A March 27 pronouncement titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” ordered the secretary of the interior to take action to ensure that public properties “do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
Within a few days, the Washington Post reported, employees of the National Park Service had rewritten its web pages on American history, removing references to slavery from a page about the Underground Railroad and references to transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument. Gender disappeared from an article by Wendy Rouse about the queer history of the women’s suffrage movement.
Reports of this whitewashing raised an outcry. Still, I found myself thinking about Winston Smith, the tormented hero of George Orwell’s novel 1984, written in 1949. Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth in Big Brother’s Republic of Oceania was to do exactly what the president has ordered in 2025: rewriting history to suit the political orthodoxy of the moment.
“This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance,” Orwell wrote. “Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.”
In Orwell’s dystopia, the recording of history has stopped, and the idea that objective truth exists is quickly vanishing from the world.
Now, it is true that the outcry after the Post’s report forced the Park Service to restore the disappeared material about the Underground Railroad. An NPS spokesperson said that particular cut had been a mistake. But that’s not the end of the story. Last month, signs appeared at national parks — including the Cape Cod National Seashore’s Salt Pond Visitor Center in Eastham — instructing visitors to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans.” Comments can be submitted “via QR code,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum added in a helpful set of follow-up instructions.
In 1984, the inhabitants of Oceania are encouraged to report their neighbors who express unacceptable ideas to the Thought Police. In our new world, citizens can complain about the history lessons of park rangers without even setting foot in a park. “What would stop somebody with an agenda from posting fake comments?” Clara Wooden of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks told National Public Radio.
What will stop a president with a totalitarian agenda from canceling NPR?
