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The Nation's Pulse
The President’s House Wreck
George Washington’s “re-imagined” house in Philadelphia will never replace Mount Vernon.
Often, the National Park Service gets things right. Sometimes it gets them very wrong. The recently opened “re-imagining” of the President’s House in Philadelphia is one of the wrong ones.
In November 1790, President George Washington and his family moved into the two-story brick house Congress has rented for them from financier Robert Morris. It was near where Congress would meet, now that the government was moving from New York City. (It moved again in 1800, to Washington, D.C.)
In this house the executive branch of the nation’s government took shape. Washington met with Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and other cabinet members, issues were thrashed out and levies held — receptions in which the president would be accessible to the people. Sensitive to the need to appear to be composed at such times, this tall, august man had a bow window installed in the state dining room so he could create the right impression by standing with his back to the light when greeting guests.
The building was razed in 1832 and in the 1950s the area was cleared for the creation of Independence Mall. No one seemed to know the precise location of the house until an amateur historian, Edward Lawler, Jr., published the results of his intensive sleuth work and pinpointed its location. This was in 2002 and the National Park Service was then beginning to plan a redesign for the Independence National Historic Park. Lawler had also discovered where Washington had housed his stablehands, most of whom were slaves. It was within feet of the new Liberty Bell Center.
The NPS could have made a replica of the President’s House. This has been done in many places, Williamsburg, Virginia being the most prominent. Historic replicas are out of fashion these days, however. Instead they hired an architectural firm and historian Gary Nash to conjure up an abstraction. Nash is a member of the Revisionist School of American History. In 1994 he was hired by the National Endowment for the Humanities to draft new national standards for the teaching of American history. His view of the nation’s founders was that they were all oppressive, hypocritical and interested largely in advancing their own economic interests. His “product” was so egregiously negative that the worse parts were excised two years later.
The architect concocted a neo-ruin of a colonial building. It has four brick-clad walls with three tall pillars, several window frames and a doorframe, but nothing above them. There is nothing inspiring or even thought provoking about this open-to-the-sky structure. It does not even conform to the dimensions of the actual building’s measurements.
Inside, the flat surfaces display a surfeit of interpretive panels and videos. None describe the achievements of the first president and the government. The concentration is on race relations and mistakes made (clear in hindsight), such as Washington signing the Fugitive Slave Act and John Adams signing the Alien & Sedition Acts.
The fact that there were slaves in Washington’s household in Philadelphia is worth pointing out, but so are Washington’s political skill, determination and personal modesty. Nash may have thought he was offering what he has calls “multi-layered, multi-faceted social history,” but he has given us a one-dimensional and negative view of what was, in fact, the beginning of a socio-political miracle, a successful, durable republican government.
The bending-over-backwards quality of the presentation can be attributed in part to a local black activist group which relentlessly lobbied the National Park Service to “honor, primarily, the nine enslaved African descendants.” They were part of the story, of course, but only part of it.
Mount Vernon, Washington’s Virginia home, has a Slave Memorial, an annual ceremony honoring the slaves and a support group made up mainly of descendants of Washington’s slaves who work closely with the Mount Vernon staff to make sure this aspect of Mount Vernon is well represented. It is, and so are all the other aspects of the place. The result is that the visitor gets a “multi-faceted” impression.
Not so at the “re-imagined” President’s House. The architects got an abstract original, no matter how unattractive; Nash got to portray the nation and its leaders in a dark light; and the pressure group got what it wanted.
Mr. Hannaford is a former member of the Mount Vernon Advisory Board.
About the Author
Peter Hannaford was closely associated for a number of years with the late President Reagan, beginning in the California Governor’s office. His latest book is Presidential Retreats.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (16) | Leave a comment
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Southern_Comment| 7.19.11 @ 7:17AM
What a complete waste of money - right up there with the study on the effects of penis size for gay men.
The parks service has become a ridiculous hindrance to the people - again another gov't agency doing their best to play rockstar. This is minor though in comparison to the parks service that built a 3000 acre memorial to the Americans who defended their country on a commercial flight and lost their lives as that plane crashed in a field. What makes that memorial so special? The parks service of that area used imminent domain to oust people from their homes for this memorial. They ousted people from their built American lives - that btw, those people on the plane were fighting to defend. It is with shame that memorial was built and it is with shame that the parks service used thug tactics to make a name for themselves. A farce just as this one is, but at least no property was stolen from the citizens this time.
