There was no project during my first decade at Disney about which I
felt more passionate than Disney's America - and none that ran up
against fiercer resistance. Building a Disney theme park based on
American history seemed like a natural extension of the company's
lifelong focus on children and education, a perfect way of marrying
our self-interest with a broader public interest.
The seeds of the idea were first planted in the summer of 1991.
Chastened by the rising costs of Euro Disney, we began to look for
ways to develop smaller-scale theme parks. Dick Nunis, then head of
the parks, persuaded Frank and me to visit Colonial Williamsburg, the
restored colonial town in Tidewater Virginia. Dick envisioned it as a
potential site for a park with related themes. I had American history
on my mind anyway. The next executive retreat we planned was to be
devoted to the subject of democracy. The idea for an animated film
based on the story of Pocahontas had been suggested at one of our
recent Gong Shows, and I was in the midst of reading several books
about John Smith and Pocahontas.
The visit to Williamsburg was intriguing, but when our strategic
planning group took a hard look at the site, they concluded that it
was the wrong location for a Disney theme park, which depends on
several million annual guests. The business in Williamsburg was mostly
seasonal, in the summers, and the drive from Washington, D.C., took
nearly two hours - too far for most one-day visitors. Our visit did
convince me that a park based on historical and patriotic themes could
succeed, if we found the right place for it.
When we returned to Los Angeles, Frank and I authorized Peter Rummell
and his Disney Development team to begin scouting for a site. Within a
few weeks, they settled on the Washington, D.C., area. "It's no
contest," Peter explained. "It has a huge tourist population, and
they're just the kind of people who would be interested in a
historical theme park." More than 19 million people visit the nation's
capital each year and the vast majority are drawn by the city's
historical sites, government buildings, and museums. When I was a
teenager, my parents had taken me and my younger sister there several
times. I still remember racing my sister up the Washington Monument,
fighting with her along the Potomac, and visiting the White House and
the Smithsonian. We even walked past Vice President Nixon standing all
by himself in the halls of Congress. It was impossible to replace
these kinds of experiences, but the Disney park we had in mind had the
potential to engage young people in American history in novel ways.
Drawing on our natural strengths as storytellers, we could use these
skills to be substantive without being dull, to bring historical
events alive and to make the story of America more vivid and
three-dimensional.
Our first important misstep was the decision to call the park
"Disney's America." "Disney" and "America" just seemed to slide off
the tongue together easily and naturally. Frank and I both liked
associating Disney with America and America with Disney. But the name
would prove to be a disaster. "Disney's America" implied ownership of
the country's history, which only antagonized our critics. That was
unfortunate because we were never interested in a park that merely
reflected a Disneyesque view of American history.
While Peter's group looked for a site through the fall of 1992, we
began putting together a team from Imagineering to design the park. It
was led by Bob Weis, who had played the same role at the Disney-MGM
Studios. I first met with Bob's group on a Sunday in January 1993 and
we set out to generate as many ideas and points of view about the park
as possible.
"Whatever we ultimately do, it should be built around a small number
of emotionally stirring, heart-wrenching stories based on important
themes in American history," I told our group. "We ought to have
elements that are fun and frivolous and carefree alongside ones that
are serious and challenging and sobering. We need the same sort of
dramatic highs and lows that you find in any great film. If we're
truly going to celebrate America, we need to capture the country in
all its complexity." One suggestion was to find dramatic ways to tell
the story of immigration. Other arenas that came up included the
Native American experience; the writing of the Constitution and the
birth of democracy; the story of slavery and the Civil War; the role
of the military; the birth and death of the family farm; and the
launch of the industrial revolution.
In the spring of 1993, Peter's team found what sounded like an ideal
location, just outside the town of Haymarket, Virginia, only twenty
miles from downtown Washington, D.C. More than 2,300 of the 3,000
acres we wanted to buy were controlled by a single entity - Exxon. The
company's real estate division had purchased the undeveloped farmland
at the height of the real estate boom in the late 1980s. They managed
to win zoning approval for a large mixed-use development of homes and
office buildings, only to abandon the project when the real estate
market fell apart in the early 1990s.
With few prospective buyers for such a large parcel, Exxon was willing
to sell an option to buy the land rather than insisting on an outright
purchase. That enabled us to hold the land for a modest cost while we
continued to design the park and began the zoning and approvals
process with state and local authorities. Peter's team also set out to
purchase or take options on a dozen other smaller adjacent parcels
surrounding the main site. In none of the transactions, including with
Exxon, did we let on that Disney was the buyer.
Early in August, [my wife] Jane [Breckenridge Eisner] and I flew to
Washington to tour the site for the first time. We landed at Dulles
Airport around 9:30 a.m., rented a car, and drove to the site, where
we met Peter and several of his executives. The drive took us less
than half an hour, which I found encouraging. While the Disney's
America site was just off Interstate 66, a main highway leading to
Washington, it was still almost pure rural countryside. Hills and
farmland extended as far as we could see. Jane and I spent several
hours exploring the property. At one point, walking through a
long-abandoned house, I went down into the cellar and discovered a
pair of andirons that had to be at least a hundred years old.
