by Joel Garreau
That notion is admittedly a rosy one. Even I have difficulty imagining the National Trust for Historic Preservation sitting down with the National Association of Industrial and Office Parks, the Sierra Club sitting down with the Building Owners and Managers Association. Each recoiling from the alien, pathological beings across from them like the barroom scene in Star Wars. Rather an entertaining vision, actually.
But that is exactly what I am talking about. And who knows? Maybe we are at a cusp in how mankind builds, a rebirth of that uncommon wisdom called common sense. Human life has not always been like this. Perhaps we should give more credit to the redemption, even the perfectibility, of man. Such a partnership with each other, and with the land, would be one in which conservation and development were no longer antithetical, and dreams could be compared. Above all there would be this guarantee: the places you grow up caring about most will be there for you when you’re ready to start a family of your own.
And finally, it may be the foundation for an agreement in which building with “life” would reflexively attempt to help heal the neighborhood and the region. It would gradually turn out to be viewed as simply a social obligation.
The virtue of this deal—as a deal—is that it beats the hell out of the reality we have now.
All we do now is fight, and fight, and fight.
Though, truth to tell, this is not the first time such internal dissension has raged. We are continually drawn to our Armaged don of a century and a quarter ago; it echoes to the days of our lives. We cluster to it in our battle re-enactments. It is our Passion Play, our Iliad, our Agony, our Golgotha.
It is the Civil War.
In it we Americans fought each other over our most basic values—over who we are, how we got that way, and where we were headed.
That is why, when we fought, we fought to the bitter, ugly, final end.
VI
The Final Battle
Look! There stands Jackson like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!
—Brigadier General Barnard Bee, CSA, just before his death, First Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861
IN THE DUST and the swirl of the 1988 battle in which Americans debated the moral worth of Til Hazel and his land, it was difficult, as always in war, to pinpoint exactly when the turn of fortune came.
It may have been the ad with the photo of the churning bulldozer and the words: “Without Your Support, the Soldiers Who Died at Manassas Will Be Turning Over in Their Graves.”
The work of volunteer copy writers from an obscure Richmond agency, the advertisement was prepared for a ragtag collection of preservationists and history buffs called the Save the Battlefield Coalition. That ad hit people’s hot buttons. The idea of the bones of the Civil War dead rising up from forgotten mass graves before the racking blades of the bulldozers as they pushed dirt for a mall—that really, really got to people.
The ad continued: “As you read this plea, bulldozers are razing a sacred place in American history. A place where the blood of over 28,000 men was spilled in two valiant struggles which would determine the fate of the American republic …
“Indeed, the slaughter was so great that the bodies were piled into mass graves. Many who died here were not men at all. They were little more than boys doing what they thought was right.
“If developer John T. Hazel has his way, the tranquil 542 acre tract at Manassas Battlefield will be transformed overnight into a snarling traffic jam adjacent to a huge office park and shopping mall … This national historical site will no longer pay tribute to the men who paid the ultimate price for their country. Instead, it will pay tribute to plastic watches, fastfood, movie theatres and video stores … If Manassas battlefield can be turned into a parking lot, then is any part of our heritage safe from developers? Help us stop the ‘progress.’ ”
Then again, maybe the turning point was the testimony of Princeton’s James M. McPherson before a panel of the U.S. Senate.
McPherson’s book, Battle Cry of Freedom, having been widely reviewed as the best one-volume history of the Civil War, had just rocketed to the national best-seller lists on its way to winning the Pulitzer Prize, contributing to the most unprecedented wave of interest in that conflict since the bloodshed actually stopped.
McPherson called Stuart’s Hill—the site that Hazel had bought and rechristened William Center—“one of the most significant Civil War monuments I’ve ever seen—the Virginia monument to Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia.” McPherson told the senators: “The property is equally important in historical significance to Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg, where Long-street and Lee had their headquarters, from which Pickett’s Charge was launched.
“I think this issue is of importance to the United States Congress, but more than that, it is important to all of the American people. This is a significant part of our national heritage. What was at stake in the Civil War and at Second Manassas and in the William Center tract was the very fate of the nation. Whether it would be one country or two, would be a nation with slavery or without slavery. That part of our heritage can best be understood by studying it. And Civil War battles can best be studied by going to the battlefields. Walking them as I’ve done to this one several times. Bicycling over them as I’ve tried to do in the midst of the traffic that we’ve heard about today.
“I would have liked to go to the William Center tract—to go on Stuart’s Hill—so that I could see from that height the large part of the battlefield, to go where Longstreet’s troops were, and to try to understand why Fitz-John Porter would not attack across there. That has not been my opportunity in the past, but I hope that as a result of congressional action it will be my opportunity in the future.”
