It's possible that some list members will want to see this Fort Monroe
update from Sunday, August 30. Thanks.
Steve Corneliussen
- - - - - - - - -
The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot has joined the National Parks Conservation
Association and the Civil War Trust in endorsing Gov. Terry McAuliffe's
effort to unify the split national monument (national park) on Fort Monroe’s
east side.
In that way, the Pilot opinion editors renewed their past advocacy for
unification in an editorial today at
http://hamptonroads.com/2015/08/preserve-more-fort-monroe .
The governor, going against predecessors from both political parties, seeks
to extend federal stewardship to the Fort Monroe land that previous Virginia
leaders, kowtowing to developers, deliberately omitted from the national
park. The missing land appears in red at
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ (the original website of Citizens for
a Fort Monroe National Park).
The editorial makes clear that far from saving public money, overdevelopment
of this national treasure would cost us dearly. When that land gets saved
from those who seek to misuse it, the fake, split national monument will
become real. Then it can also become the fourth node of a Historic Diamond
elevating Virginia's present Historic Triangle.
Maybe the Pilot opinion editors' news colleagues will now themselves report
on the governor's effort. Meanwhile, readers can see Civil War News's
report:
http://www.civilwarnews.com/archive/articles/2015/febmar/mcaulffie-021506.htm
Unfortunately, the Newport News Daily Press sides emphatically with
parochialism, overdevelopment, Hampton insiders, and Hampton University
president Bill Harvey. It even commits factual blunders about the issue.
(See, for example,
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/DailyPress_Factual_Blunders.htm .) The
Daily Press’s editors regularly take the developers’ side on Virginia’s only
political issue having thousand-year implications, yet don’t even bother to
find out what they’re talking about.
Today’s Pilot editorial mentions Virginia’s leaders’ failure to plan for
flooding in their officially envisioned condo-construction area at
low-lying, ocean-facing Fort Monroe, where Hurricane Isabel did a tenth of a
billion dollars in damage. Wetlands Watch has formally criticized that
failure and has publicly called it “stupid.” A Daily Press editorial today
calls for wiser planning for flooding in Virginia—for limiting “new
development on impermeable and threatened land”—but yet again leaves the
Fort Monroe flood-planning failure unaddressed.
Possibly from timidity given the influence of the economically powerful,
Tidewater’s NPR and PBS stations also avoid discussing the “stupid” condo
plan in frequent broadcasts on Virignia’s supposed flood-planning
forehandedness. And the national-monument unification issue has almost never
come up on either of the local noontime NPR talk shows.
Oddly, the Friday noontime show, which targets African-Americans, carefully
avoids the central historical question about Fort Monroe: Was it really a
white general who changed history there, or was he merely reacting to the
profoundly meaningful initiative of brave black self-emancipators
forthrightly asserting the inevitable?
Maybe this Pilot editorial will inspire Virginia journalists to resume—or to
start—paying attention. You might even dream that some real coverage will
come at last from the nearly oblivious Washington Post, which has always
merely transcribed official press-release nonsense about post-Army Fort
Monroe.
Media inattention in recent years concerning Fort Monroe is all the more
troubling during a time when the country is reassessing the Confederacy and
when Fort Monroe—the site of what the Civil War historian Edward Ayers once
called “the greatest moment in American history”—represents an emerging
clearer understanding of historical facts:
* Henry Louis Gates’s essay on those Fort Monroe self-emancipators:
http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2014/05/how_did_fort_monroe_become_freedom_s_fort.html
* "How Slavery Really Ended in America":
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazine/mag-03CivilWar-t.html
* Three-minute YouTube summary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27e_85dm8s4
Fort Monroe also represents those emerging “Historic Diamond” opportunities.
Even the National Park Service, belatedly but blessedly, has begun
officially using that term. Today’s Pilot editorial’s closing paragraph
repeats the key verb—“squander”—that the Pilot editors made famous in the
past about those opportunities:
QUOTE
The historical value of Fort Monroe is only starting to be realized, and the
opportunities to promote the monument—and the region—are legion. It would be
a shame to squander those opportunities by pursuing development that
jeopardizes the monument's purpose.
UNQUOTE
Thanks.
Steven T. Corneliussen
(for the highly informal Save Fort Monroe network, now numbering nearly 1000
true friends of Fort Monroe; please see
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ and please “like” and promote the
Save Fort Monroe Facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Fort-Monroe/195557853805992 )
______________________________________
To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at
http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
|