The setting was so beautiful that I began to wonder how local
residents would feel about our building a theme park there, no matter
how much of the land around it we protected. But Peter and his group
were reassuring that since the site had already been zoned once for a
large residential and commercial development, we wouldn't have a
problem - and indeed that local residents would welcome thousands of
jobs in an area that was struggling economically. Our hope was to
announce the plans for Disney's America sometime before the end of the
year, but it was clear that we had a lot of preparatory work ahead.
One focus would be to persuade the Virginia legislature to help
underwrite infrastructure improvements such as the widening of
Interstate 66. As with the renovation of the New Amsterdam Theatre,
Disney's America wasn't economically viable without government
subsidies. In this instance, the state was likely to be drawn to the
project by its potential to create new jobs, generate additional tax
revenues, and attract tourists.
As we moved forward, there were two key issues that we badly
underestimated - and that would haunt us over the next year. First, we
failed to recognize how deeply people often feel about maintaining
their communities just as they are. This was especially true of the
land to the west of us - the very heart of Virginia hunt country -
where our neighbors included some of the most powerful families in
America, among them the Mellons, the DuPonts, the Harrimans, and the
Grahams. Many of these prominent families had maintained large homes
in this pristine Virginia countryside for generations - huge farms
with vast pastures and split-rail fences and barns filled with
Thoroughbred horses.
For more than two decades, we would soon discover, these families had
also generously funded the Piedmont Environmental Council, a local
rural preservation group. There may have been no collection of people
in America better equipped to lobby a cause, whether with Congress or
government agencies or through the media. They had the financial
resources to do battle, the expertise, and the political connections.
Many of them did this sort of work for a living in Washington, and
with Disney's America, they had a highly personal stake in the
outcome.
The other issue that blindsided us was the Civil War battlefield in
the town of Manassas, approximately five miles from our site. We knew
that there had been a large controversy five years earlier, when a
developer announced plans to build a shopping center close to the
battlefield. Fierce opposition arose, led by historians and Civil War
buffs, including Jody Powell, former press secretary to Jimmy Carter.
Ultimately, the opponents prevailed, and plans to build the shopping
center were withdrawn. But we believed - and so did Jody Powell, whom
we consulted - that our location was far enough away from Manassas
that it wouldn't be an issue. We couldn't have been more wrong. Our
opponents did eventually make an issue of Manassas - and ultimately
were successful at conveying the impression that our site literally
sat on a Civil War battlefield rather than five miles from one. But
all this was ahead of us. At the end of the day that Jane and I spent
walking the site and talking with Peter and his team, I was more
confident and enthusiastic about Disney's America than ever.
Our next mistake was assuming that we could announce the project on
our own timetable. Our focus on secrecy in land acquisition had
prevented us from even briefing, much less lobbying, the leading
politicians in the state about our plans as they evolved. The
consequence was that we lost the opportunity to develop crucial allies
and nurture goodwill. The secrecy also precluded seeking out prominent
historians, whose ideas and criticisms could have helped us shape our
plans, alerted us to areas of potential controversy, and given the
project more legitimacy from the start. Finally, the commitment to
secrecy kept me or any of our top executives from meeting with top
Washington politicians and opinion makers in advance of our
announcement, to describe our plans in detail. By doing so we could
have shared our genuine passion for the project and the seriousness of
our intentions.
Without the freedom to thoroughly test the political waters, we
weren't in a position to assess intelligently where opposition might
arise, as it does in virtually every large-scale development. We chose
an aggressive young executive named Mark Pacala to oversee the park,
but by the time he came aboard in the fall of 1993, the key mistakes
had already been made and events were moving fast. News of our plans
began to leak in late October, and we found ourselves scrambling
defensively to cover our bases. We never fully recovered.
With reporters hot on the trail of our plans, I called George F. Allen
early in November. He'd just been elected governor of Virginia.
Completely coincidentally, it turned out that Allen was at Walt Disney
World, vacationing with his family in the aftermath of his landslide
victory. ("Mr. Allen, now that you've been elected Governor of
Virginia, what are you going to do next?") Allen called me back from
the Magic Kingdom, and I described our plans to him. "It sounds
great," he said. "It's just the kind of project I want to bring to
Virginia. I look forward to working with you." I also placed a call to
Douglas Wilder, the outgoing governor, and he, too, expressed support.
As Governor-elect Allen had, Gov. Wilder promised to show up for our
public announcement, which we had now scheduled for Thursday, November
11.
