Capital disgrace: Still no National WWI Memorial -- May 31, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

When you’re in Washington, you can visit memorials to veterans of Vietnam, Korea and World War II -- but you won’t find one for the veterans of World War I.   

“If all goes as hoped,” the National World War I memorial will open in 2018, the 100^th anniversary of the armistice ending the Great War, I wrote in a column three years ago.

It certainly seemed doable. The last surviving World War I veteran, Frank Buckles, died in 2011, after devoting his last years to pushing for a memorial on the National Mall in Washington.

But all did not go as hoped. In a capital known for its dysfunction, the National World War I Memorial could be Exhibit A.  

For Americans, the Great War lasted one year, seven months and five days – but planning for this national memorial has dragged on more than five years.

The World War One Centennial Commission was created by Congress in 2013 to educate people on what it calls “America’s forgotten war, even though more Americans gave their lives during that war than during Korea and Vietnam combined.”

Nearly 5 million American men and women served and 116,516 died in the “war to end all wars.” 

Congress authorized building the national memorial in Washington in 2014. But squabbling over the design continues, and no opening date has been set. Planners now hope for 2021, Politico reported this week. 

Washington once again could learn from the people in cities and towns around the country, who gathered together to honor their World War I dead in their hometowns. Residents of the District of Columbia built an elegant memorial and bandstand in West Potomac Park in 1931 to honor the more than 26,000 district residents who served in World War I. 

Almost every city and county in Virginia has a memorial to the local men and women who served in the First World War. The 240-foot tall Carillon in Richmond’s Byrd Park is the state’s memorial to the 3,700 Virginians who died in or because of World War I.

In Lynchburg, a “doughboy” statue at the base of Monument Terrace remembers 43 casualties. A granite column outside Alexandria’s Union Station commemorates the city’s World War I dead.

There’s even a National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri. But not to include World War I with the memorials to other 20^th century wars in Washington would be wrong.

Congress has declared the National Mall complete, so the commission in 2014 chose for the memorial’s site Pershing Park, a 1 ¾-acre trapezoidal space on Pennsylvania Avenue between 14^th and 15^th Streets, N.W., a block from the White House.

The park opened in 1981 as part of a plan to spruce up Pennsylvania Avenue. Designed by noted architect M. Paul Friedberg, it was a quiet oasis with a large pool and a waterfall in the summer that became an ice rink in the winter. The pool, ice rink and the kiosk that served snacks have long been closed, and the park has fallen into disrepair.

A 12-foot bronze statue of famous World War I Army General John “Black Jack” Pershing shows him in uniform, his hat in his left hand, his right hand beginning to raise his field glasses as he looks to the west.

In January 2016, Joe Weishaar, an architect-in-training just 25 years old, won a design competition for the national memorial. Last November, bigwigs brought out the gold shovels for a ceremonial groundbreaking.

But there’s a complication. The National Park Service in 2016 designated Pershing Park eligible for the National Register of Historic Places because it once was a fine example of modern landscape design.  

The designation could greatly limit how much of the park can be obliterated to accommodate the new design, which includes a large bronze sculpture by Sabin Howard of the life of a doughboy.   

Every day the design dispute continues is a day school children and tourists can’t visit a national memorial in Washington to learn about the heroes who sacrificed so much in World War I. And that’s a capital disgrace.  

©2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Ka-ching! National parks get only Trump change -- for now -- April 6, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

You’d have thought the National Park Service won the lottery.

The photos of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke holding an oversized check with Tyrone Brandyburg, superintendent of Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, looked like shots of a lucky lottery winner with a gazillion-dollar bonanza.   

But this check to the National Park Service was chump change – or Trump change -- $78,333.32.

That’s how much salary taxpayers have paid Trump since noon Jan. 20. To compare: Taxpayers have shelled out an estimated $10 million on Trump’s visits to Mar-a-Lago.

Candidate Trump vowed he wouldn’t accept a salary as president, but the Constitution requires a president to be paid. The framers thought compensation would keep the president independent and free of corruption.

Until now, only Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy gave their presidential salaries to charity.

