In 1901, six months into his second term, President William McKinley was assassinated by an Anarchist terrorist. Sixteen years later, the Congress officially named the tallest mountain in the United States in his honor – Alaska’s Mount McKinley. Democratic President Woodrow Wilson signed off on it. This week, the name was changed.
To be sure, McKinley was worthy of having this mountain named after him. He was a Civil War hero, a Union private who rose through the ranks and was at one point promoted on the battlefield as high as the rank of major. He saw more actual combat than most veterans of most wars. He fought at Antietam, among other major and minor battles, and even had a horse shot out from underneath him. He then served in Congress and won election as president twice.
However, the original naming of the Alaska mountain in question had been far less dignified than McKinley’s life might suggest. He was alive and well in 1896 and running for president when a gold prospector gave it that name in hopes of helping McKinley’s presidential bid. He never had the chance to visit Alaska before he died. The name is thus somewhat controversial, despite what happened later.
In 1975, the State of Alaska began a long and fruitless effort to change the name officially back to Denali, the older name from the native language. For years, bipartisan efforts by Alaskan legislators to follow through with this change in Congress failed, due to resistance from McKinley’s native Ohio and its senators and congressmen.
This chain of events led to President Obama’s lawful decision over the weekend to change the name. The decision, explained Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, was taken in deference to the desire of Alaskans. It is, after all, their state, and their mountain.
This is all lovely, but not terribly consistent.
If Obama would go this far to honor local wishes — stripping honor from a war hero and predecessor who was murdered in office — perhaps he could consider honoring those wishes when there are matters of actual substance at stake. For example, Alaskans have unsuccessfully sought for decades to exploit certain oil resources that exist in their state. Obama has instead supported the Washington, D.C.-based environmental interests that have prevented this from happening. Without the outsider interference, Americans would already have been using oil extracted from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge five or even 10 years ago.
Had Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency listened to the locals in southwest Colorado, it would have left alone the polluted but relatively harmless abandoned mines near Silverton. Had it done so, EPA would have avoided creating the biggest pollution disaster of 2015 — turning the Animas River, a source of water for people in three different states, into a poisonous orange science experiment.
Many westerners would also like to see Obama show similar deference to local wishes when it comes to handing down wilderness and landmark designations that threaten to place more of their states’ land off-limits. Some are trying to bring back logging, a profitable enterprise which in some areas could help diminish the fury of each year’s fire season.
These are the local wishes, but don’t expect them to be honored. Some causes just aren’t sufficiently politically correct.
