Check out this New York Times article on the growth of black membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. The new chapter in Queens is the first one started by an African-American woman.
We’ve come a long way since 1939, when the DAR refused to let contralto Marian Anderson perform at Constitution Hall. That refusal famously prompted Eleanor Roosevelt to resign her membership and led to a public concert at the Lincoln Memorial. (The DAR invited Anderson to perform a benefit concert at Constitution Hall in 1942.)
Over at Salon.com, Sara Robinson claims that the Southern aristocracy’s values—or lack thereof—have become the dominant ones among the governing class. This, she believes, is sending us all to hell in a handcart. I stumble across similar editorials from time to time, in which a pundit flies into hysterics over the ascendancy of Southern and/or conservative and/or evangelical forces with the same horror of a Roman patrician watching the Goths pour across the border.
Robinson started losing me right at the outset. She argues that the Yankee elite had a sense of noblesse oblige, whereas Southern planters always displayed an “utter lack of civic interest.” From a purely historical standpoint, this is simply asinine. Noblesse oblige was an integral part of the worldview of colonial Tidewater planters. Anyone who’s read anything substantial on early Virginia society should know this.
Equally bizarre is her inclusion of Woodrow Wilson as one of the “nerdy, wonky intellectuals who, for all their faults, at least took the business of good government seriously.” It’s true that Wilson was a reformer. And yet Wilson was also a Southern Democrat, the son of a Celtic father who migrated from Ohio to the South before the Civil War and enthusiastically embraced the Confederacy. Robinson decries the Southern aristocracy’s belief in inequality; she should recall that Wilson held firmly to that belief, and allowed his cabinet members to segregate their departments’ offices. In fact, Wilson is one of many examples one might cite to demonstrate the extent of Robinson’s drastic over-generalization; neither Southernness nor a belief in racial inequality have been incompatible with the reformist spirit over the course of American history.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is traditional progressive storytelling. It uses an axe-swinging superhero, Abe Lincoln, to retell the Left’s primary mythos – a parasitic few live off the misery of the people.
The idea of America as a nation secretly created and controlled by vampires actually builds on a long history of popular “subversion myths” in which Freemasons, communists, or other conspiracies have secretly taken control of an otherwise good nation and threaten its social order. Like vampire stories, subversion myths frame good and evil in clear, unwavering terms. As nocturnal creatures who attack unseen, the vampires of folklore represent one of the oldest forms of subversion myth.
When Abraham starts in on his vampire-hunting career, the movie still takes time to drop plot cookies that illuminate how awesome and pro-abolition he is, and how this fact makes him beloved by all good people. Such as the moment when Mary Todd, his future wife, gets all interested in him after he says something vaguely anti-slavery. Or the time when he and the black boy from the first act (Will Johnson) end up in jail for fisticuffs against some men who are determined to cart Will away as a slave.
My uncle just got back from New Orleans and reported an interesting conversation with a cab driver. The cabbie asked him what brought him to town and said that he always likes to find out what visitors are hoping to see. The most popular destination for his customers is the tomb of Marie Laveau, a nineteenth-century voodoo priestess.
It made me think of all those people who patronize ghost tours at Gettysburg. I wonder how many of them don’t make any distinction between that and heritage tourism?
A New Jersey man noticed Gadsden flag merchandise for sale at Gettysburg National Military Park’s bookstore and then went off on a three-alarm tear:
“It isn’t sold in a historically relevant context,” said Paul Gioni, a battlefield enthusiast from Mahwah, N.J., who contacted the National Park Service and The Evening Sun after visiting the park recently. “This is blatantly political merchandise.”
The nonprofit Gettysburg Foundation operates the bookstore and a spokeswoman said the Gadsden flag merchandise serves a goal of representing the broader context of American history. Furthermore, Cindy Small said, there remain connections between the Gadsden flag and fighting at Gettysburg.
“During the Civil War, the flag was used in some Southern states as a symbol of secession,” she said.
Personally, I think there’s a legitimate case to be made that a Civil War battlefield isn’t the best venue for selling a flag usually associated with the Rev War, but this isn’t it.
“The flag is legitimate in the proper context,” Gioni said. “The problem is this flag has been hijacked for the political stage. It’s definitely partisan and definitely inappropriate. The park should be politically neutral.”
Look, when it comes to historic sites, the Gadsden flag is pretty neutral. Unless you’re a monarchist.
Gioni doesn’t believe the Gettysburg bookstore is pushing partisan politics. Rather, he said, the items are probably stocked because they sell.
I think that’s a safe bet. Stores usually stock items because they sell.
“When you’re in an election year, you know this stuff is going to make a fast buck,” he said. “They’re disregarding what’s appropriate in the interest of money.”
The folks at Gettysburg denied any intention of pandering to present-day politics, and I don’t see any reason not to believe them. In any case, GNMP has only gotten one complaint about the Gadsden merch. So I’m not saying it’s just you, Gioni, but…it’s just you.
