From layoffs to billion-dollar budget cuts and ideological battles over history itself, the National Park Service is facing one of the most turbulent moments in its 109-year history.
Reporter Heath Druzin hikes deep into Yellowstone National Park’s backcountry with biologist Doug Smith, who helped reintroduce wolves to the park 30 years ago. The program transformed the ecosystem but could be at risk in future rounds of budget cuts.
Also particularly at risk: biologists and other scientists whose conservation work happens behind the scenes. Reveal’s Nadia Hamdan talks to Andria Townsend, a carnivore biologist at Yosemite National Park who tracks endangered fishers and Sierra Nevada red foxes.
“I would say myself and every other federal employee has not felt safe in their position,” Townsend says. “It makes it challenging to feel that same passion and drive that you maybe had for your work before.”
Meanwhile in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, reporter Najib Aminy attends a Civil War reenactment. He meets hobbyists and historians grappling with a new executive order from the Trump administration that directs the National Park Service to strip away what it calls “partisan ideology” from monuments and signage. This week on Reveal: what’s really at stake in the battle over America’s parks.
Dig Deeper
Listen: Howl podcast (Boise State Public Radio and Idaho Capital Sun)
Read: Howl series (Idaho Capital Sun)
Read: Trump’s Ruthless Cuts Have Left Our National Parks in “Survival Mode” (Mother Jones)
Read: Trump Shrank Staffing of National Parks. See How Many Are Struggling. (The New York Times)
Photos
Credits
Reporters: Heath Druzin, Clark Corbin, Nadia Hamdan, and Najib Aminy | Producers: Najib Aminy and Nadia Hamdan | Editor: Jenny Casas | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Fact checker: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Original score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Legal review: Victoria Baranetsky | Episode executive producer: Kate Howard | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks: Ashley Cleek
Support for Reveal is provided by listeners like you, and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. |
| Heath Druzin: | So we’re looking for the trail again. It’s been disappearing on us at this juncture here. |
| Al Letson: | This is Idaho-based Public Radio reporter, Heath Druzin, and he’s a little lost. |
| Doug Smith: | Yeah, it’s gone. We’ve lost it. |
| Al Letson: | He’s with wildlife biologist Doug Smith, and they’re hiking in the back country of the first national park, Yellowstone. They’re in a remote part of Wyoming near the Montana border, walking through thick grass, miles away from any road. |
| Heath Druzin: | What’s your tips and tricks when you’re looking for a trail like this? Are there some sort of telltale signs ahead? |
| Doug Smith: | Well, terrain’s a big one, where would you walk that’s best. |
| Al Letson: | Doug has spent much of his life in Yellowstone. He’s crisscrossed it on foot, horseback and overhead in small planes, so he knows the park better than most. |
| Heath Druzin: | You found it? Oh, there it is. |
| Doug Smith: | I don’t know how we lost it. It’s pretty good here. |
| Heath Druzin: | We’re back on the trail. For now. |
| Al Letson: | Heath and Doug are searching for something that many of us would try to avoid, wolves. Doug has kind of been the wolf guide for decades ever since the federal government first reintroduced wolves to the Rocky Mountains. |
| Doug Smith: | Where we’re going is a beautiful area, Cache Creek that isn’t really visited that much and it’s important to wolves. So we’re going to just head in there and kind of immerse ourselves in wolf world. |
| Al Letson: | Reviving this population was controversial. Wolves had mostly been exterminated in the region by the 1940s to protect cattle and sheep, but the absence of this top predator left the ecosystem out of whack. So in 1995, the federal government brought in a few dozen wolves from Canada and released them in Yellowstone and Idaho. From there, the Feds nurtured and monitored that population in partnership with state wildlife agencies and indigenous tribes. It was a huge success. This year is the 30th anniversary of wolves being reintroduced to this area. There are now roughly 3000 of them in the west. |
| Doug Smith: | Yellowstone is a very different place with and without wolves. They have a big influence. |
| Al Letson: | Labor Day weekend is the end of the peak season for many of the country’s national parks. Parks officials think this year’s visitorship might break last year’s record of nearly 332 million visitors. Out of the view of the visitor centers and crowded trails, biologists and researchers have spent decades monitoring and protecting the biodiversity that many people come to the national parks to see, and their work is under threat. |
| In the last few months, the National Park Service has lost 24% of its staff. President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill rescinded $267 million that was promised for the park service and the Trump administration has proposed more cuts to the tune of more than a billion dollars, roughly a third of its budget. | |
| It’s the work that happens off the trail like Yellowstone’s Wolf program that is the most at risk of losing staff and funding. This hour we’re spending time in our national parks to see firsthand what conservation work has accomplished, and we hear about the big changes, financial and ideological, that threaten these parks as we know them. First up this hour, Heath takes us into wolf world. | |
| Heath Druzin: | Just getting into wolf country was difficult enough. We had to carry 40-pound packs heavy with food, cook stoves, sleeping bags and tents. |
| Okay, we’re at the Lamar River trailhead and we’re just finishing up packing, getting some sunscreen on. | |
