The National Park
Service has been out buying video footage of
conservative rallies as it struggles to respond to a new
civil war over a historical film shown at the Lincoln
Memorial. Conservatives fired the first verbal shots
in this conflict by complaining in 2003 that the
video, produced in 1994 with the help of high school
students from around the nation, implies that Abraham
Lincoln supported abortion, homosexuality, and liberal
causes.
The marble
memorial to Lincoln, the first Republican president, draws
more than 4 million visitors a year. Many stop at a
first-floor exhibit to see an eight-minute video that
showcases Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream"
speech, presidential visits, and glimpses of dozens of
protest marches at the memorial on the National Mall.
Park Service
documents, released recently under the Freedom of
Information Act to two liberal advocacy groups, show that
the agency moved quickly to assuage conservatives'
ire. The service bought footage of President Bush,
pro-gun demonstrations, and pro-Iraq war rallies and
even considered cutting out a section showing former
president Clinton, a Democrat. Park Service officials
said they wanted the video to be politically balanced
but refused to provide a copy of the revision to the
Associated Press, saying it was still being evaluated.
Students who
worked on and collected money for the project were surprised
by the effort to give their display a more conservative
touch. "The Lincoln Memorial is America's soapbox,"
said Ilene M. Morgan of Los Angeles, who as a
Scottsdale, Ariz., high school student helped organize
the project. "This was where people have stood to get
America's attention. That's what we were trying to
capture."
The service has
spent about $20,000 revamping the video and buying
footage--including some from the Associated
Press--after conservative political groups
organized a campaign of petitions and e-mails demanding
changes. "The video gave the impression that Lincoln would
have supported abortion and homosexuality," said the
Web site of the Reverend Louis Sheldon's
notoriously antigay Traditional Values Coalition. It
cited footage showing rallies at the memorial by abortion
and gay rights supporters and war opponents but no similar
footage from Christian and conservative interests.
"Absent from the video were any Promise Keepers
marches or Marches for Jesus rallies at the capital. The
video was totally skewed to present only a leftist
viewpoint," the Web site said. Andrea Lafferty,
executive director of Sheldon's group, said Thursday,
"The department knows there's a problem, and we don't
know why they haven't dealt with it in a timely manner."
Sheldon's attack
engendered some e-mails supporting the video from gay
rights supporters and others. Documents about the revision
were released to Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility and the People for the American Way
Foundation. Major portions of the 1,500 pages, provided
to AP by the groups, were blacked out on grounds they
included pre-decision information that did not have to
be disclosed. "This is yet another example of the Bush
administration's efforts to turn the federal
government into a right-wing propaganda machine," PFAW
president Ralph G. Neas said. "Now they're trying to rewrite
history on the basis of ideology and abuse FOIA to
conceal the evidence."
Park Service
deputy director Don Murphy disagreed. The service has a
"responsibility to present a balanced approach. We do not
respond solely to any special interest group," he
said.
On February 3,
2003, the conservative Web site CNSNews.com criticized the
video, particularly a montage of marchers carrying signs
that included, "The Lord Is My Shepherd and Knows I Am
Gay," "Ratify the ERA" and "Keep Abortion Legal."
Sheldon said in a broadcast transcript that was
distributed among Park Service executives: "If Bush is
in office, let's have it our way. Let's make it fair now."
Within weeks of the first conservative complaints, the Park
Service's Harpers Ferry, W.Va., design center was put
to work on revisions.
In a February 20,
2003, e-mail, Tim Radford, a Harpers Ferry Center
employee, requested a search of video archives "for footage
of conservative--'right wing' demonstrations [several
lines blacked out] Lincoln Memorial. please 'rush."'
On March 5, 2003, Radford e-mailed his boss:
"Replacing Clinton would require creating a totally new
interpretive production. Please remember many other
presidents, Republican and Democrat, are shown."
In an October 21,
2003, e-mail, Park Service production assistant Amber
Perkins asked CNN for video of a recent ceremony at which a
Bush administration political appointee helped unveil
a marker at the spot where King gave his famous
speech. She also requested "pro-gun rights/NRA events
at the Lincoln memorial." A February 3, 2005, document
says the revisions project bought video footage of Bush and
his father walking down the Lincoln Memorial steps,
protesters carrying signs opposing gun control, a
rally supporting the war in Iraq, a vigil supporting
the war in Afghanistan, and the Million Man March.
In a December 10,
2004, memo, the Harpers Ferry Center said the revisions
resulted from "concerns and complaints that the interpretive
video in the memorial exhibit space focuses on
protests from liberal or special interest groups from
one point of view and excludes or minimizes other
points of view of a more conservative perspective." Proposed
solutions are blacked out. Vikki Keys, superintendent of
Mall parks and monuments, said the video work has been
folded into a routine reassessment of the entire
exhibit that could produce an entirely new theme. She
said people today appear more interested in Lincoln's
life--"how he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps from
backwoods frontiersman to president "--than in the
memorial's role as a soapbox.
Jaime L. Marquez
of Scottsdale, one of the original student organizers,
said an exhibit on Lincoln's life would be different from
what the students attempted to create a decade ago. "I
hope they don't completely redo it, because a lot of
kids hold personal ownership of it. It demonstrates
that even if you are a sixth-grader you can still make a
difference," she said. Marquez, who described herself as a
Republican, said, "We had support from liberals and
conservatives in Congress, and we had students who
were both. It was not a political platform." Gregg
Behr, who as a student in Pittsburgh's suburbs helped
design the exhibit, said the protests shown in the video
"should move, provoke, or charge us and outrage us. That
isn't an endorsement of any view. I'm glad Reverend
Sheldon is outraged. An exhibit so bland that it
offends no one would dishonor all our fellow Americans
and friends who came to that space for all sorts of
different reasons." (AP)