“The American People Can Handle the Truth!” King Lashes Out at Administration Efforts to Erase American History at National Parks

To watch the floor speech, click here

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Today, U.S. Senator Angus King (I-ME), Ranking Member of the Senate National Parks Subcommittee, spoke on the Senate Floor to criticize the Trump Administration's attempts to whitewash American history at our national parks.

The floor speech comes on the heels of a letter he sent to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, King requests information pertaining to Executive Order 14253 "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," and Secretarial Order 3431, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" which together directs the Department to remove or alter properties that present American history in a negative light. He also previously shared remarks on social media last week after a rally to support truth-telling at America's National Parks.

The full transcript of Senator King's floor speech from this afternoon is below.

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"Mr. President, I'd like to begin by talking a little bit about history generally, rather than the topic that has been the subject of the prior remarks, and then get into the question that's been raised today. There are several cliches about history and one of the problems with cliches is, you hear them so often that they lose their meaning, and you just sort of slough them off, but these two, I think, do have some meaning, and they have become cliches because they're true.

"One is, if you ignore history, you're doomed to repeat it. I've been hearing that all my life. If you don't know your history and if you ignore history, you're doomed to repeat it. The second is attributed to mark Twain, who said, history doesn't always repeat itself, but it usually rhymes. And that means that things that have happened in the past may not be exactly what happens in the future, but the history predicts the future. I recently finished a biography of Cicero, the great Roman statesman, and he said something about history that really stuck with me, which is, if you don't know the history of your civilization, you live your whole life as a child. I thought that was a really important insight, because what that's really sayings, all you have is your life, if you're 50 years old, or 40 years old 25 years old, that' your sum knowledge, if you don't know the history that goes back five years, ten years, 100 years, or 1,000 years. If you don't know your history, you live your whole life as a child.

"And what we're seeing in this process at our national parks is a kind of lie to try to erase history, to try to keep us from understanding the historical events that shaped this country, is a lie. It's not true if our parks and our historical sites are supposed to enrich our lives and tell us about the background and the history of our country, if you leave out the important parts, it's a damned lie, and that's what's happening today. We have a fantastic history. We have a great history. We have an extraordinary history in this country of triumphs, of achievements, but we also have dark periods of our history. And indeed I would argue one of our great triumphs is overcoming those dark periods in our history, to try to whitewash, and eliminate, and cover-up the history of our slavery is to ignore the first third of our country's history altogether and the cause of the greatest cataclysm that this country has ever faced. And to eliminate, for example, a display about slavery at Harper's ferry is just flat ridiculous. Harpers Ferry is there because of slavery because that's where John Brown's raid was and that was the issue at that moment. It's like saying you can't have a model rocket at cape Kennedy. I mean, it's just ridiculous to try to make that kind of change. And the problem is if we don't know our history, as I go back to my early cliches, we may be doomed to repeat it or some dark version thereof.

"The President and the secretary have talked about not wanting people to be uncomfortable and feel bad about their history. People should feel uncomfortable about slavery. They should understand that was part of the first third of the history of this country and they should understand the evils. One of the most moving experiences I ever had when I went on a civil rights pilgrimage several years ago, and we went to Montgomery. And in Montgomery there was a monument to lynching and hanging from the ceiling of this building, they looked like large coffins, and they had the names on them from virtually every state, all the way up until the 1950s, where people were lynched by mobs. It was a shock, but it was something that educated me and made we understand the depth of this issue and how important it was to the early part of the history of this country. I had an experience that directly informs what I'm talking about today.

"Several years ago, I was on a trip with a group of members of this body to Europe to I think it was a NATO conference and on the way back we stopped at the Frankfurt airport and there was a fellow there who worked at the airport who was sort of guiding us through to get to our gate to come home. And I got to chatting with him, and he told me something amazing. He said when he was in high school in Germany, he was required to go to a concentration camp. He was required to see what his country had done the Jews and others in that incredibly dark period of German history. The Germans are requiring their people to face their dark history and we're trying to cover up our dark history. I just find the contrast extraordinary. You learn from your history. You learn from the dark periods. And here's a perfect example, the greatest sentence ever written in English, "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," was written on a desk by a slaveholder and the desk was built by a slave at Monticello. That's an irony, that's perplexing, that's difficult, it's uncomfortable, but it's part of the reality. It's part of the reality of our history of our country and it's something we have to conjure with.

"When I was a boy growing up, I used to go to rotary club meetings with my father and the prize for the people who came the furthest for the rotary meeting was a copy of George Washington's will, which is a very interesting document because in his will he freed his slaves. Again, that's a part of our history and we need to understand that. We need to understand that people who came before us went through difficult periods and had to face difficult issues. Whitewashing history, throughout history, is part of the authoritarian's playbook. To try to manipulate history to have all glory go to the leader, all glory go to the government and have people not be uncomfortable about what went on with the past so they won't be uncomfortable about what is being done to them by an authoritarian government. The glory of our country is a journey to a more perfect union. Ever since I first read the constitution in law school, it was very telling that the framers used the term more perfect union. They didn't say perfect union or toward a union, they saw America as a journey. They saw America as moving through time by moving through and progressing over time. When the constitution was first written, the only people that could vote were white male property owners. Since that time, through tremendous struggle, and sometimes violence, ask John Lewis or the early suffragettes who were imprisoned. That circle of who could vote, of who could participate, has gradually grown and that is the heart of the American journey and that's the heart of what we must understand and recognize in order to know our history and not live our entire lives as a child. What is going on now, I believe, is an affront to the American people. And what it's really saying is that the American people can't handle the truth like Jack Nicholson in the movie, you can't handle the truth. The American people can handle the truth, they can understand what happened, they can understand why it was evil and how the struggles that took place in order to overcome the dark portions of our history. It's underestimating our people. They need to understand. We all need to understand from whence we came. And I'll conclude by saying again, the glory of our country is the journey, including the hard parts, toward a more perfect union."

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