National Archives exhibit blurs images critical of President Trump

The original, unaltered photo of the 2017 Women’s March in the District. An altered version appears in an exhibit at the National Archives. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Joe Heim Jan. 17, 2020

The large color photograph that greets visitors to a National Archives1 exhibit celebrating the centennial2 of women’s suffrage shows a massive crowd filling Pennsylvania Avenue NW for the Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration. (1)

1 National Archives: noun: The National Archives and Records Administration(NARA) is an independent agency of the United States government charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records. 2 Centennial: noun: a hundredth anniversary; adjective: relating to a hundredth anniversary

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The 49-by-69-inch photograph is a powerful display. Viewed from one perspective, it shows the 2017 march. Viewed from another angle, it shifts to show a 1913 black-and-white image of a women’s suffrage march also on Pennsylvania Avenue. The display links momentous demonstrations for women’s rights more than a century apart on the same stretch of pavement. (2)

But a closer look reveals a different story. (3)

The Archives acknowledged in a statement this week that it made multiple alterations to the photo of the 2017 Women’s March showcased at the museum, blurring signs held by marchers that were critical of Trump. Words on signs that referenced women’s anatomy were also blurred. (4)

In the original version of the 2017 photograph, taken by Getty Images photographer Mario Tama, the street is packed with marchers carrying a variety of signs, with the Capitol in the background. In the Archives version, at least four of those signs are altered. (5)

A placard that proclaims “God Hates Trump” has “Trump” blotted out so that it reads “God Hates.” A sign that reads “Trump & GOP — Hands Off Women” has the word Trump blurred out. (6)

A sign in the original, unaltered photo of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

An altered version of the sign as it appears in the photograph shown at the National Archives. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

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Signs with messages that referenced women’s anatomy — which were prevalent at the march — are also digitally altered. One that reads “If my vagina could shoot bullets, it’d be less REGULATED” has “vagina” blurred out. And another that says “This Pussy Grabs Back” has the word “Pussy” erased. (7)

The Archives said the decision to obscure the words was made as the exhibit was being developed by agency managers and museum staff members. It said David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009, participated in talks regarding the exhibit and supports the decision to edit the photo. (8)

“As a non-partisan, non-political federal agency, we blurred references to the President’s name on some posters, so as not to engage in current political controversy,” Archives spokeswoman Miriam Kleiman said in an emailed statement. “Our mission is to safeguard and provide access to the nation’s most important federal records, and our exhibits are one way in which we connect the American people to those records. Modifying the image was an attempt on our part to keep the focus on the records.” (9)

Archive officials did not respond to a request to provide examples of previous instances in which the Archives altered a document or photograph so as not to engage in political controversy. (10)

Kleiman said the images from the 2017 and 1913 marches were presented together “to illustrate the ongoing struggles of women fighting for their interests.” (11)

The decision to blur references to women’s genitals was made because the museum hosts many groups of students and young people and the words could be perceived as inappropriate, Kleiman said in the statement. (12)

Kleiman said the National Archives “only alters images in exhibits when they are used as graphic design components.” (13)

“We do not alter images or documents that are displayed as artifacts3 in exhibitions,” she said. “In this case, the image is part of a promotional display, not an artifact.” (14)

When told about the action taken by the Archives, prominent historians expressed dismay. (15)

"There's no reason for the National Archives to ever digitally alter a historic photograph," Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said. "If they don't 3 Artifacts: noun: an object made by a human being, typically an item of cultural or historical interest

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want to use a specific image, then don't use it. But to confuse the public is reprehensible4. The head of the Archives has to very quickly fix this damage. A lot of history is messy, and there's zero reason why the Archives can't be upfront about a photo from a women's march." (16)

Wendy Kline, a history professor at Purdue University, said it was disturbing that the Archives chose to edit out the words "vagina" and "pussy" from an image of the Women's March, especially when it was part of an exhibit about the suffragist movement. Hundreds of thousands of people took part in the 2017 march in the District, which was widely seen as a protest of Trump's victory. (17)

