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Ah the Roosevelts: they’re like a smaller, worse-looking, less-murdered Kennedy family.
America loves its Roosevelts almost as much as the Roosevelts loved, well, the Roosevelts:
maybe it’s the pragmatism, maybe it’s the big mustaches, or maybe it’s the incest—but
in any case, we just can’t stop naming things after them—Roosevelt, Georgia; Roosevelt
Island; the Roosevelt Memorial; the USS Roosevelt, the other USS Roosevelt, the other other USS
Roosevelt, the other other other USS Roosevelt, the fifth USS Roosevelt, and of course, Roose-E-Felt,
my failed line of president-themed fabric.
In fact, America’s Roosevelt reverence has gone so far that we made a Roosevelt National
Park that’s not even in the United States.
This may come as a shock to some of our American viewers, but it turns out that scientists
believe there are other countries besides the United States.
How many?
There’s no way to know for sure, but we have strong evidence that suggests that just
north of America is a strange land called Canada, filled mostly with syrup and ruled
by a beautiful manikin brought to life by a moose wizard.
Anyways, it turns out in this mythical winter wonderland of Canada—am I saying that right,
Canada—just past its border with the state of Maine, is where we find Roosevelt Campobello
International Park.
Now if International Park sounds like a strange title to you, that’s because it is: in fact,
Campobello is the US’ only International Park—but it still functions much like the
63 strictly star-spangled National Parks: it’s considered a “unit of the National
Parks Service,” it’s listed on the NPS website, it celebrates a US figure, it pulls
funding from the Department of the Interior, and parents drag their snot-nosed children
there to try to teach them some vague lesson about “history” or “nature” or something.
However, it does have some international flare—different silly hats, scary socialist leanings like
fee-free entry, and collaborative funding and stewardship split between Real America
and Maple America.
To understand why American dollars and American people are preserving a place in not-America,
we first need to consider why this chunk of Canada matters to the greatest country in
the world as determined by number of annual deaths by lawn mower.
Turns out, the mission of the National Parks Service goes beyond protecting America’s
biggest, dankest rocks, water falls, and upside down waterfalls, and extends to protecting
US heritage broadly, which includes old buildings and cultural sites… which is all to say
that while Campobello does have some decently large and dank rocks, and occasionally beautiful
snowfall, it matters to Americans not because of its snows that melt, and more its Roos-e-velts.
You see, when a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt was cutting his teeth on the mean streets
of Hyde Park, New York, engaging in dangerous, rough-and-tumble pastimes like golf and polo,
mama and papa Roosevelt did what average Americans do and got themselves a humble 34-room cottage
on Campobello Island, a popular vacation spot for Americans, where they spent their summers
sailing, lounging, and getting polio.
After a few decades at Campobello, experiencing the godlike high of using summer as a verb,
the family moved out in 1952, and because of Americans’ totally-not-destructive obsession
with rich, powerful people, we decided to turn the old summer home neighborhood into
a place of pilgrimage for celebrity worshippers and New Deal groupies.
The only obstacle was that this particular piece of American history wasn’t in America.
Now, normally when you’re making a national park, the hardest part is actually convincing
the people living there that their land ought to belong to the government, instead of to
them.
In this case though, that problem was solved by the fact that by the 1950s, an American
oil tycoon had become owner of Campabello and was already looking to enshrine it as
a historical site.
Instead, what made this national-park-making experience difficult was the fact that Canada
wasn’t and, here’s the really interesting bit, still isn’t the United States.
But nonetheless, Americans pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, girded themselves
in virtue, and convinced the Canadians to do it for the PR.
While you might think that FDR’s vacation home is hallowed ground that transcends politics,
it turns out that its tale as a national park has less to do with reverence for where our
former president learned to wear sweater vests, and more to do with getting a dam thing done.
You see, conveniently, at the same time that oil tycoon began pushing for an American park
in Canada, the Cold War was heating up, and the US and Canada were trying to smooth out
a deal about a dam on the transboundary rivers along the countries’ shared border.
With tension and distrust in the air, and the shared need to get a big dam deal done,
no politician could have picked a better time to collaborate on a relatively cheap project
that displayed that Canada and the US got along just fine, and were maybe even friends
if you’re into labels.
So, with virtue-signaling on their minds, some politician’s overworked interns drew
up a treaty that outlined a new park that the US and Canada were to share the costs
of purchasing and preserving, and on January 22, 1964, President Lyndon B for bad boi Johnson,
and Prime Minister Lester B for big dawg Pearson signed on the dotted line, creating the Roosevelt
Campobello International Park.
Now, there’s only one Roosevelt Campobello International Park where representation and
duties are split squarely between two countries—but I have good news, this isn’t the only place
you can get in touch with your proud red, white, and blue roots while outside the 50
states.
The NPS also looks after parks and monuments in American territories from Puerto Rico to
Guam while the American Battle Monuments Commission manages 23 American monuments and cemeteries
in foreign countries.
So whether you’re traveling in Maple America, Guava America, or even big weird scaffolding
America, you’ll always have a park or monument of some sort, where you can soak in the rich,
effervescent, deeply-inspiring, never bad or embarrassing or violent history of America
abroad.
When you go to these places, you’re probably going to want to take some photos to show
off your sparkling culture to the history-less heathens you’re traveling with.
To ensure the highest quality of braggadocious photos, I suggest taking Dale McManus’s
iPhone Photography class on Skillshare.
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with just the camera on your phone—no fancy apps, expensive lenses, or cameras the size
of your head and the cost of your car.
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