D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
January 2010
A Walk in the Park
NMSU history professor Dwight Pitcaithley looks back on a 30-year career with the National Park Service, including a decade as chief historian for "America's best idea."
By Jeff Berg
Dwight Pitcaithley, in spite of a 30-year career with the federal government, was one of the lucky ones. Now a professor of history at New Mexico State University, Pitcaithley served as chief historian for the National Park Service (NPS) from 1995 to 2005 — a position that might be expected to put him right in the middle of the political games that overwhelm most federal agencies. Although there were politics involved, of course, he says he was able to stay away from most of them.
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NMSU history professor Dwight Pitcaithley. |
He recalls only two incidents where political considerations threaten to take precedence over history while he was with the NPS. One case involved an interpretive panel at Women's Rights National Historic Park in Seneca, NY, when a congressman visited the site and objected to the installation because it cast Ronald Reagan's environmental record in an "unfavorable light."
After reviewing the text, Pitcaithley wrote, "I concluded that while not technically incorrect, the panel was not as prudent as it might have been in assessing Reagan's environmental legacy."
A panel of scholars was formed, an alternative exhibit text was shaped and agreed upon that all found historically and politically acceptable. The change was approved by the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, and installed at the site. Crisis averted.
The second incident occurred when two congressmen complained about an interpretive film at the Lincoln Memorial, which they thought contained too much footage of "liberal" protestors in front of the memorial as compared to that of "conservative" protestors. They wanted footage of anti-abortion and anti-gay rights protestors inserted to counterbalance the scenes containing those marching for pro-choice and gay-rights causes.
After a review, it was discovered that no such footage of conservative marchers existed, primarily because each side had marched in different areas of the Lincoln Memorial: liberals in front, conservatives to the east of the memorial.
Pitcaithley wrote, "The NPS ultimately determined that the historical accuracy of the film would be undermined with the addition of footage taken elsewhere on the (National) Mall."
Despite such occasional dustups, Pitcaithley recalls his time working for Uncle Sam fondly. "I left in 2005 after 30 years with the National Park Service," he says, "pretty much because I'd done everything I'd wanted to do as chief historian. I was burned out, and didn't want to just sit in the chair, and I thought I had affected as much change as I could affect.
"I loved every minute of my time with NPS. Most of the 20,000 employees in the agency have an espirit de corps and work like they are all on a mission. That is not to say that the NPS doesn't have its share of ineffectual managers, but I had supervisors that I respected."
He continues, "I do miss the people and the energy that they have. The environment with the staff was both progressive and supportive; there was sort of a synergy. But I don't miss the travel and cold weather, or the humidity in Washington, DC, in the summer."
Good thing that New Mexico has that "dry heat."
Pitcaithley's move to NMSU and Las Cruces after his retirement from the park service brought his life full circle, since he was born in New Mexico, in Carlsbad, in 1944. After serving in the US Marine Corps for three years, including a stint in Vietnam, he attended Eastern New Mexico University in Clovis and then went on to receive his PhD in history from Texas Tech in Lubbock in 1976.
He started at the bottom of the ladder with the National Park Service, first as a guide at Guadalupe Mountains National Park and also at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. With a minor shrug — no big deal — he says, "I was a guide and cleaned toilets at the caverns."
After three years with the NPS' Southwest Region, Pitcaithley relocated to Boston and served 10 years as regional historian for the NPS' North Atlantic Region. In 1989 he moved to Washington, DC, working first as chief of the NPS' Division of Cultural Resources and then as chief historian.
Throughout his career, Pitcaithley says he was struck by how the NPS' national parks got most of the publicity and attention. Maybe that only sounds logical — it's the National Park Service, after all — but it sells the nationwide system short.
He mentions a segment in last fall's PBS television series by Ken Burns, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" (which KRWG-TV will rebroadcast beginning Jan. 27) as an example: "There was a story of one photographer who so loves the parks that he made it a goal to go to each to get his NPS 'passport' stamped. That's a total of 58 stamps. There was some grumbling among the (NPS) employees because that was not corrected, since it infers that there are only 58. There are 392 sites managed by the NPS. They include the parks, of course, but also national monuments, historical parks and battlefields as well."
