Letters
LETTERS to the Editor Readers Respond to 'Park Service Land Grab5 As someone who thinks highly of your magazine, I was quite disappointed by Michael J. Weiss's article (October issue) depicting a...
...After all," I heard one person say, "she must abuse or neglect him if she lets him go to political rallies...
...Laurence M. Weinberger Ventura, California The author replies: Many Cuyahoga Valley in-holders surely would disagree with Congressman Seiberling's view of what his legislation has wrought...
...While I am no fan of James Watt, or of Cushman's outspoken support of the former Interior Secretary, I do applaud Cushman's efforts to champion the cause of inholders...
...Cushman has stated that Watt was "doing a hell of a job...
...The most important thing is to help kids break free from the GI Joe, Voltron War world and its every-man-for-himself mentality...
...A case in point is the response (Letters, December issue) to Stanley Aronowitz's "Are we Afraid to Be Radical...
...And yet, becoming a Government tenant would have been preferable for the thousands of residents who were not given that choice and were evicted from their LETTERS to the Editor homes in recreation areas like the Cuyahoga Valley and in the Delaware Water Gap...
...Under the provisions of the National Park Organic Act of 1916, park officials are directed to adopt policies which would "provide for the enjoyment of said parks in such manner...
...It would have strengthened the article to note the unprecedented actions taken by the national assemblies of the major Protestant churches (United Church of Christ, Disciples, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc...
...No victim I talked to "lusted after vengeance" or was hell-bent to "lock the niggers up," and if any in the office thought that, they kept the sentiment well-hidden from me...
...If Weiss wants to write about land grabs, let him at least get acquainted with the land, the people, their backgrounds, and their motivations...
...Vern Rossman Todd Kaplan James Perkins Federal Correctional Institution Danbury, Connecticut Iwas surprised to read Gary MacEoin's statement, "On this point all historical experience is clear: The powerful are unmoved by appeals to their compassion...
...I believe in it at the grass-roots level, where it's just one person trying to help another and neither of them gives a thought to Edwin Meese...
...As Tom Cahill wrote, "By turning a deaf ear, the unincar-cerated population makes itself a party to these crimes...
...Thomas Fleming Rockford, Illinois Victims9 Rights Your editorial, "Read Me My Rights" (Comment, December issue), confused me when it identified victims' rights advocates with the attack on the Constitution by Ronald Reagan, Edwin Meese, and company...
...Andy Mager Syracuse, New York Puzzling Hentoff What a puzzle Nat Hentoff is...
...calling for an end to intervention in Central America, recommending support of the Sanctuary movement, and urging arms control...
...People who did not wish to leave their old homes were given the choice of remaining on their property for life if they made a deal, or of taking the money and renting the property for a specified term...
...Today, the Park Service can only encroach on populated, nonwilderness areas...
...Some of the people mentioned in Weiss's article, who sold off and then wanted to salvage their homes, were clearly trying to have their cake and eat it, too...
...But we have so many more options available to us in creating parklands—options that don't require the destruction of established towns...
...Seiberling is mistaken when he claims that property owners in a newly established park can retain ownership for life or a twenty-five-year term...
...It has been replaced, in every unit of the National Park System, by a land-protection policy which stresses land-use agreements, scenic easements, and other protective measures, with fee title acquisition only where it is essential...
...He was even nominated by Watt to serve on Watt's National Park System Advisory Board...
...Nonetheless, that mean old Uncle Sam, as described in Weiss's article, bought out the landholders for $4,000 an acre—twenty-five to forty times what they had paid for it...
...Michael Vickerman Woodside, New York The purpose of National Parks is and always has been to provide recreation and a renewing experience of nature for American people...
...The charge was immediately dropped when my mother sent her lawyer to the stationhouse...
...Finally, Weiss insinuates that the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area, a pretty but by no means pristine region, is too close to Cleveland and Akron and their rapidly encroaching suburbs to have been a suitable location for a National Park...
...Over the years, more than 400 dwellings in the valley were condemned and acquired by the Park Service...
...Unfortunately, no laws exist which restrict these landowners from developing their holdings in a manner incongruous with and destructive to the surrounding park...
...The articles on Central America, South Africa, and domestic issues are very enlightening and educational...
...Some of these eyesores were built or started after the park had been established, on land which is usually grandfathered to minimize local resistance to a newly created park...
...This practice, which I objected to from the standpoint of economy, was dropped years ago...
...But his home was curiously spared...
...Would you rather live in a society that didn't help victims and witnesses...
...Michael Vickerman is mistaken when he states that no laws exist to limit landowners from developing their holdings...
...In "The Disc Washers" (November issue), he defends pornographic rock music on the grounds that blues singers were naughty, too...
...Those duties clearly include buying inholdings where they detract from scenic values, disrupt ecological balance, damage critical habitat, and impair the unique experience of seeing and walking through primitive America...
