Philadelphia
As the chief historian at the new Museum of the American Revolution, which opened April 19 in this city’s historic district, Philip Mead had the job of writing the museum’s explanatory labels—those little signs next to an exhibit that tell you what you’re looking at. By his own admission, he would sometimes get carried away. He has a Ph.D. in American history from Harvard, and, perforce, he writes like a guy with a Ph.D. from Harvard. He might even use words like “perforce.” Not reader-friendly, in other words.
Fortunately for him, he had several chefs peering into the pot of his prose. “They’d say things like, ‘You’ve got room for 75 words and you’re trying to get four ideas in,’ ” he said the other day. “They’d say, ‘That’s three too many. You only get one.’ ” The museum’s director of learning and engagement ran his every sentence through a pitiless piece of software called Hemingway Editor, which ranks a piece of writing by grade level. In Hemingway, the lower the grade, the better.
“She’d come back and say, ‘Hemingway says you’re writing at 37th grade level. You have to get it down to 8th grade.’ ” And so he did. Mead isn’t complaining—he says he’s glad he mastered the art of writing “short, declarative sentences” and keeping things simple.
Still, a plunge of 29 grade levels might prompt a grumpy critic to complain that the museum has undergone a measurable dumbing-down. Such a critic, whoever he is, will have to get over it. Nearly all attempts to educate the general public, from PBS documentaries to art shows to history museums, are pitched to the level of a slightly dim, constantly distracted middle-schooler. Curators and exhibit designers spend their lives gripped by the fear that they will lose the attention of this mythic museumgoer.
This is why exhibits in modern museums jump and shimmy and flash and roar with every digitized mechanism the budget will allow. The gimmickry is best understood as the frantic arm-waving of designers and curators, hopping up and down and screaming at the top of their lungs, “Hey! Kid! Over here! Look, look, look! It goes boom!”
At the Museum of the American Revolution, “immersive environments” put you at the Battle of Brandywine, in a room where the floor shakes with the roar of cannon and clouds of musket smoke rise and swirl. And then you’re among a noisy crowd pulling down a statue of King George III in high-def Surround Sound. Then you’re under the leafy Liberty Tree, lit by lanterns on Boston Common, as hidden speakers replay debates among kibitzing colonials. Turn a corner and you’re in a shaded glen getting the hairy eyeball from fiberglass mannequins meant to represent elders of the Oneida tribe, arguing whether to fight for the Americans or the British. And there’s much more. With admission prices ranging from $12 for children to $19 per adult, visitors will expect no less.
No other museum aims to cover the entire span of the American Revolution, and it was a long time in the making. Museum officials like to call it a “hundred-year start-up.” Its roots stretch back from Philadelphia to Valley Forge, 25 miles away. In 1909 a local Episcopal clergyman named W. Herbert Burk managed to raise enough money to buy George Washington’s battlefield tent from the great man’s debt-saddled heirs. Then he raised enough money to build the Washington Memorial Chapel as a showcase for the tent and his new Valley Forge Museum of American History. The reverend had a perhaps exaggerated view of Washington’s religiosity. Taciturn he may have been, Burk conceded, but Washington’s faith in Christ shone like a beacon “in that Dark Age of Deism which welcomed the cheap infidelity of ‘Tom’ Paine.” Burk didn’t care much for Ben Franklin, either.
For the next 25 years Burk accepted donations of revolutionary artifacts from families across the country. At his death, in 1933, he had collected several thousand uniforms, muskets, pistols, diaries, pots and pans, Bibles, and anything else that might have survived the revolutionary period. He was, in truth, an overeager and indiscriminate curator—somehow the chapel dedicated to the father of our country became home to the piano Queen Victoria gave to the very small circus performer Tom Thumb. The museum grew cluttered.
The dream of a more professional—a more modern—venue lasted into the first decade of the new century, when a rich Philadelphian named Gerry Lenfest bought 78 acres adjacent to Valley Forge National Park. He hoped to build a large museum dedicated to the revolution that would be supported by commercial enterprises such as a convention hotel, a conference center, shops, and restaurants. Neighbors joined the National Parks Conservation Association in suing to stop construction.
After years of jaw-jaw, Lenfest and his group agreed to swap the acreage at Valley Forge for a ramshackle visitors’ center downtown, which the National Park Service had left to rot after the bicentennial celebrations in 1976. The great architect Robert A. M. Stern was hired, the pile was pulled down, ground was broken, and more than $150 million was raised. Much of it—$35 million—was extracted from Pennsylvania taxpayers. Lenfest gave $60 million. The third-largest donor was the Oneida Indian Nation, with a check for $10 million, plus incidentals.
