Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 12, 1994 TAG: 9405120191
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune Note: above
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Calling Disney's proposed location ``sacrilegious,'' ``irrational'' and ``a national calamity,'' more than two dozen academics, biographers and historical novelists on Wednesday announced a coalition called Protect Historic America.
Their goal: Persuade the entertainment giant to find another site for its ``Disney's America'' - a proposed theme park that would portray the nation's history. The plan is to build the park on a 3,000-acre site in Northern Virginia, near the historic Manassas battlefield less than an hour's drive west of the nation's capital.
The coalition is led by John Hope Franklin, former chairman of history at the University of Chicago, and C. Vann Woodward, professor emeritus of American history at Yale University. Both are former presidents of the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association and serve as co-chairmen of the new coalition.
David McCullough, biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, acted as spokesman for the coalition at a news conference. McCullough, who narrated the acclaimed public television series on the Civil War, said he was inspired to become a historian by a visit to Virginia's historic sites when he was 14 years old.
Disney aims to ``create synthetic history by destroying real history,'' McCullough complained. The theme park also will launch ``a commercial blitzkrieg'' of hotels, T-shirt shops and strip malls in the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, just as Disney World did in Central Florida, he said.
``We are simply arguing that this is the wrong place to put it,'' an emotional McCullough said. ``We are unanimous in the feeling that what is out there is a treasure belonging to all of us ... Would we allow the construction of an amusement park at Normandy Beach? In the name of jobs, would we make splinters of Mount Vernon?''
Roger Wilkins, a civil rights activist and history professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, noted that he is the descendant of Virginia slaves. ``The idea that somehow the vistas they saw, the paths they took to freedom, will be desecrated by a theme park is obscene,'' he said.
Other coalition members include presidential scholar James David Barber of Duke University, Columbia professor and author Barbara J. Fields, Civil War historian Shelby Foote, author Doris Kearns Goodwin, Princeton professor and author James McPherson, former University of Virginia history chairman Merrill D. Peterson, author Arthur Schlesinger Jr., novelist William Styron and retired New York Times columnist Tom Wicker.
Disney officials countered that the park will serve an educational purpose, and they have enlisted a pair of historians - Columbia professor Eric Foner and George Washington University's James Oliver Horton - as well as the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites to help plan the theme park. Compatibility with the surroundings is a primary Disney goal, spokeswoman Mary Anne Reynolds insisted.
But McCullough was dismissive, noting that Foner and Horton are ``on the payroll of the Disney Company.'' Also, Disney recently gave $100,000 to the preservation group. He said the historians in his group were paying their own expenses.
The coalition hopes to help build public opposition before Disney faces local planning and zoning hearings in Prince William County over the summer.
The coalition has aligned itself with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Piedmont Environmental Council and other groups already opposing the park.
by CNB