The Consolations of Everything

In 1905 in Kansas there lived a retired man. He had been a farmer, a teacher, a Civil War nurse, and at the age of 64 it occured to him to be a legend. He began to build massive sculptures out of concrete and steel, turning his yard into a larger-than-life hallucinatory vision of his Populist interpretation of the creation story. He built himself a log cabin out of limestone. He built himself a mausoleum, and ordered his heirs to charge tourists a buck to see his corpse lying in the Garden of Eden that he had constructed around himself.

This is not a story about him. This is a story about the richest woman in America, Marjorie Merriweather Post Close Hutton Davies May, who, for obvious reasons, is now generally referred to only by her first three names. Heiress to a fortune built on coffee substitutes and breakfast cereal, she became a collector of important husbands and Imperial art. She had a movie made about her and a daughter who became a movie star* (these did not, however, overlap). She also had a mansion tucked into the side of Rock Creek Park, and it was this mansion that I came to visit.

Our group was led through by a guide of knowledge and discretion whose stately, ladylike demeanor may have been inborn, or may have been accented by the surroundings. After a short, moderately reverential film on the life of the foundress, (why not watch for yourself?) we proceeded into the house itself. The initial impression was one of a splendid clamour** - walls with more imperial Russian portraits than CNN has commentating heads, a chandelier on a velvet rope, a pair of absurdly ornate chairs that reminded me that confusion about whether you are to admire or sit on a piece of art did not begin in the modern era.  (Apologies for lack of images - Hillwood is in process of digitizing its collection. )

From the Front Hall into the French Drawing Room. You know how certain cultures and/or historical periods will capture the individual's imagination? It's an experience that, among my acquaintances, seems more common than the alternative. Something about another place and another time makes them medievalists, Japanophiles, Civil War buffs. The place-and-times that seemed to capture the heart of our absent hostess were the 18th century in France and Imperial Russia. France is a freebie - who doesn't love Louis XVI and his embroidered chairs? but Russia seemed a bit more personal.

The film included reminiscences of her as a young ambassadors wife in 1930s Russia, scrambling up shelves in dark shops, collecting relics of the Imperial age on their way to the smelters or the scrap heap. She acquired what seems to be every possible china service (each order of nobility had one), as well as some paintings. Portraits of Russian royalty line the entrance hall. In the Icon Room, shockingly green malachite tables display icons, whose raw surfaces contrast starkly with their gilded covers. And in the only room in the house that looks like a museum (glass cases, gray walls, track lighting) Russian ecclesiastical treasures take on a strange second life.

Post didn't just live in her own personal museum - she took the duties of a hostess quite seriously. An extraordinary ballroom (she enjoyed square dances and first-run movies) features a kind of metal grillwork around the ceiling. The attack-of-the-fifties kitchen was really a charming contrast to the rest of the house (relentlessly practical with just a few china sets making an appearance) and the upstairs rooms were surprisingly personal.

I didn't explore the grounds in detail - it was on the very edge of spring, and most things weren't blooming. The greenhouse, though, was filled with exotic flowers. "Of COURSE orchids," I mumbled to myself, surveying the rows upon rows of the convoluted plants that to me resemble alien creatures.

Marjorie Merriweather Post was one of those rare individuals to whom money is no object, and she went about snapping up priceless items for her private possession with an instinct somewhere between a trained curator and a magpie. So why did I find her so sympathetic? Wasn't this ostentation that should repel?

The museum bills itself as "Where Fabulous Lives" - a carefully chosen tagline. There's something in her defiant grandiosity that seems cut from the same cloth as those divas who have attained the status of gay icons. This museum is confident enough in its own identity not to have to worry about justifying its decisions or those of its foundress. I think I like Marjorie Meriwether Post for the same reason I like Samuel P. Dinsmoor. Sometimes, you've just gotta do what you gotta do, whether that means building a cabin out of limestone lincoln logs, or collecting the china of every Russian imperial order. Charming or profiting from society may have some part in it, to be sure. In the end, not only do these people follow their hearts, but in leaving such extravagant legacies, make it possible for us to follow their hearts as well - no matter into what strange places they take us.


