[As part of our
annual Virginia trip last summer, the boys and I—and AmericanStudier madre—visited
Colonial Williamsburg for the first time.
So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some different histories and elements that are
part of that complex and compelling historic site. Add your thoughts, on
Williamsburg or other historic sites, in comments!]
On the necessarily political but still magical sides to any living history
site.
One of my favorite things when I
was a kid was attending Civil War reenactments with my Dad. I didn’t get to many,
probably half a dozen or so, but each time it was a truly magical experience,
like entering directly into a historical world. Part of that effect was my
status as a bona fide Civil War buff—I can’t count the number of hours I spent
thumbing through the beautiful pages of Bruce
Catton’s Illustrated History of the Civil
War, most of them spent staring at the gorgeous painted recreations of
key battle sites and maps—but a bigger part, I’d say, was the sense that these
were people trying to make history come alive again, to inhabit it and help us
do so as well, at least for a space. As I’ve gotten older, I haven’t moved away
from that perspective—I think most reenactors love history and do have that as
a central goal—so much as added a more uncomfortable but important second
perspective: that in many cases, the overwhelmingly (if not entirely) white
participants in the reenactments were also embodying a very specific post-Civil
War narrative, one that sought to reunify white soldiers from both sides
through emphases on their shared valor and heroism and, concurrently and
crucially, deemphases on the war’s racial and social causes (the first bit of Birth of a Nation is a great example of that narrative).
That combination of genuine and
impressive historical interest and more contemporary and unsettling purposes
also, if much more subtly, drove the multi-decade creation of one of America’s
most successful historical landmarks, Colonial Williamsburg. The
historical recreation of this center of political and social life in both
colonial-era and Revolutionary Virginia began in the 1920s and 1930s, and was,
I believe, most definitely driven by a desire to connect Americans and tourists
from all over the world more fully back to this crucial early American site and
community; the project’s motto was and
remains, “That the future may learn from the past,” and in many ways the
site has done a great job bringing that past into the American present in very
engaging and successful ways. Certainly for many decades the inclusion of
African Americans, either as participants or as tourists, was painfully slight
and segregated, but over the last few decades Colonial Williamsburg, like most
such historical landmarks, has begun to do a much better job balancing its
portrayals of the different communities and experiences that existed within its
boundaries, and of the best and worst of late 1700s Virginia and America that
it comprised.
Yet the most significant push to
build up and expand Colonial Williamsburg took place not in the 20s and 30s,
but in the 1960s and 70s, and in analyzing that moment the historical purpose
must be balanced with a much more contemporary and political one. The driving
force behind the renewed efforts was the Rockefeller family; the oil magnate John D.
had been a central part of the 20s efforts, and so even in that era it
would be possible to consider more political goals for the project, but the
work of Winthrop
Rockefeller and his family in this Cold War era was much more overtly
politically motivated. Perhaps the Rockefellers chief interest in the decades
after World War II was in highlighting and exporting America’s greatest
identities, in communicating to the world (in direct opposition, to be sure, to
the USSR’s international presence and images of itself) the ideal versions of
our national past and stories and selves. They did so for example through public art exhibits and museums
that traveled the world, highlighting some of the masters (among them
Jackson Pollock and Norman Rockwell) working in America in these years. But
they did so as well through historical endeavors like Williamsburg, and the
recreations there of the ideals (and in the 1960s and 70s it was still very
much the ideals on which Williamsburg focused) of the Revolution and Founding.
W.E.B. Du Bois
entitles the last chapter of his groundbreaking Black Reconstruction in America (1936) “The
Propaganda of History”; he focuses there on the dominant (and almost
entirely false) historical narrative of Reconstruction that had developed in
the prior three decades or so, but his ideas could easily be extended to any
moments in which historical narratives are wedded to contemporary political
purposes. But just as such links can perhaps never be entirely absent, even in
the most well-intentioned efforts, so too is the more genuine attempt to
revivify and connect us to our history still a part of these endeavors. We can
and need to try our best to recognize the political side, lest the propaganda
blind us, but we can still feel that magic of history coming alive before us.
Next
Williamsburg post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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