SAN FRANCISCO — The superintendent of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, a subsidiary of the National Park Service in California’s Bay Area, will review signage on display at Muir Woods National Monument after a Federalist inquiry raising concerns it violates President Donald Trump’s executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
One of the trail signs at the national monument, which has welcomed visitors to enjoy California’s towering redwood trees since 1908, explains how the area became a national monument through the efforts of businessman William Kent and his wife Elizabeth, President Theodore Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot, the U.S. Forest Service’s first director. But affixed to the sign is a large piece of laminated paper on Muir Woods National Monument letterhead, declaring in all-caps with yellow highlighting: “ALERT: HISTORY UNDER CONSTRUCTION.” (See here for the accompanying webpage explaining the change.)
The poster warns that “the way we tell the history” is “under construction,” alerting viewers that the original sign “left out” historical facts like “the racist ideology of many people who helped to protect this place.”
In a self-proclaimed attempt to “tell a more complete story,” park staff made 21 revisions to a timeline on the sign. One of the edits noted that John Muir, the 19th-century environmentalist and namesake of the park, had referred “to Indigenous people using racist language in his diary … ignoring the genocide they survived.”
Somehow, according to the sign, Muir’s choice of language in his diary “contributes to an idea that Indigenous people don’t belong in parks.” You’ve probably never heard that idea expressed anywhere, except by this particular sign at Muir Woods National Monument.
William Kent was a conservationist who donated land to the federal government to create Muir Woods, and also helped create the National Park Service. But an addition to the sign insists readers know he also pushed “anti-Asian policy and rhetoric, laying groundwork for Japanese mass incarceration during WWII and a wave of Asian American hate that continues today.”
Other revisions emphasize the connections of some turn-of-the-century conservationists to the eugenics movement and note that a coalition of women’s groups that helped establish the first California state park “actively excluded clubs of women of color.”
One particularly anal-retentive revision declares that the Civilian Conservation Corps, a public service program that employed young men in the 1930s to do manual labor such as building National Park facilities, also included women.
Park staff also included post-George Floyd factoids. One inclusion on the sign notes that in 2020, “Save the Redwoods League and Sierra Club publicly renounce[d] the racism of their founders.”
An entry for 2021 says: “The National Park Service, California State Parks, Save the Redwoods League, and the Yurok Indigenous community reject Madison Grant’s racist ideology. They replace a plaque to him in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park with an interpretive sign about his complex legacy.” (Grant was a conservationist and a founder of the Save the Redwoods League.) Notably, a plaque placed in Muir Woods by the United Nations honoring Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt as an “apostle of lasting peace for all mankind” is so far undisturbed, despite Roosevelt’s oversight of Japanese internment camps during World War II.
Many instances where park staff went out of their way to highlight the moral failings of the park’s benefactors may be in violation of a March executive order. In the order, President Trump slammed “revisionist” attempts to emphasize the failings of influential Americans or portray them as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
The order directed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to ensure properties governed by DOI “do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” Instead, national monuments should “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.”
The Federalist reached out to the National Park Service to ask about the signage. In response, Superintendent David Smith of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area told The Federalist he would “be paying specific attention to this exhibit” when the park submits “all exhibits and printed media to the Department of the Interior” to be reviewed for compliance with the order within the next two weeks.
“Secretarial Order 3431 directs parks to begin a comprehensive inventory of all printed media to determine if there is anything that reflects poorly on the history of the [United] States,” Smith said. “I will be overseeing the final list of media that we will be submitting and will be paying specific attention to this exhibit for further review.”
Smith added that our inquiry was the “first time” he received public feedback on the sign, and that “this is the type of exhibit that the Secretary has directed us to review to ensure its appropriateness.”
“The President is our ultimate leader, and we adhere to his orders and directives,” he promised.
Elle Purnell is the assignment editor at The Federalist. She has appeared on Fox Business and Newsmax, and her work has been featured by RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