Trump initially planned to make a splash by giving away his entire $400,000 salary at year’s end. But the White House changed course and staged the photo op Monday in the press briefing room.

Trump gave the first installment of his salary to the park service, nearly everybody’s favorite federal agency. The money will go towards repairing infrastructure, Zinke said. 

But the sum will hardly make a dent in the $229 million backlog in deferred maintenance on the 25 national battlefields. Overall, the park service has a backlog of $12 billion in deferred maintenance on more than 400 parks and historic sites around the country.

Trump’s budget proposes a cut of $1.5 billion, or 12 percent, from the Interior Department’s budget. It doesn’t specify how much will be cut from the park service.

So, Trump came across not as a generous benefactor to the park service but as a latter-day John D. Rockefeller, handing it a few shiny dimes.

Visits to national parks have been growing over the past decade to a record high of 330 million visits last year during the service’s centennial celebration.

Most park facilities were built in the early and mid-20^th century and need updating or replacing. These include rest areas and visitor centers, wastewater treatment and electricity plants, staff quarters and campgrounds.

Congress has long preferred to create new parks rather than take care of existing ones, but addressing deferred maintenance may be a rare area of bipartisan cooperation in the fractured Congress.

Last year, Congress authorized an additional $90 million for non-transportation maintenance and an additional $28 million for roads and bridges in the parks, with funds rising every year for five years.  

That’s not nearly enough to tackle the enormous backlog, park service officials and fans say.

Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, introduced on March 28 the National Park Service Legacy Act, which would direct $50 million annually in 2018, 2019 and 2020 for deferred maintenance at the parks.

The Legacy Act would authorize increasingly larger sums until $500 million would be available annually from 2027 through 2047. Costs would be paid through revenues from government oil and natural gas royalties.

“Virginia ranks fifth in the list of states with the greatest need for maintenance, with a backlog of $800 million,” said Warner. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia is a cosponsor.

Republican co-sponsors include Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who wants to help the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which has a $232 million maintenance backlog.

“The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one of America’s greatest treasures and it has a tremendous economic impact on East Tennessee,” Alexander said.

The park service does have its critics.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., chairman of the Homeland Security subcommittee on federal spending and oversight, has called out park service projects in Pennsylvania and Alaska as wasteful.

While congressional action is slow, there is something you can do: make a gift directly to the National Park Service, or, if you prefer, to your favorite national park. 

Shenandoah National Park has a $90 million maintenance backlog, for example, and Gulf Islands National Seashore has a $21 million maintenance backlog.

Your gift, like Trump’s, comes with a bonus. It’s tax deductible, if you’re among the 30 percent of taxpayers who itemize.

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

At 100, National Park Service celebrates diversity -- Aug. 25, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

With his signature, President Barack Obama in June made the Stonewall Inn in New York City a national monument with the protection of a national park.

“Stonewall will be our first national monument to tell the story of the struggle for LGBT rights,” the president said in a White House video announcing the new monument.

“I believe our national parks should reflect the full story of our country – the richness and diversity and uniquely American spirit that has always defined us,” he said.

Decades ago, the Stonewall Inn was a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village at a time in the city when serving alcohol to gay people was illegal. Police raids were frequent, but in June 1969 a raid led to riots and then to protest marches. The Stonewall Uprising was a turning point in the gay rights movement.

Not everyone was thrilled with the designation of a gay bar as a monument. Evangelical Christian leader Franklin Graham, son of televangelist Billy Graham, called the Stonewall recognition “unbelievable.”

“War heroes deserve a monument, our nation’s founding fathers deserve a monument, people who have helped make America strong deserve a monument – but a monument to sin?” Graham wrote on Facebook.

Graham has a right to his opinion, but I’m with those who celebrate our nation’s diversity and the fights by racial, ethnic and other groups for equality.

From now on, Stonewall will be recognized as a watershed for gay rights the way Selma, Ala., is for voting rights for blacks and Seneca Falls, New York, is for women’s suffrage.

Congress authorized the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1980, commemorating the first Women’s Rights Convention there in 1848, and created the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in 1996. The 54-mile trail tells the story of the 1965 march that led President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act.

