A. G. Gaston Motel in Birmingham, Alabama, site of the new Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument. Photo credit Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress
The National Park Service’s centennial year was, by most accounts, a great success. In 2016 there were more than 300 million people who visited the agency’s 400-plus units throughout the country, Congress passed the National Park Service Centennial Act to help fund future maintenance and infrastructure needs, and President Barack Obama added nine National Monuments to the agency’s holdings. A week before leaving office, he also added three more National Monuments, including sites in Beaufort County, South Carolina, which comprise the nation’s first National Monument to the Reconstruction era. With record visitation numbers and broad support from the American public, things seem to be going in the right direction for the National Park Service’s future.
And yet, all is not well and serious challenges exist on the horizon. Staff shortages, maintenance backlogs, and tight budgets are commonplace at most NPS units. Some critics of Obama’s expansion of NPS units justifiably claim that expanding the agency’s holdings is unwise when other sites need help. A devastating sexual harassment scandal emerged during the centennial year, highlighting years of inadequate responses by agency leaders and hostile work environments. Former NPS director Jonathan Jarvis got caught in his own ethics scandal. A growing number of politicians advocate the selling of public lands (but not necessarily NPS sites) to states and private entities for economic development. And on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the NPS got in trouble with the new administration for retweeting several items that were, depending on your perspective, harmless statements of fact or insults towards the new President’s administration.
This minor controversy about NPS social media speaks to a larger truth: the Trump administration, as with new administrations in the past, will be keeping a close eye on the actions of the agency. With the threat of future budget cuts always looming when bad PR hits the Park Service, one can see why, as Cathy Stanton argues, the agency has a tendency to stifle workplace dissent and lacks “serious self-reflection.” In any case, public historians working as interpreters for the NPS or any agency in the Department of Interior should use these recent challenges to think about the nature of their work, the educational messages they hope to convey to their many audiences, and how those messages can compliment or clash with larger institutional and political desires. There have been previous instances when the NPS’s interpretive goals clashed with Congress’s goals for the agency, and we could find ourselves in a similar situation moving forward.
The NPS enthusiastically embraces the idea of using interpretive programming to establish “relevance” with audiences. The agency argues that relevance occurs when “all Americans are able to establish a personal connection to the NPS parks and programs,” but how are those personal connections established, especially when we acknowledge that different audiences have different needs, interests, and motivations for visiting NPS sites? On the one hand, public historians at NPS sites are now often encouraged to establish relevance by drawing connections between past and present and making a conscious choice to not stop their historical narratives at 1776, 1865, 1965, or even 2017. On the other hand, a fine line exists between making historical connections to the present and making a statement on contemporary politics, and that line changes whenever new leaders take charge in Washington, D.C. The message for NPS interpreters, it seems, is to be relevant, but not too relevant in how we frame our narratives.
In the late 1990s, for example, the NPS took major steps to craft more inclusive and historically accurate programs about slavery at historic sites influenced by its history. Public historians should remember, however, that the original impetus for this effort came from Congress, which issued directives to the secretary of the interior calling upon NPS Civil War battle sites to more explicitly recognize”the larger context of the Civil War and American history,” including slavery, in shaping the “causes and consequences of the war on all the American people.” More recently, the agency expanded this task through its “Civil War to Civil Rights” initiative, which encouraged NPS interpreters to make connections between Civil War history and fights for civil rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
These initiatives remind us that Congress controls the purse strings and the overall interpretive direction of the NPS. What’s also notable, however, is that such initiatives don’t provide a clear blueprint for making historical connections over time or establishing historical relevance with our audiences. It’s one thing to speak with visitors about slavery, for example, but another to discuss Black Lives Matter, racism, modern-day slavery, or any other contemporary concern. We are trained to interpret the past, but not often trained to make sense of the present. How “relevant” can and should our interpretive programs—and yes, our social media posts as well—be allowed to extend going forward in the interests of education and understanding?
National Park Service Climate Change page Screenshot credit: Adina Langer
Lest we think these political issues are exclusive to interpreters at NPS historical sites, those working at nature-based sites will face the same challenges. The NPS argues that climate change and global warming are serious environmental issues and recently developed a Climate Change Action Plan to encourage environmentally-efficient management practices at NPS sites. What will be the fate of the agency’s future initiatives against climate change in the wake of President Trump’s stated belief that climate change is a “hoax” and that “nobody really knows” whether it exists or not?
The NPS’s mission to protect and provide access to the nation’s natural and cultural resources seems simple enough on the surface. But the reality is that the agency’s practices, particularly the interpretive programs and educational initiatives it undertakes, are inherently political in a heated, partisan climate. Regardless of which party is in power, the agency must constantly work to strike a note of harmony with those very people in power in order to establish institutional stability and continuity. The desire for harmony with Washington, D.C., however, should not preclude the importance of NPS interpreters’s presenting themselves as reliable sources of information and enlightenment who provide audiences historically and scientifically accurate programming based on sound scholarship. With each new administration, the important work of the NPS continues.
~Nick Sacco is a public historian and park guide with the National Park Service at the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site in St. Louis, Missouri. The views shared in this article are solely the author’s and do not reflect the views of the National Park Service.