By Arman Manookian (Honolulu Academy of Arts) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Check out this fascinating item from NPR on the differences between teaching the War of 1812 in U.S. schools and teaching it in Canada. A teacher in Utah spends “a couple of days” on the war, with doses of the national anthem and Johnny Horton. A teacher in Ontario, by contrast, devotes “three to four weeks” to it.
Three to four weeks! As a pre-Civil War kind of guy, I’d love to have that much time for early American subjects in my survey classes.
Canadian units on the war aren’t just longer. They’re qualitatively different, full of important victories and heroic characters like Laura Secord. You’ve never heard of Laura Secord? Don’t sweat it; neither had I, and I’m supposed to have a master’s degree in this kind of stuff.
Here are a few other items from around the Interwebs on the War of 1812 and the way we remember it—or fail to:
…and hosted a ceremony where reps from the U.S., Britain, and Canada buried the hatchet. I’m still not forgiving them for Russell Brand.
Finally, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher and his students suggest that we should re-christen the conflict the “Second War of Independence.” Not bad, but maybe we could add a little Hollywood-style pizzazz. I’m thinking WI:2 or War of Independence 2: War Harder. Too bad The Empire Strikes Back is already taken.
A few months ago I decided to sample some H.P. Lovecraft and ended up tearing through two volumes of his short stories. A sense of place figures prominently in his work, much of which is set in old towns along New England’s fictional Miskatonic River—places like Innsmouth, Arkham, and Dunwich. Horror aficionados call this semi-imaginary region “Lovecraft Country.”
Wikimedia Commons
What particularly struck me in reading his fiction was not the just the sense of place, but specifically the sense of historical landscape. Time and again, Lovecraft used the remnants of New England’s past to evoke a palpable sense of menace and dread. The narrator of “The Picture in the House” explains this connection between horror and historic landscape in the story’s opening paragraphs:
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.
Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.
Interestingly, the protagonist of “The Picture in the House” is engaged in historical research when he stumbles across something horrific. He recounts traveling near the Miskatonic “in quest of certain genealogical data,” and the awful discovery he makes in an aging house involves an illustration in an old book. This is another historical thread running through Lovecraft’s fiction. Those who go rummaging around in the past often stumble across long-dormant terrors. His protagonists are heritage tourists and history buffs; crumbling books, manuscripts, and artifacts are the keys to unlock terrible secrets. The titular character of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” discovers a sinister legacy of necromancy while investigating his family history and restoring old heirlooms. Similarly, the narrator of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” remembers “celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England – sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical” when he arrived at a decaying seaside town occupied by inhuman beings. Lovecraft even deployed the language of the past to creepy effect, using archaic words like “shewed” in place of “showed.” For Lovecraft, history was a haunted house.
This notion of a “creepy past” is, of course, very common in fiction and film. We associate decay with death, so old buildings and artifacts are natural settings for horror stories. This is harder to accomplish when it comes to places without a visible past. They lack an atmosphere of dread because they lack an atmosphere, period. As Gertrude Stein put it, there’s no “there” there. If you’re going to use setting to evoke a mood, that setting needs to have some character, and places with a backstory tend to have more character than others.
To take a personal example, I recently watched part of Paranormal Activity, a movie about a malevolent force terrorizing a couple in a modern, suburban tract home. It didn’t frighten me in the least. It didn’t even engage me. A modern tract home simply isn’t a scary environment, at least not for me. A place needs to have some sort of patina before it can be really frightening. Even horror films set in the future will often “age” the setting in which they take place to evoke that vibe of menacing antiquity. Imagine watching a version of Alien where the Nostromo is a brand-new ship with a fresh coat of paint.
We use the past to meet all sorts of collective psychological needs, and one of those needs is the occasional desire to scare ourselves half to death.
The most popular historic home here in the Appalachian region is probably Biltmore House, the palatial Gilded Age mansion of George Washington Vanderbilt II in Asheville, NC. Some readers will be surprised that I qualified that statement with the word “probably.” In terms of visitation, no historic house museum in Appalachia comes close. In fact, few historic homes in the entire country could compete with Biltmore’s annual numbers, although offhand I’d guess that Mount Vernon and Monticello welcome more visitors. The reason I hedged is not because its popularity as a destination is in doubt, but because I’m not sure whether I’d consider it Biltmore a “historic house museum.” It’s difficult for me to associate Biltmore Estate with other historic sites.
Strictly speaking, I realize this seems a little ludicrous. It’s a house, it’s historic (or old, at least), and it’s a museum. What’s my problem here?
Biltmore House, as seen from the front
Consider the reasons why people visit Biltmore and what they get out of it. If we were to speak with guests as they stood in line to buy their tickets, how many of them would tell us that they’re about to shell out money to learn about the past? I’d say it would be very few indeed.
Or perhaps we might ask them if they came to Biltmore to learn about its first resident, the man responsible for its construction. Here, too, I think affirmative answers would be few and far between. People go to Mount Vernon, Monticello, the Hermitage, and the Lincoln Home because of their former occupants, but I don’t think this is the case with Biltmore. Quite a few Americans will probably recognize the name “Vanderbilt,” but not George Washington Vanderbilt II in particular.
