Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Civil War Gettysburg Antietam 20

We will get into that. Let me say a little bit about scott. Welcome, scott. Many of our viewers know scott from his very long and successful and productive tenure and engagement with the National Park. He has been retired for a little more than 10 years or a little less than 10 years, excuse me. Geez, actually six years. Peter one thing john and i have discussed with many of our guests is interpretation on Civil War Battlefield parks. We also talked about partnerships with academics. We have seen with many of our guests, including our guest on thursday, nina silver, one of the first historians who came to the park and had conversations about ways to broaden the interpretation of gettysburg. Time and time again, john have noticed these connections between academics and public historians. Cant then conclude there is this great gap or golf between the two sides. I thought we could open by howng you reflect upon battlefield interpretation has changed over time during your career. And then, if you wouldnt mind, i would be interested in what you see as opportunities or challenges as we look ahead. One,et me add the third observation or fun fact. My girls, i have to give them a shout out today because they love the civil rights conference. They say it is because they get to spend time with daddy, but we know it is the ice cream. They would walk over my dead carcass. They love the conference. Their favorite civil war historian in the town of you. Sburg is i want to say one more thing. I set it on the last show and want to make another point, especially in the time we are going through as a nation in which it is easy to not recognize the significant changes that occurred at battlefield parks. Barb sanders, who does such incredible and important work engaging teachers as well as the greatshe oversees task program that reaches out to underserved communities. We need to remind ourselves that people have not turned a blind eye to the fact that Civil War Battlefields have not been as inclusive as we would prefer. There are people out there doing that work. Scott hartwigs wife, barb sanders, is doing just that. A little advertisement of sorts. Pete. Well said, ifar as interpretation goes started at gettysburg in 1979. When i began at gettysburg, the the overall theme a visitor would experience when they came to the park with the high watermark. That was the real theme. The focus was on picketts charge and on the heroism of the attack on july 3. Showed thatilm we went over a lot of peoples heads but did get at what the war was about. But it was kind of ancillary. The primary interpretation you got when you came to the park was you went to the electric map that explained the movement of the troops. I think the explanation was very clear. That was one of the things people liked about the electric map. It was not exciting but it was a clear explanation and people could know the union was here, confederates here, etc. Then, you went to the psychodrama. That was a big focus on the high watermark in the heroism of the soldiers. And then, you would walk out from the painting. The idea was to take you out and walked down the high watermark trail to where picketts charge occurred and that was your interpretation. Inalso had a large museum the Visitors Center where the electric map was that was an amazing collection of artifacts with virtually no theme and no interpretation. Way openall it in a storage. For example, they had the chairs from the tavern that reynolds laid on on june 30, the night before he was killed at gettysburg. Little inscription that said these are the chairs that John Reynolds laid on in the tavern on june 30. A civil war historian would see that and say that is really interesting. But for 99 of the people that went through their, they dont know who John Reynolds is, they dont know why these chairs are important. It meant nothing to them. That is just an example. Battlefield,n the there were efforts in the 1970s before i got there, there were efforts to broaden interpretation. They had a program called women in the war. They had programs. They tried to talk about civilians. But we did not talk about slavery. We were not encouraged to talk about slavery. We were really focused on telling the story of the battle, and telling the story of the battle that occurred within the boundaries of the park. Ofdid not do interpretation gettysburg. Our interpretation and focus was relatively limited. You talked about at the beginning the relationship between National Park Service Public historians and academic historians today. We did not really have much of a relationship at all, i would say, until the 1990s is when it really began. There were a few things that started to change interpretation in the National Park service, specifically at gettysburg. When i was going to say about the National Park service is when you say National Park service, you imagine the entire service is always on board with everything that some park is doing. The National Park service is like a navy where every part is its own ship and they do things their own way at each park. There are some similarities. They wear the same uniform. They do a lot of the same things. But they are not all on board with doing the same type of interpretation. Some parks are easier to bring along than other parks. A lot of times, it has to do with the person in charge of the park. Maybe the superintendent. It might be the chief of interpretation. Feeling iwas always a encountered in the park service among some people that the only thing we should talk about on the Civil War Battlefields is the battle. The soldiers, the battle, the fighting that occurred. Lets leave it to academics in classrooms to talk about why they were fighting and what the fighting meant. And gradually, that began to change. We sighed at gettysburg. It was kind of ridiculous to do all of these different programs we did and visitors would