Pentagon history purge highlights which stories are told and why others are ignored

Geoff Bennett:

Who owns history? It's been a central question since President Trump reentered the White House. His administration's efforts to strip diversity, equity and inclusion programs prompted the Defense Department to remove thousands of Web pages and images honoring the contributions of women and people of color, like the Navajo Code Talkers who served during the World Wars.

The Pentagon is now restoring at least some of those Web pages after much pushback, including one honoring Black Medal of Honor recipient army Major General Charles Calvin Rogers. The Web site URL had labeled that a DEI Medal of Honor, which the DOD now says was a mistake.

For a deeper look at what stories are told and which are ignored and why, we're joined by Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

Let's start with the Defense Department, which has been the most active on this front. In the early days of the administration, the Pentagon temporarily removed training material about the Tuskegee Airmen. There was more recently the deleted information about the Code Talkers, which we mentioned.

Add to that Arlington National Cemetery removing histories that highlighted Black, Hispanic and female veterans from its Web site. How is the administration, in your view, seeking to shape the national identity and the historical memory with these actions?

Don Moynihan, University of Michigan: Well, the Defense Department is a great place to start.

They tell the story of American history through the story of individuals, through the story of heroes who did amazing things for the U.S. military at different points in time. And so, once you start to selectively erase the stories of those individuals, you're also erasing American military history.

And some of that is incredibly interesting history, if you look at something like the Navajo Code Talkers, where, in that case, you can't tell the story of how they were such an advantage during World War II without talking about their identity, because they used their tribal languages to share intelligence in a way that our military enemies could not break.

That is a very good demonstration of how diversity on the battlefield is actually a strength in a way that runs contrary to some of the messaging that's coming from the secretary of defense right now.

Geoff Bennett:

There's also a question of how the administration is doing this, this process many see as being haphazard and that these removals have been abrupt and accompanied by no public justification.

And you could also argue that they have been performed in a way that is clumsy. For instance, the Pentagon removed an image of the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb, because it had in its name the word gay.

I mean, what are the implications of the process?

Don Moynihan:

There are certain code words that are being used to detect images or stories, and then anything that's associated with those words is at least in the short term being pulled down.

And, as you point out, this can lead to sort of very clumsy or erroneous outcomes. In some cases, it leads to outcomes that really don't make a lot of sense for the communities that are being affected. So, for example, the National Park Service rewrote an account of the Stonewall uprising to honor LGB community members by removing the T and Q from LGBTQ.

And I think it's another example of where you have this sort of very rapid, clumsily applied set of preferences to the history of America.

Geoff Bennett:

It strikes me that there might be people on the political right who will say that the left engaged in this type of erasure in the wake of the George Floyd protests, where we saw the removal of Confederate statues, the renaming of military bases that had been named for Confederate generals.

Do you see any merit in an argument like that?

Don Moynihan:

I think, in any society, we're always having an ongoing conversation about who is included and who's excluded in the stories of histories that we're telling and who is celebrated and who is placed in the back.

And so, for example, we are also seeing Confederate generals whose names have been attached to military bases and then removed from those bases, those names have now been reattached. And so there's been a little bit of a legal work-around there where the secretary of defense is saying it's not those particular generals we are celebrating. We happen to be celebrating other military officials who happen to share the same name as those generals.

I'm not sure that it's a very compelling or persuasive explanation, but it does suggest that the secretary of defense wants to celebrate some of these Confederate memories and heroes and bring them back to the forefront at precisely the time that he is removing the images and stories of some American citizens that those Confederate generals would not have viewed as full citizens and would not have regarded as being worthy of inclusion in the military.

Geoff Bennett:

Don Moynihan, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, thanks for your time and for your insights.

Don Moynihan:

Thank you.