do you mean contested? Yeah, it's always been a little edgy, but actually never as much as right now.
In the first half of the show, Professor Blight, we heard that many historians are really quite angry about some of the changes that the Trump administration has been demanding. What does an angry historian look like? What's been going on?
Chapter 7: What concerns do historians have about rewriting or softening American history?
Well, just a week ago from where we are now in Chicago, the Organization of American Historians had its annual gathering. I, for my sins, was the current president. It was almost a kind of a rolling fear and despair in a lot of the conversations. And in many cases, it was a council of fear because, let's face it, historians don't have, we don't have a legal defense fund.
We don't have huge resources by any means. I don't think the history profession has ever received quite a frontal attack like this. They are going for the essence of what it means to do research and convert it into the narratives of history.
We often, reporters will often say Donald Trump is unprecedented. The things that he does are unprecedented. I imagine you would tell me the United States has in the past tried to rewrite its own history at certain points.
Many times, yes.
Give me some examples of the times we've tried to do this.
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Chapter 8: How do individuals protect their privacy in a time of widespread data breaches?
During World War II, the United States created a massive propaganda machine called the Office of War Information. Now, That's what governments do during wartime. They do. But that organization did indeed engage in a lot of propaganda, selling stories to keep Americans patriotic.
And the people of the United States, an angry people whose resources and privileges were the envy of the world, offering these without stiff, fighting in the factories and the foxholes.
Move ahead from that to McCarthyism. Anti-communism was a very deep phenomenon in America, and not without some reasons in the 30s and 40s and the war years and immediately after. But McCarthyism caused a wave of attempts of trying to control what writers wrote, what historians could teach, who could teach anything.
The thing that the American people can do is to be vigilant day and night to make sure they don't have communists teaching the sons and daughters of America.
Let's take the Civil War, if you want. In 1865 to 1870, 75, there was an organization in the South, for example, that called themselves the Southern Historical Society.
That was originally made up mostly of former Confederate officers who were determined to try to control the story of what the war had been about, what they had actually fought for, what their crusade meant, what the Confederacy actually was.
What was the story they were trying to sell?
they told a story that we've come to know as the Confederate lost cause. Namely, they were arguing early on that they did not really lose the war on the battlefield. They only lost to superior numbers and resources. They said they lost only to the Leviathan of Northern industrialization. There's some truth in that, but that's not the full explanation. They also argued that
in season and out for generations that the war was not really about slavery. It was really about state sovereignty and states rights. It was really about resisting the federal interference with their lives and their civilization and their mores and folkways.
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