...There have been a minimum of fifteen such actions, and there are closer to twenty-five of us in prison and a half dozen more awaiting trial...
...The Akron Beacon-Journal said it best: "You can't leave everything just the way it was and make a park at all...
...Weiss mentioned my name as the author of the legislation, yet he never contacted me and apparently never bothered even to read the authorizing statute...
...Martin Holladay Federal Correctional Institution Danbury, Connecticut Rape Behind Bars Ispent almost half of the past year in prisons in this country...
...We think our children, and many others, will be grateful that we did, long after we are gone from the beautiful valley that so many people worked so hard to save...
...Unfortunately, the few hundred valley residents had no newspaper to represent their views...
...Very little of the valley was farmed...
...Actually, anyone can easily visualize it simply by looking at the industrial areas that have sprung up in the Valley both north and south of the boundaries of the NRA...
...in the Cuyahoga Valley, however, Federal administrators found it easier to condemn 300 homes than to coexist with their new recreation area...
...Most were perfectly content with their lives until some criminal chose to attack them...
...Congress has always recognized and acknowledged that some residential properties will inevitably have to be acquired when a new national park unit has been created in an area that is not already public land...
...If anyone should be angry, it is the taxpayers who shelled out $4,000 an acre for largely scrub land with no water under it or upon it...
...Many working people who were landholders were instantly elevated to the well-to-do...
...To me, all historical experience leads to exactly the opposite conclusion: The use of power never results in resolution, but only in a continuing cycle of violence...
...I thought we were just reasonably concerned people trying to work a little humanitarian action...
...The "regrettable pain" was unnecessary in the first place...
...Generous sums were given for poorly built and old frame houses and for collapsing barns and outbuildings...
...they yield only to superior power...
...My mother politicized me when I was very young...
...I want others who are considering such acts of nonviolent resistance to know that, at least in my experience, they can survive prison...
...They deserve help, not hatred...
...Actually, they are an unrepresentative fraction from a group numbering 34,000 owners, many of whom are residential subdivides, logging companies, and owners of power plants, garbage dumps, mines, and junkyards...
...Paula Bauer Lincoln, Nebraska The Thoughtful Reader Ioften find the Letters pages frustrating, as I imagine do many readers, because so often contradictory opinions and convictions are passionately expressed but (for obvious reasons) incompletely argued...
...It was particularly distressing that Weiss built his whole article around Charles Cush-man's oft-repeated canard that a ruthless National Park Service has been forcing huge numbers of people out of their homes...
...The Park Service can offer "scenic easements" to restrict residents from significantly altering their property...
...To say that the National Park Service sees "people and parks as incompatible" is an outright lie...
...Unlike Laurence Weinberger, the dozens of people I met last winter had roots in the Cuyahoga Valley and didn't want to take the money and run, no matter the Government's offers, which were seldom as generous as Weinberger's examples suggest...
...These people didn't ask to be victims...
...I can comfortably agree with most of the criticisms without abandoning my positive response to the article...
...The original "yankees" who had sparsely settled the valley in the days of the Western Reserve Connecticut Land Grant Company had, for the most part, disappeared and the valley was inhabited by Polish, Slavic, and Hungarian ironworkers from Cleveland who had settled on small farms in order to have a few pigs, a cow, and a small garden...
...I was so amazed at the virulence of your attack that I called my former supervisor and asked if she could shed some light on the subject...
...One correction: MacEoin states that there have been twelve Plowshares actions since 1980 and that there are six of us in prison...
...My wife and I voluntarily made substantial financial sacrifices to help prevent this from happening in what is now CVNRA...
...OK, so Meese is no friend of mine and I don't think he's either morally or ethically qualified for the position he now holds as U.S...
...In the case of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, virtually all the homes were acquired by the Corps of Engineers, since the area was to have been inundated by the proposed reservoir...
...And how will your thinking change when it's your house that's burglarized, or your daughter who's raped, or your grandmother who's mugged for her Social Security check...
...Matt Silliman Lafayette, Indiana The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...
...In saying this I don't want to detract from the work of eliminating prison rape and the violence of the entire prison structure...
...Cuyahoga Valley exists because the residents of northeast Ohio want it there...
...And while new policies may prevent these confrontations in the future, many in-hold-ers are still fighting eviction under the old rules...
...as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations...
...Granted, I only worked in a victims'-rights office for several months and that was several years ago, but I had no idea that we were rabid anticonstitution-alists, intent on trashing due process and the Bill of Rights...
...The cries of in-holders should start us on the road to investigating the alternatives...
...And the Park Service never offered the one option they could have lived with: creating a recreation area that could coexist with parkland homeowners...