The Stonewall National Monument includes the bar, a triangular park across the street and nearby streets – 7.7-acres in all – and, managed by the park service, will preserve the stories of the gay rights movement for future generations.

It’s fitting as the park service celebrates its 100^th birthday that its centennial mission is “a promise to America that we will keep not only its sacred places, but the memory of its most defining moments,” Jonathan Jarvis, park service director, said at the National Press Club this month.

Besides Stonewall, Obama has authorized the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument in Washington, D.C., the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument in California, the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument in Maryland and the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument in Ohio, among others.

Obama’s protection of lesser known historic sites ensures that some details of the American experience we might sweep under the rug will be remembered. The new monuments build his legacy as a champion of diversity and provide a way for him to honor key Democratic constituencies.

While only Congress can create a national park, the president and Congress have the authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to create national monuments to protect “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest.”

National parks were never about scenery alone. History was always part of the picture.

When President Woodrow Wilson signed the legislation creating the National Park Service 100 years ago this week, Aug. 25, 1916, he brought together in the new bureau 35 parks and monuments and those yet to be established.

The purpose was “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife . . . by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Today we’re all better off because we have more than 400 national park areas.

We’re fortunate Congress thought to preserve historic objects and places as well as beautiful vistas. And we can thank the National Park Service for finding ways to help us understand all aspects of the American experience and reinterpreting historical events as times – and passions -- change.

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Readers have their say about new monuments -- column of Aug. 6, 2015

By MARSHA MERCER

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote in this space about the opportunity cities and towns in the South have as they weigh moving Confederate monuments from streets and parks to museums.  

If cities relocate the statues, as I believe some will, they then can move on to consider new monuments that reflect modern sensibilities. Surely, 150 years after the Civil War we can think beyond the bronze hero on a horse and find other men – and women – whose accomplishments and stories we want to pass to future generations.

Traditionally in this country we have memorialized presidents, generals and victims of disasters. In the 21^st century we can widen our horizons and honor the artists, athletes, composers, entrepreneurs, explorers, scientists, writers and others who have contributed to America’s rich cultural history.

I asked readers to email me their answers to the question: To whom – or what – would you like to see a monument in your community? Today I share your ideas.

This is nothing close to a scientific sample, but several people who wrote me objected to my guess that a year from now we’ll find more Confederate statues in museums and fewer in streets and parks. They made it clear they want the Confederate statues to stay right where they are, thank you.

“We are remembering our Confederate ancestors who fought in a long and brutal war for a wide range of reasons – and not necessarily for slavery,” a reader from Richmond, Va. , wrote.

He insisted that Confederate memorials are no more backward-looking or divisive than memorials to black soldiers who fought for the Union.

“`Moving on,’ as you recommend, should not mean taking down or hiding away all things Confederate. Rather it should mean constructively adding to that national memory and narrative – not destructively subtracting from it,” he said.

Another reader wrote: “I don’t want to change my American history. For better or worse, it is what it is. You want to add to it, fine.”

Neither offered any names for new monuments. One even defied me to find a leader “who doesn’t lie to us every other day. Someone who cares about this country and not his party. I cannot.”

Whoa.  The last thing we need is a monument to a living politician.  

But my correspondents raise an excellent point. Even if Confederate statues stay in place, this is a good time to consider adding to the mix of outdoor memorials.

A supporter of a proposed Fallen Heroes Monument in Richmond told me about a campaign by local veterans to honor on Monument Avenue the collective sacrifice of Richmond’s citizens in foreign wars. 

While many other communities have memorials commemorating the generations that have answered the call to military service overseas, Richmond does not.

First, though, supporters need funds and approval to build the monument.  

Most Confederate monuments were paid originally by private funds. In our time, too, individuals are stepping up to contribute.

For example, in New York’s Central Park, there are 22 statues honoring men but not one honors a woman. Instead, there are statues of fictional characters -- Alice in Wonderland, Mother Goose, Juliet (with Romeo) and various nymphs and angels. A fundraising campaign is underway to build a monument to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, along with other pioneers of women’s rights. 