That would be the same Oneida in the exhibit with the stern-faced tribal elders. The Oneida’s donation came with a quid pro quo that is refreshing in its openly transactional nature. Concessions to big-ticket donors are of course routine in every nonprofit project, not only in museums but hospitals too, and performing arts centers, and so on. Long gone are the days when a benefactor like Andrew Mellon could found and endow a museum like the National Gallery of Art without naming the enterprise after his own modest and generous self. Ballrooms and theaters, even toilets and water fountains, carry the names of the donors who made it all possible. Inside or outside the Museum of the American Revolution you’ll have trouble finding a square foot of real estate whose naming rights haven’t been bought by a big corporation or a civic-minded, guilt-ridden member of the 1 percent.
But buying the content of exhibits is seldom so frankly acknowledged. The curatorial attention lavished on the Oneida is almost comically out of proportion to the role the tribe played in the real revolutionary war, and no one I talked to at the museum bothers to argue otherwise. The curators never miss a chance to pay tribute to the benefactor. In a cathedral-like space dubbed the Oneida Indian Nation Atrium, at the head of a grand staircase, a 16-by-19-foot painting of Washington conferring with Rochambeau, called the Siege of Yorktown, dominates the room.
The original painting, done in 1835, hangs at Versailles. It shows the two generals surrounded by aides, and it’s not clear what relation it bears to the Oneida—until the museum label directs you to a handful of dim figures huddled in the distance. “The American Indian figures in the background may represent a delegation of Oneida and other Native Americans who witnessed the surrender of British General Charles Cornwallis.” Yes, they may. Then again, maybe not.
If you look longer you’ll notice something else: Rochambeau commands the center of the painting, gesturing toward the enemy, with Washington to his left, looking to the other side, distracted. All the other officers are French. The lesson taught to 19th-century visitors at Versailles is plain: It is we Frenchmen who won zee Americans their independence, not zee Americans themselves. Special pleading about the revolution didn’t begin with the Oneida.
The museum itself is a new chapter in this long tradition of special pleading. The lessons being taught to 21st-century visitors to Philadelphia are plain, too, and entirely predictable, given the obsessions of our contemporary historians. True to the conventions of “social history,” the story of the revolution is told more through the lives of “ordinary people” than through the actions of great men. The museum does concede the fragility of the revolution, how easily things could have gone the other way. And we are not discouraged from concluding that the nation’s fate rested at a dark hour on the courage of individual human beings whose names we are obliged to recognize, even today.
Yet the visitor is also reminded at every turn of the Founders’ weaknesses—their racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, and their lack of awareness of their own racism, ethnocentrism, and sexism. This has the happy effect of flattering museumgoers for their own sensitivity and virtue, relative to troglodytes like John Adams and James Madison.
The flattery comes at a cost. “Visitors,” says the museum, “explore the personal stories of the diverse range of individuals who were part of establishing our nation, including women, native people, and free and enslaved people of African descent.” And visitors do so continuously. They have no choice. As the curators pile up one ordinary person after another, the main story, propelled by the choices of the main actors, fades into the background as surely as those Oneida at Yorktown. After a while, some of the greatest Americans who ever lived seem no more or less consequential, historically, than . . . all the other Americans who ever lived.
There’s a Catch-22 to social history: If we had lots of information about the personal story of an ordinary person who lived 250 years ago, it would probably be because he or she had done something extraordinary. Which would mean he or she wasn’t ordinary, and hence not a fit subject for social history. In seeking the stories of people who were known only to family and friends, social historians face a lot of blank spaces. They’re forced to fill them in with educated guesses.
At the new museum, the curators are sometimes frank about this contrivance. One slavery exhibit, for example, promises to relate “the lives of five [enslaved] men and women who followed different paths to seek freedom during the revolutionary war.”
Their stories are told through touchscreens. The details are vivid; the tales are breathless or tragic but always ennobling. After each life story a button appears in the corner of the screen, asking the question, “How Do We Know?” Press the button and the answer is, inevitably, we don’t really know; the five slaves left behind them few or no written records. How could it be otherwise? American slaves were kept from learning to read or write, and they lived in communities that were similarly abject. “The stories,” says the exhibit, “have been dramatized.” Invented is a truer word.
Well, drama is a good thing when you’re teaching history. It is better if it’s not made up, though. Here the need to provide political uplift dovetails with the need to make the museum exciting. And the result isn’t really history at all.
The middle-schoolers won’t notice.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
