Let's Write about how evil Donald Trump is erasing history with executive orders

Franco-American History is being erased in Lowell, Massachusetts

Statue in Lowell MA, honors women who staffed the early mills.
On the Road author Jack Kerouac's mother was a Lowell mill worker. 

Videos about exploited 19th-century mill workers- most of them were French-Canadian immigrants, have been removed from Lowell National Historical Park following President Trump’s executive order. By Renée Loth Contributor, Updated March 6, 2026

The following things happened in Lowell in the 19th century: Girls as young as 10 worked 12-hour days, six days a week, in hot, unhealthy textile mills with little ventilation. The harsh conditions led the mill workers to organize the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, which pushed for a 10-hour work day. Its newspaper, The Voice of Industry, took strong stands against war and slavery, and many workers stood in solidarity with the enslaved Africans who harvested the cotton spun in those very mills.

Apparently Donald Trump doesn’t want you to know about all of this, because in accordance with his executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” two videos about the mill workers shown at the Lowell National Historical Park have been removed.

“Lowell: The Continuing Revolution” is one of the two missing films (still available online if not on the park website). It’s a standard overview of the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, mostly supporting the narrative of benevolent mill owners and young women happy to be liberated from farm drudgery to earn their own money. But the film does describe the air in the mills as “swarming with lint, leaving the workers susceptible to lung disease,” and says that owners looking to optimize profits regularly cut wages, leading to strikes. 

Since the US Interior Department’s directives enforcing Trump’s order compel the National Park Service to “flag for removal” any materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” the educational videos had to go.

“Every American should be alarmed that this is happening,” said Kristin Sykes, Northeast regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, an independent guardian of the parks. “We’re just starting to see this whitewashing, and we could see much more.”

The association is among the plaintiffs in a recent lawsuit filed by the group Democracy Forward in federal district court in Boston, challenging Trump’s authority to alter American history by executive fiat. Advocates worry that cultural institutions will begin to self-censor in order to stay out of the administration’s crosshairs. 

In a recent visit to the park, Sykes said a guide told her the films were being “updated.”  The expunged videos in Lowell are just part of a sweeping attack on the country’s cultural heritage, targeting stories about slavery, civil rights, climate change, and anything else disliked by this president. The range of threatened material is breathtaking, including 80 items at the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama. A rainbow flag was removed from the Stonewall National Monument in New York City, which commemorates the struggle for LGBTQ rights. In Maine, signs about climate change and Native American rights were removed from Acadia National Park. Not even gift shop items are exempt.

A separate order required that QR codes be installed at national historic sites, encouraging visitors to report any “negative” material they might perceive. The idea was to unleash an army of cultural vigilantes seeking out divisive topics to erase from the national memory. But, oops, ❗ most of the initial comments received through the QR code criticized park funding cuts and the administration’s efforts to rewrite history.

The courts have tried to put a stop to some of the more egregious revisionism; in addition to the Democracy Forward suit, last month a federal judge ruled that a dismantled panel discussing the nine enslaved people at George Washington’s home at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia must be restored. The judge, appointed by Republican president George W. Bush, quoted George Orwell’s dystopian “1984” and said Trump did not have the right to “disassemble historical truths.”

Why does it matter if a couple of videos about 200-year-old industrial history are removed from the Lowell national park❓

For Robert Forrant, a professor of labor history at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, the stories are searingly relevant today. “We’re diminishing the history of working people,” he said. And without a shared understanding of labor’s hard-fought rights, he said, “it’s easier to ride roughshod over them.”

Indeed, in his second term Trump has slashed funding for occupational health and safety and equal employment agencies, forced labor department workers into early retirement, and, under the guise of national security, stripped collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers. For this administration, the less Americans know about the organized struggle for workers’ rights — including government workers — the better.

Because one thing the evil Trump administration does understand: Knowledge is power.