I
t is well known that American citizens are
immune to self-reflection when it comes to social
class, just as American scholars shy away from
analytic reflection on it. On the other hand,
Americans love to talk about "identity," and are
seemingly expert in parsing its dimensions--
national, regional, racial, ethnic, generational, religious,
sexual. Indeed, features of social location and
personhood that sociologists once routinely associated
with class, such as "lifestyle" (or consumption
patterns), educational attainments, and occupation,
are more likely to be understood by contemporary
Americans as markers of personal identity than as
consequences of social forces. Identity is the central
concept of American natives' social theory because
it pictures personhood as a function of individual
choice. The social cohesion that identity generates
is understood to be natural and automatic (of the
"birds of a feather" variety) and, hence, apolitical.
On the other hand, to talk too persistently of social
class elicits accusations of unpatriotic politics, of
fomenting "class warfare" and jeopardizing a unified
national identity.
The new critical literature on American history
museums reflects this pattern of native social
thought. The last two decades have seen an enormous
burst of scholarship on museums of all types,
in all parts of the world. This trend has brought
together scholars from many disciplines and countries,
both in universities and in museums, to reexamine
the museum as a central institution of
modern society. Museums, as institutions, became
newly visible precisely at the moment when "the politics
of culture" became an important issue in the
humanities and social sciences (Whisnant 1983;
Handler 1988; Williams 1991), and when "identity"
came to rival "culture" as the central term for discussing
what was at stake in those politics (Gleason
1983; Handler 1994). It was as if, some time in the
middle of the 1980s, a light bulb went on in people's
heads: "Eureka," they said, "museums represent
culture! They collect and preserve artifacts that
objectify collective identities. No wonder they are
contested terrains, contact zones. If we want to
study the politics of cultural identity, where better
to do it than in the museum?"1
As the new critical literature on museums developed,
two strands emerged. In the dominant strand,
people studied the content of museum representations
in relation to struggles (both inside and outside
the museum) over identity. At issue was whose culture
(or identity, or history) was portrayed (or marginalized),
in what terms, and under whose control.
In the second strand (which, though influential, was
taken up by far fewer people), scholars focused less
on representation than on presentation. They asked
how museums, as authoritative social institutions,
presented the cultural materials they controlled to
shape the ideology and behavior of their audiences.
Work in this vein did not ignore the cultural content
of museum displays, but it was not interested in the
celebration of identity as such. Rather, its overriding
theoretical concern was hegemony in a class hierarchy:
how did elites use institutions like museums to
cultivate citizens who would behave in ways that
reaffirmed the social status quo?2
Taking its cue from the second strand of
museum studies, the present essay examines
5
Museum Anthropology Vol. 29, Issue 1, pp. 5­19, ISSN 0892-8339, online ISSN 1548-1379. Copyright 2006 American
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Persons of Stature and the Passing Parade:
Egalitarian Dilemmas at Monticello
and Colonial Williamsburg
Eric Gable and Richard Handler
"egalitarian dilemmas" that public visitation presents
to two prominent American history museums.
Although Colonial Williamsburg [hereafter CW] and
Monticello differ in many respects, both institutions
dichotomously categorize visitors as elites and
masses, VIPs and ordinary Americans, "persons of
stature" and "the passing parade." These museums
conceive their educational and patriotic mission in
lofty and altruistic terms. It is their responsibility,
as they see it, to tell the American story (at least that
part of it which their material culture embodies), as
fully and accurately as they can. That story at once
belongs to the public and is necessary for them to
know, to complete their education in American citizenship.
Yet, despite this kind of ideological deference
to the public, when we examine these museums
as social arenas, we find deep anxieties about social
hierarchy on the part of all participants in the
museum encounter. Whatever the explicit representational
content of these museums, other stories
(hidden scripts, we might say) are enacted everyday
in the interactions between museum personnel and
visitors and, backstage, between administrators and
the employees they supervise.
Thus, it is only by working in the second strand
of the new critical literature on museums, and pushing
it in some new directions, that we can proceed.
To confine the discussion to the representational
contents of exhibits, as most museum scholarship
does, would be to limit ourselves to those topics
about which the natives (museum insiders, visitors,
scholars, and critics alike) can self-consciously
reflect. Indeed, the critical literature on museums
has reached a point, we think, where insiders and
outsiders speak the same language. Everyone
knows how to argue about cultural representations,
and although the terrain of such representations
may be contested, everyone agrees to the same rules
of engagement. In contrast, museum observers tend
to ignore the cultural meanings that structure, we
think, the social encounters that occur in the
museum. Studies of visitors' "museum experience"
focus either on representational content ("what did
you learn?") or on consumer satisfaction ("would you
visit again?"). Even those studies in the second
strand of scholarship that focus on hegemony and,
sometimes, resistance, tend to approach the
museum with a global model that leaves little room
for ethnographic attention to the lived experience of
museum workers and visitors. But it is precisely in
those lived experiences that we will find the "egalitarian
dilemmas" that challenge not only museum
administrators, but also theorists of a too-well-oiled
hegemonic machine.
Both CW and Monticello were founded as museums
in the mid-1920s. We focus here on the life of
those museums in the second half of the twentieth
century, a period we have studied through frequent
visits, formal fieldwork, interviews, archival records
and, recently, website analysis.3
Our comparison of
the two institutions has revealed certain dilemmas
of egalitarianism that we might not have noticed
had we confined our attention to one museum. But
we cannot pretend to be exhaustive in this comparative
analysis. As prominent American history
museums, CW and Monticello share certain features;
yet, since one is a restored town and the other
a single historic house, they also differ significantly.
These similarities and differences are not our main
concern. Nor will we attempt to update systematically
what these museums have done since we
stopped studying them, or develop a coherent historical
narrative of institutional developments
during the past 50 years. Indeed, while "house histories"
of these institutions tend to focus on changing
historical representations, especially on how
they have become more inclusive and less elitist in
the stories they tell about the past, we are more
interested in what we came to see as an enduring
cultural pattern: the natives' ambivalences about
persons of stature and the passing parade, a cluster
of meanings they enact in their routine interactions
but overlook when they talk about what they
think the museum exhibits.
Persons of Stature and the Passing
Parade at Monticello
Monticello embodies egalitarian ambivalence.