Pitcaithley has been to about 225 of the sites.
History quiz for you: How many sites are managed by the NPS in New Mexico? If you got stuck after thinking of Carlsbad Caverns, Gila Cliff Dwellings and White Sands, you only missed 11 more, including the fascinating Capulin Volcano National Monument in the northeast corner of the state and the recently expanded and upgraded Pecos National Monument, just north of Santa Fe.
What's Pitcaithley's favorite of the 392 NPS sites nationwide? "I always refused to answer that question before," he replies. "Bandelier has always been a favorite. I also like the John Adams home in Quincy, Mass. Four generations of the family lived there."
Pitcaithley continues, "In the house there is a portrait of Adams sitting on a sofa holding a cane. The cane is still in the cane rack and the sofa is still there as well. I can go in and know that Adams was sitting on THAT sofa, holding THAT cane."
Still pondering his favorites, Pitcaithley adds, "I also like Lincoln's Birthplace, since it has such a bizarre story."
Briefly, it seems that there is a lack of evidence showing that the log cabin at Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site in Hodgenville, Ky., is actually THAT log cabin. In his essay, "Becoming a Historian," Pitcaithley says that documentation for the cabin was complete only back to 1895. After several trips to the site, he wrote a paper supporting the findings of Benjamin Davis, who was then the historian of the Hodgenville site. Apparently the cabin was a hoax, built on the land where the Lincoln farm once was, by a huckster named Alfred Dennett. An agent of Dennett had the cabin built, and when approached by a newsman who doubted the claim, the agent, James Bigham, reportedly said, "Lincoln was born in a log cabin, wasn't he? Well, one cabin is as good as another!"
Today the NPS website guide to the Lincoln Birthplace says, "An early 19th century Kentucky cabin symbolizes the one in which Abraham was born." (One is reminded of the relocated movie-set log cabin in Silver City that visitors see at the site where Billy the Kid lived.)
Lincoln controversies live on. Recent news articles have suggested that Honest Abe's birthplace may have actually been in North Carolina (www.bosticlincolncenter.com) and not Kentucky. Other stories have emerged about who was actually Lincoln's father.
During his years with the NPS, Pitcaithley's deep interest in the Civil War — its causes, as opposed to battlefield and tactical history — took root. That interest can be directly linked to an incident while Pitcaithley was still with the NPS.
"In 1933, a decision was made that the NPS would manage Civil War battlefields, and from then until 1995, there was an unwritten policy for park staff and superintendents to not talk about the causes of the Civil War," he relates. "But in 1998, at an NPS superintendents' conference in Nashville, it was decided to change that policy, with the 150th anniversary of the start of the war coming up."
After the policy change, Pitcaithley's office fielded a flood of protest. "We got 2,500 cards and letters against doing that, and they all ended up on my desk."
Each letter was answered. At the heart of the outcry was a new NPS reference to slavery as a "cause" of the "the recent unpleasantness" — a sore point to descendants of Confederate veterans who fought for what is still sometimes today called "the Lost Cause."
In his essay "Becoming a Historian," Pitcaithley notes that part of the protest surrounding the decision came from the idea that NPS superintendents were not necessarily veterans of military service. Other historians, amateur and professional alike, however, "reflected on their own military experience to bolster their claim that the NPS was dishonoring their ancestors by addressing the issue of slavery as a cause of the war." Some claimed that slavery became an issue only after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
When Pitcaithley responded to all those who felt this was a concern, he noted his own personal history as a veteran, one who saw combat in Vietnam and was awarded the Purple Heart. He was wounded by mortar shrapnel in a battle in the spring of 1966, while serving as a radio operator.
He says that this response did have a "moderating effect" on some. Thereafter, when he addressed Civil War-interested audiences, he wore his Purple Heart lapel pin. That "didn't change any minds about what the NPS was doing, but it did tend to reduce the hostility in a room."