| I’m no stranger to backpacking. I’ve visited more than 25 national parks. And living in Idaho, I spent a ton of time exploring public lands, which make up nearly two-thirds of the state. But it’s also my job. I’ve reported from national parks and forests for more than 15 years, and I convinced Doug Smith to be my guide on a two-day backpacking trip to learn more about how the reintroduction of wolves had reshaped the landscape. | |
| Doug Smith: | Hiking this trail now, we’re up seven, eight miles into it. There’s moderate wolf use to this area. Could be current wolf use. |
| Heath Druzin: | Doug is retired now, but he’s been studying wolves since college. For over 40 years after that, hikes like these were just another day at the office. |
| Doug Smith: | Right over the hill is Lamar Valley, Grand Central Station for a lot of people who visit the park, short distance away for a wolf. They’re kind of back here in Shangri-La for them. |
| Heath Druzin: | Doug is tall and fit with a bushy handlebar mustache, straight out of a Mountain Men central casting, and he’s kind of famous for his work with Yellowstone wolves, which themselves are the most famous wolves in the world. Walking around with him in the park was a little like being with the conservation equivalent of Mick Jagger. I half expected tourists to ask him to sign their binoculars. Doug said that attention never stopped being weird for him. |
| Doug Smith: | I don’t feel like a person deserving of recognition, so it’s always nerve-racking because you feel like, “Oh, I better bring it up a notch so I don’t blow this person’s impression.” |
| Heath Druzin: | But out in the back country, that’s when I really saw him in his element. All around us were 9,000 foot peaks, thick with pine forests. Nearby the Lamar River cut through its namesake valley and long meandering ribbons where large herds of bison grazed. But Doug had his eyes below the horizon, on something a little less majestic. |
| Doug Smith: | I can’t say holy (censored) on the air. |
| Heath Druzin: | Oh yeah, yeah. |
| Doug Smith: | Holy mackerel. That’s a big wolf scat. No question. It’s so big. It’s a mixture of meat and hair. So this is wolf country as evidenced by that gigantic scat, which is a scientific term for feces. |
| Heath Druzin: | For wildlife researchers, feces are a big part of the job. |
| Doug Smith: | I know that sounds bad, but all biologists study poop at some point in their career because it really gives you a good idea of one, where they’re going, and two, what they’re eating. |
| Heath Druzin: | Doug has worked with wild wolves more than just about anyone else on the planet. He’s got an encyclopedic knowledge of these animals and how they affect the environment. On the trail, Doug stopped at groves of aspen trees to explain how wolves and other predators are changing the landscape. |
| Doug Smith: | This young aspen forest here is all really recent and I would say I think really cool. And I just did the thing you’re not supposed to, and put a value judgment on nature. Nature just is. But with the return of carnivores to this ecosystem, wolves, cougars, increase in bears, they’ve all kind of come back, you’ve got this which you didn’t have before, and this means life to other things. |
| Heath Druzin: | Basically wolves keep elk nervous and on the move. That means they don’t chew young aspens to the nub before they can grow tall. |
| Doug Smith: | But you guys don’t have to be ecologists to see all these aspen are young. Within a few years, and man, give them 20 or 30, you’re going to have a forest here, which for most of the 20th century was not here. |
| Heath Druzin: | In turn, this aspen forest provides wood for beavers to build dams and cover for fish like trout. So wolves can even indirectly improve rivers. It’s a process known as a trophic cascade. This is why there was such a push to bring them back. They restore balance to the ecosystem. |
| At the end of a long day on the trail, we sit around our campfire. We’re about 10 miles from any road. It’s one of the largest intact ecosystems in the world. A place that was never logged, farmed, or significantly developed, left as it was thousands of years ago. Feels like time travel. | |
| Doug Smith: | I want to share the pleasure of moments like this, and I want more people to feel that just from a purely, “Hey, this is great. You should do it.” But also we need help, and I want more people to be preservationists, like we’re looking out here, save this exactly as it is. |
| Heath Druzin: | After two days and 20 miles under a heavy pack and a climb of more than 3000 feet, I was exhausted and we didn’t see any wolves, just their scat, but they were most certainly out there, probably watching us. Even for someone like Doug, it’s hard to find wildlife that doesn’t want to be found, and this was just a tiny peek into the exhaustive work wildlife researchers like Doug do, the kind that’s at risk if Congress cuts already tight budgets for national parks and forests. |
| Our backpacking trip was in July 2024 before the presidential election. A lot has already changed and the future of ecological programs like these, they’re uncertain. | |
| Doug Smith: | I believe in nature. That has been my life. |
| Heath Druzin: | Doug and I have stayed in touch, and so I reached back out to him to ask him why preserving nature means so much to him. |
| Doug Smith: | There are times when you are out in the environment alone and a bird, a beaver or a wolf is free ranging, and humans usually to them mean bad, so they usually almost always flee. Once in a great while, they won’t. They stop. And sometimes that’s all they do. Other times they’ll actually come towards you. And there is nothing like that. Nothing. Those moments make me a different person. An animal chooses to stay with you, approach you, look at you, think about you. It rearranges everything in your life. |