It is a shrine to the man who wished to be remembered
as "Author of the Declaration of American
Independence/of the Statute of Virginia for Religious
Freedom/and Father of the University of Virginia,"
as Jefferson's tombstone, located on the Monticello
property, proclaims. But standing before Jefferson's
home, as the historian Merrill Peterson notes, leads
one to ask: "Where was Jefferson's equalitarianism,
his love of the people, his `democratic simplicity' at
Monticello? . . . Monticello was, above everything
else, the poetic statement of a spiritual nobleman"
(1960:388).
6 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 29 NUMBER 1
In 1926, Monticello became a museum run by
the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation [TJMF].
The current website states sparely that the
Foundation's mission is "preservation and education,"
but over the years mission statements have
also included the perpetuation of Jefferson's
memory and the principles for which he contended.
Those principles were, during the 1920s, kept vague
because Jefferson was still considered a controversial,
if not radical, figure in American politics.
According to Peterson, "the general tendency was
to feature Monticello . . . , the relics of [Jefferson's]
domestic life and aesthetic vision rather than the
political philosophy" (1960:384­88). In practice, this
has meant using the material culture of Monticello
to illustrate what the foundation called, during the
late 1980s,"Jefferson the Man."The Foundation sees
itself as constantly needing to bring out subtle facets
of Jefferson's personality that are obscured in public
images which overemphasize his plebian or patrician
qualities. For example, such museum pieces as
the great clock and the polygraph machine give rise
to a recurring image of Jefferson as an inventor, an
ancestral Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. The
Foundation objects to this image of Jefferson as a
"tinkerer," a "builder of gadgets." To counter it, and
thereby restore the complexity of "Jefferson the
Man," the museum stresses other aspects of
Jefferson: his interest in fine wines, or his fascination
with the aesthetics of landscape gardening.4
Thus there are many images of Jefferson suggested
at Monticello. Institutional politics, personal preferences,
and the attitudes of visitors all influence
how Jefferson will be interpreted at any moment.
Nonetheless, there is a tendency for "Jefferson the
Man" to tilt toward an elitism which is, as we shall
see, implicit in the museum's dealings with the
public.
Monticello is a private museum that depends
heavily on ticket and gift shop sales for operating
expenses. A past curator liked to call the visiting
crowds--who number over half a million people
annually--the "lifeblood" of the museum. Yet the
Foundation views this mass of visitors with ambivalence
sometimes bordering on abhorrence. In part
this is because the Foundation does not like to be
dependent on a mass that can be fickle in their interests
and patronage. Will tourists continue to flock
to Monticello year in, year out? This is a question
that constantly worries the Foundation. In part, too,
the Foundation suffers constant disappointment
at the hands of the mass. Monticello is an educational
institution commemorating Jefferson's philosophy,
which was infused with an optimistic faith
in the intelligence of the American people. Yet, as
one Monticello tour guide put it, "people come to
Monticello to look, not learn."
The curator's annual reports reveal with stark
clarity the Foundation's generally low opinion of the
mass of visitors.The reports detail new acquisitions
and describe ongoing research, but they also discuss
attendance. In 1961, for example, we read, "the
hordes of visitors, so unnecessary and onerous
during Jefferson's residence . . . [have] become the
lifeblood of Monticello's modern day operation"
(TJMF 1961:10). Moreover, the reports use Jefferson
as their authority for their negative opinion of the
visiting public: Jefferson, we are told in the 1959
report, would "decry the fact that more then two
hundred thousand persons passed through his bedroom
last year" (TJMF 1959:5).
While the reports denigrate the mass, they celebrate
the elite in equally evocative language, again
invoking Jefferson's authority. In the 1980 report,
we are told, "as long as Monticello remains open to
the public it will continue to attract those persons
whose positions and accomplishments lift them
above the passing parade" (TJMF 1980:5). It is a
visit from these people that Jefferson would "without
a doubt . . . applaud" (TJMF 1959:5).They include
"such persons as President Theodor Heuss of the
Federal Republic of Germany, his excellency Robert
Schumann, the French Ambassador . . . and members
of the Grolier club . . . [all of whom] would have
been as much to his liking as the Marquis de
Chastelleux, George Ticknor . . . and other 18th- and
19th-century visitors" (TJMF 1959:6). These "persons
of stature," as they are sometimes called in inhouse
memoranda, are invited to sign "our guest
book after crossing the threshold into Mr. Jefferson's
entrance hall" (TJMF 1981:6). Starting in 1960,
some of them would be invited to share with the
Board of Directors a dinner commemorating
Jefferson on his birthday. These dinners were
reported as "the highlight of the year's activities" in
1960 and 1961 (TJMF 1961:8, 1962:7). As usual,
the reports linked the guests directly to Jefferson:
"the ladies," we are told, "lent delightfully subtle
touches to the success of the evening, no doubt as did
Mesdames Madison, Bayard Smith, Thornton and
EGALITARIAN DILEMMAS AT MONTICELLO AND WILLIAMSBURG 7
others when they too were guests at Monticello."The
meal itself was meant to be authentic, a "Jefferson
inspired meal" reported in sumptuous detail: "the
several courses of Filet ďAncois Cresson,Consumme,
Roti ďAgneau, and Crme Brulee with Amontillado,
Chateau Lafitte 1953 and Porto were served to
twenty one diners." In the year that 21 diners ate
at Jefferson's table, 244,546 of the lifeblood were
guided through the house (TJMF 1961:8, 9). Many,
no doubt, stopped to look at the smokehouse, where
hanging Virginia hams gave off an odor of authenticity.
The hams were later removed--they were
"tacky," one guide explained. But the Jeffersonian
dinners continue.
The curator's reports, then, make a sharp distinction
between the decried but necessary mass,
the passing parade, and the applauded few, the persons
of stature. If to the public Jefferson might be a
populist who ate ham, to the curator he was a patrician
drinking Chateau Lafitte in the company of the
select. But like a good patrician, the curator was also
proud of treating the hordes of visitors with proper
courtesy.This mass was always "guided through the
house . . . with as much graciousness as we imagine
Jefferson and his family once displayed" (TJMF
1960:10).
Though only a select few can be invited to the
anniversary dinners, most persons of stature receive
a special tour of the "upper floors" of Monticello. In
contrast, ordinary visitors are confined to the
ground floor. Yet management believes that every
visitor wants to feel like an individual, and not to
be reminded that they are part of a mass, undistinguished
and indistinguishable. Thus care is taken
to conceal from the passing parade the fact that several
times a day persons of stature will get special
access to the house. They are brought in from the
side, so that the visitors patiently waiting in line to
enter through the front will not see these privileged
guests whose special tour will include the upper
floors.