As much as we care to think otherwise, the Civil War will never, ever be over.
Since his retirement and relocation back to New Mexico, at NMSU, Pitcaithley has more time to research, write about, and lecture on the slavery issue. He is also a member of the Organization of American Historians, which keeps him on the road as an occasional lecturer but not on a steady basis, and is working on a book about the coming of the Civil War.
"I've been digging into the bedrock about the secession conventions that took place before the war," he says. "All of the states that seceded except Tennessee (which discussed its possibility of secession in their general assembly) had conventions. Virginia alone has 2,000 pages of written records from their convention. It was a very deliberate process."
Pitcaithley has been poring through 8,000 pages of baseline information on secession, including the 60 amendments to the US Constitution that were introduced prior to the war that attempted to protect slavery.
He feels that no one has ever looked at the specific reasons that made the southern states feel they needed to secede, or at the amendments — none of which, of course, passed.
"It took me two years to go through the 8,000 pages, and it was like having a front row seat at the secession debates," Pitcaithley says. "Editors wrote editorials, there were sermons and secession pamphlets. There was no real argument against secession."
Border states such as Missouri and Kentucky never seceded, but there were cadres of citizens that passionately argued for both sides. West Virginia exists, of course, because of that part of the state's opposition to slavery and secession. New Mexico, too, was a part of the slavery debate and during that time did allow slavery (see Tumbleweeds, November 2009).
In January 1861, a Peace Conference attended by the "Committee of Thirty-Three" — one member from each of the then-33 states — worked to avert the impending war through compromise. At one point, the committee reported that it had reached majority agreement on a constitutional amendment to protect slavery where it existed and for the immediate admission of New Mexico Territory as a slave state. An even earlier such compromise attempt took place in 1850, which would have included making New Mexico a state as part of an anti-slavery constitutional amendment. But it took another 62 years for our fair state to enter the union in 1912 — perhaps on the very day you are reading this, Jan. 6.
Numerous other issues came up with the slavery debate, Pitcaithley notes, including the formation of the American Colonization Society. The society was formed in 1816, in part because of the number of free blacks who were living in the US after slavery was abolished in the northern states, putting its roots (no pun intended) squarely into the jaws of racism. One of the main projects of the American Colonization Society was to send blacks back to Africa, and in particular to the colony of Liberia. The plan eventually failed, but it also did draw the support of many well-known names from early American history, including Henry Clay, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas and, to a point, even Abe Lincoln.
"He was involved and favored shopping blacks to Liberia," Pitcaithley says of the 16th president. "Nor did he believe that African-Americans were equal to whites, but that they did deserve a balanced economic playing field. He believed that colonization should be part of emancipation, and encouraged Congress to pass legislation to give money to slave owners. But after the Emancipation Proclamation, he dropped his support."
Pitcaithley recently spoke on "Lincoln's Lasting Influence on New Mexico" at the Nov. 20 grand opening of the Branigan Cultural Center's exhibit, "Abraham Lincoln: Self-Made in America," which closed Dec. 18.
Dwight Pitcaithley remains a firm supporter of the National Park Service and its programs, to which he devoted three decades of his life. In talking with him, it seems at times that the agency was a second home to him, from the time he started doing research at the Buffalo National River in Arkansas to his years in Washington, DC.
The park service — specifically the Carlsbad Cavern area of the Guadalupe Mountains where he began his NPS career — will also probably provide a final resting place for Pitcaithley someday.
"I helped my mother scatter the ashes of her mother, my grandmother, in the Guadalupes," Pitcaithley says, "and have every expectation of having my ashes scattered in the Guadalupes."
For more information on your National Park Service, visit nps.gov. For more on the history of America's national parks and the PBS program "America's Best Idea," see www.pbs.org/nationalparks KRWG-TV in Las Cruces will be rebroadcasting the series Jan. 27-March 3 on Wednesdays at 8 p.m.
Senior writer Jeff Berg lives in Las Cruces.