Interesting piece in Salon about how quietly subversive the history presented at Colonial Williamsburg is. (Salon takes a while to load. Open the window, go do something else.)
The concept of going to a recreated colonial town is a little foreign to me; I do, after all, live in Philadelphia. Not only is history everywhere, I’ve been exposed to it since I was a child. I can show you where Ben Franklin is buried, I know the various myths about Elizabeth “Betsy” Ross, the history of the Mother Bethel A.M.E. church. I watched as they excavated the first White House on Market Street, where they discovered the slave quarters.
Hell, there’s even an archaeological dig going on in my neighborhood, where they’re rebuilding I-95.
But there is that American trait of wanting a sanitized, Americanized version of reality (how else to explain Las Vegas or Disney World?), so it’s good that whoever decides these things is taking the opportunity to present Colonial life in all its contradictory complexity:
It’s possible to ignore the messaging at Colonial Williamsburg and just admire the clip-clopping horses, the cutesy handicrafts and the rather anodyne pronouncements of George Washington, who projects just the air of reserve and rectitude you expect. But over the course of a Williamsburg day, we are repeatedly reminded that the magnificent Enlightenment rhetoric of the Revolutionary age came with asterisks, and did not apply to African-Americans, women or Indians (described in the Declaration of Independence as “merciless savages”). In RevQuest, a popular interactive game played mostly by children and teenagers, visitors learn that black people who took part in the Revolution largely fought for the British crown (in order to gain their freedom) and then were forced to emigrate. (Many of their descendants live in the Canadian Maritime Provinces to this day.) On the American side, even a genuine war hero like James Armistead, George Washington’s African-American double agent, required the personal intervention of the Marquis de Lafayette and an act of the Virginia legislature to gain emancipation several years after the war.
Beyond the glaring racial hypocrisy, other “Revolutionary City” episodes bring up uncomfortable contrasts. When Benedict Arnold and the Redcoats “take” the town (as they briefly did, in 1781), the infamous traitor scoffs at our boos and catcalls. You losers threw away British security over a few pennies in taxes on tea, he demands, wrecking your economy and leading to all this death and suffering. What was that all about? No one in the crowd can come up with anything good. “Religious freedom!” someone shouts. “Worship whatever deity you please,” Arnold retorts, as long as you tithe to the Church of England. “We’re taxed too much!” says someone else. Your taxes under the Continental Congress are 100 times higher than under the king, he tells us. You can almost feel the anxiety of the crowd: If the Revolution was about something bigger than church or taxes, what was it?
It has gotten better than it used to be. When I was a kid they referred to “the servants”, after enormous pressure from the black population, they now talk about “enslaved people”, a term which I prefer to slaves. They also post recreations of runaway slave posters all around the public houses, to indicate that this was an aspect of colonial life. Also, black people can now get jobs as tour guides. And there is a historical marker to mark the field where America’s first black minister preached. So yeah, it is still sanitized, but you get a better feeling for the grimmer side of colonial life.
Can’t read any of it but please let me spontaneously combust.
Is that so WRONG?