The two upper floors of Monticello include nine
bedrooms and the "dome" or "sky" room, that feature
of the house which, more than any other, is taken as
a mark of Jefferson's architectural genius. It is also
the feature visitors choose most often to photograph
(from outside the house). The Foundation began
giving special tours of the upper floors early on.And
it has always restricted common visitors to the
ground floor, even in the days when they were left
to wander through the house as they pleased.
Nevertheless, the dome and, especially, "seeing"
inside the dome are enduring enticements for visitors
to Monticello. Visitors constantly ask guides
why they cannot see the upper floors. One in-house
survey from the late 1980s found that an overwhelming
majority of visitors mentioned seeing the
upper floors as the one thing that would most
improve the tour of Monticello.
There are several reasons why the upper floors
are not open to the public. One never discussed
openly but apparent to some Monticello staff is that
it would be impossible to move masses of visitors
up the narrow stairs and through the small rooms
with any degree of speed and graciousness. Not only
is Monticello crowded, many of its guests are old,
infirm, slow on their feet, or even in wheelchairs.
As one guide observed, "many of those people have
trouble coming up the walkway. They'd never make
it up and down those stairs." Yet the Foundation
hides this reasoning, and makes excuses in advance
to curious visitors bent on seeing the upper floors.
As stated on the 2005 website: "Firecodes prevent
visitors from touring the second and third floors of
the house, including the Dome Room." On tours, the
guides point out that the stairs are narrow--"only
twenty-four inches wide"--and reiterate that "fire
regulations" forbid tours of the upper floors.
Moreover, both guides and visitors seem to accept
this excuse. Yet the guides know that groups of persons
of stature visit the upper floors routinely.
Indeed, when confronted with this fact, the guides
touch on the unspoken reason. As one guide put it,
"even if fire regulations permitted it we still couldn't
have the crowds of visitors going up and down those
staircases. It just would take too much time."
Visitors, apparently, are more gullible. In the survey
that elicited their desire to see the upper floors, several
suggested that the Foundation "ask that an
exception in the fire codes be made" or "erect fire
escapes."
Another overt restriction on visitors concerns
photography. In its "guidelines" for visitors, the
website explains that while taking pictures and
making videos of the "grounds" are permitted, "no
photography of any kind is allowed inside the house."
At the beginning of tours, guides repeat this rule.The
guides do not give an explanation for this unless
asked, and none is given on the website. But visitors
question the rule so frequently that an in-house
8 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 29 NUMBER 1
guidebook instructs employees to explain that photography
is not permitted "because of the need to
consider security, the conservation of artwork and
fabrics, and the other visitors on the tour" (TJMF
1987:2). What is not mentioned is that photography
is not permitted, at least in part, because it
would "slow down" or "block" the flow of visitors
through the house. Yet, unlike the case of the upper
floors, visitors in large numbers do not buy the official
explanation. Typically, visitors offer cynical
counter-suggestions: "I bet the gift shop will sell a
lot of postcards."
We can only speculate as to why visitors accept
the official explanation concerning fire codes, yet
reject that concerning the prohibition on photography.
But first, notice that the rationality of the institutional
prohibitions is not at issue in our analysis;
undoubtedly, there are safety and conservation
issues of relevance. What is interesting about these
sorts of visitor responses is precisely the irrelevance
of the museum's practical worries to visitors' sensibilities.
Thus, for example, perhaps the public's
varying responses to such rules has to do with visitors'
own egalitarian anxieties. If it were true that the
upper floors were denied them because the Foundation
considered them to be part of the common
mass and not worth a special tour, then in confronting
this perception visitors would have to
reflect, perhaps unpleasantly, on their place in society.
If, on the other hand, it were true that the
Foundation banned photography to maintain its
monopoly on images of the interior, then by discovering
this truth visitors would be putting themselves
into the category of "insider" by being "in on
the secret."
Secret knowledge is an important topic for many
visitors to Monticello.They often talk as if the upper
floors were themselves secret and recall childhood
visits during which the "secret staircases" were
pointed out to them. In contrast, the guides believe
it is their duty to counter such "misconceptions."
We suggest that discussing secrets allows both visitors
and guides to place themselves in a hierarchical
scheme in which high status stems from one's
closeness to the inner circle of the aristocratic
Monticello. Secret knowledge allows visitors to enter
into the elite world of Monticello, while the denial
of such information in favor of what we call "justthe-facts"
history (Gable and Handler 1994; Gable,
Handler and Lawson 1992; Handler and Gable 1997)
allows guides to put themselves in the inner circle
while excluding the mass of visitors.There are many
"myths" or "legends," as historians term them, which
persist in the public mind despite the Foundation's
best efforts to replace them with "facts." The most
pernicious of all myths, as the Foundation saw it
until quite recently, is that Jefferson had a slave
mistress named Sally Hemings. The story of their
illicit affair gets tied up with the various "hidden"
passages that, to hear some visitors tell it, honeycomb
the house and grounds. Visitors ask guides to
show them the "secret room" just above Jefferson's
bed where Sally Hemings remained hidden, waiting
to answer his call. Others ask to see the air tunnels
thought to lead not only to the privies, but to secret
rendezvous locations.
In the past, guides found visitors' curiosity
about Sally Hemings disgusting. Before DNA evidence
forced the Foundation to acknowledge the
"high probability" (as the website puts it) that
Jefferson was the father of Hemings' children, the
guides found visitors' belief in the Hemings story to
be the single most potent proof of how beneath them
the visitors really were. 5
One of the guides, joking
about the Foundation's perennial fears of declining
visitation, noted,"if they make the TV movie of Sally
Hemings, we'll have cars lined up to get in all the
way to Charlottesville." (To our knowledge, the 1995
film, Jefferson in Paris, did not produce this effect;
for further analysis of Monticello's recent treatment
of the Hemings story, see Gable 2005). Another
guide described a typical demand on the part of visitors
for insider status based on secret knowledge:
After one tour a woman came up to me and
demanded to know why we didn't mention anything
about the secret passageway to Michie's
Tavern. I would like just once to wink or to give
some sign . . . to pretend just once that the secret
does exist, that the Foundation is part of some
vast and secret conspiracy to keep the truth
from the people [but] because of some flash of
communion with this particular visitor, I'm
going to lift the veil and reveal it all.