Several readers suggested a monument honoring Maggie L. Walker, the Virginia civil rights activist and entrepreneur. Walker was the first African-American woman to found and be president of a bank. Her childhood home in Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood is a National Historic Site operated by the National Park Service.

Walker deserves “a statue or some sort of memorial, if not on Monument Avenue, then in a prominent place,” wrote one woman, who called the Confederate statues along Richmond’s Monument Avenue “great examples of civic art of the times” they were built.

“I don’t want the city to spend any money removing them but if private groups want to do this, I’d enjoy a discussion of this idea,” she said.

And she proposed something we all may be able to agree on that could be done soon: Rename Jefferson Davis Highway, as parts of U.S. Route 1 through the South are called.  

“If another name is needed, how about Reconciliation Highway?” she said. It’s a good start. 

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Camp Hoover tells a presidential tale -- Sept. 12, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Before the ranger started a tour of Camp Hoover in Shenandoah National Park the other day, she asked visitors: What do you think of when you hear the name Hoover? 

For a moment, all you heard was birdsong. Then a woman ventured, “FBI?”

That would be J. Edgar Hoover. Ranger Danielle Yoder gently explained that Camp Hoover was President Herbert Hoover’s summer White House.

Today, many people might find it hard to place the 31^st president. Hoover won the 1928 election in a landslide, only to see his popularity and prestige evaporate as the economy collapsed in the Great Depression.  His name became synonymous with misery.

Hoovervilles were the shantytowns that sprang up when the homeless sought refuge in cardboard and scrap metal shacks. Hoover blankets were newspapers stuffed inside coats to keep out the cold; Hoover Pullmans were the rail boxcars that desperate people rode to start life anew.  

Hoover blamed congressional foes for refusing to enact his programs to deal with the crisis, although he arguably worsened the Depression by signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill in 1930. Aimed at protecting American farmers and businesses, the law raised the average import tax to about 40 percent.

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt easily defeated Hoover. Historians mark Hoover as a brilliant, compassionate humanitarian -- and a failure as president.

A visit to the presidential retreat provides a sympathetic, personal portrait of a beleaguered president and his independent wife.  Byrd Visitors Center has a first-rate exhibit about the history of the park and the Hoovers’ getaway. The park service’s free bus tours start from the center. There I met Bill Jones, a newly retired teacher who, in his first summer as a seasonal naturalist park ranger, became intrigued by the Hoovers and started reading everything he could find on them.

Hoover’s life is a classic American success story, says Jones, whose enthusiasm is infectious. Hoover, the son of a Quaker blacksmith in Iowa, was orphaned by age 10 and was sent to live with relatives in Oregon. He was graduated in the first class at Stanford, where he met his future wife, Lou Henry, the university’s first woman geology graduate. She, like Hoover, loved the outdoors. 

Hoover made a fortune as a mining engineer and became known as a humanitarian during and after World War I, leading U.S. food relief efforts in Europe that fed more than 300 million people. 

Hoover’s program cut Americans’ food consumption 15 percent without rationing, through such voluntary efforts as wheatless, meatless and porkless meals and days every week.

Even before his 1929 inauguration, then in March, Hoover realized he’d need to escape the “pneumatic hammer” of the nation’s capital. He wanted a rustic place within 100 miles of Washington, at an elevation above 2,500 feet to be free of disease-carrying mosquitoes and the capital’s sweltering heat and humidity in those pre-air conditioning days, and a good trout stream to satisfy his passion for fishing. He found it at the headwaters of the Rapidan River in the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

Hoover, who refused a salary as president, paid for the 164 acres and the furnishings himself, and the Marines built the 13 buildings as a training assignment. The presidential hideaway had a mess hall to serve 20, horse stables, a trout hatchery, a town hall and guest cabins. Building Camp Rapidan, as the Hoovers called it, meant more roads, electricity and telephone lines into the remote mountains. They entertained frequently, and their guest list was a “who’s who” of American business and government. 

