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You Say You Want a Revolution? George Washington never chopped down a cherry tree, and he drank from silver while his troops went unpaid. Will a new museum built to explain the War of Independence gain independence from the fallacies of history and finally tell it straight?
Like the National Constitution Center, the center is viewed as another tool to break tourists of their old habit of using Philadelphia as a pit stop at which to quickly see the Liberty Bell and move on. Proponents of the museum, which is scheduled to open in two years, say it will attract about 900,000 visitors annually, create 855 jobs, contribute $48.5 million to the local economy and add $3.8 million in taxes to state and local coffers. The museum will replace a 1970s visitor center built to interpret the Valley Forge encampment, showcase a few artifacts and provide basic amenities. Back then, the park was forbidden by statute from telling the entire story of the Revolution – the story that will be the new museum’s mission. In the future, the old visitor center will provide storage for the park’s vastly expanded collection. It has been recently spruced up to provide a glimpse of what is coming. The new museum has the backing of politicians like Gov. Ed Rendell, who showed up at a February ceremony to present a $12 million check and to declare the Revolution a war "fought for the right reasons" – unlike, the leading Democrat seemed to imply, a certain other war. It has also attracted the clout of Pulitzer-winning historian David McCullough (author, John Adams), who serves on the center’s board of scholars and accompanied Rendell to declare, "Shame on us," if we fail to build the museum.
More challenging than fund-raising, however, may be the task of creating a credible experience at emotionally laden Valley Forge amid so many of the founders’ tschotschkes. It’s a lot to overcome: Valley Forge was created by people who wanted to glorify the Revolution, not explain or justify it. The museum’s inherited collections of artifacts – including Abigail Adams’ apron, a colonial soldier’s powderhorn and George Washington’s tent – were preserved for similar reasons. The noose used to hang John Roberts, a Lower Merion miller convicted of treason for tending the British army’s American prisoners, was not preserved. To lure contemporary Americans, the museum will emphasize the roles of African Americans, women and people of many nationalities. There is even a Hispanic hero: Bernardo de Galvez (1748-1786), the Spanish governor of Louisiana who helped supply the Americans and attacked British-held forts on the Gulf Coast.
Americans fought the Revolution, says Thomas Fleming, another museum scholar, because they were disgusted with British political corruption. "Americans knew what was going on," said Fleming, describing the outright sale of votes in a Parliament where "rotten" boroughs – light in population but heavy in representation – skewed the distribution of political power. Which raises the question: Are Washington, D.C., and the Electoral College enough better to have justified a war? Given the product and Valley Forge’s history of hokum, it is not impossible to imagine the museum as a trendy successor to the 19th Century priest who invented the stories about Washington cutting the cherry tree and kneeling in the snow to pray for his army. Parson Weems in a coat of many colors. * * * Is Valley Forge the right site? According to historian Lorett Treese (Valley Forge: Making and Remaking a National Symbol), the park’s fame is less about what happened during the winter of 1777-78 than it is to memorial efforts that began a century later. About the time of the 1876 centennial, a group of civic-minded citizens bought Washington’s headquarters and turned it into a shrine. Subsequent land purchases ultimately created the park that exists today.
"In the early 19th Century, Americans tended to be indifferent to their history," wrote Treese. "In America’s Romantic Era (after the Civil War), the tale of a dismal military winter camp at Valley Forge began taking on legendary qualities." By the end of the 19th Century, Americans were referring to such places as shrines and marking them with monuments to highlight the virtues they were believed to symbolize. Inspiring the first gush of sentiment was Washington himself. Washington’s accomplishments were undeniable, but Weems’ stories had turned the rich planter and speculator in western lands into Saint George. Nevertheless, 19th Century Americans were wired in such a way that they found this inspiring. So, on the eve of the Civil War, when many felt that the country needed a unifying symbol, Weems’ stories inspired a group of Virginia women to buy and preserve Mount Vernon as "a shrine of pure patriotism." The Valley Forge Memorial Association aimed to do as much with Washington’s headquarters. After purchasing the building for $6,000, it spent several thousand more to restore and furnish the house with appropriate-seeming antiques. An 1891 pamphlet assured visitors that "the doors, with bolts and locks, are the very same his hands have moved, the floors…are those over which the great chieftain has walked…the window glass and sash are unchanged since the days when his anxious eyes looked through them at the soldiers’ huts upon the hills." These years also produced tales of brutal weather, barefoot soldiers, widespread hunger and 3,000 graves spread around the encampment site. Evidence for all of these stories is thin. In the early 20th Century, the Rev. W. Herbert Burk gave the stories another twist. Born in 1867, Burk lived in an era in which Americans believed that religious faith had made the nation great. He was particularly taken by Weems’ image of Washington praying in the snow. Sometime after his appointment as rector of All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Norristown about 1900, Burk decided that his primary mission was to propagate belief in Washington’s Christian orthodoxy as a counterpoint to "the cheap infidelity of ‘Tom’ Payne" and the "selfish maxims of Poor Richard."