As this guide sees it, visitors in pursuit of secret
passageways and slave mistresses are by turns defiant
or conspiratorial, but in either case they are
making a special claim to insider status. And it is
possible that many are doing just that. But informal
interviewing with visitors suggests that some are
also using their visit to Monticello to construct or
EGALITARIAN DILEMMAS AT MONTICELLO AND WILLIAMSBURG 9
reconfirm another egalitarian tale, which we might
call The Great Man and His Fall. In this story,
Jefferson is to be knocked off his pedestal because
his privileged position depended on birth rather
than merit. In addition to Sally Hemings, key motifs
of The Great Man and His Fall are embodied in
comments such as:"he came from money but died in
debt" and "if I had slaves I could do a lot too." Guides
counter such remarks with just-the-facts history.
For example, they account for Jefferson's debts by
reference to such factors as "agricultural depression"
and "incompetent overseers." Doubtless, such
answers never quite satisfy the public, but they
leave the inquisitive visitor at a distinct disadvantage.
How can they argue with "the facts"?
Monticello guides are as ambivalent about persons
of stature as they are about the passing parade.
The Foundation has no clear criteria as to who qualifies
as a person of stature. Many people with no connection
to Monticello receive special tours simply by
claiming VIP status. Some guides quip that persons
of stature are people who have the nerve to ask in
advance for a special tour. Fund-raising plans in the
late 1980s envisioned the creation of a special
category of visitors to be known as "Friends" of the
museum. Friends were to be given exclusive tours,
gift shop discounts, and access to "members only"
events such as banquets on the lawn. When the
museum conducted market research in 1988 to learn
how many of their visitors might be tapped as
Friends, the guides had to administer the survey to
the public. The results showed visitors to be possessed
of higher incomes and educational attainments
than the guides had imagined. But rather
than place themselves lower than the passing
parade on the status hierarchy, many guides argued
that the surveys were inaccurate.
The guides, then, look down on the public yet are
suspicious of those who claim elite status. Referring
to a detail that almost all use in their tours--that
Jefferson was "six feet two and a half, a tall man"--
they joke that visitors "have to be over six feet two
to get a tour of the upper floors."6
The guides are also
resentful of their treatment at the hands of VIPs.As
one guide put it, "I hate giving them a tour. They
hang back in the room and they don't even look at
you when you talk."
Yet, however critical they may be of particular
persons of stature, most guides do not question
the validity of the category. Indeed, they take full
advantage of a privilege extended to them, allowing
their "immediate family" to tour the upstairs. They
do this in spite of their knowledge of the inconvenience
caused by a special tour, which slows down the
normal flow of visitors through the house and can
require guides to stay late or arrive at work early.
Nonetheless, guides believe true persons of stature
deserve special tours, though they know there is
little one can do to verify claims to elite status.Thus
one guide recounted the following incident:
They sometimes call us the day before to
arrange a tour . . . . I was eating my lunch and
didn't want to be bothered. Someone--they
didn't announce themselves--explained they
needed to arrange a special tour for an "important
celebrity" who didn't want to be exposed to
the public and would be at Monticello tomorrow.
I told them, "you'll have to talk to the head
guide, I can't do anything for you." I made it all
sound mundane.They told me they "didn't have
time and needed to arrange things now."
Despite her wish to appear uninterested, the guide
was curious to learn the celebrity's identity:
It turned out be Mary Tyler Moore and not some
schmo like Dom Deluise [who also received VIP
treatment around the time of this interview].
She is one of my favorites so I almost said,"well,
no problem, you come tomorrow and say that
you have an appointment with [her name]."
In sum,the guides accept the notion of the person
of stature but recognize that not everyone who lays
claim to that status deserves it. It is the dream of
the guides that genuine persons of stature will recognize
them as unique individuals.This desire, coupled
with the fact that this epiphany rarely occurs,
makes the subjective experience of their encounter
with VIPs a disappointment. But Monticello's management
actively courts persons of stature, both
because they are deemed worthy company for
Jefferson, and because it is thought that fund-raising
requires it.
Common and Uncommon Men
at Colonial Williamsburg
CW considers itself to be the preeminent history
museum in the United States, and many people
working at museums like Monticello would agree,
however grudgingly. CW recreates the public spaces
and life of an entire town, unlike Monticello, which is
10 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 29 NUMBER 1
confined to the domestic and private. Again unlike
Monticello,it commemorates not one man,but a community,
even "colonial society" itself. Its cast of characters
includes notables--Jefferson, Washington,
Patrick Henry--and commoners--craftsworkers,
farmers, housewives, and slaves. CW is unlike
Monticello in one further respect: throughout much
of its existence it depended on one patron, John D.
Rockefeller, Jr. Until his death in 1960, Rockefeller
was the great man of CW, almost as Jefferson is at
Monticello. As Kenneth Chorley, president of CW
from 1935 to 1958, put it, "Colonial Williamsburg
today memorializes not only the uncommon men of
the eighteenth century who helped create the great
Age of the Common Man but also Mr. Rockefeller,
himself a most uncommon man" (CW 1957:17).
Rockefeller committed himself to the restoration
of Williamsburg in 1926. He had been persuaded
that the place offered a unique opportunity to recreate
a colonial town by a local visionary, the Reverend
W.A.R. Goodwin. Sensitive to the presence of the
ghosts of the American Revolution in Williamsburg,
Goodwin wanted to turn the town into a national
shrine.The story of his collaboration with Rockefeller
has taken on legendary dimensions in official histories
(Fosdick 1956:272­301;Kopper 1986:139­93),but
despite the many tellings of the tale, it is difficult to
find a satisfactory account of what motivated
Rockefeller to undertake the project. Philip Kopper
notes that Rockefeller's life was dedicated to philanthropy,
and that at the time he took on Williamsburg,
interest in the arts, in museums, and in historic
preservation was "on the rise," with Rockefeller's
wife "in the vanguard of the cognoscenti" (Kopper
1986:155; for a more critical assessment of the early
years of the restoration, see Foster 1993).
Kopper (1986:173) also suggests that Goodwin
and Rockefeller had little idea of how their project
would develop. Absorbed with architectural details,
they gave almost no thought to the restoration as a
pedagogical tool. CW attracted visitors from the
start, however, and by the mid-1930s, administrators
began considering ways to lodge and feed them,
and to guide them over the site. Early visitors were
mainly upper-class travelers interested in antiques
and colonial architecture. During World War II,
Rockefeller brought 100,000 servicemen to the
museum, which was used to deliver a patriotic message
that became even more emphatic during the
Cold War. CW documents of the 1950s define the
museum's message as the democratic "faith," one
grounded in "the integrity of the individual" and in
"the endless struggle for freedom, liberty, justice,
and representative government" (CW 1951:12, 30).