“I have discovered that even the work of government can be improved by leisurely discussions of its problems out under the trees where no bells or callers jar one’s thoughts,” Hoover said.

After using the camp from 1929 to 1933, the Hoovers gave it to the federal government, with the idea that it would be used by future presidents. FDR visited once and found the terrain too challenging. He built his presidential retreat, Shangri-la, in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. President Dwight Eisenhower renamed it Camp David.

Visitors today can go inside two of the three buildings still standing at Camp Hoover, including the Hoovers’ simple cottage, which they had painted brown to contrast with the ornate White House and its political noise, worries and cares. The camp remains as secluded in the mountains as Hoover’s life is in the public memory.

©2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Gloomy about USA? Visit a national park -- May 31, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Roughly three in four Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

That means President Barack Obama faces re-election trouble. Or maybe not. A coin toss is as good as any poll at this point for predicting who’ll win in November, says political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.

So let’s stop trying to handicap whether Mitt Romney or Obama is ahead in the horse race and consider how the rest of us are doing. Americans have been grumpy a long time, and it’s not healthy to live perpetually under a cloud.

Here’s an idea: The next time the state of the Union makes you feel blue, turn off the TV, unplug from the web and head for a national park. Oh, and it won’t kill you to leave your smart phone in the trunk.

I’ve tried this antidote myself recently, walking Civil War battlefields, historic sites and a national seashore. Each trip taught me something about our rich and quirky history. America has faced challenges before and triumphed over them. We’re stronger than we think we are.

I know, I know. Congress is dysfunctional, the economy fragile, the presidential campaign toxic, and the public discourse relentlessly depressing.

And yet, violent crime is down, marriage is up and at least one federal agency actually works. The rate of visitor satisfaction at national parks over the last several years is an astounding 97 percent.

There’s one thing even Obama and Romney, his Republican rival, can agree on. The national parks are beloved.

In 2008, candidate Obama promised to boost funding for national parks and national forests, and he signed a law in 2009 that did so, modestly. PolitiFact rated it “a promise kept.”

Romney talks fondly about boyhood vacations in which his family piled into the Rambler (his father ran American Motors which made the car) and toured national parks.

“We went from national park to national park,” Romney has said. “And they were teaching me to fall in love with America.”

Over Memorial Day weekend, I climbed the 248 iron spiral stairs at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. It’s the equivalent of climbing a 12-story building, and I asked some people on their way down the narrow staircase if it was worth it.

“Oh, yeah!” they agreed, all broad smiles. And they were right. At the top, a wild, happy wind blew away cares and the coastal views were endless.

Built in 1870, the nation’s tallest lighthouse would have been lost to the sea had Congress not spent $10 million to move it half a mile inland in 1999. Engineers lifted the entire structure with hydraulic jacks, placed it on steel mats and slid it on rails, inch by inch.

The plan was fraught with controversy. Local people feared the engineers would fail, leaving a pile of bricks where a major tourist attraction once stood. But the amazing plan succeeded, and the beacon draws 3 million visitors a year.

The Hatteras lighthouse is safe from the encroaching ocean for another hundred years, if we’re lucky.

In Fredericksburg, Va., earlier in May, National Park Service historian John Hennessy led a walking tour that traced President Lincoln’s route around town in 1862. Lincoln met with his generals to plan what was to be a major assault on Richmond. As it happened, the attack was called off.

Lincoln’s visit was not unlike Obama’s recent trip to Afghanistan, Hennessy said, in that few in the Army and press knew about the visit. In Lincoln’s case, the occupied city refused to be impressed.

Fredericksburg’s Unionist newspaper, The Christian Banner, reported that, “There were no demonstrations of joy” among the citizenry – but neither had residents shown joy when Confederate President Jefferson Davis had visited the previous winter.

“The citizens of Fredericksburg seem to have little partialities for presidents,” the paper observed.

Some would say Americans haven’t changed much in 150 years.

So, before the campaign grows even more hateful and off-putting, take a clue from the men running for president. Visit a national park this summer and remind yourself why this country is special.

America’s national parks are waiting.

(c) 2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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