By Leah Arroyo
This article was published in Museum News, September/October issue of 2007.
You’d think the people running Mount Vernon would have been satisfied.
A decade ago, the home of George Washington was getting nearly one million visitors a year and touting itself as “the most popular historic estate in America.” The estate was better restored than ever to its status in 1799, the year Washington died. It was renowned as the original house museum, a pioneer in historic preservation since 1853, when Ann Pamela Cunningham of South Carolina and her genteelly named but formidable Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association raised the then-staggering sum of $200,000 to save it from ruin. The association had established a model for historic homes as places for the public to visit: the restored house, the guided tours, the velvet ropes.
But the Mount Vernon staff came to realize that they weren’t getting the job done. As Stacey Stephens, lead historic interpreter, put it, “School groups come here only knowing three myths: the cherry tree, wooden teeth and Washington throwing a coin over some river.” Gay Hart Gaines, regent of the Ladies’ Association, noted that in 1898 Americans considered Washington the country’s greatest hero; a century later, the vote went to Michael Jordan. Tours of the mansion alone couldn’t fix that.
“We looked at textbooks, focus groups, college curricula. It was clear the attention given Washington in the classroom had declined,” said Executive Director James C. Rees. Comments from focus groups were “downright shocking. When people talked about the founders, Washington was described as great but kind of boring. Any historian will tell you Washington was a man of action, in the heat of battle, surveying land where no white man had gone. For this 6-foot 2½- inch, massive, strong, athletic man to be considered boring, there was a real disconnect between him and the American people. We wanted to reconnect them.”
More importantly, America seemed to have forgotten that Washington was the “indispensable man” of the founding of the nation. Rarely can one argue that without one key individual, a major historical development simply would not have happened. But historians such as Pulitzer Prize winners David McCullough and Joseph J. Ellis join Washington’s contemporaries in contending that if there had been no George Washington, there would be no United States of America, no Union to be saved by one Abe Lincoln, who hogs the lion’s share of historians’ attention.
After all, Washington was the clear and only choice for commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary army, and no one else could have kept that army together for eight years against overwhelming odds, much less achieved victory. He was also the only man with the gravitas to be accepted as president of the 1787 Constitutional Convention by all participants—a notoriously fractious group not yet fully committed to union, but one that, under Washington’s unifying leadership, drafted the document that remains the blueprint of the national government. As the first U.S. president, Washington was unanimously elected—both terms—a feat that would never be repeated. Furthermore, his promise to voluntarily resign power, which he did at the end of both the war and his presidency, ensured that the fledgling United States would remain true to its republican ideals, forcing even King George III to say such an act would make Washington “the greatest man in the world.”
So why have so many modern Americans dismissed Washington as a snooze or, in Ellis’s term, “the deadest, whitest male in American history”? To answer this question, Rees embarked on a period of extensive evaluation. “For over two years I went around to more than 200 museums—aquariums, science, children’s—in seven countries. Frankly, history-oriented places were probably the least sophisticated in how they communicated their messages. The animal we were going to create would blend traditional communication methods with a modern approach.”
In October 2006, after raising $110 million in its To Keep Him First campaign, Mount Vernon debuted the Ford Orientation Center and Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center, at a cost of more than $60 million, to provide in-depth education about Washington’s life and legacy—just in time for Virginia’s 400th birthday in 2007. The orientation center shows a five-minute film introducing the estate, narrated (perhaps counter to what one might expect) by Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak, followed by We Fight to Be Free, an 18-minute film by Steven Spielberg’s production company emphasizing Washington as a military man of action during the French and Indian War. The staff are quite explicit about having wanted a “Hollywood film” presenting Washington as a hero in what a press release called “an action adventure movie.” In the words of Ann Bay, associate director of education, “It’s really hard to make an exciting film about presidential decision-making.”
The goal of the orientation center, museum and education center was to offer a rich overview of George Washington, from intrepid surveyor to innovative farmer to successful entrepreneur to general to president, with plenty of detail for the more serious visitor—though if need be, as a designer said, the more casual sightseer “could go through the education center on roller skates and still learn something.” The museum displays more than 700 objects: furnishings, china, clothing, jewelry, Revolutionary War artifacts, rare books and manuscripts and other personal effects of the Washington family.
The education center includes the traditional dioramas and interactive exhibitions—from sliding-panel Q&A’s to an animatronic Valley Forge soldier groaning in his bunk bed. But it also offers ten specially produced short films by the History Channel, with topics such as George Washington, original spymaster; George and Martha’s courtship and marriage; and Washington as slaveowner, as well as films by Dennis Earl Moore Productions, which did To Fly, the first Imax film. The film about Valley Forge features such you-are-there effects as snow falling from the theater’s ceiling—thrilling schoolchildren who spring from their seats to catch the flakes and rush toward the smoke that signals cannon fire—while the “legacy theater” that is the museum’s final destination pulls out the patriotic stops with a cameo by Colin Powell and a performance by the Brooklyn Children’s choir. To combat the image of Washington as the stodgy old man on the dollar bill, a team of forensic and computer experts, artists and historians created three life-size wax models depicting Washington as a 19-year-old land surveyor, a 45-year-old Revolutionary general and the 57-year-old first president. Not only did Mount Vernon get a face lift; so did George Washington himself.
How’s it playing so far?
