Here, George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument

CHAPTER 5. Framing the Colonial Picture

140 CHAPTER 5 Framing the Colonial Picture Superintendent Russell Gibbs and his staff had a rough go of it during the spring and early summer of 1959. The Potomac River oyster wars—an ongoing and very violent turf war between Maryland and Virginia oyster tongers dating all the way back to Washington’s day—erupted anew in April, killing at least one local man in the crossfire. Less dramatic, though equally troubling, were the demands placed on park resources in May and June as visitors crowded the monument’s Potomac River beachfront and filled its picnic area beyond capacity. On one occasion, vandals flooded the picnic area by disconnecting a drinking fountain. Gibbs erected traffic barriers that June and hoped to avoid recurrent problems by denying visitors access to recreational areas during evening hours. Labor shortages also plagued the superintendent throughout the summer, and murmurings in Memorial Association circles about membership expansion surely raised Gibbs’s curiosity. All of these concerns suggest something of the changing times at Washington’s birthplace during the 1950s. Though unquestionably rural and clearly embedded within the historical exigencies of its political and geographic landscape, Washington’s birthplace had also become a modern tourist destination and, as such, host to throngs of newly mobile Americans . A generation of returning veterans with young families and newly Framing the Colonial Picture 141 disposable incomes increasingly devoted its leisure time to exploring the nation’s brand new interstate highway system during the late 1940s and ’50s. Historic sites—including national parks that offered affordable vacation destinations to working- and middle-class families—experienced unprecedented visitation figures in turn. And those visitors came with a new sense of history indelibly marked, during the 1950s, by the proliferation of television and fears of communism. Cowboys and Indians had become fixtures on the tv screen, and even Davy Crockett reminded viewers about America’s frontier spirit and its manifest destiny. The frontier trope found renewed expression in the country’s space race with the Soviet Union. Disneyland’s juxtaposition of Frontierland and Tomorrowland—the epitome of the American tourist experience during the 1960s—speaks to the capacity of cold war–era Americans to understand the past and the future as two sides of the same nationalistic coin. Accordingly, cold war public historians struggled to fashion a usable past deployable in the battle against perceived threats to American democracy . Preservationists fought to protect historic buildings from the postwar construction boom by issuing their own “containment strategies.” Historic preservation, they argued, was one way of deploying the legacy of American history against those forces that threatened to destroy it. To that end, American museums dedicated their resources to the battle against communism . Colonial Williamsburg’s Kenneth Chorley, for example, employed explicitly cold war rhetoric when he proposed a “Truman Doctrine” for American history museums, suggesting that an investment in American museums equaled an investment in the fight against communism. In other regards, museums sometimes failed to promote what the federal government wanted its communist rivals to see as a strong democratic nation free of racial difference and social discord. Although Washington’s birthplace certainly understood itself as a defender of American values, we will see that deep-rooted prejudice—and the persistence of a particularly nasty sort of object fetishism—undercut any hopes for stemming racial discord at Popes Creek. Despite the radical changes underway at Washington’s birthplace during the 1950s, it is the voice of an older generation of park visitor that rings clearest from the cacophony of comments and complaints registered during those years. Mrs. C. C. Warfield visited the monument on August 13, 1959, and did not at all approve of what she discovered there. Although she had not visited the park in twenty-eight years, Warfield—who claimed to have been involved with the early Memorial Association—wasted no time in 142 Chapter 5 expressing her concern for what she considered the National Park Service’s mismanagement of the association’s Memorial House. She disparaged the building’s interior paint scheme. The wooden floors, Warfield argued, were not properly oiled.And why ever,she wondered,did the National Park Service furnish the Memorial House with such shabby decorations? Warfield took particular issue with a threadbare seventeenth-century rug on display in the parlor; she probably wondered what happened to the far more impressive bearskin rug. Warfield...