On Monday, November 8, The Wall Street Journal ran a small item saying
that Disney was planning a new park somewhere in Virginia, but
provided no details. On Wednesday, as we continued racing to brief
local Virginia politicians about the project, the Washington Post
broke the story in more detail. Right away, we had a taste of what we
were going to be facing. The front page of the Post's Metropolitan
section had two huge stories about the proposed park, one under the
headline: "In Disney's Grand Plan, Some See a Smoggy, Cloggy
Transportation Mess." Alongside were several pictures of the site
along with the caption: "A Cinderella Story - Or a Bad Dream?" It was
a strong dose of what the Post would deliver in its news pages and
editorial columns over the next ten months. The following morning,
more than 150 reporters, politicians, and local residents showed up
for our official announcement in Haymarket.
Our hope was to demonstrate that considerable planning had already
gone into the project and that our intentions were serious. Bob Weis
and his team presented artists' renderings and scale models of our
preliminary plans. They depicted seven themed areas, which included a
Presidents Square; recreations of a Native American village; a Civil
War fort; Ellis Island, the immigrant port in New York; a
turn-of-the-century factory town; a state fair; and a midwestern
family farm. In fact, we revealed far too much too soon. As with all
our major projects, we knew that this one would go through many
versions in the course of our planning. But by publicly revealing a
project that looked relatively complete, we opened ourselves up to
every critic with different ideas about what a park based on American
history should and should not include. We also left ourselves
vulnerable to the claim that any changes we subsequently made were a
response to outside pressures rather than a natural part of our own
creative process and our commitment to excellence.
At the news conference, reporters focused on the issue of
authenticity, and the degree to which Disney might be expected to
whitewash or trivialize the country's history. Contrary to these
expectations, we had no interest in telling a sanitized or sugarcoated
story, not least because doing so would make the park less interesting
and emotionally compelling for visitors. But our attempts to address
these questions backfired. When Bob Weis was asked a question about
the kind of park we had in mind, he offered a simple example. "We want
to make you a Civil War soldier," he said. "We want to make you feel
what it was like to be a slave, or what it was like to escape through
the Underground Railroad." Within days, critics had seized on this
statement as the height of presumption. "How could Disney possibly
evoke the experience of slavery in a theme park?" one editorial writer
demanded. I wished that Bob had phrased his answer more felicitously,
but his point seemed to me a reasonable one. We had no intention of
trying to replicate the experience of slavery for anyone. How could
we? But we were committed to bringing history alive by telling
emotionally compelling stories in dramatic ways. Somehow, we never
successfully communicated that distinction. The more we tried, the
more we stepped on our own toes.
A second line of questioning at the news conference focused on
traditional concerns raised by any large-scale development, namely,
its likely effect on such issues as local traffic, air pollution, and
population density. Both Bob and Peter Rummell made it clear that we
took these issues seriously. We fully intended to work with local
officials to assure that we addressed local concerns and more than met
environmental standards, as we'd done very successfully at Walt Disney
World. But none of these questions seemed likely to abate soon.
Instead, local opposition coalesced swiftly. Within five days of our
announcement, more than a dozen of the wealthy owners of Virginia
estates to the west of our site had met to organize their opposition
to our project. The Piedmont Environmental Council and several local
environmental groups also began speaking out against the project,
vowing to fight to the end.
Despite these critics, much of the initial response was more
encouraging. Governors Wilder and Allen strongly endorsed Disney's
America at the press conference. Key state legislators and local
officials, including the powerful chairwoman of the Prince William
County Board of Supervisors, also expressed support. And despite the
toughness and skepticism of the Washington Post's coverage, most of
the media treated the announcement of Disney's America as an
interesting, original, and ambitious undertaking. The initial New York
Times article described the "utter exuberance" local residents felt
about the project and made scant mention of potential opposition.
Bob Weis and his team were now finally free to solicit input from
outside experts. In mid-December 1993, he and several other Imagineers
flew to Washington to talk to leaders of several groups, including the
Washington Indian Leadership Forum, the Congressional Black Caucus,
the Virginia Historical Society, and the Smithsonian Institution. They
received a uniformly warm reception, including offers of help. We also
began seeking out historians as advisers. We saw ourselves as
storytellers first and foremost. We needed experts to help us
understand, interpret, and shape the dramas we hoped to portray.
Although some prominent historians immediately took the position that
an entertainment company like Disney shouldn't be dealing with history
at all, others were more open-minded. If Disney intended to build a
theme park devoted to American history, they told us, they were eager
to try to ensure that we did so knowledgeably and responsibly.
Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University and a
scholar of nineteenth-century American History, had first contacted us
in 1991 to raise concerns about an exhibit called Great Moments with
Mr. Lincoln at Disneyland. Opened in the 1960s, the exhibit featured
an Audio-Animatronic robot of Abe Lincoln giving a medley of several
of his speeches. Foner's concern, having visited the exhibit, was that
Lincoln's speech never mentioned slavery and that it failed to deal at
all with the issue of race. We responded by inviting Foner to help us
craft a more inclusive message for the narrator and for Lincoln - to
be used at the Magic Kingdom's expanded Audio-Animatronic exhibit, the
Hall of Presidents. He agreed. Where the original narrator had talked
about "freedom and democracy" as the central ideals of the founding
fathers, Foner worked with us to add the concept that such ideals
represent "an unfinished agenda which challenges each generation of
Americans, including our own." The poet Maya Angelou agreed to narrate
the new show. We also added Bill Clinton to the exhibit as our
forty-third president, and he agreed to record a short speech of his
own, which the White House helped us to write. (I wrote four drafts
myself. None sounded like the Gettysburg Address.) In the end, Foner's
input made for a far more textured and powerful exhibit. Now he agreed
to play a similar role in advising us on Disney's America.
Bob Weis and his deputy, Rick Rothschild, also met with James Horton,
a prominent specialist in African American history at George
Washington University who had initially expressed opposition to our
project. After Horton heard firsthand about our intentions, he agreed
to help craft the exhibit at Disney's America devoted to race.
Properly designed, he later told a Washington Post reporter, "I am
convinced that the Disney project can complement historical Washington
and prove that serious history can be every bit as fascinating as
fantasy and even more compelling."
On Saturday, January 15, 1994, we gathered the Disney's America team
for an all-day meeting at one of the Imagineering buildings in
Glendale. "The most difficult job," I told our group, "won't be to
tell important stories about our history, or to deliver an enjoyable
experience for our guests, but to achieve both these goals without
having either one dilute the other." In our original plan, for
example, we'd envisioned recreating a classic twentieth-century steel
mill and then putting a roller-coaster through it. To do that, we
began to understand, could trivialize and even demean the attempt to
portray the steel mill realistically.
If we tried to mix theme park excitement directly with history, we
weren't going to do either one justice. It was fine to create a Lewis
and Clark raft ride, for example, but not to try to explain Manifest
Destiny as part of the same experience. It was also important to tell
stories like that of American soldiers - their role in defending and
protecting our country - and to use our three-dimensional and
multimedia tools to bring historical events alive. "What we need most
of all is more edge and more depth," I said, toward the end of our
meeting. "We need to keep working to create a day-long experience that
makes our guests laugh and cry, feel proud of their country's
strengths and angry about its shortcomings."
At the political and the grassroots level, support for our project
grew. In February, a series of independently conducted polls showed
that Virginians supported Disney's America by margins averaging 3 to
1. Under Mark Pacala's leadership, we also won over a growing
percentage of community officials and local residents, who were
attracted by the promise of twelve thousand new jobs and the
substantial tax revenues the park would ultimately pay. Our critics
from the Piedmont Environmental Council tried to minimize these
figures, but even their own study concluded that Disney's America
would generate at least $10 million a year in new state tax revenues
and more than six thousand new jobs. These numbers had an effect at
the state level as well. On March 14, 1994, with Governor Allen's
strong support, the Virginia legislature approved a $140 million bond
offering for highway improvements adjacent to the site and another $20
million to support a marketing campaign for Virginia historical
tourist destinations, including our park.
None of this seemed to dampen the resolve of our opponents. Most
important, several historians began raising the specter that our park
threatened historical sites in the surrounding area, notably Manassas.
The leader of these efforts was Richard Moe, president of the National
Trust for Historic Preservation. In February, the New York Times came
out editorially in opposition to Disney's America, arguing the same
case that Moe was making. "Haymarket is not 42nd Street or Florida's
piney woods," the Times wrote. "Putting a theme park there degrades a
scenic and historic resource for a project that can be built
elsewhere. As for parents who want to give their children history, let
them - like generations before them - make the trip to Prince William
County. Let them sit still at Manassas and listen for the presence of
the dead."
In May, a group calling itself Protect Historic America was launched.
Led by Moe, it included a prestigious group of historians, writers,
and well-known public figures. On May 11, funded in part by supporters
of the Piedmont Environmental Council, they held a press conference
that featured several of their most prominent members. David
McCullough, the best-selling author of Truman and host for Ken Burns's
PBS series on the Civil War, described Disney's America as "a
commercial blitzkrieg by the Panzer division of developers." He went
on to liken the proposed building of our historical park to the Nazi
takeover of Western Europe.
"We have so little that's authentic and real," McCullough said. "It's
irrational, illogical, and enormously detrimental to attempt to create
synthetic history by destroying real history." Moe warned that if
Disney did manage to get the park built, the surrounding countryside
would be "overrun, cheapened, and trivialized." The retired Yale
historian C. Vann Woodward suggested that "it [is] pretty much taken
for granted that Disney [will] misinterpret the past." And Roger
Wilkins, a journalist and history professor, described our proposed
park as nothing less than "a national calamity."