...After the reservoir project was killed and Congress directed transfer of the land to the Park Service for administration as a national recreation area, most of the homes had already been acquired by the Government, a fact Weiss omitted...
...Jesse Unicorn London, England Gospel off Change Gary MacEoin's "Gospel of Change" (December issue) accurately and inspir-ingly charts the strengthening of witness in American Catholicism with regard to anti-nuclear activism, in support of the Sanctuary movement, against intervention in Central America, and on economic issues...
...When the National Park Organic Act was passed in 1916, the nation had thousands of acres of pristine wilderness that could be set aside for future generations...
...The responsibility for deciding which parcels are needed must, of necessity, be left to the Park Service, subject to general guidelines set forth in the applicable legislation and to its overriding purpose, to provide scenic open space which the public can use and enjoy...
...And the people who did not wish to leave their homes typically were given no choice, as documented in three General Accounting Office reports on wholesale acquisition abuses in the Cuyahoga Valley over the last six years...
...My one-time next-door neighbor, hardly able to pay taxes on his 200 acres, suddenly became a millionaire...
...Methinks the Congressman doth protest too much...
...Attorney General...
...As one of the in-holders myself, it is not hard for me to visualize what would have happened to the lovely Cuyahoga Valley if the Congress had not created the CVNRA ten years ago...
...Yes, we may all one day be suspects or criminals, but there is a greater likelihood that we will be victims first...
...That is why condemnations are occasionally necessary...
...they lust after vengeance inflicted by the State...
...I realize that had I been in a maximum-security penitentiary, my experience might have been different...
...When people invoke 'victims' rights' they really are saying 'to hell with the Constitution,' for it is the Constitution they feel victimized by," you stated...
...In these articles, University of Michigan Law School Professor Sax describes how parks can be sensitively created without wiping out established settlements—parks where people, not park visitors but longtime residents, are as much a part of the landscape as the local flora and fauna...
...In each case, a balance must be found between the interests of individual landowners and the interests of the public as a whole...
...There, the National Park Service refused to remedy the situation by returning homes to former owners...
...it's simply bad government at work...
...That Seiberling can claim himself a Cuyahoga Valley in-holder is one of the intriguing sidelights to this story that I did not explore but that was well treated in The Wall Street Journal ("The Silent Scandal," May 25, 1982...
...The legislation authorizing CVNRA has provided from the beginning that if the Park Service desires to acquire residential property inside the boundaries of the park, the owner has the absolute right of retaining ownership for life or a fixed term of up to twenty-five years, at the owner's option...
...The owner of a log cabin in Yosemite National Park, he is the son of a park ranger and the father of a Park Service employee...
...LETTERS to the Editor Readers Respond to 'Park Service Land Grab5 As someone who thinks highly of your magazine, I was quite disappointed by Michael J. Weiss's article (October issue) depicting a so-called land-grab by the National Park Service in several areas around the country, including the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area (CVNRA) between Cleveland and Akron, Ohio...
...Although scenic easements rather than outright purchases were supposed to be the norm for disposing of inholdings, the opposite took place in the valley...
...Problems abound in Michael J. Weiss's article...
...Now, just as we might be ready to write him off, Hentoff comes back strong in December with one of the most insightful pieces on country music that has been published in a long time...
...I would also agree that, in the case of the Cuyahoga Valley, the Park Service probably bought more homes initially than were necessary...
...During my four-and-a-half months in a minimum-security Federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, two weeks in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, and four weeks in the Syracuse, New York, city jail, I never saw or heard about any rapes...
...As a volunteer, most of my time was spent phoning crime victims and offering moral support: telling them that it's OK for them to feel confused, angry, and even a little paranoid...
...You see, I am thirteen years old and have been regarded as a "victim of child-abuse...
...In American society, children have no rights...
...The Akron Beacon-Journal, whose readers represent the people most likely to benefit from a nearby recreation area, understandably backs the Park Service's efforts in the Cuyahoga Valley...
...If one can gauge the popularity of a park by the numbers of volunteers from conservation and community groups working to upgrade conditions within it, then Cuyahoga Valley is an unqualified success...
...In taking those actions, I knew I might go to jail...
...I chose to break laws by refusing to register for the draft and trespassing on an Air Force base...
...Brian Suderman Ashland, Wisconsin Michael J. Weiss's article is, as far as discussion of the Federal Cuyahoga Preserve is concerned, a melange of misrepresentations, distortions, and emotional nonsense...
...Much of the "lovely Cuyahoga Valley" today is populated with boarded-up buildings, ugly excavations, and overgrown lawns where homes once stood...
...Michael J. Weiss Washington, D.C...
...The tragedy is that it could have been created without evicting valley residents...
...Should circumstances such as ill health require the tenant to move, there's no guarantee the advance rental will ever be recovered...
...They are the property of their parents, their teachers, and the State...