"Doctoring a commemorative photograph buys right into the notion that it's okay to silence women's voice and actions," Kline said in an email. "It is literally erasing something that was accurately captured on camera. That's an attempt to erase a powerful message." (18)

The altered photograph greets visitors to "Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote," an exhibit that opened in May celebrating the centennial of women's suffrage. The 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1920, prohibits the federal government and states from denying the right to vote on the basis of sex. (19)

"This landmark voting rights victory was made possible by decades of suffragists' persistent political engagement, and yet it is just one critical milestone in women's battle for the vote," reads a news release announcing the exhibit on the Archives website. (20)

Archives spokesman John Valceanu said the proposed edits were sent to Getty for approval, and Getty "then licensed our use of the image." (21)

A Getty spokeswoman, Anne Flanagan, confirmed that the image was licensed by the National Archives Foundation but said in an email Friday evening that Getty was still determining whether it approved alterations to the image. (22)

Karin Wulf, a history professor at the College of William & Mary and executive director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, said that to ensure transparency5, the Archives at the very least should have noted prominently that the photo had been altered. (23)

4 Reprehensible: adjective: deserving censure or condemnation

5 Transparency: noun: the condition of being transparent; transparent: adjective: (of an organization or its activities) open to public scrutiny

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"The Archives has always been self-conscious about its responsibility to educate about source material, and in this case they could have said, or should have said, 'We edited this image in the following way for the following reasons,' " she said. "If you don't have transparency and integrity in government documents, democracy doesn't function." (24)

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The National Archives used to stand for independence. That mission has been compromised.Philip Kennicott Jan. 18, 2020

The National Archives is one of the most imposing and beautiful buildings designed by architect John Russell Pope, who also created the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, the Jefferson Memorial and many of the finest houses, churches and association offices in the nation’s capital. Pope was a principal adviser on the design of what is known as Federal Triangle, where the Archives is located, and he was an architect keenly alert to the power of symbols in urban design. When planning the Archives, he succeeded in persuading the government to situate it where it now stands, on Pennsylvania Avenue halfway between the U.S. Capitol and the White House, suggesting its neutrality within the checks-and-balances system of the government. (1)

Now the Archives has foolishly compromised the public’s sense of its independence, so artfully embedded in its landmark building. By blurring out details from protest signs in an image of the 2017 Women’s March, including the name of President Trump and references to the female anatomy — a decision the Archives publicly apologized for on Saturday — it has damaged the faith many Americans, particularly women, may have had in its role as an impartial conservator of the nation’s records. It has unnecessarily squandered something that cannot easily be regained. (2)

There must be consequences. (3)

An Archives spokeswoman told The Washington Post the changes to a large-format image included in an exhibition about women’s suffrage were made “so as not to engage in current political controversy.” If that was the intent, they obviously failed, embroiling the institution in exactly the controversy they say they wanted to avoid. But no matter the proferred explanation or statement of apology, the decision indicates a lack of leadership and distinct confusion about the mission at the Archives. If the Archives wants to teach Americans about history, then it must be scrupulously honest in its presentation of all documentary evidence. (4)

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The blunder is egregious for multiple reasons. It indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of history among those responsible for the exhibition. The Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017, was not a march for suffrage, which was extended to women in 1920. It was a march for equality, dignity and fair treatment. For many who attended, those issues were newly urgent given the man who had been inaugurated the day before. Many of the signs at the march were directed at Trump’s denigrating language, his cavalier comments about groping and kissing women without their consent, his support for denying them the right to control their own bodies and the many accusations of harassment and assault he has denied but never disproved. (5)

The altered photo of the Women’s March on display at the Archives. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Inequality, for women today, is not an abstraction, but something understood directly through their bodies, through legislative and regulatory efforts to deny them reproductive freedom, through the fear of assault and through inequities built into our system, from bathrooms to medical research, that makes female bodies — which outnumber male bodies in the United States by several millions — the exception to the male-dominated norms and rules. (6)

