Thanks for this press release about Fort Monroe's future. Forum
participants might recall that I'm one of five co-founders of Citizens
for a Fort Monroe National Park (CFMNP.org), an organization mentioned
in the release. I attended the event described, and I'd like to
interject a few comments. I speak here only for myself, though I know of
thousands who, I believe, see things as I do.
It's important to emphasize that yes, people overwhelmingly want all of
Fort Monroe protected, with sensible provisions made for revenue
generation and self-sustenance. Many of us have known this elementary,
obvious truth from the beginning of the six-year struggle to save the
place from financially and culturally counterproductive overdevelopment.
The problem lies in the defining and control of those sensible
provisions. That process, even today -- maybe especially today -- still
amounts to an invitation for abuse by those who seek not just limited
development solely for the sake of future Fort Monroe, but development
for the sake of development.
The present euphoria -- and again, we all join in endorsing the best
possible treatment of this national treasure -- involves something like
the Big Lie Technique. Or maybe it's more of a Big Disingenuous
Conflation Technique.
Here's the conflation: it's the frequently implied, and often outright
asserted, equating of "make the moated fortress into a national park"
with "make Fort Monroe into a national park." The first is the main part
of the official plan. The second is what people actually want.
The front page of the local paper on the Peninsula the other day, for
example, cited nonexistent Washington “proposals to turn [Fort Monroe]
into a national park.” In fact, the bills before Congress, and the
requests to the president, call merely for a bifurcated, balkanized,
token national park that includes only those parts of the Fort Monroe
national historic landmark that no one ever meant to ruin anyway --
namely, the moated fortress and the green areas at the north end.
The proposals exclude the parts of the officially recognized historic
landscape that have always been in contention. They’ve been in
contention because Virginia’s leaders, including the Daily Press’s
opinion editors, consider them irresistible real estate rather than what
they actually are: the sense-of-place-conferring dimension of a national
treasure with thousand-year implications in the history of liberty itself.
If Fort Monroe is as important as everybody now belatedly admits, the
plan put forward in these bills is incoherent and irresponsible. It will
ultimately work to the discredit of Mayor Ward, Gov. McDonnell (already
vulnerable on slavery-related issues anyway), Secretary of the Interior
Salazar and President Obama. It’s like planning to place a subdivision
on the hillside opposite Monticello.
Some will try to claim that finances force on us this narrow, parochial
plan. But the financially responsible disposition is actually a Grand
Public Place based on a substantial, _nonbifurcated_ national park. Such
a national park would lie alongside Virginia-controlled portions of Fort
Monroe away from the bayfront, for example the fine old residences and
the marina. A single boundary would encircle the whole place, with
Virginia responsible for certain non-national-park-service-administered
parts. Visitors would experience Fort Monroe as an integrated whole,
like San Francisco's Presidio.
That kind of Fort Monroe could anchor the fourth side of a new Historic
Quadrangle that would tell the story of the Civil War’s completion of
America’s founding as a nation that, at long last, was really going to
try to live up to its founding ideals of liberty and equality.
Every Tidewater preservationist believes this. We had all worked hard
for six years to see such a Fort-Monroe-integrating-and-unifying
boundary drawn -- a Fort-Monroe-permanent-integrity-ensuring boundary
drawn.
But it's not drawn.
So yes, it's nice, in fact it's vital, to tell the National Park Service
that Americans resoundingly want this national treasure to be treated as
a national treasure. But in fact national parks get created by
politicians, not by federal officials. That means Gov. McDonnell and the
commonwealth's congressional delegation, not the leaders of the park
service.
This McDonnell administration press release implies, in effect, that
Virginia's leaders, after more than five years of resolute stubbornness,
suddenly had epiphanies. If we now had solid guarantees of fitting
treatment of non-National-Park-Service-administered lands at Fort Monroe
-- and if those lands were planned to lie within the boundaries of a
substantial and nonbifurcated, nonbalkanized national park that itself
would stretch the whole length of the shoreline real estate -- I'd find
these epiphanies credible.
But we don't, and I don't. In my view Virginia is actually letting
America down. So is the National Trust for Historic Preservation, with
its six-year record of feckless complicity.
Forum participants are kind to indulge this quick note. I plan to offer
more -- next time maybe with fewer words -- including a recommendation
as to exactly how Fort Monroe's true friends can best influence Fort
Monroe's future.
Thanks.
Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson
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