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8 A Case Study in Change: The New Deal’s Effect on Shiloh National Military Park The last week in October 1929 was calm at Shiloh National Military Park, the government reservation in West Tennessee set aside as a memorial to the great April 1862 Civil War battle. Matters had calmed down considerably since late September of that year when the superintendent, DeLong Rice, had died in an accidental park explosion. The new superintendent, Robert A. Livingston, knew his duties, however, having been on the park staff since 1916. Still, there were many matters of Rice’s estate to take care of, such as his belongings and the pay and death benefits due to his family. Superintendent Livingston corresponded with the Rice family that week, no doubt with a heavy heart over the shock that was just then beginning to wear off. Meanwhile, at the Shiloh National Cemetery immediately next to the park, the superintendent there, R. E. Gatewood, took care of similarly mundane matters. He reported that the cemetery was in fine shape, “except for some leaves that blew down in the last few days.” It was business as usual in late October 1929 at Pittsburg Landing.1 It was not similarly calm elsewhere in the United States. The same week that Livingston settled Rice’s estate and Gatewood worried about fallen leaves, the stock market crashed in New York. On October 29, 1929, Black Tuesday, stock market investors lost millions of dollars and a worldwide Depression ensued. While the isolated, poverty-stricken area of western Tennessee heard little of the news, those events would eventually have a profound effect on life and times at Shiloh and the surrounding area. In fact, within the next decade, the park would undergo a transformation unlike any seen since its foundation in 1894. The decade of the 1930s would see a literal makeover of Shiloh National Military Park.2 Although the Great Depression began in 1929, it was not until the 1932 election and the 1933 inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the massive government action known as the New Deal took place. Roosevelt began a multi-agency process of relief and recovery that came to affect all of 128 A Case Study in Change America, even Shiloh. Within months, workers for such bureaucratic sounding names as the Civilian Conservation Corps, Civil Works Administration, and Public Works Administration swarmed over the park, reshaping it into a modern national park equipped with modern facilities.3 Shiloh National Military Park had been established in 1894 under the auspices of the War Department. In the early years, five congressionally established battlefields, Shiloh included, were the department’s shining light. Famous and revered Civil War veterans managed them, and thousands upon thousands of other veterans flocked to them for reunions and as individual visitors. As the nation began to change in the 1910s and 1920s, however, the battlefield parks became less important to the War Department bureaucrats . World War I and the second industrial revolution produced dramatic effects such as modernization, mobilization, and urbanization. American life became increasingly hectic, and the quiet battlefield parks lost their predominant roles. By 1930, these parks were viewed more as a bother than a benefit. As a result, by 1933 the parks were run down in all areas of management, interpretation, and care.4 The New Deal years would change all that. By 1940, the Shiloh park and its surrounding area would see dramatic physical, social, economic, and political changes that would forever alter the region. Other military parks and countless other historic sites throughout the United States received the same attention. A thorough study of the New Deal’s effects on Shiloh thus presents an opportunity to see how major anti-Depression local projects, funded federally , transformed individual localities. Taken together, such work transformed the nation. Historians study change over time, and Shiloh can offer a glimpse into one local change phenomenon that, taken with all the others, helped transform America. * * * The first and foremost federal activity which affected Shiloh National Military Park was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order of August 10, 1933, which transferred Shiloh as well as the other military parks from the War Department to the National Park Service of the Department of the Interior. National Park Service officials had desired such an action as far back as the mid-1920s, and even some in the War Department finally realized that an agency mandated to preserve and interpret America’s natural and historical treasures...

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