walk away not understanding what any of it meant. It was brought home to meet one chargere picketts reaches its climax in the battle. There was a couple standing at the angle. There were not many people around. They were from britain. They had seen the electric map, the museum, they had done everything. They had even done a tour of the battlefield. , um,ked at me and said what was it all about . [laughter] i never forgot that because it brought home to meet the failure of what we were doing, that we were not helping people understand why this was relevant. One of the key things i learned as an interpreter is you can have all the facts and figures, all the troop numbers, all the ranks, all the dates of commission, all that sort of stuff, you can know all of that, and if you cant make the story you are telling relevant to the people listening, it does not matter what you know. You have to make it relevant. What does this mean to me today in my life . Why is this important . Why should i be learning about this . You have to be able to do that. In the 1990s began to broaden interpretive programming we were offering. We were experimenting with a lot of Different Things to see what might work, what might not work. Wide and thenrk more service wide what really was a big catalyst of change was the arrival of John Lasseter as a superintendent at gettysburg. He had a phd in history. He was also a colonel in the army reserve. He had a military background. He fought in vietnam. He also had an academic background. He saw the importance of connecting park interpreters with academics. With the chief historian of the National Park service a program where we historians, im sorry if i forget their names, but we brought them in and we had these workshops with park interpreters. And i will also add that we brought in a young and very academic named Pete Carmichael who spent a few weeks with us at Gettysburg National Military Park doing workshops with us in the morning, and public programs, and commenting on what we were doing as far as interpretive programs. The whole experience proved to be very eyeopening. It revealed one of the challenges of broadening your interpretation in the National Park service. And that was the people doing the interpretation, because i learned many of the people doing had beliefs about the war that were not grounded in good scholarship. Maybe they had learned it years ago. Maybe it was their cultural background that they wanted to believe it, but they had a very difficult time coming to grips with some of the realities of what the civil war was about, some of the things that occurred during the war, challenges trying to help people understand those things and interpreting it to the public. That was a very big limiting factor. A lot of people would say you should do this, you should do that. Those are all wonderful ideas. But until i have the people who can actually go out and do them, you have to move incrementally. You cant just suddenly end in the wheel. You have got to build all the spokes before you get the wheel assembled. Process allgoing the way up to when i retired at the end of 2013. We were constantly trying to improve ourselves, better ourselves. I would say one of the big advancements we made was when latcher was able to put together a Publicprivate Partnership and we built the new Visitor Center. It gave us the opportunity to reshape how visitors were prepared for their visit. We changed the theme, if you want to call it that, that the visitor would encounter from the high watermark to the new birth of freedom. We also in the museum tried to challenge people to see the war in its totality. Why did it come . What were the causes of it coming . What did it resolve, not resolve . The end of the expense in the museum left visitors somewhat disquieted. It was not a happy ending to this whole business. That was to prepare visitors before they went out onto the battlefield with a license to , the ranger program, or did a selfguided tour. That worked imperfectly. One of the problems with the Publicprivate Partnership is the private partner has got to stay financially viable. That means you have to charge for people to go into the museum. As the fee for the museum has gone up, i think the number of people going through the of the museum has not been what they would like it to be. It has not been what i would like it to be. I would like to see the majority of people who come to gettysburg go through that experience the first time they come so they have a grounded understanding of what the war is about before they go out on the battlefield. Broadbrush of where we are now. Quinn is the chris chief of interpretation. Chris started with me as a. Ollege workstudy years ago chris is now the chief. Upon the has built things we did when i was there. The first to tell you it is an incremental process, but he is really making some excellent progress in developing programming that has a broad reach and tells a broad story. Scott, you point to this incremental change which is a good one. It is also a good point that you are part of the park service that has a wide range of individuals who come with all kinds of baggage, cultural baggage, and historical understandings that are uniquely their own. I sometimes get frustrated when people will, in an anecdotal way, find a park service interpreter whose programs are not in keeping with the changes you have described that have occurred since the 1990s. I firmly believe every interpreter has her or his right to interpret those events as they see fit. But what i am frustrated by is pointing to those individuals to then make the claim that nothing has changed. What you have described is a seachange, what you have described about the museum, that foundational experience, there is nothing even remotely close to that anywhere in the park service. For those people cynical about the government, and i understand why they are, i hope you all have an opportunity at some point to connect to someone in