Maybe it was the cumulative work of the world media. Every outfit with a Washington bureau from Time to the Japanese newspapers saw the larger implications of this battle. Their reports, day after day, had their impact, congressional mailbags showed. Especially powerful was the piece on CBS Sunday Morning, the host of which is Charles Kuralt, that doyen of the American landscape. That was the one with the chopper shots showing the land laid open like a raw red wound beneath the frenzied earthmovers. Even more wrenching were the clear young voices, backed by two acoustical guitars, singing the battle hymn of the resistance as the camera panned a golden landscape of split-rail fence:
So I drove out to Manassas
Stood alone and watched the sunset
I imagined I could see grandfather fall.
Behind the place where he was standing
Just before the bullet took him
Is where they’re gonna build a shopping mall.
When all was said and done, however, the pivotal moment—like Pickett’s Charge—probably came watching Annie Snyder cry.
Annie was not the kind of woman you ever expected to see cry. Snyder, the sparkplug and ringleader of the Save the Battlefield Coalition, had a curious face. Its lower half was that of a man. She had a powerful jaw, a broad nose, and cheeks flat as plates. Nonetheless, from the bridge of her nose up, she really was quite a vamp, her eyes flashing brilliantly, even vivaciously, beneath the fashionably short cut of her auburn hair. In fact, she was more sensitive about her good looks than might be thought common in a woman of sixty-seven, even if she did appear fifteen years younger. When a builder’s magazine referred to her as a little old lady, she went so crazy as to send the publication a rather fetching photo of herself doing aerobics in tights, which of course they proceeded to print. As she discussed the work of various national reporters who had reported sympathet ically on “her” battlefield, it was as if she were reminiscing about old flames.
The contradictions were not all in her face. The more innocent and exposed Annie seemed, the more her incongruities had the capacity to startle. They might include her casual references to her professional prowess as a long-gun marksman. Or her years picking up calves that weighed ninety pounds. Annie weighed 135. Or her devout belief in conservative Republicanism. Or the way she cou
ld consciously choose to adorn her lima bean-sized earlobes with large, flat earrings the crimson color of which matched exactly the red of the U.S. Marine Corps emblem on her polo shirt.
Annie’s history was as illuminating of the strains on America at midcentury as was Til Hazel’s. Anne D. Snyder, née Annie Delp, was born nine years before Til, in 1921. The daughter of a prosperous Pittsburgh attorney, she was as intellectually gifted as Hazel, accelerating through high school to enter college at sixteen. She was also just as bull-headed.
“I’ll tell you how I got liberated,” she recalled. “I grew up in a neighborhood of boys. There were no girls. We lived next to a farm, and we were allowed to play baseball and football in their pasture. So I grew up with all these boys. I could play football as well as the rest of them. But when I started developing bosoms they decided I was an embarrassment to them and they kicked me off the football team. I’ve been a women’s libber ever since. That made me so mad. Yeah! So it was perfectly normal for me to join the Marine Corps.”
Which she did. The outbreak of World War II found her enrolled in the law school at the University of Pittsburgh—hardly routine or even welcome at that time. But as the war progressed, she espied a challenge that made any law school malevolence seem ludicrous. “I’m a flag waver. Yeah, really. My brother was a Marine,” she said simply, to explain what she did next.
Annie left law school to join the first class of women to graduate Marine Officers Candidate School. Then she became a recruiter, attracting other young women to the world of Leather-necks.
The men hated all of it. The Marines were absolutely the last service to accept women. They capitulated only because of the exigencies of war. “ ‘Free a man to fight’ was our motto,” Snyder recalled. Her father was beyond shocked. “The men had the idea all women in uniform were prostitutes.” She constantly had to conquer men’s worlds, proving her mettle not only to other Marines, but to her own family, as well as the fathers and brothers of the women she was trying to recruit.
“When I graduated from OCS I was a recruiter in New Orleans, and the day I arrived—my first plane trip—the commanding officer said, ‘Come on, Lieutenant, you have to give a speech at the St. Charles Hotel in twenty minutes.’ I’ll never forget it. The St. Charles had these gorgeous, gorgeous staircases, ceilings forty feet high. Very impressive to a twenty-one-year-old. We go careening up these steps and over to this room and I looked in and there were 150 men sitting there. I was just stunned. I backed up; I thought we were in the wrong place. What the hell was I doing talking to men? Well, you didn’t have to talk the women into joining. You had to talk their fathers, husbands, sons. My job was to convince them that I wouldn’t be selling their daughters into prostitution. The male chauvinist pigs in this country. To somebody living in your era, that might just seem incredible, I know.”
When Snyder mustered out of the Marines after the war, it was with some magnificent life stories to tell, and a marriage to Waldon Peter (Pete) Snyder, one of the Marines’ earliest Pacific Theater aviators. Pete would soon join a new elite: airline pilots. But Annie would come away with a life foundation singular for young women of that day and time: there were not many challenges she would ever view as daunting. Not compared with what she’d already done. She and Pete ended up buying a 180-acre Angus cattle operation in Prince William County that Annie ran for twenty-eight years. “I think I’m the only woman in the world who annually asked for something for Christmas that I never got. And that was a hay-bale elevator.” She and the kids ended up throwing hundreds of tons of hay way up into the loft by hand over the years.
