January 27, 2016: Colonial Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot

[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 what’s unquestionably absent from a historic film, and what it can still offer.

One of the most interesting choices made by Colonial Williamsburg can be found in the site’s Visitors Center: its continued use of a more than half-century old introductory film, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot (1957). As that hyperlinked opening illustrates, the film stars none other than future Hawaii Five-0 leading man Jack Lord as its protagonist John Fry, a fictional member of the Virginia House of Burgesses who finds himself and his family torn between the Loyalist and Revolutionary forces and causes in the years leading up to the American Revolution. The presence of a very young Lord (more than a decade before Hawaii made him one of the most famous actors in America) is no doubt part of why Williamsburg has continued to use this film (remastered but otherwise unchanged from that late 1950s version) rather than create a more updated, 21^st century equivalent (as, for example, Plimoth Plantation has done to great effect).

The contrast with the new Plimoth film, “Two Peoples: One Story,” is particularly striking, and doesn’t cast the best light on The Story of a Patriot. Plimoth’s film does full justice to its titular subject, portraying both the arriving English Pilgrims and the Wampanoag community with equal time, sensitivity, and nuance; it neither shies away from detailing the destructive effects of that English arrival on the Wampanoags nor fails to engage (as the film’s subtitle suggests) with the complex, evolving interrelationships between the two cultures. The Story of a Patriot, on the other hand, features African American characters only as the Fry’s faithful slaves; as I remember it, those slave characters have only a line or two in the nearly 30-minute film, and then only to happily assent to whatever is asked of them by the Fry’s. There’s certainly no indication that these African American communities were part of 18^th century Williamsburg and Virginia in any meaningful way, nor that their presence and voices would themselves become part of the Revolutionary debates in complex and significant ways. I can’t imagine a 21^st century Williamsburg film treating slaves and slavery in these reductive and nearly elided ways, and that would be an important change to how the site is framed for visitors.

If Story falls short in that not unexpected (for a 1957 text) but still important way, however, in others it took me by pleasant surprise. Most interesting was the film’s willingness and ability to present the Loyalist as well as the Revolutionary perspective—indeed, by making Fry the son of deeply Loyalist parents (and opening with him taking over his Loyalist late father’s House of Burgesses seat), the film rightfully positions that perspective as the mainstream one in the 1770s; and even as events unfold and the Revolution takes hold (and Fry’s own perspectives changes), the film continues to do nuanced justice to the Loyalists, treating them as thoughtful men and women following their own path through that complex moment. Moreover, by focusing on the story of one individual Virginian (a choice that reflects in part a Great Man style of history that would likely not be the center of a 21^st century film), Story allows for personalized portrayals of historical figures (and fellow Virginia legislators) like Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, an element that helped my sons connect to those figures and the era’s histories in meaningful ways. We happened to watch Story at the end of our Williamsburg experience, and I would recommend that order—it helped us appreciate these strengths of the film while better recognizing those elements it does not include.

Next Williamsburg post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 26, 2016: Colonial Williamsburg: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum

[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!]

Three telling exhibits and pieces from Williamsburg’s amazing folk art museum.

1)      An exhibition of quilts: Through December 6^th, the museum’s McCarl Gallery will feature “A Celebration of Quilts,” an exhibition featuring 12 noteworthy American quilts from the 18^th through the 20^th centuries. The exhibit includes pieces by African American, Hawaiian, and Amish quiltmakers (among other artisans), and likewise runs the gamut of techniques and styles. Serving as both utilitarian household item and artistic products, as both material and artistic culture, quilts are a perfect example of the complexity and value of folk art (compared to the more obvious “fine arts”).

2)      Pueblo jewelry: Through September 5^th, 2016, the museum’s Peebles Gallery will feature “Thunderbirds: Jewelry of the Santo Domingo Pueblo,” an exhibition that highlights a particular, Depression-era jewelry style from a New Mexico pueblo with a longstanding artistic tradition. Mass-produced (compared to the pueblo’s norms, at least) in response to the Depression’s economic exigencies, and using any and all available materials for the same reason, these jewelry pieces are thus both distinct from the pueblo’s traditions and yet represent a stage and evolution of those histories—and are vital American folk art in any case.

3)      Baby in Red Chair: And then there’s that baby, one of the perennial representations of the museum’s collections and spirit. Currently exhibited as part of an American folk portraits collection in the Clark Foundation Gallery, the baby embodies the practice and appeal of folk art—simple yet eloquent, anonymous yet enduring, everyday yet reflecting our reality in the way that only the arts can. There’s a reason why the baby has been one of the museum’s most popular pieces, and it’s the same reason why the museum has been so successful—because folk art is a vibrant and vital part of our national community and identity.

Next Williamsburg post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 25, 2016: Colonial Williamsburg: Propaganda and Magic

[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?