By any reasonable measure, this attack on Disney's America was
dramatically overstated. But for our critics, the press conference
served its purpose. Much like negative advertising in a political
campaign, these incendiary claims were very effective in influencing
public opinion and putting us further on the defensive. I was suddenly
the captain of Exxon's Valdez. It no longer mattered that the park
didn't really sit on a historic battlefield; or that by widening the
highway that ran by our site we would be improving what had long been
a nightmarish bottleneck for commuters; or that the road leading to
Manassas already contained a dense, tacky strip mall development far
more intrusive than the park we envisioned building. By the summer of
1994, opposing Disney's America had become a fashionable cause célèbre
in the media centers of New York City and Washington, D.C. If people
such as Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Bill Moyers
opposed our plans, that was reason enough for others to join the
fight.
Nonetheless, we kept pushing on, convinced that the best answer to our
critics was to build a great park. Around the same time that the
Protect Historic America group held its press conference, Bob Weis and
his team were able to gather together a different, but equally
impressive group of experts to meet with us at Walt Disney World,
listen to our current plans for Disney's America, and offer their
criticisms and their ideas. In addition to several academic
historians, the attendees included James Billington, the Librarian of
Congress; the Reverend Leo O'Donovan, the president of Georgetown
University; Robert Wilburn, the president of Colonial Williamsburg;
Sylvia Williams, director of the National Museum of African Art at the
Smithsonian; and Rex Scouten, the chief curator at the White House.
We began by taking them on a tour of several Epcot exhibits with
historical themes, ranging from The Making of Me, a film sponsored by
Metropolitan Life that tells the story of human development from
birth, to American Adventure, a twenty-five-minute Audio-Animatronics
presentation that recounts the story of the founding of the country.
After the tours, we sought their reactions. The gathered group turned
out to be highly critical of American Adventure, which hadn't been
significantly updated since it opened in 1982.
"My general impression is that it's not the America I know, neither
from the scholarship nor from my own perspective," said George
Sanchez, a history professor at the University of Michigan. "There's
way too much that's ignored about American history.... So for me, my
experience was very disjunctive." Others echoed his comments, several
of them complaining that the exhibit seemed dated. More broadly, they
voiced a criticism that we'd heard frequently in recent months.
Disney, they argued, couldn't be trusted to depict American history in
ways that were sufficiently complex, subtle, and inclusive. I was
surprised by the intensity of their reaction, but not upset by it.
Disney's America remained very much in the early planning stages, and
the whole purpose of this meeting was to solicit more input and make
it better.
"Entertainment doesn't have to be pablum, and it doesn't have to make
you feel good," I said, when my turn came to respond. "Entertainment
has to create an emotional response. It can make you laugh, it can
make you cry, it can make you angry, it can make you sad. I don't
disagree with 98 percent of what has been said here, but I do want to
point out that Disney's America won't be a 25-minute experience like
the American Adventure. The story we're going to try to tell at the
park will take eight hours to deliver. It's going to be made up of
fifteen or twenty different components. Each one will deal with a
different aspect of the American experience. Disney's America has the
potential to redefine The Walt Disney Company more than anything we've
done. Our goal, when you finish an eight-hour day there, is that
you'll have experienced an intelligent, entertaining, challenging view
of America."
The next morning, a Sunday, we took our group of experts to see the
Hall of Presidents. When we all reconvened at 11:00 a.m., I was
prepared for another tough day. To my surprise, nearly every member of
the group seemed to have been impressed and even moved by the Hall of
Presidents. Plainly, the decision to enlist the help of a tough critic
in Eric Foner a year earlier had made a difference. "Once you know
what's wrong, it isn't difficult to make it right," I told the group.
"We have the technology. We have the ability. We have the contacts.
And we also have the commitment."
Midway into our second day, our participants began to believe that we
were genuinely interested in their responses. They could see how
personally involved we all were in the project, and that while Disney
is obviously a profit-making entertainment company, that didn't
preclude a sense of social responsibility or a willingness to engage
intellectually with our critics. When we turned to the question of how
to tell the story of immigration, I now felt comfortable saying that
we were considering using the Muppets. Unusual as that might seem for
such a complex subject, we were determined to make the exhibit
accessible to children - in part by injecting some humor. If we had
brought up this idea the day before, it might well have been dismissed
out of hand. Now it sparked a rich, open discussion. Whereas the
meeting had begun in a wary, adversarial spirit, it had slowly turned
more collaborative. Suddenly, we had the benefit of highly
knowledgeable partners in thinking about how to depict historical
themes ranging from slavery to immigration in lively, novel ways
without sacrificing depth or authenticity.
At the end of the day, Eric Foner captured what seemed to be a widely
held sentiment among his colleagues. "Whatever you do is going to get
criticism," he told our team, "but I'm convinced after this weekend
that it is possible for Disney to do a job that will be entertaining,
intellectually defensible, and satisfying not only to the company but
to the rather critical-minded people who are in this room, and also to
the vast public that you will be bringing in. I'm pretty persuaded
that this park can be salutary for the country and that people leaving
it will be stimulated to learn more and think more and read more about
American history and visit more places."