It’s an odd sort of church. Christ is depicted just once, in a single stained glass window over the altar. Choir stalls are designed to honor the brigades in Washington’s army. Pews commemorate important Revolutionary figures and one is reserved for the use of the President. A stained glass window themed "Patriotism" depicts Patrick Henry demanding "Liberty or Death." A cloister is divided into 13 bays, one for each of the original 13 states. Christianity’s essential choice – God or Caesar – is not presented here. * * * The center will be different, starting with its stated ambition to explain the entire war. Dozens of other institutions tell pieces of the story of the American Revolution, but the center will be the first to tie it all together. As designed by architect Robert A.M. Stern, the museum will be cut into the wall of an old quarry near the current visitor center. Two-thirds of the facility will be underground. Above the bluff, glass walls and an observation area will allow visitors to look out on the parade ground where Baron Friedrich von Steuben drilled Washington’s troops.
Another reason that single narratives have fallen out of fashion is that they are perceived as telling people what to think. Modern history museums avoid the old-fashioned paradigm of good guys and bad guys, striving instead for a grittier reality that includes a variety of voices. From this, it is believed, museum visitors can distill a sense of the issues and, perhaps, find characters with whom they can identify. "I don’t know that it is a magic bullet," said Daly, "but it makes the Revolution more relevant to people who have had no knowledge of this diverse involvement. African Americans have told me that they think it is very important for African American children to know they were grounded in the founding of this nation." In this, Valley Forge is following Colonial Williamsburg which, in 1994, broke with its long-standing practice of ignoring the African American experience by venturing into its most appalling reality. A re-enactment of a slave auction infuriated many and cost millions in lost donations, said Bob Wilburn, former CEO of Colonial Williamsburg, who nevertheless believes it was the right thing to do. Wilburn is now CEO of the Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum Foundation. "It was part of history," said Wilburn. "You have to do your best to tell the story as accurately and fully as you can. Otherwise there is no use in being in this business." Not doing so, moreover, leads to incidents such as the 1998 vandalism of a statue of Spanish explorer Juan de Oñate in Espanola, N.M. In symbolic retaliation for a 1599 incident in which Onate punished 24 captured Acoma warriors by ordering their right feet cut off, native Americans sawed off the statue’s right foot with an electric saw. "It is harder to take these sort of risks as a startup," said Wilburn. "You’re so dependent on early gifts."
Beneath the diversity, though, the Valley Forge museum promises a traditionally positive spin. Its central theme is that the Revolution was an "eight year struggle for liberty." Independence would be more accurate; lots of Americans had no more liberty when the war ended than when it began, and some had less. But that’s less compelling. (Heck, even North Korea is independent.) What the new museum aims to do is persuade visitors that victory in the American Revolution is associated with the liberties acquired since – and that may be acquired tomorrow. Getting this across, said Daly, is "the fundamental homeland security issue." "We can have all the intelligence and security systems to protect our nation," he continued. "But if we have a populace that doesn’t understand its principles and values, the picture is very incomplete." Such worries echo those of Valley Forge’s earliest interpreters. Preservation of Washington’s headquarters, writes Treese, was an effort by old-stock Americans to protect their traditions and values from industrialization, urbanization and foreigners. They also founded groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution to which only those with a certain pedigree could belong. Burk’s chapel, built in a time of high immigration, represented an attempt to propagate the twin gospels of patriotism and Christianity to new Americans. During the Cold War, when communism seemed to threaten America, civic leaders used Valley Forge as a tool to separate "American" and "unAmerican" activities and beliefs. This was the era in which the Boy Scouts held annual "Jamborees" at the park and the conservative Freedoms Foundation set up shop nearby to proclaim the superiority of capitalism. "In Burk’s day, like now, about 10 percent of the population was foreign born," noted Daly. "With population growth, though, the order of magnitude has grown. In real numbers, the problem is much more extensive." * * * It would be easier if imperial Britain had been a truly evil empire, rather than one of the 18th Century world’s most free, most tolerant societies. It would also be easier if the Founding Fathers were less self-interested, less of what English writer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) characterized as "the drivers of Negroes."
