[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 94 (Tuesday, July 19, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 19, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                  PROTECTING OUR HISTORIC PUBLIC LANDS

                                 ______


                        HON. MICHAEL A. ANDREWS

                                of texas

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 19, 1994

  Mr. ANDREWS of Texas. Mr. Speaker, on June 16, 1994, I introduced 
House Concurrent Resolution 255. This resolution urges Congress and the 
administration to closely evaluate the Walt Disney Co.'s proposed theme 
park and real estate development in the northern piedmont area of 
Virginia, and calls on Disney to move its park to a site where it would 
have a less detrimental impact on the surrounding, historically 
significant lands of Shenandoah National Park and Manassas National 
Battlefield Park. This effort has been joined by 28 of my colleagues in 
the House and supported by numerous editorial writers across the 
country.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to submit one of the more recent pieces 
regarding the proposed theme park, which appeared in newspapers this 
past weekend, and I again call on Disney to find a more suitable 
location for its massive development.

               [From the Washington Post, July 17, 1994]

                     Virginia's Threatened Piedmont

                          (By George F. Will)

       Haymarket, VA.--In a churchyard here a gravestone reads:
       Stonewall Jackson Campbell
       May 2, 1863 Dec. 10, 1911
       The infant Campbell was named for the Virginian who earned 
     his name on a battlefield a few minutes gallop from the 
     churchyard, a soldier who on May 2, 1863, received a mortal 
     wound at Chancellorsville, not far from here.
       Problem is, much of American history was made not far from 
     here, often by men who lived nearby: The church is hard by 
     the intersection of the James Madison and John Marshall 
     highways. Just over yonder lives Miss Beuregard, a great-
     granddaughter of the Confederate general. And so it goes. You 
     can hardly turn around out here without bumping into 
     evocations of the nation's making.
       This would be merely nice, not a problem, were it not for 
     something that threatens to be the unmaking of this area. The 
     Disney company seems determined, almost irrationally so, to 
     turn this area inside out and upside down by building, about 
     a half-mile from the churchyard and 3.5 miles from the 
     Manassas field where Jackson fought, a huge commercial and 
     residential real estate development, at the core of which 
     would be an American history theme park.
       Unfortunately, many faulty reason have been 
     indiscriminately adduced for opposing Disney's project, so 
     the one sufficient reason may get lost in the melee. It is 
     that Disney has decided to build something that would 
     radically transform, beyond recognition, an area that is, 
     arguably, America's most defining landscape.
       America has various defining landscapes, not all of them 
     bucolic. One is Manhattan's forever unfinished skyline, 
     emblematic of our heroic materialism. But one is more 
     drenched in the history of heroic idealism than Virginia's 
     Piedmont region, a perishable window on the past, a place 
     which, were Jefferson and Washington and Lee to revisit it, 
     would be comfortably familiar to them.
       Some of Disney's critics would, if they could, freeze this 
     region in time. They cannot. Development will come to this 
     place because it is a short drive from Washington and the 
     government that will not stop growing. But Disney's mega-
     development, by its scale and nature, would change beyond 
     recognition a historic region rich in sites that millions of 
     Americans come to as pilgrims to shrines of our civil 
     religion.
       Some of Disney's critics get the vapors at the thought of 
     what the theme park might do to the telling of America's 
     story. But if Disney or anyone else wants to make a skit, or 
     a hash, of history, well, the right to vulgarize is one of 
     America's most vigorously exercised rights. Anyway, Disney 
     would be hard-pressed to do worse than, say, Oliver Stone's 
     movies--or, for that matter, than some historians do, 
     including some of Disney's academic despisers.
       Disney has armed its despisers by talking foolishly, as 
     when Chairman Michael Eisner said, ``I was dragged to 
     Washington as a kid and it was the worst weekend of my 
     life,'' or when a Disney ``creative director'' said the park 
     would ``make you feel what it was like to be a slave.'' (See 
     your sister sold down the river, then get cotton candy?) 
     However, again, the point is not what Disney wants to do, but 
     where it wants to do it.
       The administration of environmental, transportation and 
     other federal, state and local regulations provides many 
     opportunities for Disney's opponents to slow the project's 
     progress and raise its costs. In any such battle of 
     attrition, bet on the multibillion-dollar corporation that 
     buys lawyers by the battalions. But why does Eisner seem bent 
     on becoming the archetype of the Hollywood vulgarian, 
     greasing with money (some of it to politicians) the slide of 
     a great corporation into the role of coarse bully, stamping 
     its bootprints on hallowed places?
       One of the roads that would have to become an enlarged 
     congested highway to serve the park is Route 15, which runs 
     north to Gettysburg. There one of the Berkeley boys now 
     buried in the churchyard here was captured at the crest of 
     Pickett's charge, at the wall on Cemetery Ridge now known as 
     ``the high-water mark of the Confederacy.'' From there Lee's 
     army beat an honorable retreat.
       It is astonishing that Disney, out of sheer stubbornness is 
     risking its reputation as a good corporate citizen, and is 
     doing so to put here a project that could be put in many more 
     suitable places. But it is not too late for Disney to learn a 
     lesson from Lee, who is revered by the nation he tried to 
     dismember, revered partly because he knew how to retreat and 
     when to surrender.

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