I, too, felt reinvigorated about the project. "I hope that this is the
beginning of our dialogue," I concluded. "We spent five years making
The Lion King and still didn't have it completely right. But we got a
lot closer. This park will change and evolve over the next several
years, and we want it critiqued. It's much easier to change something
in the planning stages than it is once it's built. So we like to hear
it early, and directly. We're not experts and we're thick-skinned.
This has been very valuable. It has stimulated a lot of ideas. It has
refocused me, as I'm sure it has all of our people."
Two weeks later, over a weekend in late May, Jane and I took a two-day
trip to Washington to visit a series of historical sites, including
Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Montpelier - all landmarks of the
American presidency. We walked the same grounds at Mount Vernon where
Washington himself had pondered the future of the new nation. We saw
the office at Monticello in which Thomas Jefferson wrote the Statute
of Virginia for Religious Freedom and the bedroom in which he breathed
his last breath - on Independence Day, 1826. We were reminded, walking
through Montpelier, of the role that James Madison played in ratifying
the Constitution. Our tour was full of beauty and inspiration, but
there weren't crowds of fellow tourists. "You have to understand,"
James Rees, the director of Mount Vernon told us ruefully, "that
presidents like Washington have become politically incorrect."
The sad truth is that the level of knowledge about American history
among young people is nothing short of appalling. In a 1993 poll of
16,000 high school seniors, 80 percent could not explain the
Emancipation Proclamation and nearly 60 percent had never heard of
Teddy Roosevelt. In a second poll conducted among seventeen-year-olds,
60 percent could not identify the Dred Scott decision and 50 percent
couldn't name the era in which Thomas Jefferson was president.
Obviously, it is important to preserve authentic historic landmarks
ranging from presidential homes to Civil War battlegrounds. But it is
also critical to find ways to reinspire interest in these sites and
the events they commemorate. The multimedia approach we envisioned for
Disney's America was scarcely the whole answer, but we believed it had
the potential to help.
When Jane and I returned to Washington, after our tour of presidential
homes, we spent much of the next day at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum. In contrast to the static exhibits at so many museums -
including the three presidents' homes we had visited - this was a
truly multimedia approach to history. The experience was at once
horrifying and deeply affecting: a vivid, three-dimensional evocation
of the genocide of more than 6 million people, among them many of my
own European relatives. Especially moving was the room containing
thousands of pairs of shoes that had been confiscated from Jews as
they were about to be gassed to death. The powerful smell of leather
made the experience even more immediate. Jane and I were affected as
well by the museum's meticulous recreation of the process by which one
town was transformed from a thriving, happy community to a barren one
in which nearly all the residents were killed by the Nazis. The
museum's creators used many of the dramatic tools and techniques that
Walt Disney had pioneered - film, animation, music, voice-over
narrative - in this case to recreate and evoke the horror of the
Holocaust. These were the same tools that we intended to draw on for
Disney's America.
In mid-June, I made another trip to Washington, this one an effort to
respond directly to some of our critics, and to undertake some of the
lobbying that I should have begun a year earlier. It wasn't going to
be easy. At the prompting of the Virginia preservationists and the
historians opposed to Disney's America, Senator Dale Bumpers was about
to have his government subcommittee on public lands look into whether
our project genuinely threatened any historical sites. Any public
hearing was sure to create more negative media attention. In addition,
Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt was considering conducting his
own investigation. I flew east feeling both defensive and righteously
indignant at the campaign that had been launched against our project.
The intensity of my emotions was a double-edged sword. On the one
hand, it made me a more passionate advocate for Disney's America. On
the other hand, in the heat of the battle, it also prompted me to say
some things I would later wish I hadn't.
On the afternoon of June 13, I had a meeting with reporters and
editors at the Washington Post. The paper's coverage, I believed, had
been unduly one-sided and harsh, and I arrived with a chip on my
shoulder - never a good idea. Instead of trying to present our case
calmly and logically, I was flip and defiant, in part because I
mistakenly assumed I was speaking on background and wouldn't be quoted
directly. The next morning, the Post ran a front-page piece that
recounted my comments at length.
Two of them especially made me cringe. The first was my response to
the widespread criticism of our plans to build Disney's America. "I'm
shocked," I was quoted as saying, "because I thought we were doing
good. I expected to be taken around on people's shoulders." The second
was my reaction to the historians who'd attacked the project so
vitriolically. "I sat through many history classes where I read some
of their stuff," my quote read, "and I didn't learn anything. It was
pretty boring."
