Glad to see Hilary is on the right track . . .
Mary Krugman
_________________________________________________________
Mrs. Clinton Wants Treasures Saved
.c The Associated Press
By SONYA ROSS
WASHINGTON (AP) - Suggesting Americans are becoming ``a little out of touch
with our past,'' Hillary Rodham Clinton convened a new committee to work on
saving national treasures at risk of being lost through neglect or
deterioration.
The first lady met Monday with the Millennium Committee to Save America's
Treasures, a public-private collaboration created to address preservation of
artifacts, documents or structures that symbolize the American experience. She
is serving as honorary chair.
Mrs. Clinton said she will take a two-day tour by bus of some historic sites
in the mid-Atlantic region this summer, to see for herself how pressing the
need for preservation is. Without preservation, she said, it will be hard to
erase the bleak image of the future that young people now get through popular
culture.
``You have road-warrior movies, you have apocalyptic visions, you have people
living under bubbles because the environment has been so degraded,'' Mrs.
Clinton said. ``There's not an image of the kind of optimistic, positive
future that certainly we were raised with and that I believe in to this day.
``Part of that is because we may have gotten a little out of touch with our
past,'' she said. ``We've got some hard decisions to make ourselves on whether
we will continue to honor our past, or whether we'll get so caught up in
cyberspace and the global economy that being American seems somehow less
significant.''
President Clinton's proposed budget for fiscal 1999 contains $50 million for
historic preservation, and the committee hopes to stimulate private
contributions to go along with that money. Rebecca Rimel, president of the Pew
Charitable Trusts, said Monday her organization was committing $5 million
toward restoring the original Star-Spangled Banner, ravaged by exposure to air
and dust.
``For us, we're tithing,'' Ms. Rimel said. ``We hope every American will find
it in their hearts to tithe as well.''
Thomas G. Williams, an Air Force master sergeant, said any American, not just
those with money, can get involved in preservation. Williams mobilized more
than 1,000 fellow soldiers last September to clean up Washington's
Congressional Cemetery, where FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Marine
bandmaster John Philip Sousa are buried.
Mrs. Clinton listened attentively as trust president Richard Moe discussed
other historic sites in need of long-denied attention, such as the Henderson
Cottage on the grounds of the Soldier's and Airmen's Home in Washington.
Dating back to 1843, the house was the summer residence of presidents from
Buchanan to Arthur, and was the place where President Lincoln wrote the
Emancipation Proclamation.
``This was the Camp David of the 1800s,'' Moe said. ``It deserves to be
restored. Saving these treasures isn't someone else's job.''
Some items, such as the papers of founding fathers, will obviously draw
preservation support, Moe said. But the need is great for documents such as
the Civil War service records of 180,000 black Union soldiers or structures
such as the adobe churches of New Mexico and Thomas Edison's invention factory
in New Jersey.
AP-NY-05-04-98 1657EDT
Copyright 1998 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP
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