THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 7, 1994 TAG: 9407070001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: ANOTHER VIEW
SOURCE: The New York Times said in a recent editorial:
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
Disney's America - the planned theme park in Northern Virginia - has inspired something rare in these shallow times: impassioned debate among intellectuals and a surge of preservationist zeal in the Congress. Hooray! It would be a crime against the national heritage if the country's best historical thinkers and its legislators slumbered through this desecration of historic ground.
There is a time when a nation must listen to its scholars. A veritable pantheon of historians and writers - C. Vann Woodward, John Hope Franklin, James McPherson, Shelby Foote, Barbara Fields - has formed a group called Protect Historic America to oppose Disney's plan to build a 3,000-acre park only four miles from the Manassas battlefield.
Twenty members of Congress have introduced a resolution objecting to the project. Led by Rep. Michael Andrews, D-Texas, they echo these distinguished thinkers in rebelling against a state's right to sell out a national treasure. ``It's not just a Virginia issue,'' Andrews said. We agree. Virginia's Legislature and governor have betrayed their state's tradition as guardian of the most important collection of Colonial, Revolutionary and Civil War sites in the nation.
Listen to C. Vann Woodward on what could be lost to the motel-hamburger-condo sprawl that would ripple out from the park. ``This part of Northern Virginia has soaked up more of the blood, sweat and tears of American history than any other area of the country. It has bred more founding fathers, inspired more soaring hopes and ideals and witnessed more triumphs and failures, victories and lost causes than any other place in the country. If such a past can render a soil `sacred,' this sliver is the perfect venue.''
The congressional resolution affirms this sentiment, and calls for Disney to find another site. Disney executives, and some short-sighted commentators, say that since Disney already owns the site, it is too late to stop them. That is silly. Zoning and land-use planning are established functions of government. Disney's ability to close real estate deals does not give it the right to develop willy-nilly.
There are millions of acres elsewhere more appropriate for such a project and where Disney can exercise its creative freedom. No one should fall for the assertion of the Disney chairman, Michael Eisner, who appeared on Capitol Hill saying that ``there is no basis for which the federal government should be involved'' in challenging his plans.
A little history lesson on what central governments rightly do would be helpful here. Ulysses S. Grant, who campaigned through much of Virginia, created the first national park on March 1, 1872. Thus the man who saved the Union with victories in the field saved Yellowstone for the ages by defining the principle that Washington must intervene to preserve places of unique value to Americans.
Now the challenge is different. Few pristine natural areas are left, but Grant's principle still applies to areas of special historical, environmental or scenic value. Sen. Dale Bumpers, D-Ark., chairman of the Public Lands Subcommittee, has held hearings on the Disney project. He and his colleagues should begin the legislative work of defining a new designation, the National Historic Region, to protect critical sites and the areas around them.
The hour is not too late for Congress to bar Disney's plans to destroy the historic countryside where Robert E. Lee raised his army. That is the teaching of the nation's historians.
``I sat through many history classes where I read some of their stuff,'' Eisner said to The Washington Post of these scholars, ``and I didn't learn anything.'' So it would seem. The argument for federal intervention cannot be made any more clearly than Eisner did with those words.
KEYWORDS: DISNEY'S AMERICA by CNB