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Thus, scrubbing out references to women’s anatomy in the image was not a benign or neutral act of family-friendly censorship. It was censorship of the fundamental message of the Women’s March. (7)

A composite image of detail from the photo at the Archives. At left, the original, and at right, the censored image. ((LEFT) Mario Tama/Getty Images, (RIGHT) Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Scrubbing out negative comments about Trump is at least as disturbing, given the ballooning crisis of confidence in democratic institutions. America teeters on the precipice of authoritarianism, and that jeopardy affects every institution, no matter how seemingly detached from partisan politics its mission. The National Park Service was dragged into this vortex from the first day of Trump’s term, when a government photographer cropped out empty space in an image of the Mall taken during the president’s relatively sparsely attended inauguration. Our armed forces were dragged into it as well, when the president used military hardware as a prop for a rally at the Lincoln Memorial last July 4. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was entangled in the administration’s tortuous relation to truth when it backed the president’s false claim, complete with an altered storm map, that a hurricane had threatened Alabama last year. (8)

Every institution will be tested, and the Archives has failed. To recover from this terrible mistake, it may be necessary to get out of the business of

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presenting exhibitions. The impulse to teach history is admirable, but history is never neutral, and institutions have a tendency to equate their mission with the triumph of larger historical forces. At the now shuttered Newseum, journalists were sometimes presented more as prophets and agents of social change, like the civil rights movement, than neutral observers. It is difficult, and sometimes impossible, for institutions to present history dispassionately without also flattering themselves for playing a constructive role in the drama. (9)

The imposing National Archives building on Constitution Avenue. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

The National Archives is in a particularly difficult position, which can be seen in its basic architecture and the allegorical figures that broadcast its mission. Pope emphasized the Archives’ independence by including a dry moat surrounding the building (now altered), massive bronze doors suggesting impregnability and giant porticos with columns on all sides that indicate its intent to rise above the fray in all directions. He dramatized its purpose with statues at its Constitution Avenue entrance, one a female figure dubbed “Heritage,” the other a male figure called “Guardianship.” (10)

The main thrust of its symbolism is blunt enough: This building protects American heritage. But it is gendered symbolism, with heritage seen as bearing the seeds of the future, and guardianship depicted with the

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appurtenances of war. And heritage, in the United States, is fraught with violence, racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny, carefully packaged in storybook visions of well-intentioned, white-dominated patriarchy. (11)

Given the severity of this recent blunder, it is not clear the Archives can be trusted to finesse our most complicated cultural and archival challenge, a reassessment of history that is rigorous, honest and inclusive. If the institution’s leadership wants to make amends, however, there are two places to start. Replace the image with the original, uncensored one. And seek out the women whose signs were airbrushed out of history and give each of them a genuine apology. (12)

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The Erasure of Political History at the National ArchivesBy Masha Gessen12:30 P.M.

Signs at the fourth annual Women’s March, in Washington, D.C., on January 18th. The day before, it was reported that the National Archives had altered photos from the inaugural March, in 2017.Photograph by Zach Gibson / Getty

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Last month, a photographer named Ellen Shub died, near Boston, at the age of seventy-three. I had got to know Shub in the nineteen-eighties, when I worked for gay and lesbian publications. At that time, she was already well known as a chronicler of social protest—a role that she continued to perform up until she unexpectedly fell ill, just weeks before she died. Many of her pictures were compositionally similar—frontal, focussed on one person and one sign. In 1975, she took a picture of a woman holding a placard that said “NO MORE BACK ROOM BACK ALLEY ABORTIONS.” In 1981, at a Boston rally for the Equal Rights Amendment, she photographed a woman who held a sign on which she had pasted “59c”—the amount of money, it was said, that a woman made for every dollar earned by a man. In 2004, when the Republican National Convention was held in New York, Shub took a picture of a protester with a large sheet of cardboard printed with the words “ ‘DISSENT IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTISM’ —THOMAS JEFFERSON.” In 2014, at a rally in Boston, she photographed a young man holding one that said “#ICANTBREATHE.” There were many more, and, in each case, the message of the photograph was the message of the sign. (1)

