On a Monday afternoon this winter, 64-year-old historian James Millward climbed the steps of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery with a “little stack of handouts, like a good professor,” and no sense of the drama that was about to unfold.
He had heard that when the museum swapped out the president’s portrait in January, it also removed a placard mentioning Donald Trump’s impeachments and the Jan. 6 insurrection. For Millward, a scholar of Chinese history, well-versed in the censorial methods of that country’s Communist Party, the development stirred a familiar feeling: unease at seeing “history being snipped and clipped and disappeared.”
So Millward did what he knows best. He designated the gallery his classroom and made museumgoers his students. Where the new, abbreviated label failed to educate, he played substitute teacher. Stationed next to the freshly mounted portrait, which shows the president scowling over his desk, Millward offered printouts of the old wall text to interested visitors. They stated plainly that Trump was “impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection.”
Millward called it “guerrilla teaching.” He was at the Portrait Gallery as an educator but also as co-founder of Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, a group that last year spent thousands of hours documenting every corner of the Smithsonian, to track any changes made as Trump administration officials assert control over the content of the museums. “I think it’s really important,” he says, “to show that the people are noticing.”
Millward’s lesson was short-lived. After half an hour, a uniformed guard appeared and told him he could not hand out fliers. Millward asked for a clarification on the museum’s rules, which he didn’t see posted. The guard mentioned a policy prohibiting distribution of literature and called in reinforcements. Within minutes, Millward estimates, a group of eight to 10 guards had gathered in the gallery. They were wearing different uniforms, he says, some with handcuffs and guns. Soon, they cleared the room of visitors and closed off the exhibition.
Millward felt a surge of adrenaline as he found himself on the front lines of a battle playing out across the country — about what constitutes U.S. history, how it’s told, and who gets to tell it.
But in that moment, the operating theater was much smaller: just the guards, the history professor and a host of U.S. presidents, peering down at the scene from their frames on the walls.
Millward didn’t expect to cause a disturbance, though the Georgetown University academic understands as well as anyone that information can be seen as guide or a threat, depending on how it’s interpreted.