If you still need evidence that America is moving ever closer to authoritarianism — that is, if we haven’t gotten there already — I give you the latest decree from the Department of the Interior asking visitors at national parks to rat out any park ranger who feel the need to comment on anything resembling the complicated truths about U.S. history.
Or, for that matter, any ranger who doesn’t give sufficient emphasis to “the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features” of national parks. I know it sounds like a story from the Onion, but it’s true. It’s there in the Interior Department directive.
But, tell me, how many park rangers have you encountered that were downgrading the beauty of, say, Rocky Mountain National Park? How about, in my experience anyway, none? How many park rangers do you encounter who don’t seem to love their jobs? I’m still at zero.
We may learn the number. The parks now even provide a convenient QR code for visitors to report such, uh, potentially treacherous and/or beauty-denying park rangers and therefore keep them in line — or, more likely, fired.
If an important part of the parks’ mission is to teach us the relevant history — and it is — that mission is at grave risk. History, it seems, must be whitewashed. It’s what authoritarians do. It’s often their first move, although with Trump, the outrageous moves come at such a rapid pace, it’s hard to keep a timeline.
But if you saw ace reporter Kevin Simpson’s shocking, although hardly surprising, story last week about the new signage at national park sites in Colorado and elsewhere, you know what I mean.
Last week, signage encouraging parks visitors to report any historical information “negative about either past or living Americans” went up at the Amache site where Japanese Americans, mostly citizens, were incarcerated during World War II and at the Sand Creek Massacre site, where U.S. troops killed hundreds of peaceful Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1864.
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SUBSCRIBEYou might ask what positive things the park rangers should tell us about troops massacring Indigenous Americans or the government locking up people for the crime of their ethnicity, but you know there’s no such answer here.
Just like there’s no such answer at The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, which tells the whole story of, as one historian put it, “broken treaties and mass death and cultural erasure.”
Too woke for you? It’s definitely too woke for Trump.
Trump signed an executive order in March titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It was aimed basically at such valued American institutions as the National Historic Park in Philadelphia and the Smithsonian Institution — two examples, he cited, of casting “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
Is it the copy of the Declaration of Independence in Philly or maybe the Liberty Bell that disturbs Trump? If you’ve ever seen Trump’s interpretation of the Declaration, you might know that Trump is possibly not the best judge of U.S. history.
And yet, he instructed his lackey at the Interior Department to investigate any signs put up since the beginning of the Biden administration anything that gives “a false reconstruction” of American history. And these few months later, you see where we are.
The Interior message is little different from the one on the MAGA hats, telling us that when America was great — and, yes, the MAGAs often seem vague on the timing of the original greatness — America was not only great, but without flaw.
I hope you know the history of the long struggles to get Amache and the Sand Creek Massacre sites recognized as national monuments. I wrote a column about John Hopper, recalling the remarkable story of a high school teacher and administrator on the Eastern Plains who worked for 30 years, along with generations of his students, to keep the memory of the incarceration site alive and to finally have it recognized by the Park Service.
Three years ago, I said, maybe a bit naively, that the recognition marked a new period when “history and truth still matter, particularly history that isn’t cherry-picked or doubles as nationalist propaganda.”
But just as I was struck by the grandeur of the moment then, I am struck by the ugly stink of the McCarthyist signage now, which is up at Cesar Chavez Park in California and will expand to places like Fort Sumter National Monument, Ford’s Theater National Park and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Park. Imagine what history would look like in these places.
And it brought me immediately back to a time when America wasn’t so great — the 1950s and ’60s in the Jim Crow South, where I spent much of my youth — when the ugly revisionism about the cruelty of slavery and the South Africa-like apartheid that followed was inculcated in the history/propaganda books I read in public school.
I lived in southeastern Virginia, where one of the most significant events in Civil War history took place. But I never knew about it, because there was no mention of it in any of the history books at the schools I attended. No teacher brought it up. I wonder if they even knew about it. My high school was less than 10 miles away from the site.
I’ll cite the history much as it is explained in a National Park Service paper, when Fort Monroe, a U.S. fortress at the intersection of the James River and the Chesapeake Bay that remained in Union hands throughout the war, became a refuge for slaves. On the same day that Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, three slaves, owned by a Confederate colonel, fled to Fort Monroe as refugees.
The colonel wanted his slaves back and claimed that under the infamous 1850 Fugitive Slave Act — and the even more infamous Dred Scott decision that followed — they had to be legally returned.
But Major General Benjamin F. Butler — who was not, by the way, an abolitionist, and even voted for Jefferson Davis at the 1860 Democratic Convention — refused, saying that the law did not apply to slaves from another country, which is what the South claimed to be.
He said the slaves were basically contraband, a decision that led nearly a thousand slaves to come to Fort Monroe within a month. And so Monroe became the first contraband camp.
Eventually hundreds of thousands of slaves joined the Union lines, many of them becoming soldiers. They weren’t declared free, of course, until Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation two years later and then, finally and maybe forever, under the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution, not that parts of the 14th Amendment aren’t still under attack by the Trump administration.
This all happened so close to where I lived, but not close enough to be a part of the history I was taught — at the same elementary school where my sister’s third-grade teacher once told her students that slaves had roofs over their heads, three meals a day and were far better off than they were in Africa.
My parents — we were New Yorkers who had moved to Virginia — caused a stir when they complained to the principal about the teacher’s whitewashed version of slavery.
Too bad they didn’t have QR codes then.
There is good news, though. Park visitors, past and present, have flooded the QR codes with positive comments about the parks they’ve visited. I haven’t seen a poll, but I’m guessing national parks poll at least a little better than many of our political institutions.
The Los Angeles Times reports on one particularly telling piece of resistance to the new rules. Kimbrough Moore, a Yosemite National Park guide book author, posted on Instagram a sign he saw in the toilet at the Porcupine Flat campground in the middle of Yosemite.
From the LA Times: “Across from the ubiquitous sign in all park bathrooms that says, ‘Please DO NOT put trash in toilets, it is extremely difficult to remove,’ someone added a placard that reads, ‘Please DO NOT put trash in the White House. It is extremely difficult to remove.’”
And so, history tells us, if it looks like trash and smells like trash, it just might be a Trump executive order. And one that is very hard to remove.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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