Shub’s intention in taking such text-centric pictures was clear: she was creating a historical record. Her medium was photographs published in the alternative media and movement media: gay and lesbian newspapers, feminist newspapers, and city weeklies. If mainstream journalism likes to think of itself as the “first rough draft of history,” and indeed forms much of the record that historians use to create more lasting narratives, then the kind of papers to which Shub contributed serve as amendments to this story, a record of what was also said, also written, and also seen. Shub spent decades attending all sorts of protests in all kinds of weather, to insure that—even if contemporary television viewers were unlikely to know it—future generations could learn that we were here and we held signs. (2)

I thought of Shub on Friday, when the Washington Post reported that the National Archives had altered the signs on a photograph from the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. On the photograph in question, the word “Trump” was blurred on a sign that originally read “God Hates Trump.” In other signs in the same picture, the words “vagina” and “pussy” disappeared. (3)

In response to the Post’s initial inquiry, the Archives offered two arguments and one excuse. The excuse was that the altered photograph was not part of a current exhibition at the Archives, tracing a hundred years of the suffragist movement, but merely a display that advertised the show. Still, the display would have become part of the Archives’ record—indeed, a part of the record that would have been seen more widely than the exhibition itself. The arguments were that the words referring to female anatomy may strike visitors as “inappropriate” and, separately, that the Archives are a “non-partisan, non-political federal agency.” The word “non-partisan” seemed to

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be used to mean “in willful denial of the existence of political opinion.” The word “non-political” seemed to mean that the job of the Archives is to create a historical record that obliterates politics. (On Saturday, within twenty-four hours of the publication of the Post story, the Archives removed the display photograph and posted a note of apology, which began, “We made a mistake.”) (4)

The altered photograph, from the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, on display at the National Archives Research Center, on January 17th.Photograph by Salwan Georges / The Washington Post / Getty

The Post and others who went on to pick up the story noted that the director of the Archives, David S. Ferriero, was appointed by Obama. This is indeed an important point, because it provides a measure of how far we, as a society, have drifted under President Donald Trump. By the third anniversary of his inauguration, an organization created for the purpose of creating a historical record—and headed by someone who is not a Trump appointee—has falsified the historical record. (6)

Of course, the second thing I thought about when I saw the news was the vast and well-documented Soviet system for excising people from the record: by retouching them out of photographs and by altering books, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which sent subscribers ready-made filler pages to put in place of high-ranking officials newly exposed as enemies of the

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people. The analogy is floating on the surface, offering itself up to anyone who stops to consider the situation, even for a moment. This suggests that the head and staff of the National Archives did not, in fact, give themselves a moment to consider their actions, perhaps because their actions seemed so logical and right to them. It seems that, unless the media focussed its attention on them, they might not even have realized that they were engaging in the very opposite of what the Archives had been created to do: forge a clear and accurate historical record. (7)

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a book documenting the Soviet practice of eliding people, objects, and facts from photographs. Inevitably, I quoted Hannah Arendt, whose 1967 essay on truth and politics, also published in The New Yorker, remains some of the most insightful commentary on the danger of trying to create politics in the absence of shared reality:

The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever. Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories—even the most wildly speculative ones—produced by the human mind; they occur in the field of the ever-changing affairs of men, in whose flux there is nothing more permanent than the admittedly relative permanence of the human mind’s structure. Once they are lost, no rational effort will ever bring them back. (8)

In the case of the National Archives and the Women’s March, a swift media reaction was probably instrumental in correcting the record—if that is actually the outcome of whatever remedies the Archives has selected. But Arendt warns us that history lost, even if only because it is temporarily pushed underground, is still, indeed, memory lost. (9)