A plaque at Muir Woods National Monument commemorating the 1945 gathering of delegates for the first United Nations peace conference (courtesy of Save Our Signs)
Since almost all the news is bad these days – don’t look at me like you’re surprised – it’s nice, now and then, to hear a bit of better news.
The abrupt quorum-break rebellion by Texas Democratic legislators may well be a legal long shot, but nonetheless it’s encouraging to see our representatives taking risks and fighting back against the Trump regime’s project to rig the next election.
Now here’s another bit of inspiration: Some folks at the University of Minnesota have come up with a way to resist one small but significant aspect of the regime’s aggressive campaign to promote historical ignorance and misinformation. Moreover, they’ve provided ways for all of us to collaborate in the effort. If we are to survive the mandated dark ages imposed by Trump’s official eraserheads, it may well be the librarians who save us.
Under the simple slogan “Save Our Signs,” this group of librarians and public historians would like us all to help protect and preserve the informational signs that the National Park Service provides visitors to the myriad U.S. national parks and monuments. They hope to defend the signs from federally mandated, dishonest revisions and censorship.
Under the ongoing Trumpist effort to whitewash U.S. history, National Park personnel have been ordered to review all Park signage to determine whether it is sufficiently “solemn and uplifting,” and does not present “descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”
At Manzanar National Historic Site in California, a plaque reads: “In 1942, the United States government ordered over 110,000 men, women, and children to leave their homes and detained them in remote, military-style camps. Two-thirds of them were born in America. Not one was convicted of espionage or sabotage. For 10,000 of them, Manzanar would be their new home.” It’s not yet clear how the Trump administration plans to reframe that history in order to “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” (courtesy of Save Our Signs)
That bloviation is from Trump’s March 27 executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It was followed by a May 20 implementation order from Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, requiring National Park personnel – already decimated by reckless budget cuts – to review all signage for any deviations from Trumpist political correctness and to report back within 90 days. Under the pretense of restoring historical accuracy, the directives insist that any inkling of negative commentary about anything – people, places, or things – is to be removed. (How that idiotic directive might apply, for just one example, to the Manzanar National Historic Site, commemorating the WWII concentration-camp internment of 10,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens, is a mystery.)
The offending signage is to be rectified or removed by September, although at least some historical heresies have already been censored by the administration. Among the first casualties were the signs at Muir Woods National Monument, the magnificent grove of old growth redwoods in Marin County, California (near Sausalito). The land was donated to the federal government in 1908, named after pioneer conservationist John Muir, and designated a National Monument by President Theodore Roosevelt. The grove is a 250-acre remnant of the massive, heavily logged redwood forest that once extended from Oregon to California, and as such represents a natural and political history both inspiring and distressing.
At Muir Woods National Monument, a National Park Service project called “History Under Construction” updated signage (in yellow) to a offer more expansive and nuanced history of the place. Under Trump’s order, that additional context has been removed. (courtesy of Save Our Signs)
The Monument has always had signage providing a basic history of the Park’s creation, explanatory instructions, and recently, environmental information. In 2021, Muir Rangers decided to add additional contextual material to the existing signs. Under the heading “History Under Construction,” they maintained the existing information, but filled in some historical blanks: the indigenous history of the area, the initial efforts of local women’s clubs to preserve the park, the sometimes racist sentiments of the park’s official founders (including even environmental saint Muir). Other signs along the park’s trails provided expanded notes about the precarious future of the trees under the effects of climate change.
Former Ranger Elizabeth Villano, who helped write the annotated signs, wrote recently in Medium: “Rangers are the nation’s history keepers, its storytellers. And our job is to tell an unbiased, complete version of history. We tell the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between.”
So for a few years, Muir Woods visitors could read both the basic but incomplete information, and the helpful contextual commentary added in 2021. By chance, I was among the last people to read the full signage; on a visit in mid-July, my wife and I spent an afternoon walking through Muir Woods. It was an emotionally exalting experience of natural and historical resonance. But when I read the explanatory signage – complete with its important, enlightening additions – I sensed that once our new Washington masters got wind of them, the additional notes were doomed.