My comments made me sound not just smug and arrogant but like
something of a Philistine. The quote about being carried around on
people's shoulders was an unfortunate shorthand I used to describe my
surprise and disappointment that Disney's effort to undertake
something serious and substantive hadn't been more widely encouraged
and embraced. The glib reference to historians was an irritated
response to a group of people who I believed had attacked us unfairly,
without making any real effort to understand what we were trying to
do. It didn't matter that I was also inspired by my share of teachers,
or that Disney sponsors the American Teacher Awards precisely to honor
great teaching. That didn't qualify as news. Looking back, I realize
how much my brief moment of intemperance undermined our cause.
Later in the week, I spent two days paying calls to senators,
congressmen, and government officials, including Bruce Babbitt and
Dale Bumpers, whose committee was set to begin hearings. I also met
with Virginia senator John Warner, a Republican who, like his
Democratic counterpart, Charles Robb, and most of the state's
politicians, supported Disney's America. The following day I met with
Tom Foley, then Speaker of the House, who brought together a dozen
congressmen for a lunch. In the process, I discovered that the
overwhelming majority of legislators were intrigued by Disney's
America and opposed to involving the federal government in what was
obviously a local dispute. Nonetheless, a week later Senator Bumpers
held what was almost surely the first Senate Energy and National
Resources subcommittee meeting in history to attract dozens of
journalists and TV cameras, and some five hundred curious onlookers.
It was beside the point that the majority of senators, Democrat and
Republican, took our side. The event once again focused attention on
the controversy over our project rather than on its substance.
For me, the saving grace that day was the blunt testimony by George
Allen, the Virginia governor, who remained a staunch supporter of
Disney's America. "I think I'm on solid ground in suggesting that
Senator Bumpers' committee wouldn't have held a hearing if opposition
to this park had not become a crusade among well-connected folks who
don't want it located within 30 miles of their neighborhood," Allen
began. "With all other arguments faltering, [these] opponents turned
to historians who don't like the idea of history-based theme parks....
They have the same right as other Americans to express their points of
view. But in arguing that this project ought to be blocked because
they fear that The Walt Disney Company will not interpret history to
their satisfaction, these folks are practicing censorship."
A week after my visit to Washington, Protect Historic America took out
an ad in the New York Times which reprinted the Post's version of my
quote about boring historians. The ad was headlined: "The Man Who
Would Destroy American History." This time I could only laugh. (All
right, I probably didn't laugh, but I didn't get as upset as Jane
did.) Fairness seemed to have given way to polemics. As William Safire
put it, succinctly addressing our critics: "Historians don't own
history." I tried to take a conciliatory approach. "The concerns of
thoughtful critics have helped us to refine our vision of what this
park can be," I wrote in an op-ed piece for the Washington Post, a
week after my visit there. "We will now go forward with our dream and
hope our detractors can hold their fire and wait to judge us and our
work on its merits."
Jane and I spent the Fourth of July at her parents' home in Jamestown,
New York, for a large family reunion. Jane's grandmother, who lived
with the family as Jane grew up, was herself the oldest of nine
children. All of them were born in Sweden and six had emigrated to
America in the early 1900s. This was a reunion of their children and
grandchildren - Jane's cousins, nieces, and nephews - and it reminded
me of The New Land, Jan Troell's powerful film about Swedish
emigration to America. The second-generation Americans who made up
Jane's family now lived all across the country. They had laid down
roots and built successful careers, from teacher to airline pilot.
Now, in the backyard of Jane's childhood home over Independence Day
weekend, we were experiencing firsthand a version of the immigrant
experience. For two days, I spent hours listening to the stories of
Jane's relatives, many of whom I'd never met before. I was reminded
once again of what had sparked my interest in building Disney's
America.
The first event that seriously undermined my resolve was the bypass
operation I underwent in mid-July. Before surgery, my plan had been to
spend most of August in Aspen, but I was also excited about
undertaking a series of short one- and two-day trips aimed at seeking
further ideas for Disney's America. These included visits to Santa Fe,
New Mexico, for the annual Pueblo Indian Dance Ritual; and to San
Antonio, Texas, to see its widely touted Fiesta, Texas, regional theme
park. I was also scheduled to visit Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for
a meeting that Bob Weis's team had put together with Maya Angelou and
a series of prominent black leaders and historians. In this case, the
plan was to discuss how we intended to portray the African American
experience at Disney's America. Obviously, I had to cancel all of
these trips. Equally important, the operation left me with less
strength to deal with the continuous opposition to the park. Even so,
I remained determined to move forward.
On Friday, August 5 - exactly three weeks after surgery - I made my
first visit to the office specifically to attend a lunch meeting about
our progress on Disney's America. Jane came along as my chauffeur and
traveling nurse. I listened to a report on each of the aspects of the
park, and we spent some time discussing a possible name change to
"Disney's American Celebration." Several members of our group felt
that it was softer and less presumptuous. We also talked some more
about a new round of protests that we knew our opponents had set for
September, in Washington, and how we intended to respond. After ninety
minutes, I was exhausted, but very happy to be back at work.
