Can History Be Disneyfied and Dignified?

As a boy, Oswald Robinson worked the family farm here. It was land where the spent ammunition of Union and Confederate infantry was as common as rock. Often he’d find old cannonballs and artillery shells; sometimes the plow would turn up the bones of the dead. These would have been the Union men, probably, who by virtue of their defeat had been buried where they fell.

The custom was to rebury remains in Groveton Cemetery. But sometimes the mischievous Oswald would frighten younger children with a soldier’s skull. “I was 12 or 13, just old enough to be a devil,” he says. “When my mother found out, she tanned my hide.”

Mr. Robinson, 84 now, lives in my Aunt Jack’s neighborhood on the western edge of the Manassas National Battlefield Park. In the first battle of Manassas--what Yankees call Bull Run--the old Robinson home, the home where Mr. Robinson’s grandfather was reared, served as Gen. Sigel’s headquarters. In the second battle a year later, it did duty as a hospital.

Mr. Robinson understands that history has a way of being revised, as when they moved the marker signifying where Gen. Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson earned his famous nickname. Now there are fears that history won’t just be revised, but commercialized, merchandised and trivialized. This time, the invaders are coming from the West--from Burbank, to be precise. And they’re wearing mouse ears.

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Perhaps the “mouse ears” crack is a cheap shot. It’s almost too easy to satirize the Walt Disney Co. and its plans for its fifth theme park, the third in these United States. By now, you’ve probably heard of “Disney’s America” and the new battle it has sparked in a region that many Americans consider sacred.

In a way, it’s hard not to admire Disney’s acumen. In Anaheim and Orlando, the company had to create a tourist destination from scratch. Here, they are grafting an amusement park within an hour’s drive of Washington, already a family vacation spot. And, as in California, tax dollars are paying for roads and utilities to support the project.

In keeping with the surroundings, Disney’s America intends to evoke American heritage with shows, displays and rides. One Disney official actually was quoted as saying the park will be so historically true that it will really make visitors “feel what it’s like to be a slave.” If there’s a “Roller Coaster of American History,” it should be a hell of a ride.

Meanwhile, historians such as C. Vann Woodward and James McPherson are fearing the worst. It is not hard to imagine Disney, as the novelist Shelby Foote suggests, treating America’s past the way it treats nature. Disney says don’t worry--the park will educate America’s youth. “Lion King” dolls are cuddly; real lions have a bite.

Disney’s opponents persuaded a Senate subcommittee last week to hold a hearing on the project’s potential impact on the Manassas battlefield. Historian David McCullough may have been eloquent in stating the case against Disney. But Virginia Gov. George Allen, whose football coach father famously preached that “the future is now,” made it clear that the state’s power structure wants Disney in its future. It all looked very, very much like a done deal.

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If that’s the case, my Aunt Jack will be disappointed. She is 77--old enough to remember at least one elderly Confederate veteran in our family. My great-great- uncle, it seems, lost a few fingers at Manassas. When I called on Aunt Jack, she insisted I meet Mr. Robinson, who proved more edifying than any government hearing.

Mr. Robinson claims a heritage of both Southern aristocracy and the people they enslaved. His great-grandfather, “Gentleman Jim” Robinson, was the son of a plantation owner and a slave woman. His father granted Gentleman Jim his freedom and some property, but it was up to him to purchase his wife and four of six children out of slavery. Two sons, it seems, had the misfortune of being trained as stone masons; Gentleman Jim could not afford the price.

The legacy of such history was 100 years of lawful segregation and the inequities and strife that remain. If the Civil War seems musty, consider that Fairfax County, Va., didn’t integrate its schools until 1965. Mr. Robinson was the principal at the only black school that enrolled white students; the others were turned into warehouses.

Can such history be both Disneyfied and dignified? Mr. Robinson wants no part of that fight, but of this much he is sure: “They will slant it in a direction that will be to their profit.”

Mr. Robinson suggests that those who tamper with history may pay a price. Once, he explains, Stonewall’s marker was on Gentleman Jim’s old property. Later, it was decided that Stonewall really made his stand on a neighboring farm. A statue was erected on the spot.

Since then, Mr. Robinson says, Stonewall has been struck twice by lightning.