Muir Woods National Park, located just north of San Francisco, is a beautiful and (if we’re feeling romantic) magical place.
Redwood canopies make you feel minuscule — like you’re an observer of nature, rather than a participant in it. While it’s true that the woods welcome something like one million visitors in a year, it doesn’t feel that way. Something about the soft forest floor covered in ferns seems to eat the ambient sound (and, of course, when you visit “Cathedral Grove” you’re supposed to be whispering anyway).
It’s rare that I feel like spontaneously bursting into poetry written by anyone other than Robert Frost, but my visit to Muir Woods four years ago suddenly reminded me that I had memorized Joyce Kilmer’s Trees sometime in elementary school, and it does fit the place rather perfectly:
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
…. Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Unfortunately, that feeling of awe and wonder was, apparently, somewhat lost on the park employees who came up with the park placards littering the boardwalk. One of them was (somewhat infamously) rather hard to miss, since it was decked out in yellow caution tape and featured a notice warning visitors that “Everything on this sign is true but incomplete.” (READ MORE: Blue States’ High Tax State-of-Mind)
Part of this particular display included a series of yellow sticky notes added to the original sign offering amended details about “historical gaps,” including John Muir’s use of “racist language in his writing about Native Americans,” and Rep. William Kent’s involvement in the passage of California’s Alien Land Laws, which “targeted Asian immigrants,” local news outlet SFGate said.
If you visit Muir Woods today, you won’t find that particular sign. It was recently removed after the Trump administration told the National Parks Service to take down placards that “inappropriately disparage Americans.” American National Parks, the administration seems to indicate, should celebrate this great country, not try to undermine it.
By all accounts, the removal of the sign happened a bit before schedule. According to an executive order signed in late March entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” employees (and the public) had until last week to flag potentially problematic placards. The administration aims to review and remove them by Sept. 17, 2025.
According to the New York Times, the move hasn’t made Park Service employees all that happy. Dan Wenk, a former superintendent at Yellowstone National Park, complained that “The national parks were established to tell the American story, and we shouldn’t just tell all the things that make us look wonderful.” Meanwhile, Elizabeth Villano, a former park ranger who had helped work on that post-it note sign at Muir Woods, told SFGate that “they’re telling you what you can and can’t learn. That’s anti-American.” (READ MORE: VW’s EV: Only 10 Percent Loss!)
The concern from these former park rangers and superintendents seems to be that American park signs will devolve into mere outlets for propaganda.
These signs, they tell us, are an important part of the way the average American learns about men like Gifford Pinchot, who both headed what is now the U.S. Forest Service and advised the American Eugenics Society in the 1930s. How else are we, the American public, supposed to discover that rising sea levels threaten the Ocracoke Ponies’ habitat in Cape Hatteras, North Carolina?
No one on either side of the aisle really wants our National Park signs to be mouthpieces for propaganda. But, what critics of the process miss is that many of these placards are currently serving as anti-American propaganda. It’s difficult, for instance, to visit the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, read the exhibit panel calling out “the systemic and violent racism and sexism that existed at the time” (per park employees), and not leave feeling a bit guilty.
Spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of the Interior Elizabeth Peace is correct in noting that “[i]nterpretive materials that disproportionately emphasize negative aspects of U.S. history or historical figures, without acknowledging broader context or national progress, can unintentionally distort understanding rather than enrich it.”
The goal isn’t to rewrite or to erase those less flattering elements of our history. Instead, it’s to remind visitors to our nation’s monuments and national parks that while this country may not be perfect, it’s pretty spectacular.
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