Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 11, 1994 TAG: 9408030007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
Close your eyes, listen to the soft Southern accent, and for a moment it could easily be the summer of '64 with James "Bud" Robertson conducting the Confederacy's daily military briefing:
"Northern Virginia may be a lost cause . . . In Richmond, we think we've saved Malvern Hill . . . In the Shenandoah Valley, we're doing pretty well at the moment . . . "
These are troubled days on the Civil War battlefront, and Robertson ticks off the list of victories and defeats - mostly, the latter - with an air of resignation.
Virginia, now as it was then, is a battleground. But these days, the enemy isn't Billy Yank, it's development encroaching on the state's Civil War battlefields.
That's why this gentle history professor has unsheathed his sword of war - a rhetorical one, to be sure - against the biggest, best-known and most well-organized force to roll into Virginia since Ulysses S. Grant commanded the Union army.
Disney.
The longtime Virginia Tech history professor - and the author of 13, soon to be 14 books on the Civil War - has added his name to the list of prominent historians who have banded together to fight Disney's proposed history-oriented theme park in Northern Virginia.
Among his more famous colleagues on the advisory board to the newly formed Protect Historic America: David McCullough of "Truman" fame, the documentarian Ken Burns, Yale's C. Vann Woodward and Princeton's James McPherson.
Or, as Robertson modestly puts it: "Thirty of the leading historians in the country - plus me."
Robertson may be humble about his role - essentially, it involves speaking to any group that will listen - but he's hardly reserved when it comes to speaking his mind on just why Disney shouldn't be allowed to build its theme park a short infantry march from the Manassas battlefield.
Or why it shouldn't be allowed to build a history-oriented theme park anywhere in Virginia, for that matter.
"Virginia is the mother state," Robertson says from behind the desk in the wood-paneled office of his Blacksburg home. "We're overwhelmed with history. We hardly need some company to come in and manufacture it for us."
Keep in mind, Robertson is a purist when it comes to presenting history. The author of a forthcoming biography of Stonewall Jackson, Robertson doesn't think much of the popular "Stonewall Country" musical at Lexington's Lime Kiln Arts theater, either. "He was tone-deaf, and here they had him singing with this wonderful voice," Robertson says. "Disney would have had Mickey Mouse right behind him."
Disney supporters have accused the historians of being "elitists."
But Disney, Robertson grumbles in retort, "trivializes" history by turning it into entertainment.
And Robertson sees nothing entertaining about the Civil War at all.
"Disney and history are far too different," Robertson says. He's especially riled that one Disney executive said when visitors leave a Disney park, the company wants them to leave smiling. "When they come off a battlefield," Robertson says, "I want them to be somber and educated."
If Virginia wants to use history to promote tourism, he says, then it should encourage visitors to visit an authentic Civil War battlefield. "What [Disney's America] can never substitute is being able to go onto a battlefield drenched with the blood of patriots, to listen to the silence."
To Robertson, these are reasons enough to oppose Disney's America regardless of where the park would go. But the proposed location five miles from the Manassas battlefield, where Union and Confederate soldiers twice fought major engagements in the war's early years, is particularly galling to him.
"You wouldn't put a carnival next to the Arlington National Cemetery," he says. "And that's not a wild comparison. Men have fought and died at that site for their country. That makes it in my mind holy ground. I hate to sound sermonic."
Northern Virginia is about to get paved over anyway, Robertson is reminded. If Disney's America doesn't build at the site, then a Wal-Mart might be. What's the difference?
"The lesser of evils," Robertson says. "At least Wal-Mart isn't selling history."
But forget Disney, for a moment, he says; the real problem is that precious little is being done to preserve Virginia's Civil War battlefields, regardless of what kind of development is threatening them. "It's a big crisis," he says.
And it's accelerating.
From 1961 to 1965, Robertson served as executive director of the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission. "In four years, I can remember two instances where battlefields were threatened," he says. "In the past 10 years, we seem to be in a constant war. In the past 10 years, we've had more Civil War battlefields threatened than in the previous 120 years."
Robertson is heartened to see that Virginia's two U.S. senators, along with Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, and Frank Wolf, R-Vienna, have sponsored legislation to create the Shenandoah Valley National Battlefield Park - which would preserve 10 Civil War sites, from Kernstown to McDowell. That bill passed the Senate this spring and now awaits action in the House.
But on the whole, he says, Virginia's record of preserving its Civil War battlefields is rather poor. Last year, development won out over preservation at the Brandy Station battlefield in Culpeper County. "Brandy Station disappointed me," Robertson says. "The largest cavalry battle in the western hemisphere was fought at that site. That ought to count for something. Now we've got, of all things, an auto racetrack going in there."
With those engagements in the background, Robertson sees the fight over Disney - a Third Manassas, if you will - as merely the most visible in a series of decisive land battles that developers and preservationists will wage over the next decade.
"In 10 years, it'll be all over," he says. "We'll either have won or lost, because the destruction is occuring so fast that by the turn of the century, we'll have preserved all the battlefields we're going to preserve."
The problem, of course, is that many of the prime Civil War sites were - and are - just outside major cities, most notably, Washington and Richmond.
And just as Civil War generals argued over strategy, so too do modern-day preservationists.
Robertson is also on the advisory board to the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, which Disney has hired to advise it on authenticity. Robertson breaks ranks with his association colleagues on that decision.
"The big criticism of the APCWS is that it's turning its back on Northern Virginia in order to accept money to use for buying battlefields elsewhere," Robertson says. "It's created a lot of ill will."
But Manassas is where Robertson draws the line and is prepared to stand, as Jackson once did, like stone wall.
"It's unrealistic to save it all," Robertson says of the nation's battlefield heritage, "but they don't need to denigrate it."
by CNB