What the Freedom Trucks don’t say about American history speaks volumes

Some red flags had already popped up in my mind when I visited the Freedom Truck on July 11 in Huron during its three-day stop in that typical, small, welcoming South Dakota city.

But after I experienced it, despite its beautiful, engaging, and by-and-large historically accurate and straightforward design, I soon realized how subtly insidious the mostly federally funded mobile History Truck initiative is, as it aims to airbrush all the most appalling and shameful episodes in American history.

There are six of the massive double-wide semitruck trailers, whose displays and narratives cater to children, visiting hamlets, small cities and metros in all the lower 48 states and Washington, D.C., by the end of this year, the nation’s 250th (semiquincentennial, or sestercentennial, which is one syllable shorter) year.

But all the trucks, including the one in Huron, provide only America’s laudable, uber-positive and heroically exceptional history. As was evident in the Huron Freedom Truck’s narrative, the bad stuff is simply left out. 

Like it never happened.

America’s 250th birthday is on sale. Where’s all that merch money going?

One of the main display themes is that the Declaration of Independence codified the then-radical principle that “all men are created equal,” and that the nation, once formed, “conquered” slavery. Incongruously, though, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among other Founding Fathers, themselves owned slaves at the time. In fact, Jefferson didn’t free his slaves even when he died; Washington, however, freed his. Of course, none of this would be evident to children and adults alike even if they closely read the Freedom Truck display texts.

But who freed whom or when is beside the point. That Founders owned human beings at all is the point and should be clear in the Freedom Truck displays. This fact is irreducibly critical to fully understanding the epic American story, spotlighting an ignoble reality that the fawning hyperbole of the Freedom Trucks ignores or deceitfully understates.

I wasn’t particularly surprised at the Trump administration’s spendy, baroque effort, employing omission, to pull such historical wool over the eyes of children (and adults). My initial wariness stemmed from who wrote the Freedom Truck script and who created its audio-visual extravaganza.

The script for the trucks was written by arch-conservative Matthew Spalding, head of the Washington program at Michigan’s ultra-conservative Christian Hillsdale College, who directed a similar project, the anti-diversity 1776 Commission, at the end of Donald Trump’s first term. Creator of all the trucks’ audio-video displays was Dennis Prager, a conservative talk-show host and writer who in 2009 co-founded PragerU, which is not an accredited university but a nonprofit that produces videos and materials promoting a conservative, right-wing, Christian nationalist, Judeo-Christian-aligned agenda. The platform is highly controversial, particularly for its educational programs criticized as politically slanted that are sold to public schools. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center has accused PragerU of pushing historically inaccurate propaganda and ideological indoctrination. The center wrote that PragerU claims it “promotes the American values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but in fact “perpetrates far-right ideology vilifying the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants and people of color.”

Many critics of the Freedom Truck agenda focus on its lack of full candor about the nation’s unavoidably checkered past, by avoiding upfront discussion of past horrors and continuing negative effects of slavery, the brutal mistreatment of Native Americans and theft of enormous swaths of their land, and violent persecution of various waves of immigrants, among other shameful periods of our history.

“Notably, America is depicted [in the Freedom Trucks] as a white Christian nation,” wrote The Guardian newspaper. “Several Black luminaries are mentioned: among the 50 American heroes are Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. But the prevailing wind blowing through the truck is towards the white men who led the charge to nationhood, with minor roles granted to their women dutifully holding the fort back home, and on God as the source of the country’s greatness.”

There’s no mention of how Founders were greatly influenced by a focus on reason, science and religious skepticism during the European Enlightenment, which was still ongoing when the Declaration was penned, and which led to the first American government being set up as a secular project with no official religion dominating, in contrast to the war-mongering governments they emigrated from. 

A Freedom Truck was parked on July 18 at the wonderful, enthusiastically patriotic Sioux Falls Air Show, with thousands of people milling about. The throngs entering the truck for an honest, inspiring history lesson were artfully, even dazzlingly, misled. For a hot minute, even I was.