Michael Wallace has depicted CW's ideology
before the 1980s as reactionary, pointing out that
the museum emphasized such values as individualism
and freedom to the exclusion of "equally plausible
revolutionary legacies like `equality' or . . .
`anticolonialism'" (1986a:152). But even within this
reactionary perspective, CW was haunted by the
dilemmas of egalitarianism. Unlike Monticello, but
typical of Rockefeller philanthropic endeavors, CW
had been set up as a modern corporation, run by
bureaucratically organized teams of experts. After
World War II, the museum professionalized its interpretive
programs in response to its increasing popularity
as a tourist attraction. It now faced the public,
and its own employees, as a large corporation, bent
on using public relations techniques to handle the
masses efficiently and graciously. But it also prided
itself on the VIPs who visited. Indeed, during the
Eisenhower presidency it became, as Wallace notes,
"a semiofficial auxiliary of the state, . . . serv[ing] as
the customary arrival point for heads of state on their
way to Washington" (1986a:153; Kopper 1986:217).
It can fairly be said that CW's official publications,
its annual reports and in-house newspaper
(the Colonial Williamsburg News), are obsessed
with the dichotomy of masses and VIPs, common
and uncommon men.The 1953 report opens with the
following typical meditation:
Six hundred thousand people visited Williamsburg
last year. They came from all over the
world, from all stations of life. They came by
air, by train, by automobile, by boat and even
by motorcycle. Some came in limousines, others
with camping gear bundled on the roofs of the
automobiles. Some spoke little or no English.
The President of the United States, the House
of Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church,
the Crown Prince of Japan, the King and Queen
of Greece, ambassadors, generals, senators--
these came.
But also the less celebrated came . . . . [CW
1953:11]
In this rhetoric, masses and VIPs alternate in rapid
succession,and the masses are conceived as widely as
possible to include those not fortunate enough to
EGALITARIAN DILEMMAS AT MONTICELLO AND WILLIAMSBURG 11
belong to the Anglo-American tradition. In the same
report, a photo essay pictures visiting dignitaries,
named in accompanying captions.This contrasts with
the photo essay of the previous year's report, showing
anonymous faces in the crowds. And month after
month, in pages of the News, the same juxtaposition
of elites and masses dominates the museum's presentation
of itself.To take but one example,in the News
of 22 December 1976, an article paraphrases an
Ann Landers column on "the customer" to celebrate
"The Visitor" as "the life-blood of the . . . restoration."
On the following page, a photo essay entitled
"Visitors" shows Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and
Nelson Rockefeller.
CW's attention to the visiting public combines
readily with its faith in democracy. Since at CW the
democratic faith is understood to be universally
valid, the museum can dedicate itself in good conscience
to delivering its message "in a manner
understandable to all" (1953:19). CW rhetoric
stresses that the museum "exists . . . for all people,"
and that everyone should "have" the CW "experience."
President Eisenhower, for example, is quoted
to this effect:"I wish sincerely that every single man,
woman and child that has the proud privilege of calling
himself an American . . . could walk through this
building [the House of Burgesses]" (CW 1953:12).
Similarly, the News (January 1958) approvingly
quoted a visitor who wrote that CW's orientation film
"should be seen by every school child and thinking
person in our country." Nor is there any doubt as to
the reason for a visit to CW:"Through personal contact
with the beginnings of American self-government, all
who come have an opportunity to rededicate themselves
to the principles of human freedom and individual
integrity" (CW 1956:11­12). This rhetoric
continues unchanged into the twenty-first century
(e.g., Campbell 2005:7).
Almost by definition, "personal contact" is difficult
to deliver to a mass public. Rockefeller had
always been ambivalent about mass visitation, and
once "suggested closing the doors lest wear and tear
destroy painstakingly restored buildings" (Kopper
1986:208). As attendance figures increased during
the 1950s, President Chorley saw this egalitarian
dilemma as one of CW's greatest challenges: "it is
possible for the number of visitors to be so great
that the illusion of communion with another century
is endangered by the very numbers of those who
come here. Can we have a perfect restoration if its
popularity increases?" (CW 1957:21). Even in the
mid-1970s, when fuel shortages led to decreasing
tourism, a worried CW president nonetheless noted
that constantly increasing attendance was undesirable:
"huge crowds wear out our buildings, walks
and gardens, press our interpretive efforts to an
expeditious minimum, and tempt us all to deal with
visitors as things to be processed rather than individuals"
(News January 23, 1978).
To avoid treating individuals as things, or, perhaps,
to prevent visitors from recognizing such
treatment, CW has pursued two strategies. First,
the museum constantly experiments with crowdand
traffic-control techniques, ticketing schemes,
and the use of costumed "interpreters" to guide visitors
in orderly groups and patterns. For example,
as crowds grew during the 1950s, CW tried various
plans to achieve "more equal distribution of visitors
between the various exhibition buildings," a
goal summarized in a phrase with ironic egalitarian
overtones: "the leveling of visitation" (News
November 1958). In the News one finds repeated
stories of the teamwork required to handle crowds,
and repeated praise for employees' success in doing
so. Thus, after a particularly busy Easter season,
Chorley congratulated CW personnel in these
terms: "I have never seen crowds of people handled
as efficiently and as smoothly" (News April 1952).
The second strategy for delivering a personalized
experience to the mass public is constant attention
to friendliness.Again, CW publications harp on
this theme. Early tour guides, called "hostesses," had
been asked to treat visitors as though they were
guests in their own homes. Such admonishments
drew initially on an aristocratic ethos of graciousness,
but this has been eclipsed by an emphasis on
treating visitors as individuals, even friends. In
brief, colonial-aristocratic pretensions have been
dropped in favor of a corporate image of efficiency
and friendly service. Since the 1950s, managemenťs
insistence on friendliness has been justified in terms
of economic self-interest: it creates the "good will"
that "makes visitors wish to return," which leads to
the "continued growth of Williamsburg as a major
travel attraction" (News March 1959). The repetition
of such rhetoric suggests resistance to routinized
friendliness on the part of at least some
employees, an antagonism we found in our fieldwork
to be a fundamental feature of "front-line" guide
work (Handler and Gable 1997:170­207).