I didn’t realize it would happen so quickly. Late July news accounts reported that the amplified signage had been removed. A Muir Woods spokesman confirmed to me that the main historical timeline discussing both the official Park founding and the larger historical context – including the expropriation and near-genocide of the Miwok Indians who had maintained the forest for centuries, and the California women’s clubs that initiated the 20th century preservation effort – had been returned to its pre-annotated state: no Miwok, no women, and definitely no hints of the eugenicist sympathies of the Park’s official, white, male founders. The restored original, if it’s ever re-installed, should fulfill Burgum’s direction of no “inappropriate disparagement of Americans past or living.” Some Americans just get disappeared – or, in contemporary right-wing parlance, “canceled.”
Enter the librarians. The Save Our Signs group has embarked on a “collaborative, crowd-sourced” effort to record and preserve the historical signage before Burgum can erase it all. Judging from their initial results posted on the SOS web site, they’re well on their way to publicly preserving all that signage, Trump and Burgum be damned. They plan to complete the website by October – although to a great degree that depends on the rest of us, whoever among us visits one of the myriad National Parks or Monuments in the next few weeks, photographs the current signage, and uploads the photos to the Save Our Signs website. (As of early August, visitors had uploaded groups of photos for four National Monuments. One is Muir Woods.)
Nearly 20 National Park sites are in Texas, including Big Bend and the Big Thicket, both threatened by climate change, no longer federally recognized. Not sure what Burgum and company will make of Marfa’s Blackwell School National Historical Site, commemorating decades of segregated education for Mexican Americans. Maybe they’ll just blame it on DEI.
I spoke to Molly Blake, one of the five co-founders of Save Our Signs, about the project. She’s a social sciences librarian at the University of Minnesota, and she understands her professional responsibility is “preserving information for researchers, and to enable public access to that information.” So the project is right in her wheelhouse, and in those of the other librarians and historians working on it. Blake says she and her partners have been “totally thrilled” with the early public response – and to judge from the map filled with green spots indicating where National Park visitors have recorded signs thus far, her elation is understandable.
Blake admits she is no “National Park guru,” so she has been pleased with the personal opportunity to learn more about the sites around the country. By early August, nearly 3,500 photos had been uploaded to the project, with more arriving each day. The Park Service lists “433 units covering more than 85 million acres in all 50 states,” among them literal parks, monuments, battlefields, rivers, etc. To record all that now-threatened signage, the organizers are hoping that a few of the millions of annual visitors to the Parks will do the legwork.
“We’re not asking people to comment or analyze the signs,” Blake said, “although we invite them to think critically about the content. Our goal is to raise awareness, and to invite people to get involved.” The project asks that people submit photos of “signs, exhibits, placards, and text from areas administered by the National Park Service” – the signs alone, not tourist-snaps including people (to protect privacy) – and the photos will become part of the public domain. (Much more information is available at Save Our Signs, along with the beginnings of the public archive.)
Signage at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia includes the experiences of enslaved people, who would not have benefitted from the protections granted in the Constitution of the United States, adopted on site at Independence Hall. The acknowledgment of America’s long history of slavery may not fit Trump’s directive that National Park signage be “uplifting.” (courtesy of Save Our Signs)
It’s a singular but important effort, to begin to hold back the tidal wave of historical erasure undertaken by the Trump regime – at the White House, at the Smithsonian Institution, at the National Archives, at the Kennedy Center, at universities, at every public institution they are bullying or blackmailing into submission. Burgum has designated Sept. 17 as the deadline for censoring of the existing signs into some form of official pablum, in an Orwellian attempt to restore what the Trumpists call “truth and sanity” – their euphemism for sneering dishonesty.
“Here’s something people can do to help preserve that information,” Blake said. If you’re one of the millions of people visiting these places this summer, you can collaborate directly to the project. The SOS website also provides a link for financial donations.
SOS notes that the National Park Service is our “largest outdoor history classroom,” and adds that “real history is not just happy stories.” If the Trump regime is not stopped, it will begin constructing a radically dishonest version of American history suitable only for authoritarian rule. In the words of former Ranger Villano, “The American people deserve better than this. We don’t need executive paternalism telling us what we can and can’t say, and taking away our ability to make decisions for ourselves. The administration says [its action] ‘is not about rewriting the past.’ But how can that be the case if they’re erasing half of the narrative?”