*And a member of the board of Lehman Brothers. Wikipedia, some days I love you best.

**I nearly said "a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty" - and thought I thought of it. Dammit.

***Apologies for the inordinate delay in posting this - every time I had free time to write, it occurred to me that I actually had to be doing my taxes. Taxes are my second least favorite thing in the world, so I didn't actually do those taxes. But I didn't do useful things either. Like this post.

Living up to Ourselves

I'd been to the American History museum once before. I don't remember the time of year, so I don't know whether it was impending heat prostration or frostbite that drove us into the shelter of the huge front hall. I remember a silver flag. I remember crowds of people. I remember being profoundly unimpressed.

It looks like an air conditioner the size of a city block. 

I wasn't optimistic when I came back. This building has a powerful case of the uglies. I'd much rather look at the Art Deco EPA across the street - but in I went, and found myself in a hall that did nothing to dispel the impression of a 70s office building on steroids. Behind glass on either side of the hall were random items, a hodge-podge of the detritus of history. From an anti-stamp act teapot to pop-culture icon C-3PO, the items were presented without logic or coherence. More moving was the broken school bus window from integration riots. The fire hats were hilarious, the missionary quilt was touching - but the display so resembled a high-school trophy case that I had to struggle to muster emotion.

Continuing through the downstairs I came upon the Hall of Invention. Here there was more coherence - colors, vertical and horizontal displays, mixtures of text and objects - but there was still more to see than to do. You're targeting this toward the young and celebrating the creative and analytical process that leads to inventions like Kevlar and folding strollers. Why not let the museum-goers experience the problem-solving? Have them push an old-style stroller and ask what might be inconvenient about it! You have the favorite toys of celebrated inventors - but under glass. Perhaps I'd have a more charitable opinion if I had a chance to go through the Spark Lab, but it was full of small children (a good sign) and I didn't want to increase the chances of my trampling someone.

Descartes "De Homine" - Latin for "Pat the Bunny"

That was another problem I had with the museum's lighting. If it wasn't lunch-period fluorescent, it was so dim that I had to practically stick my head into the text-heavy exhibits to read the tags - stumbling over the smaller museum-goers and obstructing the view of the larger ones. I can understand the need for dim lighting in the paper engineering exhibit, but it's still unfortunate. Maybe I should just get my eyes checked. Anyway, it was a small, delightful display about to extract three dimensions from two, and about how we've always loved a pop-up book. Even Descartes wrote one, who knew.

Not all of the smaller exhibits were so coherent. Trying to find my way to the escalators I came up against a small wall showcasing the history of.. the "Maid of Cotton" beauty pageant. What? Why? Perhaps it has some greater significance to people who aren't me, like the packed room displaying Julia Child's kitchen and stage set. It was a strikingly ordinary kitchen, but from the videos of her show playing all around the room, she seems like a pretty awesome lady.

The elevators at last! Up on the third floor, trying to find my way, I came across Stephen Colbert's portrait staring patriotically into... the freight elevator. At least the curatorial staff seems to have a sense of humour about their building's terrible design.

So it's been a hundred and fifty years since our country's most serious attempt at suicide, and any museum that touches history at all has got something up about it. The Museum of American History can hardly be outdone - Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life has plastered pictures of his top hat all over the subway and the exhibit has raided many of the museum's other collections to try and present a complete portrait of the president. Using objects to present history is trickier when describing an individual than a culture, I think, but there are some gems - like a pocket watch in whose workings the watchmakers appear to have carried out a graffiti war. But, as with so many exhibits on Lincoln, the president's own words wind up dominating the narrative. He's articulate, dry, and self-deprecating - his writing has the idiosyncratic cadences of the autodidact combined with the terseness of a man who has actually had to make things work rather than merely comment on them. I thought at first that his "railsplitter" political persona might be disingenuous for a man who has (at that point) spent the better part of his life at law than at manual labor, but he has in word as well as deed a streak of relentless practicality. He dubbed himself and his wife "the long and short of it", and the museum's exhibit of both their costumes shows the accuracy of that characterization.