12 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 29 NUMBER 1
Routinized friendliness occasionally transcends
itself in egalitarian ceremonies that make VIPs of
plebians. Thus the millionth person to view CW's
orientation film was singled out of the audience and
honored by museum executives:
Mrs. Trapnell was quite overwhelmed at being a
milestone in the history of the film. "Imagine
being the millionth anything," she laughed . . . .
Prior to the showing of the film, Vice President
John Goodbody spoke briefly to the audience . . .
informing them that the millionth viewer was
somewhere among them.In honor of the occasion,
he treated them to a special look "backstage" . . . .
All were then invited to attend a small ceremony
after the film was shown.
CW President Carlisle H. Humelsine greeted
Mrs.Trapnell after the movie, and presented her
with a corsage, an engraved pewter tray . . . , a
special pass to the exhibition buildings, and an
assortment of CW publications. [News November
1958]
This ceremony brilliantly ritualizes the values of
mass society. Our base-ten number system, "counting
itself" (Whorf 1956:140), bestows, at random and
with no apparent favoritism, a unique identity upon
a face in the crowd.The randomness of this creation
of an identity is emphasized in the structure of the
ceremony, which singles out, first, an audience
among audiences, and then an individual among
that audience. The audience is granted celebrity
status en masse by being taken "backstage"--the
virtual equivalent of the tour of the upper floors at
Monticello. But the special audience is quickly
returned to the status of anonymous mass by the
selection of Mrs. Trapnell. To be "the millionth anything,"
to borrow her felicitous phrase, allays egalitarian
anxieties, for one's distinction carries none of
the particularity of privilege. The millionth anything
is at once distinguished and anonymous.7
In addition to the random creation of VIPs, CW
uses other rhetorical ploys to mask the facelessness
of its crowds. The naturalistic rhetoric of family is
routinely used to exhort both visitors and employees
to consider themselves members of the
"Williamsburg family," and the museum a "home"
that "belongs" to them all. The rhetoric of nationalism
is also used to displace egalitarian dilemmas by
equating or merging all Americans with the great
ancestors who once peopled Williamsburg.Thus the
News quoted at length from a letter written by a
teenager to her father, a military officer serving in
Viet Nam:
I kept thinking that right where I was standing/walking
men like Washington, Henry, and
Jefferson had been and, Dad, it made me feel so
humble and proud at the same time . . . . I felt
humble and small because . . . they were so
great, I really felt insignificant, but I felt proud
and important because I am an American . . . .
And I thought, wouldn't it be awful to lose everything
Washington and millions of other
Americans had fought to gain? [April 30, 1969]
The writer, though "insignificant," becomes "important"
because, as an American national, she becomes
one with the founding fathers. Her fear of losing
what others gained for her draws on the rhetoric of
possession that characterizes nationalist ideology:
all the members of the nation own, together and
without distinction of status or wealth, the national
heritage (Handler 1988). CW draws on the same
rhetoric when it claims that the museum belongs to
the American people.
A final technique to resolve egalitarian dilemmas
can be found in CW's treatment of history. In
the early 1950s, the museum began to focus on the
history of ordinary citizens, and it did so to appeal
to the masses of ordinary citizens who were becoming
the lifeblood of the museum:
[The Craft Shop] program is part of a broad
experiment to reveal 18th-century Williamsburg
in the light of human personalities--to
make modern day visitors truly feel the companionship
and presence of the people who proclaimed
the rights of man in words and deeds no
American should ever forget. In this light, that
society may be seen as not only the gifted, the
articulate, the famous, but as men and women
who lived useful daily lives . . . .
The Governor's Palace impresses the modern
visitor with its royal elegance . . . but there is an
intimacy in the [crafts] shops . . . which unfailingly
appeals to the average American visitor
and stimulates his understanding.
In the Apothecary Shop, for instance, where a
yellowing ledger reveals an unpaid bill of
seven shillings owed by Patrick Henry, the
Revolutionary orator is recreated . . . in warmly
human terms. [CW 1954:10]
Here it is assumed that ordinary visitors will be put
off by the VIPs of the past, who must, therefore, be
EGALITARIAN DILEMMAS AT MONTICELLO AND WILLIAMSBURG 13
humanized. It is also assumed that ordinary visitors
want ordinary history, and years before "the rise of
the new social history," CW repeatedly justified its
experiments in that domain by reference to the need
to make the masses feel comfortable and at home.
Turning now to the museum's treatment of living
VIPs, we find the same concern to humanize them.
This is a constant theme in CW's portrayal of its great
patron, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Indeed, to appear
"ordinary" was a Rockefeller preoccupation (Fosdick
1956:82­96). Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller took to living
in Williamsburg two months a year, because, as one
of their sons explained, there "they could be just like
everybody else" (Kopper 1986:213). And stories
abound, both in the museum and in the town, of
Rockefeller the good neighbor.Visitors,too,responded
to the Rockefeller presence, but they tended to
humanize him as their host, thereby drawing on the
imagery of family and home to dissipate egalitarian
tensions. Thus the News quoted several visitors who
wrote to thank the patron, "for it is just as though
we are guests of Mr. Rockefeller's" (May­June 1958).
Other VIPs, less easily imagined as neighbors
and family, must nonetheless be portrayed in
human terms. For example, a News retrospective
chose the following incident as the most newsworthy
event of President Truman's 1948 visit to CW:
Maid Robbie Gough was in the Presidenťs room
with instructions to hand the President the
room key and leave. As she did the President
asked her name and then asked her if she would
like his autograph. After she had recovered
enough to say yes, he brought out a dollar bill,
autographed it and handed it to her. [June 1953]
The incident epitomizes the egalitarian dilemma,
for hierarchy is both dissolved and maintained. By
exchanging personal names with an anonymous and
lowly employee, Truman creates the populist image
that good public relations require. Yet the greater
"weight" of Truman's name is established by its
reproduction as a concrete fetish, a signature. But
again, by placing that signature on a dollar bill, the
greatest common denominator of all America,
Truman stresses equality over hierarchy--though
the bill itself pictures George Washington, a person
of stature.
Interaction with VIPs both humanizes them and
raises the status of ordinary citizens and employees,
who enjoy "rubbing shoulders with interesting
people" (News June 18, 1970). This suggests that
VIPs must be allowed to remain VIPs in addition to
appearing as ordinary people. Like Monticello, CW
keeps an "exclusive book, reserved for the autographs
of the great and near great," though ordinary
people sign guest books at the museum's
many restaurants and hotels (News July 1959).
