On Thursday, a historian revealed the truth behind a strange affair in which President Donald Trump’s MAGA ideas put an unexpected item in the crosshairs: a t-shirt bearing the image of a butterfly and the word “vote.” According to Jessica Dickinson Goodman, co-founder of Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, the Trump administration targeted the shirt for removal from the Smithsonian because of an inaccurate belief that it was part of a scheme to give voting rights to undocumented immigrants.
As Goodman writes in America Magazine, the incident emerged out of the Trump administration’s “Saving America’s Story” report, in which it accused the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History of treating “the American story” as “a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens,” specifically claiming there is an “anti-Christian, and anti-freedom narrative of America that NMAH and the Smithsonian seek to tell.” In the report, the administration alleges that 14 items – out of 1.7 million objects on display – support its claim that the Smithsonian was purposely disparaging American history and values. According to Goodman, “One of the objects was a T-shirt from the 1970s with a single word, VOTE, and an image of a butterfly. The report claimed that the butterfly was ‘a well-known symbol in the illegal alien activist community, symbolizing illegal aliens crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S.’ But I have found no evidence that the T-shirt had anything to do with immigration reform. Sometimes a butterfly is just a butterfly.”
A closer look at the report reveals that indeed, someone in the Trump administration was really worried about that butterfly shirt. “In its American Democracy exhibit,” the report alleges, “NMAH recently added an umbrella and t-shirt depicting a Monarch butterfly covered in American stars and stripes and the word ‘VOTE’ underneath, implying that illegal aliens should be given the right to vote.” According to the report, “the message could not be clearer” – “it is the illegal alien whose rights and interests NMAH seeks to prioritize and tell the story of, not the American people’s.” The report argues that in discussing illegal immigration, the museum “makes no effort to highlight Americans’ rights and interests in, for example, protecting (a) the availability and wages of low-skilled jobs and workers; (b) already strained public resources like schools, healthcare, and welfare; and (c) the public safety, national security, and cultural and social cohesion of America — not to mention the rule of law. This is by design, and it is intended to spur visitors into political action, not teach American history.”
But as Goodman notes, there is no evidence that the shirt has anything to do with the immigration debate. While images of the monarch butterfly have been used as a symbol among migrant communities since 2012, when artist Favianna Rodriguez created “Migration is Beautiful,” the t-shirt in question is from the 1970s – decades before the symbol was adopted.