Who holds the power over public memory — and by what authority?

The Guardian reports that the Trump administration has replaced exhibits on slavery at George Washington's home, Mount Vernon, substituting panels critics describe as sympathetic to enslavers, and doing so, in the words of those critics, 'under cover of darkness.' I will not pretend to recall the precise arrangements between the federal government and Mount Vernon's trustees, for those details postdate my own era. But the constitutional question the episode raises is one I know intimately: when the executive reaches into a public institution to reshape the narrative it presents to citizens, what authority does it invoke, and to whom is it answerable?

I must first say plainly what the historical record requires me to say: George Washington held enslaved people. I held enslaved people. That is a moral failure — mine, his, the era's — and no honest accounting of the founding can omit it. The Constitution's framers used universal language — all men are created equal, the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity — while tolerating an institution that violated every word of it. The distance between that language and that practice is not a footnote; it is the central unresolved tension the republic inherited. An exhibit that names the enslaved, tells their stories, and counts the cost of that tolerance does not dishonor the founders. It holds the founding to its own stated standard.

The structural concern here is this: the executive branch commands enormous resources and, in an administration disposed toward consolidating authority, the temptation to use those resources to manage public memory is real and dangerous. The First Amendment does not merely protect speech from suppression; it reflects a deeper principle — that in a republic, the government is not the arbiter of which truths the people may hear. When panels are replaced quietly, without deliberation, without the transparency that democratic accountability demands, the process itself is the injury, whatever one thinks of the content.

I argued in Federalist No. 51 that the safety of a republic lies not in the virtue of any one officer but in the structural arrangement that makes ambition counteract ambition. The remedy here is not outrage alone but oversight: Congress holds the appropriations power; if federal funds or federal authority were used to alter these exhibits, committees have both the right and the duty to compel disclosure of the decision-making process, the officials who ordered the change, and the criteria applied. Sunlight is not merely a metaphor — it is the mechanism.

I would caution readers against reducing this to a partisan quarrel over aesthetics. The question is structural. A government that controls which version of its own origins the public is permitted to see is a government that has claimed a power the Constitution nowhere grants and that every free-press and free-speech principle the Bill of Rights embodies was designed to resist. Whether the administration acted within any lawful grant of authority over Mount Vernon — a matter I mark as requiring factual inquiry, not inference — is precisely what oversight exists to determine.

The founders were not saints. The republic they built was imperfect in ways that cost millions of people their freedom and their lives. Acknowledging that is not an attack on the republic; it is the precondition for holding the republic to its own ideals. Any administration that finds that acknowledgment threatening should ask itself why — and the rest of us should ask, with equal urgency, what other truths it means to manage next.