Opinions

Obama's Denali change gives posthumous win for Stevens

FAIRBANKS -- In 1991, Sen. Ted Stevens vowed that one day the U.S. Board on Geographic Names would decide between two names for the highest peak on the continent -- McKinley and Denali.

"I can assure you, this is going to be acted on in my lifetime," an angry Stevens told the Associated Press after one of his many failed attempts to end a congressional stalemate.

He was wrong on the timing. Five years after his death, the federal board has yet to take up the mountainous matter because a 40-year congressional impasse continues.

But President Barack Obama handed Stevens a posthumous victory last week over an equally stubborn and steadfast Ohio congressman who made it his life's work to maintain the McKinley moniker.

Obama bypassed the bureaucratic deadlock in Congress that frustrated Stevens for decades by giving Interior Secretary Sally Jewell instructions to make the switch. This has Republicans in Ohio crying federal overreach, while the Alaska delegation and many other people in Alaska are saying, "Thanks, Obama" -- skipping the sarcasm this time around.

The deadlock in Congress began as a showdown between Stevens and Rep. Ralph Regula of Ohio, who stymied the Denali campaign on his own for decades. For years, he attached riders to the Interior Department spending bills. After Stevens blocked money for a coal gasification plant in Stark County, Ohio, in 1991, Regula changed tactics, the Akron Beacon Journal reported.

Regula began to introduce a bill every two years that said McKinley should remain the name. Congress never paid attention to the bill, but the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, made up of federal employees from departments and agencies, had a policy against taking action as long as a bill was alive.

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The loophole gave Regula veto power by simply recycling the same one-page bill. This did not sit well with Stevens.

"It's not a loophole, it's just an ostrich-type decision to stick their head in the sand every time a congressman breathes," Stevens said in 1991. "It means they really don't want to do their job."

Against someone else, Stevens might have had his way, but the breathing congressman was a powerful figure on the House Appropriations Committee.

Regula, who studied at the William McKinley School of Law, was a one-issue politician as far as the Interior Department was concerned. He vowed to defend the McKinley name to his last breath. Regula celebrated McKinley's birthday every Jan. 29 by handing out scarlet carnations, the state flower adopted in McKinley's memory -- to fellow lawmakers. He had no interest in a compromise on some other issue.

In the end, the two neutralized each other on the mountain name, a pattern that continues with the elected officials from Alaska and Ohio who followed Stevens and Regula to Congress.

In his 1914 book, "The Ascent of Denali," about the first successful climb to the mountain top, Hudson Stuck argued that the "immemorial Native name" be restored. He also objected to naming a mountain 14 miles from Denali after another Ohio politician, Sen. Joseph Foraker, saying "there they stand upon the maps, side by side, the two greatest peaks in the Alaska Range."

"And there they should stand no longer, since if there be right and reason in these matters, they should not have been placed there at all," Stuck wrote.

Stevens picked up the battle after a 1975 resolution by the Alaska Legislature recommended naming the mountain Denali. That resolution also suggested that Mount McKinley National Park remain the name of the park, but it became Denali as part of the 1980 Alaska Lands Act.

Regula, 90, spent 36 years in Congress and retired in 2009. He is miffed about McKinley's sudden downfall, complaining to reporters that this is an Obama stunt to placate a small number of people in Alaska.

"I don't think he has the authority to do that. I think it's a cheap shot by the president to make a certain group of people in Alaska happy," Regula told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

This week he told a reporter he's worried that Obama might change the name of the Ohio River to the "United States River." Someone should tell him to stop worrying.

He said it was "my prerogative" to stop the McKinley change. This confession undercuts the complaints from offended Ohioans who claim Obama is working to circumvent the will of Congress and destroy America.

As for McKinley, residents of Ohio should take solace in knowing that the name will remain on the maps of Alaska.

The Dictionary of Alaska Place Names, an authoritative source on such things, cites 11 waterways known as McKinley Creek in Alaska, along with the McKinley River, the McKinley Bar and the McKinley Peak, the latter name reported in 1914 for a 2,351-foot summit in the Chugach Mountains. At least some of those honor the late president who was known as the "Idol of Ohio."

Dermot Cole

Former ADN columnist Dermot Cole is a longtime reporter, editor and author.

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