Sanitizing History Risks National Park Service's Reputation

The National Park Service risks losing its reputation as the nation’s unbiased storyteller thanks to Trump administration’s efforts to sanitize how it presents U.S. history, a former superintendent and historian asserts in a newly published analysis of the changes.

Climate change interpretation, Colonial America’s enslavement practices, and the maltreatment of native cultures are among the current and historic story lines the Trump administration has downplayed or suggested for removal in many national parks, according to Rolf Diamant, who reviewed a leaked to the public database of how parks responded when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered them to avoid interpretation that denigrated the United States.

“All told, the DOI database identified approximately 800 items flagged for review in approximately 140 out of 433 national parks. My analysis of park submissions reveals a significant de­gree of variability in the way park managers responded to the SO (secretarial order), with some standing up for integrity even in this current environment of fear and insecurity,” Diamant wrote.

“Nevertheless, much damage is being done across the National Park System,” he concluded.

"Nothing To Report"

Diamant, who was superintendent of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Vermont, placed park responses to Interior into four buckets: “Nothing to Report,” “Within Right Reason,” “Abundance of Caution,” or “Anything and Everything.”

Among his findings was that about two-thirds of the 433 units of the National Park System responded to Interior said they had “nothing to report.”

“Recognizing that terms like ‘inappropriately disparages’ or ‘emphasizes matters unrelated’ are highly subjective, it is possible that most parks decided they could not implement the SO without significant clarification,” wrote Diamant. “I assume that many sized up the SO as an ambitious but poorly conceived, ideologically driven exercise in self-censorship.”

The administration’s efforts, he said, amounted to “an extraordinary stress test of NPS fidelity to historical and scientific truths.”

Diamant noted Park Service staff flagged interpretive materials and presentations across the park system — from proposing to remove signage relating to Indigenous history and climate-change impacts to interpretations of the treatment of enslaved populations — that were in response to Burgum’s “Restore Truth and Sanity to American History” order.

The order told parks to focus on positive aspects of U.S. history and remove material that might be seen as disparaging.  

“If this process remains unchecked, favoring façade at the expense of substance, NPS is at risk of becoming increasingly diminished, much like Lewis Carroll’s disappearing Cheshire Cat, where only the feline’s fading grin is left,” Diamant stated in a May article for the Park Stewardship Forum at the University of California-Berkeley.

“In recent years NPS has made truly remarkable strides upgrading, expanding, and contextualizing information available to the public through video, publications, museum displays, and wayside exhibits,” Diamant wrote.

But the administration’s determination to rewrite history by cherry-picking only positive aspects for its interpretive materials risks damaging the agency’s integrity, maintained Diamant, who spent nearly four decades with the Park Service and who has regularly looked to the future of national parks through his “Letter from Woodstock” published by the George Wright Society.

Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, agreed with Diamant's concerns over the Park Service's integrity in the public's eye.

"National parks have a sacred mandate: to preserve and interpret the full breadth of the American experience, the good and the bad. Visitors come not just to witness awe-inspiring landscapes, but to confront the complex, often painful tapestry of our history and our world — the triumphs and the failings," she said in an email. "National parks are not propaganda tools nor should they be used for partisan purposes. They exist to preserve and interpret the full American story, not just the parts that make some politicians comfortable. Erasing history doesn’t make it go away, it just makes it more likely to repeat itself. And harkens back to some very dark and dangerous times in world history."

Once the Trump administration leaves Washington, wrote Diamant, the Park Service will need to “evaluate the hurricane-like impact that this administration is having on our National Park System, and on the well-being of its staff. If such an evaluation can be done, then widely shared and honestly discussed, perhaps one day in the future NPS employees might be better prepared — legally, ethically, and psychologically — should they against have to navigate trials of a similar magnitude.”

Diamant viewed the matter as just “one of a series of stress tests” that the Trump administration has subjected upon the Park Service.

“There are lessons NPS can learn from all of them: assessing sources of weakness and vulnerability, as well as strength and resiliency,” he wrote. “One obvious vulnerability is the toxic relationship between the NPS and the department that oversees it. Any conversation around ‘Refoundation’, building a more robust conservation future, should consider ways to extricate an undermined NPS from the growing domination of DOI.”

Park Responses

Diamant’s research found widely differing responses from parks to the secretary’s directive.

For instance, he noted that while Acadia National Park in Maine was arguably “once the flagship park for NPS climate change interpretation,” staff there “identified for review and removal a score of waysides, including signage explaining air quality and atmospheric ozone levels, the decline of spruce-fir forests and habitat, and the fundamental importance of research in ‘helping park managers make informed decisions.’”

“In the wake of the SO, signs on climate change and Indigenous history have been removed from two heavily visited sites, Cadillac Mountain and the Great Meadows wetlands, and from the Sieur du Monts Nature Center,” he added.

Some parks took Burgum’s directive as an opportunity to correct what they see as overlooking the nation’s dark chapters. At Natchez Trace Parkway, Diamant discovered that park staff  told the Interior Department that a better job could be done in interpreting Black and Indigenous history.

A sign interpreting the “Red Dog Road” along the Trace, which was named for a Choctaw chief, “diminishes the forced removal of all native tribes and is disparaging to these Americans,” park staff wrote.

Diamant also found some staff questioning what things qualified as disparaging aspects of U.S. history.

“Applying the SO’s directions literally—or perhaps to make a point—C&O Canal National Historical Park asked for clarification on whether its Lockhouse 22 Wayside, which recounted the story of an inebriated lockkeeper who allowed a canal boat loaded with coal to sink in the lock, ‘could potentially be seen as denigrating the lockkeeper,’” wrote Diamant. 

In Washington, D.C., the Park Service staff at the Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial, didn’t spend time trying to make their own judgments about their interpretive exhibits and materials.

“We are submitting photos of all of the exhibits found within the museum,” was the park’s response, according to Diamant.  “We decided to submit all exhibits so they can be reviewed in their entirety.” 

Big Bend National Park staff similarly submitted “images of signs describing everything from fossil discoveries to declining flows of the Rio Grande River,” he found.