...To my knowledge, no one was brutally forced off the land...
...In the meantime, though, I was fingerprinted, questioned by a Federal agent (I think he was) and examined by a psychiatrist, who said I looked thin and was a "victim...
...While I can't contradict the stories told in Tom Cahill's "Rape Behind Bars" (November issue), I can offer a different experience...
...Charles Cushman, director of the National Inholders Association, knows from first-hand experience that park residents and visitors can coexist...
...If such a trip is impossible, they could review two excellent articles on the subject by Joseph Sax, one published in The New York Times (February 28, 1982), the other in Natural History (June 1982...
...The Progressive should look into the issue of children's rights...
...In fact, homeowners must become Government tenants who pay rent for a negotiated period, in advance at 1 per cent per year of the purchase price...
...The thoughtful reader frequently doesn't know whom to agree with...
...This was because, in the early years after the park was created, the first park superintendent and his acquisition staff followed a policy of buying from virtually anyone who offered to sell, as many did...
...Weiss's inholders are sympathetic creatures, portrayed to resemble Jewell Ivy in Country—tough, down-to-earth folks attached to their land...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...Nowhere does Weiss say that the National Park Service is empowered to maintain and improve, where possible, the condition of our parks, a mandate overwhelmingly supported by the American people...
...And more often than not, their high-sounding slogan reduces to 'lock the niggers up.' " What are you talking about...
...Maybe you should give some thought to these things before you lash out at victims'-rights advocates again...
...One such article, "Invasion of the Child Savers" (September issue), was of particular interest to me...
...If we are ever to bring about significant change, we must educate youth on the issues that affect them, such as forced schooling, subservience to school authorities, regulation of the kind of music they can listen to, etc...
...In twenty years, when the populations of Cleveland, Akron, and their suburbs will densely surround the Cuyahoga Valley, the poor, the workers, and the apartment dwellers will have a large park that will offer quiet, natural beauty, and recreation...
...She believed that if I knew what was going on, nobody would be able to take advantage of me...
...Hentoff has the rare gift of recognizing the genuine article even in musical regions in which he is not conspicuously at home...
...And there are myriad reasons for believing that the park's benefits for millions far outweigh the regrettable pain suffered by the few park area residents unwilling to accept any of the rather broad range of options the Park Service offers them...
...From 1953 to 1969, my wife and I were active in township affairs and we knew the valley and its people...
...The destruction of an in-holder community like the Cuyahoga Valley is neither a conservative nor a liberal issue...
...They don't seek justice achieved by due process...
...The story was repeated many times...
...And I'll admit that I was equally amazed to learn that Meese was one of the original founders of the movement...
...The Left must include youth in its plans for a new world society based on education, cooperation, and hu-manitarianism...
...Free the Children Ihave been reading The Progressive for a few months now, and am very pleased with the quality of thought in your magazine...
...In addition, Jewish national assemblies have taken stands supporting the offering of sanctuary...
...It is true that the Park Service has not always acted with sensitivity to the concerns of homeowners, and indeed I have been quite critical of their sometimes tactless approach...
...it was too poor, too hilly, and had long been worked out...
...A 110-acre piece across the road from me made the owner rich...
...I am better informed than Weiss, having owned acreage, a house, and a lake less than a mile from the village of Peninsula, which is the heart of the projected park...
...I'd like both Vickerman and Brian Suderman to visit a regional park in France...
...How could Hentoff, of all people, confuse the witty and allusive indecencies of an adult subculture like blues with the celebrations of rape and incest which pollute the major aesthetic experience of American teen-agers...
...I entered jail with tales of prison rape in my head, but my experience was that rape in prison is not the universal practice Tom Cahill portrays...
...It's easy from a distance to support the Park Service in exercising its right of eminent domain, compensating a few citizens to allow greater numbers access to public resources...
...Particularly distressing was the fact that Michael J. Weiss chose to quote Charles Cushman, ally and supporter of Ronald Reagan and James Watt...
...It is always pleasant to note that apparent differences of opinion may, in fact, be compatible, especially when I find myself sympathetic to both sides...
...When I was eight years old, I was distributing leaflets for a Rock Against Racism concert in New York City's Central Park and was taken in for "being too young to distribute political literature...
...It seems to me that the invention of nuclear weapons, which represent the supreme fruit of a philosophy of violence, has finally proved the bankruptcy of the pursuit of superior power...
...I left prison feeling that as long as I maintained a sense of my own dignity and didn't poke my nose into other people's business, I would get along fine with the other prisoners...
...and yet, I believe in the movement he helped start...
...He also failed to report that many of the former owners were allowed by the Park Service to stay on for years, though they had already sold their property and received payment...
...John F. Seiberling Member of Congress Washington, D.C...
Vol. 50 • February 1986 • No. 2