 The exhibit loops a History Channel special on slavery and emancipation, trying to get into our heads what it meant when we ceased to be a slave society. 3 times the value of manufacturing held in human beings! 50 times the federal budget! How do we properly understand that? "Eeeeaaagh! I DON'T need to see that!" proclaimed a young boy, recoiling from a battlefield image of bodies bloating. Score one for history, if it still retains the power to horrify.

Out of the Lincoln exhibit, and into the permanent exhibit on the presidency. This was rather less well put-together, with a propensity to indulge in enthusiastic generalizations like "Americans are wary of pomp and circumstance" and "The President is America's leading man!" Three kids jostled behind the photo-op podium where you can pretend to address the nation. "The three knuckleheads for President," sighed a woman I assumed to be their mother. "Sure, why not?"

My feet ached and my brain throbbed with the beginning of an information headache*, but I suppose I** can't really visit this museum and not check and see if our flag is, in fact, still there. Yup, it is. Bombarded by time and age instead of British guns, the ragged, mammoth banner now occupies pride of place in a newly designed exhibit space. Though its constant use in the museum's promotional materials makes it seems like the apotheosis of American history's knicknack collection, in the flesh (well, cloth) it really does have a certain majesty. A montage of flag-waving images loops at the end - from new citizens clutching pocket-sized flags to WWI doughboys riding giddily off to Europe  Set (of course) to the National Anthem, the video is moderately successful in a relatively decent goal: to make Americans proud of the country that's worth being proud of. No images of the flag appear in negative or embarrassing contexts - at protests and blazoned on t-shirts is as far from hagiographical as it will stray. (And now you have the song in your head - the only song in the world that actually works better as a national anthem than it does as a drinking song.)

There's not necessarily anything wrong with that. What's praiseworthy should be praised. The danger is that we should come to believe that praiseworthy is all we've got, and that American flag never signified to anyone what the Fourth of July did to Frederick Douglass. Fortunately, the American History museum is incubating some of the collections of African American History and Culture, and there're few commentaries more horrifying or more hopeful on the US's potential as a nation. Currently they're displaying the collection of the Kinseys, and while the exhibit takes a positively medieval tone toward its patrons, the combination of art, document, and artifact is strikingly well-done. Rather than a litany of old sorrows and old hates, it celebrates the accomplishments of men and women, free and slave, throughout US history.

In addition to the heroes of the past, the exhibit includes chilling evidence of what it meant to be a slave society. A bill of sale for William Johnson. A letter describing the domestic talents of one Frances Crawford, mentioning "She does not know that she is to be sold". A newspaper ad for two runaways, saying that anyone "may kill or destroy said slaves."

Can you read that unmoved, knowing that they're talking about you? Knowing you're doing the talking? We have to face up to both if we're going to be America. The Museum of American History could be an important part of that process - and it's working on it. I guess that's all the best of us can say.


* Like an ice cream headache, but without delicious chocolate.

**Especially not as a St. John's graduate!

SYNOPSIS
Place: The Smithsonian Museum of American History
Pros: Imposes a measure of coherence on a cluttered past.
Cons: Hasn't yet transcended its attic-like nature.
Definitely Check Out: Lincoln's patent model. 
Rating: 3-8/10 objects

What Price History: A Visit to Mount Vernon

LivingSocial, that friend of the cultured and broke, told me one day that it could get me tickets at slightly less than half of Mount Vernon's usual price of $15 for an adult. I had borne something of a grudge against the estate ever since I had taken a brisk bike ride down the superb Mount Vernon Trail and found at the end that I was expected to fork over some cash if I wished to stroll about the grounds. Living in DC has quite spoiled me for pay-museums.