| Heath Druzin: | I know what he means. A few years ago, I was hiking by myself in Yellowstone. I was in the Lamar Valley not far from where Doug and I spent our two days. It was an unseasonably chilly summer morning, and I was winding my way up through a mix of pine trees and sagebrush. I was about a mile into the trail when I saw something large move in the bushes ahead of me. I froze. Then she emerged, a black wolf. And she wasn’t alone. She had three pups with her. They were just a couple hundred feet from me. The mama wolf sat on her haunches and locked eyes with me panting. She looked so relaxed. I stared at her wide-eyed trying not to move a muscle for what felt like the longest 30 seconds of my life. She eventually padded off out of sight with her brood. Then this happened. |
| I knew how rare this was, so I quickly whipped out my phone to record it. I was alone in the wilderness, surrounded by the eerie wolf howls. The feeling I had was a tingling of excitement mixed with awe and a touch of fear. It’s the feeling you get from being a visitor in the domain of the wild. That squishy idea of conservation becomes the tangible idea of protecting what’s right in front of your face. Doug was right. It does change you. | |
| America’s national parks and wildernesses are some of the last truly wild places. The question is, will they stay that way? | |
| Al Letson: | This segment was reported by Heath Druzin with production help from Reveal’s Nadia Hamdan. Heath just completed a five-part series about the controversial and violent history of the effort to reintroduce wolves into the west. It’s called Howl. In partnership with Boise State Public Radio, you can hear it wherever you get your podcasts. You can also read a version of Heath’s reporting at the Idaho Capital Sun. That’s idahocapitolsun.com. |
| Up next, how the cuts to national parks are threatening conservation efforts like Doug’s. | |
| Speaker 4: | If you want your grandkids to come back and see bison or other species, you need to have those scientists behind the scenes making sure that they’re protected there as well. |
| Al Letson: | You are listening to Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. It wasn’t until college in mammalogy class that Andria Townsend learned about fishers, not people who hunt fish, fisher the mammal. |
| Andria Townsend: | They’re like a dark chocolate brown that can vary in color with golden highlights and silver highlights. They have rounded ears and a cute little pointed face. |
| Al Letson: | They’re often called fisher cats because they’re about the same size as a cat with long, fluffy tails, but they’re actually part of the weasel family. Think otters, badgers, wolverines. |
| Andria Townsend: | If anyone listening doesn’t know, they should definitely google fisher right now and check them out because they’re so cute. |
| Al Letson: | And there are fewer than 500 of them left in the Sierra Nevada. |
| Andria Townsend: | They’ve really suffered in their last decade or so from the drought that California experienced. |
| Al Letson: | There are hundreds of endangered animals across the National Park System and it’s biologists like Andria who do the behind the scenes work to make sure they aren’t lost forever, and to get to do this in a place like Yosemite National Park, well, it was a dream job for Andria. Then came February. |
| Andria Townsend: | It was Valentine’s Day. It was February 14th when I got an email that told me that I was being fired because of my probationary status. |
| Al Letson: | Andria was a part of the Trump administration’s mass layoff of federal workers. The White House and its Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE fired thousands of probationary workers in one day to eliminate what they called waste, fraud, and abuse. The National Park Service alone lost about a thousand people. |
| Andria Townsend: | I was the only one in the office on a Friday afternoon and just lost it a little bit, and I was very, very sad. |
| Al Letson: | This was the first in a line of very specific budget threats to NPS. Not only has the agency already lost a quarter of its staff since January, it could lose tens of millions in government-funded research. In October, we’ll find out if even more cuts are coming down the pike when Congress reaches its deadline for a new budget. Reveal producer Nadia Hamdan spoke with 20 people who worked in and around NPS to find out what we’ve lost, what we could lose, and what it means for the future of the National Park System. Nadia takes it from here. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | The mass firing in February coincided with one of the busiest times of year for Andria and her team, capture season. To monitor fishers, they have to catch them, fit them with GPS collars, then let them go. They only do this in the fall and winter when the animals aren’t breeding. |
| Andria Townsend: | So, for me, that was what felt the worst was to be leaving my colleagues like that and not being able to continue contributing to the work that we were doing. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Andria and her team also monitor red foxes. To do this, they set up remote camera stations up in the high alpine parts of Yosemite. These red foxes are even more rare. |
| Andria Townsend: | There’s estimated to be fewer than 50 individuals in the park. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Andria got a lot of calls from reporters after she was fired, and we all asked her the same question, what did the layoffs mean for those fishers and foxes? |
| Andria Townsend: | I think I didn’t have a satisfactory answer because it’s not one of those things where everything just falls apart immediately and species that are going to go extinct tomorrow, right? What it really meant is that the people that I work with had to take on a lot more. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | But there was another question she got a lot, one I also had to ask. Why should I care about that box? |