In fact, I think most Biltmore visitors would be hard pressed to identify any salient facts about Biltmore’s first owner, or to name any notable accomplishments of his other than the fact that he built himself an awesome pad. An introverted younger sibling, George wasn’t responsible for running the family’s business affairs. Instead, he spent most of his free time (presumably he had a great deal of it) cultivating his own personal intellectual interests. A brief bio on Wikipedia notes that he was fluent in a number of foreign languages and managed some family property for a while; other than that, he “inherited $1 million from his grandfather and received another million on his 21st birthday from his father. Upon his father’s death, he inherited $5 million more, as well as the income from a $5 million trust fund.” Not a bad gig if you can get it, but it won’t lead generations of children to recite your speeches at their second grade recitals.
My point here is not to belittle G.W. Vanderbilt II, but to point out that neither a regard for history nor a familiarity with Biltmore’s original occupant will explain the estate’s astronomical attendance numbers. Instead, I submit that the overwhelming majority of visitors to Biltmore are exercising the same impulse that makes people watch TV shows where opulent houses are exposed to the cameras and to buy magazines with photographs of lavish interiors. They go there because want to see how the fabulously rich once lived, to vicariously experience what it must have been like to enjoy untold wealth in an age of elegance and opulence, and to appreciate majesty and beauty. Having talked to people who enjoy visiting Biltmore, and having visited myself on a number of occasions, I think most people go there just because they want to ooh and aah.
In and of itself, this is no big deal. Historic sites aren’t necessarily any less historic just because visitors patronize them for reasons that have nothing to do with history. Lots of folks visit national historical parks for the fresh air, the hiking, and so on. The difference is this: What I’ve seen of interpretation during my visits to Biltmore, and what I’ve seen of the estate’s promotional material, leads me to believe that oohing and aahing is pretty much all you’re supposed to get out of the experience.
Now, before we rush to denounce this “lifestyles of the rich and famous” approach to historic interpretation, and to ask ourselves whether it constitutes historic interpretation at all, let me pose a consideration about historic house museums in general.
Perhaps historic house sites are inherently deceptive, in that they inadvertently perpetuate a very common and romanticized view of the past that I call the “frilly notion of history.” When people think about how great it must have been to live in an earlier age, it’s usually because they have a myopic view of what living in that earlier age was actually like. Many people have spoken to me about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a sort of wistful attitude, longing for the days when well-mannered ladies and gentlemen lived in gorgeous houses, wore frilly dresses, and danced the quadrille.
And yet the world of mansions, frilly gowns, and quadrilles wasn’t necessarily how “people lived back then.” That was how the affluent lived “back then.” It reflects only a slice of human experience from the period in question. In the pre-modern world, most people’s lives were anything but mannered and frilly.
Historic house museums, I think, can unwittingly perpetuate this notion of a comfy, genteel past, although it happens through no fault at all of the people who manage and interpret these sites. It’s simply a by-product of the differential vagaries of time. The houses that last 150 or 200 years and transform into museums are generally the homes of the wealthy or notable. Places where ordinary schmoes lived are harder to come by; they get torn down, renovated beyond recognition, or cannibalized for building materials to make the homes of later ordinary schmoes. Thus when you visit some historic house, it was probably the home of someone who was comparatively well off.
Lest you think I’m knocking historic house museums, let me note that I spent a year of my life running one. It was pretty small as far as historic house museums go—just three rooms, a garret, and a kitchen joined to the main residence by a dogtrot—but it was pretty nice for the time and place of its construction. The occupant had been an officer in the militia, a statesman, and one of the largest slaveholders in his county. When visitors remarked that the house seemed awfully small, I reminded them that contemporaries of its original owner would have found it quite comfortable.
At the really big house museums, the discrepancy between what visitors see and how most people of the period lived is even greater. Most Revolutionary Virginians didn’t live at places like Monticello, just as most Tennesseans of the Jacksonian era couldn’t dream of living at a mansion like the Hermitage. We cherish these places because we’re lucky that they’ve lasted to the present day and because of the remarkable men who inhabited them. They’re worthy of our appreciation not because they’re typical residences of typical people, but precisely because they and their owners were very special indeed.
So this brings us back to the question of whether visitors to historic house museums are getting a skewed view of the past. I suppose they are, but that’s also true of visitors to any public history institution. No site can ever hope to encompass an entire era or place. People who restrict their heritage tourism to one type of site or field of interest—battlefields, for instance—will invariably miss out on many other aspects of historical interpretation. Perhaps people who visit Biltmore in order to vicariously experience the life of a Gilded Age millionaire are not so different from those who visit battlegrounds to vicariously live the experiences of common men and boys who left their mark on history with bombs and bullets rather than bricks.
He claims that conservatives can legitimately claim to be the heirs of Jefferson and the ideals of 1776, but liberals “have the arc of American history on their side” due to the general trajectory of an increasing role for government over the past couple of centuries.
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