Miniature animatronic house

But now, an opportunity to fork over somewhat less cash while checking off an item on the MusePrint list! I took it. Thus it was that on an unpleasantly cold day I found myself nose to nose with a life-size bronze of our first President. Well, not quite nose to nose. Washington was tall even by modern standards. This was one of the few things I gathered from the orientation center,* which consisted of four photo-op bronzes, a motorized miniature of the Mansion House, and a 20 minute movie billed incessantly as an action oriented epic. It features Washington crossing the Delaware river, killing some French and Indians, falling off a horse, and smooching Martha Custis, not exactly in that order but not in any order that makes much narrative sense. The attempted whiz-bang-FORD rebranding of someone I assume is a complex man of a fascinating period left me dissatisfied; I was relieved even by the cold as we set off up the hill toward the Mansion House itself.

As a plantation, Mount Vernon seemed to be somewhere between a castle and a small town. The outbuildings surrounding the main house included the gardener's house, the salt house, the overseer's house (apparently he oversaw both slave and free labor... wonder how that worked) but we had time for little more before the Mansion House tour began. Having grown up in a house built in 1779, I regarded the uneven floorboards, the four-poster beds, and the game efforts at right angles with a familiar and affectionate eye. There was, however, a considerable difference of style between the New England houses of my youth and Washington's manor - not just in wealth, but in spatial quality. Corners of rooms were cut off much more frequently, curves and pillars figured more prominently in the design.

The place was staffed by assiduous volunteers, mostly women of middle age with bright lipstick and stiff smiles.** Each seemed to know mostly about the room they explained (fair enough). I learned a few things from the house: Washington placed a great emphasis on agriculture and wished his visitors to know it, the family underscored their wealth through the day-glo green dining room, and Martha Washington custom-ordered their bed. Hanging in the front hall was a key to the Bastille, a souvenir from Lafayette- perhaps in fond memory of his revolutionary internship.

The Sixteen-Sided Barn (fifteen sides just aren't enough)

The view of the Potomac from Mount Vernon looked very familiar. Perhaps this is because I've seen it in pictures, but I suspect that it's because it is very nearly the Form of the River View. Walking down the hill brought us to the farm, which works from April to October but which was now inhabited only by a few well-insulated sheep. This was only one of five farms that Washington managed over the original 8000 acres of the plantation.  Washington maintained a steady program of architectural expansion and improvement as well as agricultural experimentation.

Appreciation for the personal and political character of the man who helmed this enterprise was undermined by the uneasy consciousness of the slave labor on which it was created and sustained. The Estate seems to have no notion of how to address this disconnect. The periodic references to some named slaves, and the insertion of "by enslaved workers" into passive constructions in the signage only reinforce the unease. A less begrudging approach might have done better service, even if the goal was to focus all the attention on Washington. As it is, I found myself constantly wondering what he, or the estate, had got to hide. It may be worth noting that he bought teeth off his slaves.

Our visit ended in the museum, a place that seems to have a bit more money than it knows what to do with. In between the obsessive fascination with just how accurately the team of forensics experts had been able to reconstruct Washington's appearance, and the nervously commercial plugs for products in the Mount Vernon store, the museum conveyed a number of interesting and humanizing historical details. I had previously no idea just how far across the world the French and Indian war had ranged. Nor did I know of Washington's involvement in precipitating the conflict, or his bitterness over his failure to obtain a commission in the British army. The transition from identity as British colonist to American fascinates me.

But again, opportunities to learn about Washington and the tenor of his timers were obscured by a hagiography that veered from the uncomfortable to the absurd. The final chamber in the museum was a theater-in-the-round, which was used to play what amounted to a powerpoint showing a montage of positive words. "Will we ever see his like again?" intoned the narrator. "Perhaps, if we remain true to his memory." And exit through the gift shop. Washington plates. Washington spoons. Washington stained glass. Washington on a horse. The once and future Washington! Surely Washington doesn't need to be sold to compel attention.

But it's easy for me to decry commercial obtrusion into my history museum experience. I don't have an estate to run.

*Fun exercise: click that link and see if the references to Ford outnumber those to Washington.
**To be fair, I defy you to smile any other way when the temperature goes below 30.

SYNOPSIS
Place: Mount Vernon
Pros: The best river view on the East Coast.
Cons: Weirdly commercial vibe.
Definitely Check Out: The combination hothouse/slave quarters.
Rating: 5/10 silver spoons.