Trump's Assault on the NPS is Not a Disagreement Over History. It is an Attack on History Itself

We need to stop framing this ongoing “review,” ordered by the Trump administration of the National Park Service’s interpretive assets, as a disagreement over history. Only one side in this story is engaged in the interpretation of American history and it is not the Trump administration.

What the Trump administration is pushing is censorship, plain and simple, through an agenda that ultimately hopes to put an end to any serious attempt at interpreting the past across the NPS system. It’s doing this by intimidating NPS staff and pushing them to question historical content that isn’t in any way controversial or problematic.

According to The New York Times, which is following this ongoing internal review:

On the National Mall in Washington, a sign labeled ‘Working Waterfront’ describes what had been a 19th century wharf and a landing spot for goods moving along a Potomac River tributary. ‘You might hear the shouts of dockworkers, many of them enslaved people until the end of the Civil War,’ the sign says. A park employee called attention to it, asking, ‘Is the word ‘enslaved’ OK here?’

And at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, also in Washington, a park official raised concerns about books sold at the gift shop, writing, ‘Not sure if they’re all considered disparaging, but they are about either Malcolm X or Freedom Riders or slavery.’

The Trump administration should just come out and order the NPS to stop talking about the history of slavery and race, even at sites where those stories take center stage. At least the administration will have laid its true cards on the table and we can then acknowledge their agenda for what it is.

At the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, park employees flagged an exhibit panel that discussed the bell’s travels across the country during the post-Reconstruction period. The panel ‘calls out the systemic and violent racism and sexism that existed at the time,’ employees noted.

And at the nearby Independence National Historical Park, where the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were debated and signed, park staff raised concerns about an exhibit that memorializes nine slaves whom George Washington had brought from Mount Vernon. One panel emphasizes the intentional brutality of slaveholders, which included whippings, beatings, torture and rape.

Today I learned that the NPS staff at Arlington House can talk about the existence of slavery on the grounds, but that they are not allowed to discuss any individual act of enslavement or violence.

The most troubling example coming out of the NYTs article concerns identifying slavery as the primary cause at a NPS battlefield.

‘Text addresses slavery as the primary cause of the American Civil War,’ one Park Service official noted of a plaque at the Stones River National Battlefield in Tennessee, the site of one of the bloodiest conflicts of the Civil War.

‘This is both historically correct and legislatively mandated, but we ask for further review to confirm it is aligned’ with the executive order, the official wrote.

No one that I’ve talked to, within the NPS, has any idea how these internal reviews will be evaluated or who will lead it.

The only bit of good news that I can share is that the internal review at Gettysburg did not yield any perceived problematic interpretive assets.

Again, what we are witnessing is not a disagreement over history. The question at stake here is whether the American people should be exposed to as complete a narrative of this nation’s past as possible and in all of its complexity or whether history will be replaced by a narrative designed simply to serve the Trump administration’s political agenda.