TrueBlue| 7.19.11 @ 2:57PM
They do the same thing any time an endangered or "protected" species is found to live in an area. They kick out anyone living there because they might interfere with the animal's "natural habitat" like they are more important than the people who live or work there. It's pretty disgusting.
masly | 7.20.11 @ 2:36AM
Washington asking for and being baptised in
PURE Calvinist fashion just weeks before his death.I am a 28 years old doctor, mature and beautiful.and now I am seeking a good man who can give me real love , so i got a username Andromeda2002 on--s'e'ek'c'ou'ga'r.c óm--.it is the first and best club for y'ounger women and old'er men, or older women and y'ounger men,to int'eract with each other. Maybe you wanna ch'eck 'it out or tell your friends!
Skippy| 7.19.11 @ 9:13PM
My favorite part of the Pa. 9/11 memorial is the neat crescent shape of it, when viewed from above.
I hope the next batch of airborne Muslim butchers enjoy the view!
It's all about them.
Southern_Comment| 7.19.11 @ 7:19AM
eminent
bluecollarbytes| 7.19.11 @ 8:39AM
Why not 're-imagine' this structure in New York, right next to the upcoming mosque close to ground zero? there are some natural tie-ins there....
Sheila| 7.19.11 @ 11:34AM
American monuments and museums were hijacked decades ago, and now you're suddenly noticing? The Smithsonian is unbearable; even ten years ago when I visited D.C. with my older child, the classic exhibits I remember from my childhood (grew up in the D.C. area but escaped from the east coast as soon as I could) had all vanished. Instead, we saw exhibits on blacks' northward migration for jobs, on the Japanese internment camps during WWII, and on women's oppression. It's museum after museum of multicultural grievance. And yet all these fine, "conservative" and "patriotic" Americans continue to troop to D.C. to immerse their children in this cultural rot. I have chosen to wall my family off from this culture instead of bemoaning what was a fait accompli years ago.
Peter| 7.20.11 @ 10:03AM
I don't understand the current preoccupation with slavery. If you think about it, slavery was pretty much the norm throughout almost all of recorded history, yet to listen to the modern progressive, you would get the impression that slavery was a uniquely American creation practiced exclisively in the antebellum American south. The real tragedy of slavery was not so much in the enslavement itself but in the treatment of freed black slaves by racist southern Democrats (the forebears of our modern progressives) after emancipation. This racism is alive and well today in the progressive belief that the descendents of black slaves are too stupid to take care of themselves and require the government to look after their every need.
Dai Alanye | 7.19.11 @ 1:48PM
Under present conditions we shouldn't be spending money on abstractions or anything else--no new Pell Grants, no consumer agencies headed by losing Ohio politicians, no bonuses to government employes who are merely doing the jobs they were hired for, no vacations or fund raising events that require Air Force One.
No nuthin.
Flee| 7.19.11 @ 3:36PM
What a waste of time and money to portray a single view of history. He could easily have pointed out the flaws of the time but to try to portray our founding fathers as money grubbing slave traders is too far a stretch.
CalMark| 7.19.11 @ 4:18PM
The Smithsonian Enola Gay redux.
What a hateful, nasty, poisonous little man this "artist" must be.
Richard Baker| 7.19.11 @ 5:46PM
Amazing, isn't it, that the federal government pays for this tripe? Nash hates his country's history so. How ever does he stand living here?
TimG| 7.19.11 @ 8:12PM
Thank our lucky stars that Mt. Vernon is owned and operated by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, and receives NO public funding of any kind. Otherwise, the NPS would have turned it into what they've done with the Philadelphia house.
POST American| 7.19.11 @ 11:26PM
----Washington demoralization soft-programming
ALERT!
FACT IS Washington becomes more valid and
urgently relevant by the hour.
Washington! ---repudiating Freemasonry and
the EUGENICS agenda of the 'Illuminati'.
Washington asking for and being baptised in
PURE Calvinist fashion just weeks before his death.
--------WASHINGTON is an American sign
for ALLLLL time.
--------WASHINGTON LIVES!
weddingdresses | 7.21.11 @ 6:02AM
that the federal government pays for this tripe? Nash hates his country's history so. How ever does he stand living here?
Tiddly| 8.13.11 @ 3:02PM
The latest Park Service monument that I know of is the Sand Creek Massacre site in SE Colorado, designed to show how evil Americans were to Indians. After a rancher's family (one of several ) were murdered by marauding Indians, and their butchered bodies brought into Denver (the little children were disemboweled and nearly beheaded), a group of Colorado volunteer militia, including a lot of mining toughs, retaliated by attacking a village of Cheyenne camped on Sand Creek and killing many members of the tribe. In the Park Service version, of course, it was an unprovoked attack on peaceful Native Americans who had immediately surrendered to the militia and were massacred anyway (the Park Service brochure shows an American flag dominating a white flag of surrender). Like the Wounded Knee battle in which many Indians were also killed--when they pulled hidden guns on their U.S. Army captors--there are two sides to the story, but you will only ever see one presented by the Park Service. Their message is: America (and white people) are irredeemably evil.