Much of my attention over the next few weeks was focused on resolving
Jeffrey Katzenberg's situation. On August 29, six days after we
announced Jeffrey's departure, I turned my attention back to Disney's
America to attend a meeting reviewing updated financial projections
for the park. Larry Murphy and Richard Nanula had been taking a hard
new look at our numbers, in consultation with Mark Pacala and Peter
Rummell. It was Peter who delivered their stunning conclusion. The new
figures, he explained, showed that rather than the profit we'd
previously projected for Disney's America, we were now facing the
prospect of substantial losses. There were several explanations.
First, the concerted efforts of our critics - which included raising a
legal challenge to nearly every environmental approval we received -
had forced us to spend far more than we anticipated on attorneys,
land-use experts, and lobbyists. Largely as a result, our projected
opening was going to be delayed by at least two years, which meant far
higher carrying costs in the interim, and more spending to combat our
opponents. Also, as we continued to refine and strengthen our vision
of the park, adding attractions and exhibits, its projected cost had
increased by nearly 40 percent.
These numbers were discouraging, but particularly so when Peter
explained that projections for the park's revenues had been scaled
back. "With the softness in attendance at our domestic parks and at
Disneyland Paris, it looks like we might ultimately have to drop the
price point for tickets at Disney's America," he explained. Finally,
there was the issue of the length of the park's season. In our
original model, the assumption had been that Disney's America would be
closed for three months in the winter. Now that a dozen members of our
team had spent a year living in the towns adjacent to our site, they
had a different view. An eight-month season for the park seemed more
realistic.
Unanticipated costs and obstacles are a part of any project. In this
case, we simply had more than our share. Under ordinary circumstances,
I would have sent our team back to conceive a scaled-down version of
the park that made more economic sense. There was, after all, still
reason for optimism. Mark Pacala's group won several more key zoning
and environmental approvals in the summer and fall of 1994. On
September 8, nearly ten thousand local supporters of Disney's America
turned out for a country fair that we held in Prince William County
Stadium to rally the troops and counter the critics.
I still believed that it was possible to get Disney's America built,
but the question now was at what cost - not just financially but
psychically. Frank's death, my bypass surgery, and Jeffrey's departure
had resulted in a harrowing five months for the company. I still
hadn't recovered my full strength. On September 15, after two weeks of
soul-searching, we finally agreed that it wasn't fair to subject the
company to more trauma. The issue was no longer who was right or
wrong. We had lost the perception game. Largely through our own
missteps, the Walt Disney Company had been effectively portrayed as an
enemy of American history and a plunderer of sacred ground. The
revised economic projections took the last bit of wind out of our
sails. The cost of moving forward on Disney's America, we reluctantly
concluded, finally outweighed the potential gain.
Having decided to give up the ship, we turned our attention to
withdrawing in a way that avoided creating more ill will and left the
door open to eventually building the park elsewhere. The key was to
make peace with the historians who had so vocally opposed the project.
I asked John Cooke, who was head of the Disney Channel but had
consulted on the park from the start, to handle this mission. In
addition to his passion for history, John was well connected in
Washington. Among other relationships, he sat on the board of a
Democratic policy group with Dick Moe, one of the earliest and most
influential critics of Disney's America. John agreed to set up a
meeting with Moe, and on September 19, they met for dinner in
Washington, D.C.
"If we were to leave the site in Virginia," John began, "do you think
that some of the historians would agree to attend a joint news
conference and endorse our right to build the park in another
location?" Moe responded encouragingly. John then asked whether some
of the historians might agree to serve on a future advisory panel,
helping Disney to further refine the content of a historical park.
Again, Moe was positive. He also agreed to arrange a dinner in New
York the following evening that would include David McCullough. That,
too, went well. The following morning, John drove out to Princeton and
had a successfull lunch with the historian James McPherson, yet a
third prominent critic.
My plan was to confirm the decision to withdraw from Virginia to the
board of directors at our regular meeting scheduled at the end of
September. After that, we would share the decision with Governor
Allen, our staunchest and most effective supporter, and with other
local Virginia officials. Once again, however, our plans began to leak
in the press. For Gov. Allen to read about our decision before we
could share it with him directly was simply unacceptable. Instead, we
decided to charter a plane and rush two of our Disney's America team -
Mark Pacala and Bob Shinn, Peter Rummell's deputy - to see the
governor in person.
Governor Allen was understandably dismayed by the news, but absorbed
it calmly. At mid-meeting, an aide interrupted to say that reporters
were gathering outside his door. The governor arranged for Pacala and
Shinn to leave by a back door and then met with the reporters himself.
To this day, I feel sorry that we couldn't give Gov. Allen more
reasonable advance warning. By the next morning, September 28, the
story was on the front page of the Washington Post. The war was over,
but in the course of the battle we'd learned important lessons. A good
idea never dies and I had no intention of giving up on a historical
park permanently. In the meantime, there were plenty of other pressing
challenges to occupy our immediate attention.
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