| Andria Townsend: | Yeah, totally. That question came up a lot in many different ways, and even now, I still… It’s hard for me because I see intrinsic value in wildlife, so I don’t know how to make people care about that necessarily. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | At a time when the Trump administration has slashed spending on healthcare, ramped up immigration arrests and shuttered life-saving foreign aid programs, it can be hard to make a case for programs that don’t immediately impact humans. But poll after poll shows that national parks are beloved in this country. We go to these places to escape from the news, from politics, from the day-to-day grind of being alive in the modern world. |
| Andria Townsend: | I think sometimes it takes people kind of having experiences with wildlife or having experiences in a wilderness area or in a national park to really maybe fully understand what that means. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | And those experiences don’t just happen by accident. There is someone right now monitoring the animals, the grass, the streams, the air. It’s part of the original mission of the parks to provide enjoyment, yes, but also to conserve the environment for future generations. After five weeks, Andria was ultimately rehired with back pay, along with about a thousand other park service employees. A ruling out of a federal court in California found that the firings were illegal, but there’s still so much uncertainty. |
| Andria Townsend: | I would say myself and every other federal employee has not felt safe in their position going to work every day wondering, “Do I still have a job?” It makes it challenging to feel that same passion and drive that you maybe had for your work before because now you’re wondering, “Does it mean anything anymore if this is all just going to be torn down from the inside out?” |
| Nadia Hamdan: | In July, a ruling from the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to execute more mass federal layoffs. This means all those probationary workers are at risk of losing their jobs again, and there could be an even bigger reduction in NPS staff. |
| Ed Stierli: | So when you lose people that do a lot of these studies, you lose a lot of the institutional knowledge. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | This is Ed Stierli. |
| Ed Stierli: | And we’re so concerned about that because that’s not something that you can just go and rehire, right? |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Ed is a regional director with the National Parks Conservation Association. Founded in 1919, the NPCA is the country’s oldest watchdog group to protect national parks, and Ed tells me the park service has lost more than 4,000 employees this year. The jobs lost were through a mix of firings, buyouts and just plain old attrition. Since the Trump administration’s hiring freeze is still in place, many were the people working directly with wildlife or doing other long-term scientific research. |
| Ed Stierli: | Unfortunately, this administration has really centered their target on them and those programs thinking that they’re expendable because they are not in the customer service business. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | These are people like the two fish biologists whose job it was to monitor wild salmon and seal head over 4,000 miles of river at Olympic National Park. There were the people whose job it was to protect infrastructure, like the staff restoring the seawall near the National Mall to protect it from flooding. Then there were the people at the top who manage these long-term research programs and studies. |
| Ed Stierli: | If you want your grandkids to come back and see bison or other species, you need to have those scientists behind the scenes making sure that they’re protected there as well in the forever business here, right? It’s not about what my experience is like next month. It needs to be also about what the experience is about three generations from now. People are looking for their jobs, and I don’t blame them, especially because they’re not there for the money, right? They’re there because they’re passionate about conservation, and they’re going to look for a different avenue to pursue that passion. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | I’m always hesitant to throw around a word like passionate, but I’ve heard some pretty incredible stories during my reporting. One biologist told me about a time he carried an overheated wolf into a near freezing river to cool it down with little concern for his own well-being. Another biologist told me that when budget cuts made it impossible to afford new bear traps, he got creative. He scoured antique stores for old foot snares that he could rehab in his workshop, busting a few fingers in the process. And then there was this story from Jim Schaberl, a former manager at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. He’s been a wildlife ecologist for nearly 40 years and worked with all of species. |
| Jim Schaberl: | Black bears, gray wolves, bald eagles, mom and loons. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | But this story involves a moose. It was the mid-1990s at Voyagers National Park in Minnesota, winter time, Jim and a couple of guys from New Zealand were in a helicopter trying to tag and track the animal. |
| Jim Schaberl: | The term for the person doing the physical restraint of the animal is called a mugger. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | The muggers were trying to catch the moose, not with anesthesia, not with a tranquilizer, but with a net gun, which is exactly what it sounds like. So Jim and his team shoot the net and catch the moose, mostly. |
| Jim Schaberl: | Well, the back legs were free on that moose and I watched as one mugger went airborne. I saw this orange jumpsuit fly backwards, eagle spread and fell on his back in the snow. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | The mugger had been kicked so far by the moose. Jim was sure he would have to call in for a medical rescue, but instead the mugger quickly got up, shook it off, and went right back to tackling the moose. |
