In D.C. a City Under Siege and History Itself Under Attack

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”            George Orwell

Letter from Washington, D.C., August 2025

The thing that struck me was how like a ghost town Washington, D.C. was on my visit there last week, my first in almost 25 years. You could cross the wide and expansive Pennsylvania Avenue without a walk light, so sparse was traffic.  It was the emptiest I’ve ever seen the nation’s capital on my many trips there, starting way back to my first visit to the city on an eighth-grade field trip in 1975.

Where was everyone?  The crowds in long lines at museums and memorials…foreign tourists taking in American history for the first time…families from all over the United States enjoying a living civics class, America 101.  

The food trucks and t-shirt vendors lined up on the curb in front of the National Mall. But there were very few folk to buy sparkly red, white, and blue hats or orange popsicles or an all-American hot dog.  The double-decker tourist buses that ride up and down the streets were mostly empty. At the FDR and MLK memorials I toured on the Tidal Basin, the beauty and poignancy of those places seemed like it was reserved for just me.   

What happened to this so alive city of history and politics and power? 

I roamed the vacant halls of the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and took in  Julia Child’s full Cambridge, Massachusetts kitchen preserved for the ages. I entered almost unaccompanied the hushed space that houses the original “Star Spangled Banner” flag. I got a bit teary when I looked at that historic remnant which symbolizes our nation’s aspirational ideals of sacrifice, courage, and resilience. The flag was still there! But few to witness it.

What is keeping folks away?

Doesn’t help that the current occupant of the White House labels the city a den of thieves and place of uncontrolled crime, even though crime is actually down in D.C., historically speaking. Facts do not matter to our ever-performative reality TV President, who ordered the National Guard to patrol the streets, subways stations and parks. It felt like there were more khaki clad soldiers at so many corners, than out-of-town visitors or federal workers. 

And the feeling on the streets of our Capitol was one of fear.

Deep fear about what’s next from the chaos creating, revenge seeking, attention addicted commander in chief.  Would more federal employees face job loss, in addition to 300,000 people already laid off? More federal prosecutors fired because they dared to indict January 6^th insurrectionists? The current regime continues to slash and burn, with no plan really. Just torch it all down. A nihilistic fever has overtaken the folks in power in D.C., and the chaos shows no sign of slowing.

Even the exhibits I enjoyed at the Smithsonian museums are under siege. As the President wrote on Truth Social recently, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was….Nothing about Success…Brightness…the Future. This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE.”

The exhibit voting and free and fair elections and another on the tapestry of immigration that makes America, well, great—are these on the chopping block? The African American History Museum taught me more about the story and legacy of slavery in America than I’ve ever learned before. How soon might it be censored, altered, or even erased in the days to come?  Like that history didn’t ever happen.

I love the Smithsonian museums because these try to tell the whole American story. Good, bad, ugly, everything. A story that includes everyone, no one left out or silenced. Maybe that’s why select exhibits anger some so much, those who would whitewash any history that discomforts them, contradicts their view of American greatness. I love America for its humanity and its flawed and beautiful nature.  Our American story is tragedy and triumph, and it is a story that is still being written and that is wonderful and amazing.   

My advice is to get to D.C. very soon.  We’ve no idea what is to come next for the Smithsonian, or for any of the repositories and landmarks of American history in the District of Columbia.  Our shared history and how that is told and what is being told is under attack.  And that is sad. And that is scary. And that is such a shame. 

And that is history in the making that I for one wish was not true.

(The views expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect the views of the people and church I serve nor the United Church of Christ.)

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.