![\"Pullman](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2015\/02\/Pullman_strikers_outside_Arcade_Building.jpg\")
<\/a>Back a couple weeks ago, President Obama was in town to declare the Pullman Historic District a National Monument. \u00a0And a couple days ago, Tribune columnist Ron Grossman wrote a great piece, \u201cHistory mugged in recent Pullman coverage<\/a>,\u201d the gist of which is that the history of that site is being grossly misrepresented by Obama, the media, and the site\u2019s cheerleaders in general.<\/p>\n The site is, as you may know from your history books, the location of the former company town set up by George Pullman for the workers manufacturing sleeping cars for rail lines. \u00a0Initially, it was a model of employer benevolence, but then, as Grossman summarizes,<\/p>\n In 1894, the workers of Pullman \u2014 most white immigrants \u2014 went on strike, trapped between wage cuts during a depression and George Pullman\u2019s insistence on their paying the full rents on the apartments he leased them. The American Railway Union backed them, but the strike was broken by a court injunction enforced by federal troops. The union went under, a setback that crippled the labor movement until it was revived during the New Deal era, four decades afterward.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But Obama, and the media, tell another story. \u00a0The Washington Post calls the area \u201cthe birthplace of the nation\u2019s first African American labor union\u201d and Obama implies the same in his speech, though more obliquely, as he simply shifts from discussing the 1894 strike (which he implies succeeded) to the establishment of the\u00a0Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, glossing over the fact that the porters themselves had no connection at all to the Pullman district, which, if I remember correctly, had long since ceased to be a company town, and was in any case never home to any of the (black) porters due to segregation. \u00a0Obama then uses his speech to praise unionization, the Civil Rights Movement, and the modern welfare state, including Social Security and Obamacare (OK, he said \u201cAffordable Care Act\u201d).<\/p>\n (You want a national park memorializing the true birthplace of unionization? \u00a0I doubt that Ford would turn over the River Rouge factory complex to the National Park Service.)<\/p>\n You can read the Washington Post coverage here<\/a>, and Obama\u2019s speech here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now, this irritates me, in part, because of the inaccuracy of the history lesson being told, and because Obama is using his inaccurate history to promote his politics (and, let\u2019s face it, his praise of Rahm Emanuel just days before an election). \u00a0But also because this is transforming, and politicizing, the idea of the national park.<\/p>\n I griped about this earlier in my blogging days, here<\/a>, back when the move contemplated was even bigger, naming the site a National Park \u2014 and the Tribune, and local politicians were all for it because of the hope it would bring federal largesse to Chicago.<\/p>\n My first complaint is that National parks used to be about the great natural wonders of the United States. \u00a0Now, slowly but surely, we\u2019re diluting the brand. \u00a0We\u2019re bean-counting how many sites are dedicated to specific minority or other interest groups. \u00a0(Per the Post, \u201cAccording to an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress on the country\u2019s 461 national parks and monuments, 26 center on the black community, 19 on Latinos, eight on women and two on Asian Americans.\u201d) \u00a0Site are being named to be equitable to various regions, including the recent designation of First State National Historic Park in Delaware, celebrated by boosters<\/a> for the prospect of tourism revenue and as a feel-good for state residents.<\/p>\n But, beyond that, it seems as if this reflects a peculiarly American way of looking at history. \u00a0I can\u2019t quite articulate it, but it seems as if we\u2019re more likely to want to set apart and freeze-in-time historical sites, where Germans, and presumably Europeans in general, recognize that history is all around them but they can\u2019t turn their entire country into a museum. \u00a0Germans do have national parks (a list is here<\/a>), but they are limited to natural areas. \u00a0And they do have preserved historic sites: \u00a0Bavaria, for instance, opened Neuschwanstein Castle to tourists<\/a> a mere six weeks after Ludwig II\u2019s death. \u00a0The main site connected with Martin Luther is now a museum<\/a>, and you can visit Beethoven\u2019s birthplace <\/a>to learn about the composer \u2014 not to mention the various concentration camps. \u00a0But other sites continue to be used, with historical markers, of course. \u00a0The Fuggerei<\/a>, the world\u2019s oldest social housing complex still in use, is, indeed, still in use as\u00a0housing\u00a0for the needy. \u00a0And \u2014 in any case \u2014 there is no single national authority running all these establishments under the label \u201cnational park.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back a couple weeks ago, President Obama was in town to declare the Pullman Historic District a National Monument. \u00a0And a couple days ago, Tribune columnist Ron Grossman wrote a great piece, \u201cHistory mugged in recent Pullman coverage,\u201d the gist of which is that the history of that site is being grossly misrepresented by Obama, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":1380,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[196,195],"class_list":["post-1376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-national-parks","tag-pullman"],"yoast_head":"\n