Furthermore, as Kopper notes, the "tradition of the
state visit" has been developed to a high art at CW,
where elaborate protocol celebrates persons of
stature, with attention to minute gradations of rank,
even as management lauds the "CW family" for its
"teamwork" in bringing off such performances
(News November 16, 1963). In passing, we should
note that some visitors would rather not be treated
as VIPs (cf. Goffman 1963:71­72). Thus Eleanor
Roosevelt tried to tour CW unnoticed, but was met
midway during her visit by CW officials who had
gotten wind of her presence (News February 1959).
The visits of VIPs bestow prestige on the
museum and on the employees who serve them. As
at Monticello, museum staff relish personal contacts
with important people, and the News abounds with
tales of such meetings. Articles commemorating
lengthy service to the museum often mention interactions
with VIPs, particularly in the case of
employees in subaltern positions. For example,
when a custodian retired after 26 years of service,
the News noted, "During her years at the Raleigh
[Tavern], Lula met the Queen Mother of England,
Prince Albert of Belgium, the Prime Minister of
Cambodia and many other famous people"
(November 8, 1966). Perhaps the ultimate resolution
of the egalitarian dilemma comes when contacts
with visiting VIPs lead to return visits, with persons
of stature hosting CW employees. Thus Hubert
Humphrey's "escort" at CW was invited to the 1965
presidential inauguration, a fact deemed worthy of
a headline in the News, which quoted the lucky
employee's description of her visit with the future
Vice President: "We had a leisurely lunch . . . and
just sat and talked like `home folks'" (January 12,
1965). Even more impressive was a CW presidenťs
visit to British royalty:
Kenneth Chorley and Mr. Winthrop Rockefeller
were dinner guests of the Queen Mother in her
home, Clarence House. On arriving, they were
surprised and honored to find that it was an
intimate family gathering attended by Queen
Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. [News
January 1956]
14 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 29 NUMBER 1
To interact on familial terms with royalty is to achieve
the highest status imaginable,yet"an intimate family
gathering" is one in which all are equals, and questions
of status irrelevant. This displaces egalitarian
dilemmas, as does "the royal treatment" that CW
tries to extend to all visitors.
Egalitarian Dilemmas in American Culture
We began this essay by observing that both
Monticello and CW dichotomously categorize visitors
as elites and masses, persons of stature and the
passing parade. As we have seen, this dichotomy
permeates the "public relations" of both museums.
Both have chosen to depend financially on mass visitation,
and worry that one day the masses will
cease visiting. But both also worry that too many
visitors will destroy the historical properties they
have worked so hard to preserve. Both pride themselves
on attracting distinguished visitors, both
accord such visitors VIP treatment, and management
and employees at both museums take pride
in associating "personally" with them. But both
museums also work to avoid the appearance of
catering to VIPs, either by pretending that all visitors
receive VIP treatment, as at CW, or by hiding
VIP tours from the mass, as at Monticello.
An anthropological interpretation of these
observations must be grounded in an understanding
of egalitarian culture. After all, neither utilitarian
reasoning nor unreasoning circumstances force
CW and Monticello to dichotomize visitors as elites
and masses. It could be argued (and demonstrated
through interviews or surveys) that elites expect to
be treated as such, and that they would be less likely
to give generously to an institution that did not meet
their expectations in this matter. Likewise, it could
be argued or demonstrated that most Americans
who visit museums would rather not be reminded
of their individual insignificance, or of the fact that
there are others among them about whom the institution
cares more than about them.That Americans
feel this way and that museums build into their routines
these expectations is a cultural fact, to be
understood in cultural terms. We can develop such
an understanding by explicating our notion of egalitarian
dilemmas, anxieties, and ambivalences,
phrases that we have used repeatedly but without
further definition in the present essay.
No work has captured the dilemmas of egalitarian
culture better than Alexis de Tocqueville's
Democracy in America. Tocqueville's great work is
a sustained comparison between what he termed
democratic and aristocratic societies. His comparative
perspective made it possible for Tocqueville to
see modern egalitarianism as a value system rather
than a rational social state to which human progress
inevitably led (Dumont 1983:112).Thus Tocqueville
wrote with a sense of what we would today call the
arbitrariness of the cultural values he analyzed--
values that are difficult for us moderns to dissect, so
thoroughly are we accustomed to think in terms of
them. Like many later observers of American culture,
Tocqueville noted that hierarchical social differences,
such as those of the European ancient
regime, became intolerable to those among whom
egalitarian and individualistic cultural values have
come to prevail:
Do not ask what singular charm the men of
democratic ages find in being equal, or what
special reasons they may have for clinging so
tenaciously to equality rather than to the other
advantages that society holds out to them . . . .
They will endure poverty, servitude, barbarism,
but they will not endure aristocracy. [1955:
100­103]
Tocqueville further observed that social differences,
which could not fail to exist in a mobile and
prosperous society, were ceaselessly rendered invisible
in democratic culture:
When equality is an old and acknowledged fact,
the public mind . . . assigns certain general limits
to the value of man,above or below which no man
can long remain placed. It is in vain that wealth
and poverty, authority and obedience, accidentally
interpose great distances between two men;
public opinion . . . draws them to a common level
and creates a species of imaginary equality
between them, in spite of the real inequality of
their conditions. [1955:192]
This passage speaks to a characteristic feature of
the American cultural landscape that has long
fascinated social analysts: the masking of even the
most glaring socioeconomic inequalities by egalitarian
belief. When Tocqueville speaks of "a species
of imaginary equality" that renders "real inequality"
invisible, he defines the particular version of
false consciousness that has repeatedly challenged
Marxist analysts of American society (Hartz 1955:
228­55). Tocqueville's adjective, "imaginary," suggests
anthropological culture theory: the word
EGALITARIAN DILEMMAS AT MONTICELLO AND WILLIAMSBURG 15
suggests not the "unreal," but a socially generated
vision of reality--in this case, of a social reality composed
of equal individuals. Moreover, Tocqueville
notes a peculiar interpretive mechanism that egalitarian
ideology fosters: though social life inevitably
generates distance and difference among the citizens
of democracies, egalitarian discourse continually
projects a vision of homogeneity and equality.