| Jim Schaberl: | I can’t do the accent very well, but it was just really a kick because he said, “I’ll tell you the other animals we’ve been working on,” and he pulled up his sleeve and there was a big scar. “See that? That’s a bison.” He pulled up his shirt. “That’s a wolf right there, scratching me, bit me right there.” He’s just showing all the different scars that he had over his mugging career. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Jim says he comes back to the story all the time because it not only showcases the dangers associated with this kind of work, but also the insane dedication of the people who do it. |
| Jim Schaberl: | Anybody else would’ve probably quit their job that day. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | This story also highlights the role of federal research funding. Trapping a moose requires expertise that doesn’t come cheap. Jim says they were able to pay for those two New Zealand muggers thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation, one of the world’s biggest supporters of scientific research, but that wouldn’t be possible today. The Trump administration has reportedly frozen all outgoing funding from the NSF until they can identify which grants are aligned with agency priorities. Not only that, but the White House’s proposed budget for next year would cut the foundation’s funding by more than half. The same goes for the Environmental Protection Agency, which also funds a ton of research in national parks. Then there’s the $27 million in grant funding DOGE has earmarked for cancellation, which would directly impact climate-related programs within the Park Service, and this is all on top of a $267 million budget cut from NPS, thanks to Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. In short, it’s a lot of money lost. |
| We reached out to Department of Interior asking how all these cuts to staff and funding are impacting conservation efforts. They didn’t answer our questions, but Jim says, “If the original mission behind the national parks was to leave the land unimpaired for future generations, we shouldn’t be playing fast and loose with the science that’s supposed to fulfill that mission.” | |
| Jim Schaberl: | This up and down business of funding and funding cuts and working on a project proposal for a year or two just to see it dashed because somebody doesn’t like the term climate change, that’s a dangerous game to play with national parks. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | The National Parks Conservation Association has started compiling a list of the different programs that it thinks could be most damaged by these cuts. There are 16 of them on that list, but one stood out to me immediately, and it’s one you’ve already heard about this hour, the Yellowstone Wolf Project. |
| Doug Smith: | Am I worried? Yeah. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Wildlife biologist, Doug Smith, again, the Mick Jagger of wolves. |
| Doug Smith: | There’s a lot of red flags right now. A ton of red flags. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Doug says he’s glad that the program has led to a booming wolf population in Yellowstone, but that doesn’t mean you just stop paying attention. |
| Doug Smith: | Wolf monitoring, which I think is vitally important, bird monitoring, beavers, elk, whatever, it’s environmental monitoring. It’s what’s going on in the world. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Doug says, “What so many people fail to realize is that we are a part of that world, not separate from it.” |
| Doug Smith: | We’re all connected. What wolves need is the same thing we need. Other life counts, and that ultimately is a healthier viewpoint for existence for everything, humans included. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | While all these programs aren’t gone yet, almost everyone I spoke to is worried, especially when they’ve seen budget proposals for similar programs across other public land agencies getting slashed. If the Trump administration gets its way, the entire research arm of the US Forest Service would be gone. The US Geological Survey ecosystem studies unit, gone. The US Fish and Wildlife Services conservation funds, gone. |
| Doug Smith: | I was a governor employee 28 years. I rode out hard times. Politics or politics, but you kept the programs going. They might’ve got less money, you might’ve got more staff turnover, but you got it done. Now, they’re ending. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | The Trump administration has said that this is all in an effort to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, but nearly everyone I spoke to, Andria, Jim, and others who’ve worked closely with national parks, they all had another theory, that the underlying goal of this administration is to sell off and privatize more public land. |
| Andria Townsend: | I completely feel like it’s a systematic approach of making things inefficient under the guise of efficiency. If you do that- |
| Jim Schaberl: | Well, look, if the government is not working, look, we can privatize this. That ends the work- |
| Speaker 7: | It’s really part of this bigger agenda to transfer wealth from the public to the private sector that the government- |
| Speaker 8: | Let’s turn it into dollars. Let’s sell it. I mean, and I’m speaking- |
| Speaker 9: | Just because we’re living in an era of conspiracy theories doesn’t deny that there are real conspiracies. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | I heard this fear again and again, and if true, it would be wildly unpopular with the American people. Polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose selling or closing federal public lands. This brings me back to what Andria said about intrinsic value. The entire National Park System was created on this very idea. Most people just want these places to exist, and Doug Smith says that should be enough. |
| Doug Smith: | Public lands are vital to this country. I think they in a lot of ways make this country. I’ve been to Europe a few times. It’s great. I love it, the ancient kind of cities and buildings and culture. But what the United States is known for is more wildness, more wide open spaces, and I am worried about losing that. |
