Orders from President Donald Trump for the National Park Service to scrub signs and displays of words considered to contain "improper partisan ideology" or negative or unpatriotic language are causing consternation among critics who say the parks are being asked to erase negative parts of American history.
"The whole thing is 'flabbergasting,'" according to Dennis Arguelles, the Southern California director for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, reported the Los Angeles Times Thursday. "These stories may not be flattering to American heritage, but they're an integral part of our history. If we lose these stories, then we're in danger of repeating some of these mistakes."
Trump's executive order, signed on March 27, went into effect last week, with national parks, monuments, and museums that are supervised by the Department of the Interior to make sure signs remind Americans of the country's "extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing."
But Trump opponents and free speech advocates say they don't know how Park service employees are to make positive displays on monuments that acknowledge troubled times in the nation's history, such as slavery, or how to put a positive spin on monuments about the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Park service employees have been putting up signs at the monuments to explain the changes, giving a QR code so visitors can report any wording that potentially goes against the executive order.
A notice at Manzanar National Historic Site in the desert of eastern California, 1 of 10 camps where more than 120,000 Japanese American civilians were imprisoned in the early 1940s, contains the QR code and a request to report signs that are "negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur and abundance of landscapes."
The same signs have gone up at the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument in Kern County, California, which pays tribute to the struggle for safe working conditions and better wages for migrant farm workers.
The signs are also at places such as the Fort Sumter National Monument, where the first shots in the Civil War were fired; at Ford's Theater National Historic Site in Washington, D.C., the location of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination; and at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Park.
A National Park Service spokesperson did not address specific parks or monuments when asked for comment by the LA Times but said changes are being made "where appropriate."
In Trump's order, the president specifically asked the Department of the Interior to examine signs put up since the Biden administration's beginning in 2020 and to remove language that shows what he called "false reconstruction" of American history.
He also spoke out against signs that "undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light."
Trump specifically said that the National Historical Park in Philadelphia and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., had followed the Biden administration's attempts to paint "our nation's unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights and human happiness" as being "inherently racist, sexist, oppressive or otherwise irredeemably flawed."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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