The farm turned out to have a stream running through it called Little Bull Run. It was an accident of geography that would end up changing her life as she fought fight after fight for the battlefield next door, which she came to love.
All those fights. And of course it ended up with Annie squaring off against the most powerful force in the region, Til Hazel. It’s curious, but Hazel’s most persistent and successful opponents in life have been women. In fact, throughout America, from California to Texas to Florida, it is striking how often, whenever the partisans in the battle over progress collide, the builders are men, and the preservationists, women. It is by no means a hard-and-fast divide. There is always crossover. But throughout history, there is a pattern. Joseph Campbell discussed it in The Power of Myth. “Society is always patriarchal. Nature is always matrilineal. Since her magic is that of giving birth and nourishment, as the earth does, her magic supports the magic of the earth. She is the first planter. The hunter is an individual in a way that no farmer will ever be.”
The media would enjoy describing the cataclysm between the forces marshaled by Annie Snyder and those of Til Hazel as the Third Battle of Bull Run. But that clever label was misleading; it suggested that the fight was the only one since the gunfire. That was by no means right. The intense struggles over the use of the land began almost before the Rebel yells—heard for the first time at Manassas—had died away. The land was bought by a real estate speculator only weeks after the battle in 1861. He thought it would make a good tourist attraction.
The fields were haunted by ghosts of battles that always seemed to swirl around Manassas. For it was there, in the First Battle of Bull Run—only three months after Fort Sumter fell—that it first became clear there would be no cheap victory, no quick score.
Annie counted the 1988 struggle as her sixth Third Battle of Manassas. And she got started only in the second half of the twentieth century. One reporter checking the clips back to 1890 counted it as at least the tenth.
Snyder’s first battle came in the 1950s, over the interstate. That was an awesome struggle. Deflecting the intentions of freeway engineers in those days was unheard of—even if they did see the shortest distance between two points as straight through the middle of a historic battlefield. In the end, however, deflected they were. The battle is marked on the atlases of America to this day. Just west of Fairfax, for no apparent reason unless you know your modern history, the freeway dips idiosyncratically to the south.
Another of Snyder’s several battles of Manassas involved Mar riott’s plan in 1973 to put a Great America theme park on the land. Seemed like a good idea to put roller coasters and Ferris wheels and water slides and cotton candy next to the battlefield there. That plan too was brought to its knees. And it too served to burnish Annie’s legend.
But by the late 1980s, it seemed the battles might have come to an end. For decades, the Prince William County government had tried to encourage commercial development. It was urgently needed to help meet the crushing tax burden of providing schools and services for all the residential subdivisions popping up around one of the fastest growing jurisdictions in the nation. The county had earmarked nearly six hundred acres adjacent to the interstate—and thus, incidentally, next to the National Battlefield Park—as among the most promising sites. In the late 1970s, the county had fought desperately to prevent those woods and fields from being included in the National Park. They wanted jobs there. So in 1986, the Hazel/Peterson Companies came up with a plan. Its centerpiece, the county believed, would be a wooded Edge City corporate park of glass and steel and trees for highly educated, high-tech, white-collar workers. It would be screened from the battlefield. The traffic impact, it was promised, would be minimal. It seemed that the outline of a decent compromise was at hand. Those like Snyder who had fought so much for the battlefield were hardly happy with the idea of having mid-rise offices where Longstreet swept forward to close the vise on the Federals. But if development was inevitable, a relatively classy and low-rise Planned Mixed-Use Development such as the one the Hazel/Peterson Companies were proposing, with 560 new homes and 2.9 million square feet of commercial space—half the size of downtown San Antonio—might be about as good a deal as they were going to get. Hazel/Peterson ran tours of their office park eight miles down the interstate, at Fair Lakes. It did indeed have trees and lakes and geese. The shopping area was small scale
. Politics, after all, is the art of the possible. The special PMD zoning ordinance was passed. And that seemed to be about the end of that. Annie even announced her retirement as an activist. The doctors had read her the riot act. If she didn’t slow down, they told her, a combination of ills threatened her life. In the Washington Post article intending to bid her farewell and recap her long history of struggle, however, up cropped another of those Annie Snyder incongruities. She was photographed out in one of her lovely fields, attractively dressed. But what she was leaning on was her shotgun. Almost as if she knew.
When the final battle resumed in Manassas on January 28, 1988, it started with a shock like a thunderclap on a sunny day. Without warning, Hazel/Peterson announced a change in plans. The future corporate campus at William Center needed a shot in the arm, they announced. So they were going to switch some uses in their Planned Mixed-Use Development. Almost half the 2.9 million square feet of nonresidential use to which they were entitled was not going to be corporate campus after all. The page one headline in the Washington Post the next day said it all: HUGE MALL PLANNED AT MANASSAS. 600-Acre Project to Be Located Near Battlefield
“It excites me in the sense that we’re no longer going to stand in the shadow of Fairfax County,” said the Prince William supervisor representing the district. “This is going to be nicer than Fair Oaks,” he said, referring to the mall of astounding size only eight miles away with 1.4 million square feet and 213 stores.