| Al Letson: | Up next, a trip to a different kind of national park where an ideological battle is underway. |
| Speaker 10: | We want the past to make us feel better, but here’s a thing, the past has no responsibility to how we feel. |
| Al Letson: | That’s next on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. |
| Najib Aminy: | I am on this farm that has this huge event for Civil War reenactors. |
| Al Letson: | It’s the 4th of July at a farm out in Pennsylvania. Reveal’s Najib Aminy is there walking around a Civil War reenactment just outside of Gettysburg National Military Park. |
| Najib Aminy: | There’s a lot of memorabilia, flags. You can guess which kind of flags. |
| Al Letson: | It’s like a Renaissance fair, but Civil War themed. Najib is here because of an executive order issued by President Trump. It’s titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. It directs the Department of Interior to do an internal audit of all public monuments, memorials, statues, and signs. And that audit is supposed to find and remove any content inside national parks that disparages Americans, past or living, to instead focus on the greatness of the American people. The National Park Service is responsible for more than the sprawling wilderness of places like Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. It also maintains more than 200 sites because of their history. But how do you accurately tell the story of America without explaining the many periods of its troubling past, like the Civil War? |
| Speaker X: | Aim. Fire. |
| No charge. It’s on the house. | |
| Al Letson: | At this reenactment, Najib asked people about the executive order, and how it would change the official story being taught at Gettysburg just a few miles away. |
| Ralph Aiken: | They have a narrative that they want to keep pushing. The reason for the Civil War was slavery. The north was right, the south were bad. |
| Al Letson: | In one of the booths, Najib meets Ralph Aiken, who’s dressed as an embalmer, someone who prepares the dead. Ralph was in favor of Trump’s order if the changes meant the narrative at the park would line up with his views of the war. |
| Ralph Aiken: | The war was not about slavery originally. It was about State’s rights. |
| Al Letson: | Najib heard different versions of this again and again from people like Steve Reinke, a reenactor on the Union side. |
| Steve Reinke: | People want to make sure they get that opinion out there, which I think is great, but it’s not just about the slavery. There was so many political things. You follow the money. They did not want big government in their hand and in their pockets. |
| Al Letson: | And Jason Van Hart, a young reenactor dressed up as a Confederate officer. |
| Jason Van Hart: | There’s a lot of people who want to have one narrative of the Civil War. And maybe it’s a pro-Confederacy narrative, maybe it’s a pro-Union narrative. I think all of them are important. While there were two sides to it, there isn’t one story for the Civil War. |
| Al Letson: | The Park Service is tasked with interpreting this country’s history, including the Civil War. On its website, it describes slavery as a cause of the war. But when you’re on the actual battlefield, amidst hundreds of monuments, memorials, and markers, there is almost no mention of why the Civil War started. That is except for six signs. Six signs with just a few paragraphs and usually an image. Six signs that could be taken down under Trump’s executive order. Najib starts on the battlefield. |
| Speaker 7: | Battalion. Battalion [inaudible 00:03:31]. We’re going to break through the Union line up there and chase them Yankees back north. |
| Speaker X: | Let’s do it this time. |
| Sounds good, General. | |
| Speaker 7: | Yes. Okay. |
| Najib Aminy: | The main attraction here at Gettysburg National Military Park is the battlefield. Nearly 6,000 acres of it. It is the site of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War that took place 162 years ago. |
| Speaker 7: | We are going to take a moment, and we’ll do some remembrance. |
| Najib Aminy: | This holiday weekend, there are plenty of reenactors walking around the park. This small group dressed up as Confederate soldiers is here to salute the largest monument on this side of the park, a 14-foot bronze statue of Robert E. Lee on his horse, Traveler. They’re on top of a granite pedestal. When you add it all up, it’s 41 feet of commemoration. |
| Scott Hancock: | As you driving the other side of the battlefield, you can see this easily from a mile away. |
| Najib Aminy: | Next to me is Scott Hancock. He’s not a Reenactor or tour guide, but he knows a lot about this site. Scott is a professor of history in Africana studies at Gettysburg College. He’s in his early 60s and he hides it well. He’s in shorts and a black shirt. |
| Scott Hancock: | Well, my shirt says, “I’m Black every day, but today I’m Blackity Black Black.” |
| Najib Aminy: | And as we’re looking up at this giant monument, he points to a much smaller one, almost half its size, a speck on the horizon. |
| Scott Hancock: | See the statue between the two trees? |
| Najib Aminy: | Yes. |
| Scott Hancock: | So you can barely make it out, right? That’s General Meade. He’s the commander of the Union Army. He’s the winner. This is the loser. |
| Najib Aminy: | At the base of the General Lee Monument, there’s an inscription that reads, “Virginia, to her sons at Gettysburg.” Again, this is four stories tall, but Scott says there’s one major story that’s missing. |
| Scott Hancock: | So what it doesn’t say is that Robert E. Lee through his wife owned 189 people. But you don’t get any of that here. |
| Najib Aminy: | No. No.Should you get that here? |
| Scott Hancock: | I think yes, because if you’re going to have this that is such a glorification of Lee, then I would argue, well, let’s tell a fuller story. |
| Najib Aminy: | Scott never wanted to be a Civil War historian. His work focuses on American history between the 1600s and 1800s, but the Battle of Gettysburg is a difficult topic to avoid when you’re this close to the site. |
