A National Parks organization sounded the alarm Thursday on CNN over the Trump administration's move to remove national acknowledgment of historical facts such as slavery, the treatment of Native Americans and climate change.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper noted that a group of historians and rangers is fighting back against what they say is an "attempt to whitewash and erase history." That comes after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March known as “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order directed the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior to review all interpretive materials in national parks, such as plaques, exhibits, signs, and educational content, for information that could be considered as "inappropriately disparaging Americans."
Alan Spears, senior director for Cultural Resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, shared with Tapper a list of things being targeted by the order, including slavery, the Civil War, civil rights, labor rights and women’s rights. At the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan and other Park Service sites that referenced LGBTQ people, the administration removed the letter T, a reference to transgender. Images and quotes from Harriet Tubman were also removed from an Underground Railroad site.
"So the trend that we're seeing is taking us in a direction that we think is very dangerous, very aggressive, and quite frankly, un-American," he said.
The National Park Service's park superintendents have to create lists of items that could be "problematic or refer to the country in a negative light, and then ship those back to the Interior Department for review," he said.
Tapper noted that information about America's first president, George Washington, owning nine slaves that he brought from Virginia to Philadelphia, could be removed from Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
"That's right," said Spears. "Because I think what's happening right now is, the idea is to narrow the focus of American history so tightly that we lose sight of a lot of the things that helped to make this country."
Spears said America has a shared national narrative, where the nation did "great things, where we excelled," and other times where it "failed to live up to the better angels of our nature," as said by President Abraham Lincoln.
"That’s our story too. And what we're seeing right now are efforts to kind of whitewash, sanitize, and censor history as it’s told in our national parks," he lamented.
Spears said his organization is hoping for a groundswell of support from the public to oppose the changes. So far, that may be happening, he said. QR codes that went into national parks last month asked people to write in and "tattle" on National Park Service sites haven't succeeded.
"What we've seen is 10 to 1, 20 to 1, 30 to 1 response rate—where people are telling us how much they love national parks and how much they want the truth in our history, that they don’t want to see things censored," Spears said." So we’ve got a good uproar coming from the grassroots level and the public, and we hope to capitalize on that, drive public support."
He urged lawmakers in Congress to step up help stop the attack on history.
"We're in the fight for our lives. This is about as serious as it gets," he said.