Yes, African Americans fought in the Continental army, but more fought for the British. After November 1775, when the royal governor of Virginia offered freedom to any slave who could reach British lines, more than 30,000 Virginia slaves fled their masters, including 23 who belonged to Jefferson and 17 belonging to Washington. In South Carolina and Georgia, fully one-third to one-half fled. More than any other act of the British, Lord Dunmore’s proclamation caused the South to rise to the cause of liberty.
Yes, Bernardo de Galvez also assisted the Continental army. Later, as viceroy of New Spain, Galvez went on to reconstruct the Castle of Chapultepec in Mexico City – a fortress that, in 1847, fell to invading U.S. forces. Because of the Mexican war, the city named for Galvez – Galveston, Texas – lies in the United States. * * * Much of the rationalization for the new museum is that it will house several collections that will come together for the first time. There is, of course, the visitor center’s existing collection. To this will be added the Washington Memorial Chapel’s collection gathered by Burk, the Neumann collection of militaria, the Reed manuscript collection and the Benninghoff collection, which focuses on Revolutionary artifacts and documents from outside the country. There is some irony in this: Museums are less about stuff than they once were. They still store and care for artifacts, of course, but increasingly subordinate them to a larger storyline. Part of the reason, says cultural historian Jeanne Cannizzo (author, Negotiated Realities: Towards an Ethnography of Museums), is that the mere act of putting an object in a museum gives it a distorting holy aura. In Cuba, for instance, the yacht from which Fidel Castro staged his revolution is now the centerpiece of its own museum – along with old pens and shirts used by the bearded one. In England, a new museum is under construction that will house the fragile topsail from the H.M.S. Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar. "The abstraction of permanent display and the removal of context seem to be the muted evils of all museum display," wrote Cannizzo. "Museums are always fictional in that they are always created or constructed by us in a particular set of social and historical circumstances."
At Valley Forge, only about 5 percent of the various collections will be on view at once. What stories might they tell? Let’s consider George Washington’s silver "coin cups." They’re called coin cups because, in August 1777, on the eve of the Battle of the Brandywine, Washington sent 16 silver (probably Spanish) dollars to Philadelphia silversmith Edmund Milne. Melt down the coins, he told Milne, and turn the silver into 12 simple drinking vessels without handles, each about four inches tall. Milne did so, adding tin or pewter as an alloy to stretch and harden the silver. Washington carried the cups through the war and, when he died in 1799, the set was part of his estate. Half a century ago, or even less, most museums would have displayed the cups as objects hallowed by their relationship to Washington. They might have depicted the great man and his fellow officers sharing drinks as they planned the battle of Trenton or celebrated the victory at Yorktown. More recent revisionists might have cited Washington’s silver cups as evidence of class divisions that the war did little to disrupt. Historian Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States), for example, numbers among his heroes the thousand soldiers of the New Jersey Line who mutinied in 1781 after going a year without pay and only tin cups to drink from. Washington – snug in winter quarters with Martha and slave William Lee to wash and fill his silver cups – suppressed the uprising, and ordered the first-tier ringleaders shot by their second-tier comrades.
Perhaps, then, a winning museum and a winning country. Someday.
 Mark
E. Dixon
757 Upper Gulph Road
Wayne, PA 19087-2022
USA
610-971-0649
dixon_mark@verizon.net
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On paper, the proposed $100 million Center for the American Revolution looks
like a winner. Planned for a site at Valley Forge National Historical Park, the
museum’s 110,000 square feet – construction of which is scheduled to begin
this year – will house nearly 26,000 objects and many, many more documents
from the Revolutionary period.
CEO Tom Daly is "working with" Pennsylvania’s congressmen to
obtain $40 million in federal money and intends to raise $50 million privately.
There have been no big appropriations from Washington, but the project has
raised about $32 million and an additional private gift of $10 million will
likely have been announced by the time you read this. So, make no mistake: This
museum is going to be built.
A century after the troops left, though, Valley Forge was little more than
farms, mills and small factories. The encampment had been an economic disaster
for local property owners who quickly plowed over the site and tore down the
army’s huts for fuel and fencing. In the 1820s, the headquarters had briefly
been the home of James Jones, supervisor of the short-lived Owenite colony, an
early attempt at voluntary communism.