Denali
The invidious pet project of one former Ohio congressman has finally reached an end: Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, with the support of President Obama, has directed the United States Board on Geographic Names
to officially return the name of Alaska's Mt. McKinley to Denali, a name native peoples bestowed on America's tallest mountain long ago. This corrects a more than one-hundred-year-old error, when the name "Mt. McKinley" was popularized in a fit of political pique over the gold standard.
So what does Ohio have to do with this? And how can one congressman hold up the renaming of mountain in another state? The answers are below the fold.
"Denali" means "the high one" in the language of the Athabaskans, who have inhabited the region for thousands of years. But when a gold prospector named William A. Dickey "discovered" the mountain during the presidential campaign of 1896, he did something bizarre. Upon re-entering civilization after his "discovery," Dickey heard that William McKinley of Ohio had received the Republican Party's nomination, so he bestowed a new name on Denali—for no good purpose at all:
Dickey had no serious reason to name the mountain as he did. William McKinley had not yet been martyred when he received the honor; indeed he had not even been elected president. Nor had McKinley ever been to the mountain, or even to Alaska. William Dickey favored conservative fiscal policies, while most people in the West wanted to expand the amount of money in circulation by minting more silver coins and certificates. Dickey was irritated by arguments he had lost with "free silver" partisans on his trip and decided to retaliate by naming Denali after the gold standard champion.
"The original naming was little more than a joke," according to George R. Stewart, author of American Place-Names.
Why Dickey of all people should have gotten to "rename" Denali makes no sense, but nonetheless, his joke somehow stuck and proved difficult to undo. In 1975, Alaska changed the mountain's name back to Denali for official state purposes and requested that the U.S. Board on Geographic Names do the same. But Alaskans were blocked—by Rep.
Ralph Regula of Ohio, whose 16th district included
President McKinley's hometown. Under President Carter, the park surrounding the mountain, known as Mt. McKinley National Park, was renamed Denali National Park, but Regula made sure the peak's name remained unchanged. It was a cause he championed until his retirement in 2009, and his fellow Ohio representatives took it up after he left Congress.
How, exactly, could Regula and his colleagues do that? By exploiting a quirky loophole. A Regula aide explained:
"The Board of Geographic Names won't change names so long as legislation on the subject is pending. Congressman Regula always has legislation pending."
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski—also a Republican, like Regula—
was not pleased about this perma-block up in the permafrost:
"It's not even a law, I checked into that. It's just kind of like somebody's protocol is what I'm told. I think there should be some kind of work-around," Murkowski said. "If you have an agency that says, 'We can't do anything because there is something else introduced out there'—we're going to take a look at that."
The situation was finally resolved thanks to a
a 1947 law giving the secretary of the interior some power in this situation; the law says the secretary may take action when "the Board does not act within a reasonable time." And most reasonable persons would reasonably agree that 40 years is an
unreasonably long time to wait.
Regula, apparently, isn't a reasonable person:
"I think President Obama is confused. He thinks he's a dictator, and he's not. He's president of the United States. ... He doesn't have the right to change a statutory law, and that's what he's trying to do here," Regula said. "This is purely a political act on the part of the president. The fact that he’s not visiting the mountain tells you he could care less. This is all just about show business."
I'll leave you with some advice for Ralph Regula and
any other nutcase with a beef about this issue from Jordan Klepper of
The Daily Show, in terms we here at Daily Kos are familiar with:
They should have listened!