| Scott Hancock: | So the Union won the Battle of Gettysburg. The Union won the American Civil War. I would argue, and many others, that in many ways the white Southerners and their descendants won the battle of culture and minds through the 20th century because they were able to effectively erase slavery and Black people from what this battle and what this war was about. |
| Najib Aminy: | In the wake of the protests over George Floyd’s murder in 2020, almost a hundred Confederate statues and memorials were taken down across the country, but the 40 or so Confederate monuments at Gettysburg are still standing. Historians like Scott advocated that the park service keep the statues, but also put up interpretive signs that give more context. Scott had many talks with the local Rangers, and in 2021 the park put up six new signs. These signs, some written with Scott’s input, mentioned the role of slavery, race, and the African-American experience. |
| Scott Hancock: | We want more history, not less history, and part of more history means understanding that this specific landscape is part of a battle that’s connected to a larger story of the war, and that war is connected to a larger story of America. |
| Najib Aminy: | Take for example, the sign that overlooks the Warfield House, a Black-owned property that was shot up during the battle. The sign reads, “Freedom threatened.” And has a line about how the Confederate army while in Pennsylvania abducted Black men, women and children, and forced them into slavery. |
| Scott Hancock: | And it’s got a picture down in the right and inset black and white image from Harper’s Weekly of African-Americans being rounded up and kidnapped by the Confederate Army. |
| Najib Aminy: | This is pretty in your face. |
| Scott Hancock: | Yeah, this is probably, of all the signs, it’s probably the most explicit. |
| Najib Aminy: | Do you feel like this could be one of the signs in jeopardy? |
| Scott Hancock: | Oh, yeah, definitely. |
| Najib Aminy: | Why is that? |
| Scott Hancock: | It certainly doesn’t make the Confederate Army sound good in any way, or like this was just all about noble sacrifice. |
| Najib Aminy: | These are the types of unflattering details that President Trump’s executive order is trying to remove. |
| Speaker 9: | In the last 24 hours, president Trump signed an executive order aimed at what he calls Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. |
| Najib Aminy: | The Trump administration is reviewing all signs at National Park service sites, and planning to remove them if they “minimize the value of certain historical events or figures”. The administration has already signaled it’s especially focused on references to systemic racism, transgender people, and diversity, equity and inclusion more generally. |
| The executive order has also received congressional support. Republican Senator Jim Banks of Indiana has introduced a bill that would turn the order into federal law if passed. Senator Banks is also the founder of the Anti-Woke Caucus in Congress. Yes, there’s a caucus for that and said in a press release about his bill, “it’s time to stop letting activists rewrite our past”. I asked Scott about this critique, that signs like the ones he helped put up in Gettysburg are just some woke liberal exercise. | |
| Scott Hancock: | To the people who would discount it as woke, I think I would argue show me the evidence that says that the Civil War was not about slavery, that race and racism wasn’t central to this story. Convince me of that. |
| Najib Aminy: | There are about 1,400 monuments, markers, and signs scattered all over this battlefield. Union veterans had long resisted the idea of commemorating the Confederacy, wary of honoring a cause they fought to defeat. But by 1917, reconciliation became the dominant theme, especially as the nation was entering the first World War. The nation’s leaders pushed the country to come together and move on. It wouldn’t be until 54 years after the Battle of Gettysburg when the first State Confederate monument was placed on the battlefield. It’s the one of Robert E. Lee on his horse. But the timing of the Robert E. Lee Monument was part of another national trend. Across the country, Confederate statues were appearing in city squares and courthouse lawns. |
| Chandra Manning: | The big push for Confederate monuments is not right after the war. No, it is directly hard on the heels of the establishment in 1909 of the NAACP. |
| Najib Aminy: | Dr. Chandra Manning teaches 19th century US history at Georgetown University, and she says that there’s also a second wave of Confederate monuments that go up across the country during the civil rights era, notably after the Supreme Court ruled on Brown versus Board of Education where state sponsored segregation was deemed unconstitutional. |
| Chandra Manning: | What are those monuments doing? Certainly, they’re sanitizing and they’re erasing, and they’re also making a strong argument about who belongs and who doesn’t. And making an argument about who belongs and who doesn’t in the past is a way of making an argument about who belongs and who doesn’t in the present as well. |
| Najib Aminy: | Though, these memorials were often sponsored by State legislatures, they echoed the efforts of another group that wants to rewrite Civil War history through bronze and stone, the United Daughters of the Confederacy. |
| Chandra Manning: | They’re largely elite white women. They come from families who had the most to lose by the destruction of slavery, but have started to get it back. Not slavery, but their wealth and their status back by the 1880s and 1890s. |
| Najib Aminy: | With their wealth and status restored, they rallied around the so-called lost cause narrative. In that version of the story, the Confederates are mainly the victims, and slavery is a footnote. But this movement didn’t just build statues. They edited textbooks, trained teachers, and made sure many students across the country learned that the Civil War was about tariffs and States’ rights, not slavery. |
