The Trump Administration is rewriting history and getting it wrong. That's the point.

President Trump wants to purge government records of what he considers unpleasant chapters in U.S. history.

Seventy-eight years ago today - April 15, 1947 - Jackie Robinson played his first baseball game with the Brooklyn Dodgers. He started at first base and failed to get a hit. He did reach base on an error in the 7th inning, and came around to score the go-ahead run. The 26,623 fans who attended the game at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field that day got to see their beloved Dodgers defeat the Boston Braves by a final score of 5-3. They were also witnesses to history. Not just baseball history. American history. On that spring day in Brooklyn, Robinson became the first Black person to play major league baseball since Moses Fleetwood Walker in 1894, before baseball conspired to ban Black players.

These are the facts. This is what happened.

Jackie Robinson. Photo credit: Jared Enos

Last month, the website of the United States Department of Defense was suddenly changed. It deleted Jackie Robinson, who had been an Army lieutenant during the Second World War, from its Sports Heroes Who Served section. It was done to confirm with a directive from President Trump and the new Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, to get rid of anything that remotely smacked of diversity, equity and inclusion.

It wasn’t just Robinson. Also erased were accounts of the segregated Japanese-American 442nd Infantry Division of the Army which served with distinction in the European theater during WWII, the Navajo Code Talkers during the Second World War, Ira Hayes, the Native American Marine who helped raise the American flag on Iwo Jima, and Army Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers, 1970 recipient of the Medal of Honor for extraordinary valor during the Vietnam War. Rogers is Black. Also earmarked for deletion were tens of thousands of archival photos and posts across all branches of the military.

“The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military,” the Associated Press reported. “It also removes a large number of posts that mention commemorative months - such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.”

Enola Gay B-52. Photo credit: Sh4rp_i

Some of this zealotry is almost comical. Service members whose last name was "Gay" were removed. So was a photo of the crew of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

In a statement, a Pentagon spokesperson said, “As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department.”

After a public uproar, the Defense Department retreated on Robinson, the 442nd Infantry Division, Rogers and others, restoring them to the website. But most of what was removed remains gone.

George Orwell. Photo credit: Abee5

In George Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four, about a future totalitarian state, Big Brother and The Party spy on and control everyone and everything.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, works in the Records Department with the Ministry of Truth where he is kept busy changing any documentary evidence from the past - books, newspaper articles, photos, film - to conform with the regime’s current positions and policies. The re-writing of the past is called “rectifying.”

Early on, Smith muses, “If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the present. Who controls the present, controls the past.’”

The Trump Administration wants to control the past, how it is perceived and how it is believed. It seeks to cleanse American history of whatever the administration considers offensive, discordant and unpleasant, which includes stories of racism, racial and ethnic conflict, discrimination, misogyny, oppression and inequality. The ugliness is to be filtered out and replaced by a gleaming fantasy of American omnipotence and perfection. In a March 27 executive order, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," Trump asserts that interpretations of history that focus on things like slavery only "distort our shared history."

Maya Angelou (left). Photo credit: zsrlibrary. Adolf Hitler (right). Photo credit: Jared Enos

Yesterday, The New York Times reported that the Administration directed the Department of the Navy to comb the books in the library at the Naval Academy in Maryland to remove offensive material. A Navy spokesperson, Cmdr. Tim Hawkins was quoted saying, “Approximately 900 books were identified during the preliminary search. Departmental officials then closely examined the preliminary list to determine which books required removal to comply with the directives outlined in executive orders by the president.”

The Times article said:

Gone is “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou’s transformative best-selling 1970 memoir chronicling her struggles with racism and trauma.

Two copies of “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler are still on the shelves.

Gone is “Memorializing the Holocaust,” Janet Jacobs’s 2010 examination of how female victims of the Holocaust have been portrayed and remembered.

“The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail is still on the shelves. The 1973 novel, which envisions a takeover of the Western world by immigrants from developing countries, has been embraced and promoted by Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser.

“The Bell Curve,” which argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people, is still there. But a critique of the book was pulled.”

I cannot even begin to comprehend the logic by which a book by Maya Angelou is deemed unacceptable, but Mein Kampf is not.

Photo credit: Washington Post

There's more.

Also recently, the National Park Service heavily edited its website history of the Underground Railroad, the clandestine and dangerous routes taken by Black slaves to escape the pre-Civil War South. It deleted or rewrote other passages to soften the recounting of the horrors of slavery.

The photo of Harriett Tubman, the legendary “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, was removed and the accompanying introduction in her own words heavily edited.

Photo by Jeanine Michna-Bales from Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad

Jeanine Micha-Bales is a photographer who traveled a 1,600-mile imagined Underground Railroad route from Louisiana to Ontario, Canada. Her powerful images are in her book, Through Darkness To Light.

“Re-writing our country's history is incapable of removing the tragedies of the past,” Michna-Bales told me in an email. “Understanding the past helps us comprehend the present and connect past events to their lasting impact on today’s reality.”

The National Park Service eventually withdrew the website changes, no doubt thanks to the media attention it drew. But, like Winston Smith and his colleagues in the Ministry of Truth, Trump Administration apparatchiks continue to work feverishly at their task. More "rectifications" will inevitably slip through. There are just too many to monitor and flag them all.

Late in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith observes, “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth."