Trump Accused of Erasing History With War Memorial Update
The quotes are getting removed following a complaint of “woke” from one woman.
Eric Lee/Reuters
The National Park Service has ordered the removal of quotes about slavery, immigrants, and war from the Bunker Hill Monument in Boston in order to comply with an executive order from Donald Trump.
The site commemorating a major battle fought there during the Revolutionary War will no longer feature the quotes after one woman complained that another plaque featuring a quote related to women’s suffrage was “woke” feminist ideology, The Washington Post reported.
The complaint triggered a wider review, with the National Park Service finding that the other three quotes violated Trump’s March 2025 order to restore “truth and sanity” to American history by removing references that frame it as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
One of the quotes being removed from the monument is a 1971 anti-war editorial by Vietnam War veterans Arthur Johnson and Bestor Cram, suggesting that the U.S. should “cease to build memorials to death and begin to glorify life.”
The Battle of Bunker Hill in Boston which was among the first major battles between the Red Coats and Patriots in the Revolutionary War.
Chutn via Getty Images/iStockphoto
In an interview with The Washington Post, Cram said he is “completely outraged with the administration wanting to essentially reinterpret history or erase history.”
“Bunker Hill represents a physical place where people took a stand, during the earliest stages of the American Revolution,” he added.
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“That’s exactly what our quote was all about, the need to continue to enact essentially our pursuit of liberty and the freedom that we enjoy to express dissent when we see something that is compromising the ideals of what we all stand for as Americans.”
Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, also condemned the removal of the quotes based on the complaint of a single person when the exhibits had been curated and planned by teams of experts.
“It’s scary that we aren’t trusting the experts and academics who have put together this material and instead we are censoring history and science that is not incorrect and it’s not inaccurate,” Thompson told the Post. “It’s just information that makes people uncomfortable, and it’s politically motivated.”
Trump has taken numerous steps to rewrite history as part of his order to scrub “corrosive ideology” from federal institutions. This has included reviewing whether exhibitions and signs about slavery should be removed from public view in national parks and restoring monuments and paintings of Confederate leaders.
President Donald Trump has also moaned that museums such as the Smithsonian were too concerned with portraying “how bad slavery was.”
KENT NISHIMURA/AFP via Getty Images
Another quote set to be removed from Bunker Hill is taken from an 1846 letter to the Boston-based abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, attacking the hypocrisy of Americans who “love liberty” but own slaves.
The third panel is from a Boston newspaper in 1875 praising immigrants in the U.S. “Now that a public orator has declared that foreign-born men have no association with the men of the Revolution, it is our duty to show that in love of freedom and loyalty to the republic, the citizens of foreign birth take no second place,” it reads.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Interior Department, which oversees the Park Service, told the Daily Beast: “Through President Trump, we have encouraged Americans to visit our cultural and historic sites and engage in meaningful conversations about the moments that have shaped our country.
“By telling the full story, every triumph, every challenge, and every step towards a more perfect union we strengthen our shared understanding and ensure that future generations inherit not just the land we love, but the truth of the journey that brought us here.
“Efforts to transform a routine exhibit refresh into a story attacking President Trump and this administration is tired and the American people see through it.”
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