West Virginia historians raise alarm about Trump executive order

This story was produced by journalism students in the WVU Reed School of Media and Communications. Read more at journalism.wvu.edu.

HARPERS FERRY, W.Va. — Despite concerns about attempted historical erasure at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park due to new Trump administration policies being unfounded, some historians worry other attempts across the country may have a detrimental impact on historical preservation in the U.S.

ABC 7 News first reported that Harpers Ferry was forced to remove items located in its slavery exhibit due to the Trump Administration’s March 27 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” According to the report, the order would force “the National Park Service [to] remove or cover up signs or displays that have been determined by the Trump administration to disproportionally emphasize negative aspects of American history or historical figures.”

However, Alan Spears, the senior director for cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, said a citizen watchdog group created to protect and enhance America’s national parks found the story to be false. As a historian, Spears’ work in the association is focused on protecting and promoting historic and cultural resources tied to the federal parks department.

According to him and other historians, concern is still being raised about how this order is affecting national parks and important historical exhibits across the country.

According to the order, it intends to “restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity and human flourishing.”

Two months after the initial order was released, on May 20, the Secretary of the Interior released an additional order, SO 3431, which essentially “operationalized” the order for the United States Parks Service, according to Spears.

The order did three things. First, it set up QR codes that allowed parkgoers to enter comments about the location. Spears said he believes that the administration was looking for people to “tattle on the National Park service to say, ‘We don’t really like this interpretation. It’s too liberal, it’s too woke, it’s too DEI, it’s too anti-American.’”

However, what the Secretary of the Interior found instead was that many parkgoers had either positive things to say about the historical interpretation of these sites or that these sites actually needed more work when defining issues like slavery, women’s rights, labor rights, and Native and Indigenous history.

Next, the parks were ordered to submit lists of any interpretive materials that might fall into what SO 3431 is trying to remove. Finally, the Secretary of the Interior sorted through these lists and sent out letters of noncompliance.

According to Spears, not all parks submitted lists for review, and not all parks were sent letters from the Interior. Ultimately, Harpers Ferry was not included in either set.

There are some images that could trigger a letter of noncompliance, according to Spears, such as photographs from their “Protests in America” display of a man being arrested at an AIDS protest, a group protesting the Vietnam War and the National Women’s Party that protested for women’s suffrage, for example. However, the park has not received orders to remove them, and Spears said that as far as he is aware, they do not plan to.

However, he said he does believe that the administration is not running an entirely transparent process. Despite Harpers Ferry not being on the list, several other facilities in the country were told to scrub their historical sites and landmarks.

Signs about climate change at Acadia National Park in Maine have been taken down, an LGBTQ display at a Rosie the Riveter site in Oakland, California, was taken down and then put back after concern was raised, and references to transgender activism at the Stonewall Inn in New York City have been removed.

“The truth of the matter is that nobody really is talking publicly about what’s been on the target list,” Spears said.

The language of the order itself has also caused concern, with the focus framed 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,” instead of outright saying it will enforce bans on historical knowledge focused on marginalized groups.

Another historian and graduate student, Peter D’Arpa, said he believes the wording is built to give it plausible deniability.

“[The administration] can’t, right now, just do stuff. They have to keep people happy, where we’re at right now.”

He compared this language to fascist states like Nazi Germany, in which Nazis would “build consensus amongst your population of who belongs and who doesn’t,” “get them angry at certain groups,” and only then, once they were used to ostracize members of the group, could they move on to their removal or inflict violence on them.

Spears said what’s happening now is an issue of “whether or not this country wants to come to grips with the lingering effects” of difficult parts of American history, including slavery.

In his perspective, some do and some don’t — and that is one of the crises at the heart of the historical erasure, he said.

“I think it’s important that efforts to soften, sanitize, erase this history is critically important,” Spears said. “If you don’t want to learn about slavery and its lingering impacts on this country, that’s your choice. I think it’s a bad choice, but it’s your choice.”

In the end, he said he does not want that choice to be taken away from those who actively want to seek out these stories and learn from them.

“I do believe that if we… want to bring people together, that we have to see each other and understand a little bit more about where we’ve come from. That means our history — that shared national narrative of ours — has to include the ugly parts as well as the beautiful parts,” Spears said.

D’Arpa has also raised concerns about the order and how it points to division within the country. According to him, the division and historical erasure happening now are a result of citizens being angry and scared that they are being forgotten by those in power.

“They hear that the Democrats say they want to take care of a specific group of people, but they don’t hear the Democrats say they want to take care of all Americans, and that scares people that are in rural America that might like American policies,” he said. “They don’t want to be forgotten, they don’t want to feel like they’re being forced to accept a certain ideology that they don’t agree with.”

Politically, D’Arpa said he believes the order to be anti-American. He said that it points to the president taking power away from the people and the states, using the power of the federal government to force the people and the states “to basically think the way the government wants them to think.”

The historical preservation and documentation that took place during this time also inspired the Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, an organization in which volunteers photograph and film different exhibits in the Smithsonian, should anything be removed or changed. The Smithsonian museums located in D.C. have been sent letters of noncompliance, but as of right now, nothing has changed.

Historically, similar censorship has happened in Communist China, according to historian and professor at Georgetown University and co-founder of the citizen historians group Citizens Historians for the Smithsonian James Millward.

After the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party worked very hard over decades to ensure people didn’t know the full story of what happened.

“They created their own version of what it was, and made it impossible to write about or talk about,” Millward said.

The historical preservation and documentation that took place during this time also inspired the Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, an organization in which volunteers photograph and film different exhibits in the Smithsonian, should anything be removed or changed. The Smithsonian museums located in D.C. have been sent letters of noncompliance, but as of right now, nothing has changed.

Lizzie Watts, who worked in the National Parks Service for 49 years, said she feels the order makes it harder to tell a complete story. She said she believes people work hard to preserve historical sites like Harpers Ferry because they tell an inclusive story of our history.

“All stories are not happy, all stories don’t end on a good note, but they’re history,” she said. “If we ever want to get back to a moderate world where everyone gets along and understands each other and works for the betterment of the United States, then we have to be inclusive. You can’t leave people out, you can’t avoid the sad things to just “try to save the positive parts of history.”

Ultimately, all these historians say that the order is unique to the United States in this moment, and although it is not clear what the future of it will look like, they worry about the preservation of the nation’s history for future generations.