Butte, America
POISONED, RUINED, AND self-cannibalized, this city is still the grandest of all boomtowns
April 1997 | Volume 48, Issue 2
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EmailReavis, an imposing six feet five with bright red hair, can work himself into a beard-pulling, arm-waving lather extolling his town’s architecture and history. “The finest example of industrial American architecture in the country,” he exclaims during a conversation in the 1910-vintage courthouse that’s grandiose enough to be an opera house. “What took place here happened nowhere else!”
Reavis could celebrate Butte all day, but he’s off to yet another planning meeting. He punches into a worn tweed jacket with leather patches peeling from the elbows, gathers up a bundle of rolled blueprints, and suggests I try a certain Mexican lunch place around the corner. “Unusual atmosphere,” he says, and disappears, still talking, down the hall.
Following his directions, I find myself back at the Metals Bank & Trust Building, the ground floor this time, in what used to be the bank’s palatial lobby. After a beer at the old marble tellers’ counter under a distant towering ceiling, I’m shown to a table. It’s inside the old vault, and there’s a story about the vault. It took thirty-six horses two days to haul it up the hill from the railroad station, my waiter tells me. “In 1928,” he says, for of course he too is a Butte historian, “this vault held more money than any other between Minneapolis and Seattle.”
And now I’m eating enchiladas in it.
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Why do we need a national nonprofit membership society for American history?
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“Save America’s Treasures” has been totally eliminated—the largest Federal program supporting preservation of such treasures as the original Star Spangled Banner and George Washington’s tent.
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65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.
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Visits to the Top 20 Civil War battlefields have dropped in half from 1970 to 2009 according to official National Park Service statistics.
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40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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A quarter of Americans believe Congress shares power over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations, according to a recent Annenberg survey.
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“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.
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The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.
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Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.
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The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.