| Speaker 11: | April 12th, 1861, Confederate guns fire on Fort Sumter. The war had come. |
| Najib Aminy: | And for generations, classrooms taught a feel-good version of the Confederacy, full of fearless generals. |
| Speaker 12: | Then I will follow my native state with my sword, and if need be, with my life. |
| Najib Aminy: | In a way, it was historical fan fiction. |
| Speaker 12: | The North lost more than a state. It lost the general. |
| MUSIC: | [inaudible 00:13:05] |
| Najib Aminy: | And it stuck full. |
| Chandra Manning: | My students walk into my classrooms convinced that slavery is the simpleton answer and that it has to be more complicated than that, because we don’t want slavery to be central to this central drama of US history. That’s a hard truth. |
| MUSIC: | In eighteen-hundred and sixty-four. |
| The rebels had enough of the war. | |
| Chandra Manning: | We want a nicer story. We want the past to make us feel better,. But here’s the thing, the past has no responsibility to how we feel. |
| Najib Aminy: | By now, the head of the National Park Service was ordered to have completed the internal review of all public monuments, memorials, statues, and signs. And in mid-September, any of these signs, monuments, or memorials that are deemed to disparage America’s past are slated to come down based on the Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum’s order. |
| Speaker 14: | I don’t know if they’re doing anything specifically, these six signs in there. In some ways, it’s almost like I’m afraid to talk to you about them because do we want them to get attention? But in a way, we do want them to get attention because we want people to see them and read them. |
| Najib Aminy: | I sent a list of questions about the executive order to the National Park Service and the Department of Interior. The response I got back didn’t answer any of them. Instead, they sent me two paragraphs confirming that all signs are under review. I also sent a list of questions to the White House that also went unanswered. Instead, a spokesperson wrote back saying the executive order was a necessary response to “the woke left’s attempts to force our nation to adopt a factually baseless ideology”. |
| Back at the battlefield, Scott takes me to his favorite sign. We make our way towards a watchtower obviously built after the war, where we walk up 120 plus steps to a panoramic bird’s eye view of the battlefield. | |
| Scott Hancock: | Everybody comes up here and they do what we did as they look this way, right, over the battlefield, which makes sense. |
| Najib Aminy: | But if you turn around and face the west, you’ll see a tree line that goes out towards the horizon. It leads to a natural passageway, the South Mountain pass. And Scott remembers one of the first times he took his own son, who had just started high school, up this watchtower. |
| Scott Hancock: | But I was telling him the mountains to the west are part of the reason why there’s a battlefield. And I said to him, “If Africans never come to these shores, there’s no battlefield here.” And my own son says to me, “Well, I don’t know Dad. State’s rights and stuff like that.” And I thought, he’s been in that high school for like two months and he’s already drinking the Kool-Aid. |
| Najib Aminy: | Scott took that interaction with his son into the language he wrote for the sign. In just a few short sentences, the sign acknowledges the mountain range in the distance and how it both guided freedom seekers from the South and protected the Confederate Army in its final retreat from Gettysburg. |
| Scott Hancock: | I like this sign because I think it wraps it all together, that none of this is discreet and separate from the other. It’s all connected. I’m not fooling myself that this is going to change the whole narrative, but if this little bit is removed, it’s just another step in the wrong direction. |
| Najib Aminy: | Before we part ways, we stand at the battlefield’s high watermark. Cannons rest silently in front of us, and behind, the modest statue of Union General George Meade looks over us. Remember, he’s the winner. There’s one of the new six signs near a patch of old trees, and one of those trees is believed to be a witness tree. |
| Scott Hancock: | Witness trees were trees that they can document were here during the battle. |
| Najib Aminy: | I guess, if that witness tree could speak, what do you think it would say? |
| Scott Hancock: | One, I think that tree would say, keep funding the National Park Service because otherwise they’re not going to be able to take care of it because they won’t have the manpower or the funds to do it. And that’s a great way to think about it because that tree remembers, right, happens in ways that we have often forgotten. |
| Najib Aminy: | The Department of Interior has yet to publicize which signs, markers, and monuments might be replaced. The signs Scott helped work on remain at Gettysburg, at least for now. |
| Al Letson: | The Trump administration has already moved to restore Civil War-era symbols, like renaming military bases after Confederate leaders. And the administration has begun re-erecting Confederate monuments that were taken down in recent years as a part of its broader campaign to restore “truth and sanity to American history”. |
| Our lead producers for this week’s show were Nadia Hamdan and Najib Aminy. Additional reporting from Heath Druzin and Clark Corbin. Special thanks to producer Ashley Cleek. Jenny Cossis edited the show, and Kate Howard was the executive producer for this hour. Nikki Frick is our fact-checker. Legal Review by Victoria Baranetsky. Our production manager is the great Zulema Cobb. Score and sound designed by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando Mameño-Arruda. Taki Telonidis is our deputy executive producer. Our executive producer is Brett Myers. Our theme music is by Camerado Lightning. Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. | |
| I’m Al Letson. And remember, there is always more to the story. |