EXCLUSIVE — In a paper released concurrently with this Washington Examiner column, which exclusively reports it as a first (at this link), Heritage Foundation scholar Brenda Hafera writes that “the legacies of the [American] Founders are being distorted or erased” by the groups operating the historic homes of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
Fortunately, and unlike the foundations that run Jefferson’s Monticello and Madison’s Montpelier, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association has made George Washington’s home “the gold standard” because of its “careful attention to Washington’s accomplishments, dedication to historical honesty and standards, and overall modest tone.”
By contrast, Hafera writes, “Monticello and Montpelier fall short, as they devote little time to Jefferson’s and Madison’s achievements. They expand on each of the Founders’ shortcomings without also providing an adequate account of their contributions. A site should not portray our Founders as exemplary but flawed without first explaining how they were, in fact, exemplary.”
Montpelier, which has experienced gut-wrenching staff and board shake-ups this year, is the worst. Hafera writes, “James Madison’s legacy at Montpelier has been effectively erased, as there are no exhibits dedicated to his significant contributions.”
Montpelier “promote[s] a distorted view of American history, suffused with critical race theory,” she adds. “There is a great deal of overlap between the curriculum developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a political interest group that is widely regarded as extremist.”
Indeed, one SPLC leader is now on Montpelier’s board, and another is on a key advisory committee.
Meanwhile, in a cellar, as part of an overall exhibition on slavery called the “Mere Distinction of Color” rather than as a stand-alone project, there is just one exhibit on the U.S. Constitution, and Hafera says it falls woefully short.
She told me in an interview this morning, “Instead of making that exhibit on the Constitution about Madison and his role in shaping it, or about the remarkableness of that document itself … they instead made the choice to make that exhibit about the Constitution and slavery.” And: “It really seems to be attempting to demonstrate that slavery is the central animating force behind the economy and laws of the United States.”
Before wokesters have a conniption, Hafera made it clear in the interview that she is utterly against sweeping slavery under a historical rug.
“We should talk about slavery,” she said. “It’s part of our history. I don’t think any good-hearted American wants to whitewash our history. I think the question is really are we going to take a critical race theory approach, which is fundamentally a resentment approach, which puts slavery” as the source and reason “behind our founding and behind America?”
Or, she continued, “are we [instead] going to take an approach fundamentally based in gratitude which acknowledges the tragedies of our past but places slavery properly as an institution that always contradicted our principles and that we strove to eliminate? That striving started with the founding generation, and generations of Americans have contributed to the fuller realization of the principle that ‘all men are created equal.’”
Alas, as the report makes abundantly clear, Montpelier is a massive exercise in ahistorical self-flagellation, and Monticello is a mixed bag.
“Missing,” says her new report’s section on Monticello, “are any exhibits on Jefferson as President, Vice President, Secretary of State, diplomat, governor, drafter of the Declaration of Independence and Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, or founder of the University of Virginia.”
Overall, as the title of her paper describes the situation, Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Montpelier respectively represent “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of the enterprises originally intended to preserve and celebrate those Founders’ legacies.
On Friday (July 29), Hafera and three other scholars will participate in a Heritage forum (available online as well) to discuss all this and suggest “what Americans can and should do to save these cradles of the Republic.”
“The very existence of America is an immense contribution to the furthering of human liberty,” Hafera told me. She’s right. Even as the three presidential homes give ample attention to slavery, they absolutely falsify history if they fail to highlight how Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were, in astonishingly impressive and admirable ways, essential to liberty’s advance.
