The bouncers at national park bookstores

Curation, censorship, and the value of cultural gatekeeping

Ford’s Theater in 2014 (Tim Brown, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons)

Fourteen years ago this week, a historic event took place at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC.

Ford’s Theater, of course, is where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Today it operates as a National Park Service site exploring Lincoln’s legacy and the power of theater. Obviously no subsequent event can be as historic as what happened there on April 14, 1865.

But on Nov. 12, 2011, the Theater’s official museum bookstore announced that it would not carry the book Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever, by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, because it was filled with historical errors.

No surprise: a media kerfuffle ensued. O’Reilly claimed that there was “a concerted effort by people who don’t like me to diminish the book,” added that a million copies were already in print, and said, “We well understand our enemies are full of rage at our success.”

Salon, the Washington Post, and a leading Civil War magazine surveyed historians who condemned the book’s lack of footnotes plus errors such as depicting Lincoln in the Oval Office, which was not built until 1909. In an investigation, Politico found that Amazon customer reviewers agreed with the professionals: 845 out of 1133 rated the book with one star, and several said it was riddled with inaccuracies.

But, Politico noted, “It appears that at least some of the negative reviews on Amazon are being ginned up by supporters of Ron Paul… because of an unrelated dispute.”

So what we might call the knowledge establishment tried to take issue with O’Reilly and Dugard’s text, O’Reilly tried to turn the dispute political, and other political factions gleefully joined in. I think this dynamic explains a lot about our country today, and not just books.

But here I want to focus on that first step, the role of the knowledge establishment as gatekeeper. We’re living amid the biggest attack on gatekeepers since the invention of the printing press. Before then, the European knowledge establishment was monks, who had the time and money to study and copy great books—and whose priorities were set by the church. The printing press unleashed not only rising literacy rates but also Protestant faiths and violent conflicts.

Today’s printing press is the twinned rise of self-publishing and social media (plus, coming soon, artificial intelligence). I know many Baby Boomers who cheer this disempowering of gatekeepers. They remember the 1960s, when the powers-that-were tamped down on sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll while fighting a pointless war in Vietnam. Power to the people!

But to me there’s a difference between altering gatekeepers’ priorities and eliminating them entirely. In books, for example, I learn what’s worth reading from the actions of major New York publishers, major critics in major publications, and the choices of my favorite bookstore owners. Even as the proprietor of a Substack newsletter (“alternative media”), which I started partly in frustration with the gatekeepers of nature writing, I’m invested in the gatekeeper model.

Because otherwise, a national park bookstore could get filled with self-published screeds promoting kooky theories, such as how Martians created Crater Lake. In a knowledge-based culture, I want the National Park Service to be a trusted source of knowledge. The Crater Lake Martian guy may call it “censorship,” but I call it worthwhile gatekeeping.

When Donald Trump talks about a deep state, I think this is what he means: the way something as insignificant as a book set in a national park can face unexpected gatekeepers—and those gatekeepers are empowered not by elections or wealth or media savvy, but by a job they hold in a process largely hidden from public view.

So I think those of us who like gatekeepers need to bring them a little sunlight. Let’s stop hiding these processes. Because many of my books are set in national parks, I’ve had to go through the same gatekeeping process that Killing Lincoln did. I’m consistently amazed at how few readers—and for that matter how few authors and publishers—know about it.

Here’s what I know: The process starts with the manager of a park’s official bookstore submitting a book to the Park Service. This has to be a physical book, not an e-book or a pre-print. That’s why the Killing Lincoln debate erupted only after it had been on bestseller lists for weeks.

The process is modeled on academic peer review: an expert grades the book against certain criteria (example at the bottom here). The decision to disqualify a book appears to be at the expert’s discretion. It must be difficult: in my experience, almost every history book has some sort of error, although it’s usually honest and very minor.

Could the decision also be political? Several years ago, at the visitor center of Arizona’s Glen Canyon Dam, I eagerly checked the bookstore’s shelves for The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey’s novel about blowing up that very dam. It wasn’t there. Sold out? Disqualified by gatekeepers? Because nobody talks about this process, I never learned the answer.

I believe that talking about this process—debating it—could productively take us to some worthy philosophical issues, standing in for some more emotional cultural conflicts. Censorship versus free speech. Institutional power versus media magnetism. Safeguarding the reputation of a venerated institution versus making money by giving the people what they want.

To be clear, however, those debates will have little to do with book sales. In the case of Killing Lincoln, it turned out that Ford’s Theater had two places to buy books: the museum store and a lobby gift shop. (This dual setup is common in many parks.) Because the gift shop wasn’t integrated into the museum, it was exempt from the Park Service’s approval processes. Its manager decided “to let our visitors judge the book themselves.”

To me, the lesson is that gatekeepers have far less day-to-day power than either the knowledge establishment or its critics would like to believe. Instead the gatekeepers’ role is mostly symbolic: these are the values our culture wants to uphold. Debate about those values is appropriate, but fans of good debate should want it to be informed by rich knowledge of gatekeeping processes.

End notes:

• Wonderlandscape, my book about Yellowstone, has been approved in that park. The Cowboy Girl, set partly in what is today the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, has been approved in that park. Natural Rivals, set partly in Glacier, has been approved in that park.

• I’ll admit that I started down this road for somewhat selfish reasons: I’d like to think that Natural Rivals, which is about the origins of public land in general, would be of interest to book-buyers in multiple national parks. But how to initiate the process?

• If you’d like to support keeping these essays free to all, please consider buying one of my books (those are affiliate links to bookshop.org) or becoming a paying subscriber. Thanks!