As the National Park Service prepared to celebrate its 109th birthday this month, rangers and other staff members–already reduced in number by the widespread firings of federal workers–spent weeks scrambling to review signage and other materials for topics that may be considered “disparaging” or reflective of “corrosive ideology.”
Across more than 400 U.S. national parks, historic sites, monuments and memorials managed by the park service, staff reportedly conducted reviews of exhibits, gift shops, books available for sale and other materials. Among the materials flagged were signs describing the brutality of slavery, the impact of climate change on rising sea levels, the harm that air pollution poses to plants, and the imprisonment of Native Americans at Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in Florida.
Books targeted for review at various parks included What Your Ribbon Skirt Means to Me: Deb Haaland’s Inauguration by Alexis Bunten, a children’s story book about the first Native American to serve as U.S. Secretary of the Interior; Harriet A. Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Marjory Wentworth’s Shackles, a Moonbeam Children’s Book Award-winning picture book about understanding slavery, and Nikole Hannah-Jones seminal The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.
The review was prescribed in a March executive order issued by President Trump entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The same order has been used to justify an expansive review of Smithsonian exhibitions, collections, online content and curatorial processes, as part of an effort to remove “improper ideology” before the U.S. celebrates its 250th birthday.
As a result, exhibits and books at national parks that address the country’s messy history may soon be sanitized or removed altogether.
“This administration has decided to use the power of government to rewrite history and assert an ideological agenda into spaces that expert historians and curators meticulously care for with integrity and professionalism,” says Hadar Harris, Managing Director of PEN America Washington. “By dictating which narratives are ‘acceptable,’ the administration seeks to restrict the public’s access to a broad spectrum of accurate historical information which reflect the complexities of American history. Rather than being honest about the challenges, as well as the successes, of the story of the United States, the administration is attempting to dictate what American national identity and history means and to suppress or erase the narratives or representations with which they disagree.”
Rather than being honest about the challenges, as well as the successes, of the story of the United States, the administration is attempting to dictate what American national identity and history means and to suppress or erase the narratives or representations with which they disagree.
Erasing Identities and History
The park service in February removed the “T” and “Q” from LBGTQ+ at Stonewall National Monument in New York, the birthplace of the gay rights movement, and deleted pages from the monument’s website describing Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two transgender women who were pivotal figures in the Stonewall uprising.
Most of the attention around the executive order has so far focused on its directive that charged Vice President J.D. Vance, an ex-officio member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, with taking the lead on removing what the administration called a “distorted narrative” from Smithsonian museums, as well as including an explicit disparagement of transgender people by demanding that the American Museum of Women’s History “not recognize men as women in any respect in the Museum.”
What received fewer headlines was another section of the executive order that took aim at the national parks, directing the Secretary of the Interior to take action, “to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”
Getting public feedback
The effort to review signs at national parks also included a version of crowdsourcing opinions of history. A QR code was posted for several weeks at park sites asking the public to identify interpretive materials and other information “negative about either past or living Americans.” By most accounts, the vast majority of responses praised the parks, while most of the complaints pointed to problems like unclean bathrooms and overabundant mosquitos.
To be sure, the parks’ interpretive materials have always gone through reviews. Alan Spears, the senior director of cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, a private group that advocates for and supports the parks, said the reviews are typically conducted by park service staff, including historians and subject matter experts with a focus on historical accuracy rather than ideology. The process can take years as the experts carefully craft appropriate language for the signs that describe exhibits or natural features.
Books and other merchandise sold at park stores are also regularly reviewed for appropriateness and historical accuracy.
Removing interpretive materials and books from national park bookstores doesn’t advance our understanding of the nation’s history, Spears said. “That kind of censorship and sanitization takes us backwards,” Spears said.
He noted that the National Park Service has spent the last few decades modernizing its exhibits and interpretive efforts to make them “more accurate, more inclusive and more just,” which he added “also makes them more inspiring.”
“This is just not how you make a country great,” Spears said of the effort to remove anything that might make certain visitors uncomfortable. “Great countries do not hide from their history.” Today’s parks attempt, he said, paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, “to examine where we failed to live up to the better angels of our nature.”
Great countries do not hide from their history.
The parks and the nonprofit organizations generally known as “friends” of the parks, which typically operate bookstores and gift shops, are expected in mid-August to receive “letters of compliance” that provide guidance for how to address any materials flagged by park workers or visitors. Then they’ll reportedly have until mid-September to take the advised steps.
That means we could start to see the impact of these orders in just a few weeks.
What changes will be made at National Historical Parks like the Brown v. Board of Education site, where the story of desegregation is told? Or the Manzanar National Historic Site in California, which preserves the history of Japanese Americans interned there during World War II, and whose website is currently not functional? Or at the hallowed grounds of Gettysburg and Antietam and the other national battlefields?
“It will take some time to see if we have a complete disaster on our hands, or whether this is something nefarious but milder,” Spears said. “We just don’t know yet. But even with this ambiguity, this is an alarming trend right now.”