In the middle of the night this past July, National Park Service crews removed the panels at the President’s House on Independence Mall and replaced them with a different version of the story. No announcement. No public unveiling. That was probably the point.
In the musical Gigi, there is a song called “I Remember It Well.” Two former lovers recall the same night, and their memories don’t agree on a single detail. Neither is lying. They illustrate what history frequently does too: the story we tell ourselves is often incomplete and rarely matches what actually happened.
We like our history tidy and uncomplicated, an unblemished hero, and an easily understood meaning. History, like most human stories, is not a record of what happened. It is processed and filtered, then handed back by the storyteller/redactor as meaning.
In 2010, a new exhibit titled “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” opened at the President’s House. It told two stories at once: the birth of the presidency and the story of the nine people Washington enslaved in that same house while he governed. He led a nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, yet he owned slaves. This fuller, more honest story is both complex and ironic.
In March 2025, a presidential executive order directed the National Park Service to remove exhibit content that portrayed our founding in a negative light. Last January, the Park Service removed the panels at the President’s House. Philadelphia sued to have the original panels restored and lost. This is a fight over the manner we understand history, including whether we can hold two truths about the same man at the same time.
George Washington was a brilliant general and a remarkable first president. He nobly and voluntarily walked away from power when he could have kept it. He was also a slaveholder who relied on enslaved labor to run his household while building a nation on the language of liberty. All of this is true. Nothing cancels the other. A history that tells only the first part isn’t protecting Washington for us; it’s attempting to protect us from him and from what his contradiction asks us to see in ourselves.
I don’t think the answer is to tear him down or to build him up. Our responsibility is harder than either: to let him stand as he was, admirable and implicated at once, and to ask what that implies for us.
Washington is not a special case. Shlomo Carlebach rewired how a generation of Jews sang and prayed, and he used his standing to harm women who trusted him. Richard Wagner composed music that can move people to tears and also wrote antisemitic tracts that the Nazis later claimed as their own. Genius and leadership often come with their shadow.
Do we dismiss a person’s achievements because of their faults? Or do we hold the gift and the fault together, refusing to let either erase the other? That is the real work before us, at the President’s House and whenever someone or something we admire also carries the inexcusable.
The comfortable version of history asks little of us. We may learn some new facts, but otherwise it essentially confirms what we already believe and sends us home unchanged. The complicated version asks us to sit with imperfect people, including our ancestors and even ourselves, who were capable of both nobility and cruelty in the same lifetime.
Some see this as a weakness in the story; I believe it is the story itself.
What would it mean to let the fault sit right beside the gift, in Washington, in Carlebach, in anyone on whom we’ve built an inheritance, not as a footnote but as part of the story? What would it mean to do the same with our own history, our own families, or our own choices? We don’t get to answer that question once and be done. We have to keep answering it, generation after generation, argument after argument.
That is where learning from history truly lives, not in the tidy version but in the argument we’re still willing to have.