federal service like scott, quinn, theohn, chris list goes on, academics, im leaving a lot of people out. But these are people really dedicated and devoted and have done such Incredible Service to broaden the reach of the park. Scott is pointing out he is not satisfied. I am not satisfied. No one is satisfied. But it does not do us any good to simply say we tell the same old story the same old way and talk to the same old people we always have. It is factually not true. It is a great destruction to what we are trying to accomplish. Cost, this issue about and i dont want to pin you down on this, but it worries me a great deal. The Visitor Experience at the museum is just not accessible to the vast majority of people regardless of color. Even a lower middleclass family would struggle now to pay for their kids and adults to be able to go through that. Is there a way, is there an alternative that we can make it more affordable . Is that a question above our pay grade . Know, i cannotou say i know the answer to that. I guess what i would say is if i was still working at the park right now and was in a position where i could make my voice say one ofoice would the goals we need to have is to try to find a way, and we have to consider all options on this, to maximize the number of people who get that experience. That is our goal. When your goal is we need to make sure that the private financially doing i thinkat is your goal, your goal is misplaced. I am not saying that is their goal. But that goal is misplaced. That cannot be your goal at a park like gettysburg. Your goal has to be we want to educate the public about what happened here and what happened in this war so they understand it and have a rich experience. And the financial part of it will adjust to whatever we are able to afford here as far as the number of people going through. We need to try and find that price point at which we can survive with it but we maximize the number of people going through the experience. There are some organizational things that when we were planning the museum ended up getting cut for financial reasons that i think would have helped a lot, one of which was some of the Visitor Center we designed based on our experience when we had gone to the williamsburg Visitor Center which was very effective. I think it still is. It was different at the time we were going through. The visitors walking into the Visitor Center, the first thing they saw was the restrooms. That eliminated about 90 of the questions at the information desk. You left the restrooms and came around the corner and there was an orientation film. The orientation film was short but it told you all of your options of what you can do. The only reason he went to the information desk was you needed to book a hotel room or you needed some specific information. After you left the film, you pretty much knew what you wanted to do. The film was guiding the visitors to do what williamsburg wanted them to do. That is what we wanted to do. We had an orientation film. It is still there i believe. Nobody watches it. They dont even know what it is. They think they are at walmart looking at a tv on a commercial. The purpose of that film was to prepare visitors on what their options were so that they knew what they wanted to do, whether they wanted to walk over and buy a ticket to the museum, but it people through the experience. The best way is to do the psychodrama and then do the museum and then the battlefield. That is your best way to experians gettysburg. What happened is when that was lost, the visitor wandered around more, and it was harder for the visitor to figure out what it was they wanted to do their. I think that is still an issue at the Visitor Center. As tors like to be guided what you are recommending they should do. Peter absolutely. When i worked in the park service, i actually enjoyed working the information desk because it was so critical. It was going to make or break that experience. I would see people who would give a long list of things to the visitor. You can do this, this, this. You need to first ask how much time they have. At frederick burg fredericksburg, we tell them there is a movie and then walk the road. After two or three minutes, people shut down taking things in. John and i have talked about this. Nothing beats persontoperson interaction. Scott that is very true. Before we get to antietam, the immense pride you must feel when you drop barb off at work and give her a peck on the cheek and go to the visitor mean you must be thinking of all the things you have done in your career. There have been many. There are more to come. The Visitor Center must be an immense source of pride for you. Was a yeah, i think that really unique experience. I have often talked about why everything worked out well. I think it started again with latch or latcher. Environment,ed an we talk about armies, they all create a culture and their army. He created a culture in which all voices were valued and were heard. I could disagree with him in a meeting and i can voice my opinion, and i felt her fig leaf fine doing it. There were no egos in the room. Nobody trying to control where this thing would go and imprint their vision on it. I think everybody in the room wanted to make this the best experience they possibly could. I think one of the things i am moist delighted with and recommend at the Visitor Center is the visitor flow in the Building Works beautifully. It works exactly like they hoped it would work. If you were ever in the old Visitor Center [laughter] peter it was a mess. Scott horrible, horrible. Last thing i will say about interpretation is jim burton one day was at the park, we were out back of the psychodrama center center. Orama he was a professor at George Washington university. He passed away a few years ago. Just a brilliant guy. Yeah. And his wife. Scott he and his wife. He said to me, you know, my job is easy. I have a bunch of students need to be there and they have to listen to me