If egalitarianism led to the masking of hierarchical
social relationships, it also led to the conformity
and anonymity of mass society. Tocqueville
pointed out that though democracy rendered each
citizen the equal of every other, it also made all indistinguishable
and impotent, "faces in the crowd":
When the inhabitant of a democratic country
compares himself individually with all those
about him, he feels with pride that he is the
equal of any one of them; but when he comes to
survey the totality of his fellows and to place
himself in contrast with so huge a body, he is
instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his own
insignificance. [1955:11]
Tocqueville's observations have often been borrowed
or reinvented by later analysts of American
society, but it is their combination in one comparative,
anthropological vision that is seldom understood
(Handler 2005:22­48).And it is precisely their
combination that allows them to speak eloquently to
the egalitarian dilemmas we have explored at
Monticello and CW.The obsession with equality and
the desire to mask inequality is prominent at CW,
where VIPs must be humanized, the Patrick Henrys
recreated "in warmly human terms." But the opposite
also occurs, when the reality of a faceless mass
public must be denied by the claim that each
member of the mass is an individual and will be
treated as such. Monticello, though less concerned to
treat the public as individuals, nonetheless tries to
hide from its public the distinction it draws between
elites and masses, for it will not do to tell visitors that
the upper floors are open to VIPs but not to them.
More puzzling is why both museums court persons
of stature and, more generally, why egalitarian
American culture so fetishizes those to whom we
refer as "the stars." Here again, Tocqueville's observations
on the relationship between individualism
and anonymity are suggestive.A central paradox of
American culture is that it celebrates individuality
yet engenders conformity. Modern consumer culture
"works" by mass producing authenticity and
individuality and selling them to persons forever
seeking them, and forever falling short of attaining
them. "The stars," from this perspective, are those
who have attained individuality by rising above the
mass (though ironically, they exist only by the grace
of a conformist public opinion).Thus to associate with
persons of stature provides vicarious authentification
for those who have otherwise failed to distinguish
themselves (cf. Trilling 1971:97­100). Notice that
from this analytical perspective, it makes little difference
how people define VIPs, or in which domains
(politics, entertainment, "high society," and so on)
they expect to find them.The structural relationship
between individualism and anonymity requires, we
might say, the existence of a VIP category to oppose
that of the unmarked, ordinary individual.
This leads us to comment on an important difference
in the way Monticello and CW approach the
public. Though both museums process the masses
efficiently, CW also markets an ethos of friendliness
that has been absent from Monticello until recently.
We would relate that difference to two culturally significant
distinctions, that between private and
public spaces, and that between an absent "founding
father," Jefferson at Monticello, and a present
benefactor, Rockefeller at CW.
To enshrine a domestic space,such as Monticello,
in order to preserve it as part of a national heritage
creates a cultural contradiction: the secular mass
public must be invited to enter what is culturally
defined as a private (and sacred) space. The people
who founded and went on to administer Monticello
saw themselves as performing a public service, and
wanted public visitation. As custodians of a sacred
interior, however, they saw, and continue to see, visitors
as an invading, almost polluting, presence.
Moreover, Monticello staff feel themselves to have
a privileged relationship to "Jefferson the Man,"
whom they wish at once to display to, and protect
from, a public that is constantly falling below the
expectations staff have of it. Monticello staff are connected
to the ultimate VIP, as it were, and this raises
their status above that of the masses whom they
must entertain courteously, to be sure, but not on a
footing of equality.
In contrast to Monticello, CW is a public space
(the museum does not own the streets of Williamsburg,
Virginia), and it was constructed by corporately
organized philanthropy with a mission to
serve a wide public. Moreover, CW focuses on no
16 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 29 NUMBER 1
single founding father, and CW staff have no privileged
relationship to such a figure. Even if we take
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. as the great man of CW, he
was a person of stature who stayed out of the limelight,
and did not permit museum staff to use their
connection to him openly to raise themselves above
the visiting public. Jefferson can no longer control
the use of his name, but Rockefeller took elaborate
precautions to control the use of his.
We can comment further on the different
approaches to the public taken at Monticello and CW
by looking at the social origins of each museum's
founders and staff. As Wallace has suggested,
Rockefeller's CW represents a relatively new class of
the "superwealthy" who "sought partly to celebrate
their newly won preeminence and partly to construct
a retrospective lineage for themselves by buying
their way into the American past" (1986b:170).As we
have noted, CW was from the start run as a public
corporation. Attuned to the emerging mass consumer
society, its goal quickly became the creation
of an "experience" for the national public. CW "hostesses"
were at first drawn from the ranks of the local
elite, and the pages of the News suggest that an aristocratic
ethos prevailed among CW hostesses until
well into the 1970s. Nonetheless, management was
not committed to such an ethos. Indeed, one retired
CW official who had been instrumental in the professionalization
of the museum's interpretive programs
during the 1950s explained in an interview
that he and his staff worked hard to combat the aristocratic
pretensions of the hostesses.As he put it,"iťs
not a good idea to look down at people."
It is tempting, but ultimately misleading, to
attribute the apparently aristocratic ethos of
Monticello to a fading class of Southern patricians.
Wallace has described such patricians as an important
force in the historic preservation movement,
spurred on by their perception that "their inherited
political and cultural authority [was] ebbing
away to plutocrats above and immigrants below"
(1986b:168). Such people have played a role at
Monticello, where many guides have been members
of the local Daughters of the American Revolution.
And until 1980, the guides, or "hostesses," as they
were then called, were assisted by uniformed Black
"housemen," who "greeted" visitors at the threshold
and let them into the house, whereupon the hostesses
took charge. Yet many guides count themselves
as"liberals,"and liberal museum professionals
have also been an important force at Monticello.
Moreover, the museum, with its connection to
Jeffersonian ideals, has never been dominated by
conservative or reactionary political ideologies.
Though more research on the social origins of
museum personnel is necessary, it is worth noting
that many visitors like to think of staff as members
of an impoverished gentry, and that staff enjoy
entertaining that illusion even though their social
backgrounds may be other than "genteel."
In the lifestyles of such visitors, and with the
politically liberal guides and professionals who,
despite their politics, savor the aesthetic of an aristocratic
tradition, we might find one solution to the
egalitarian dilemmas Monticello creates by distinguishing
persons of stature from the passing parade.
Monticello offers a stage upon which to act out the
distinction between an elitism of taste and an egalitarian
political ideology (cf.Gable and Handler 2005).
Monticello appears to open its doors to everyone, but
invites to dinner only those who can prove by their
merits that they deserve to sit at Jefferson's table.On
the surface, CW does everything in its power to blur
the distinction between VIPs and ordinary visitors.
Yet it is true as well that while the Rockefellers
reserved the right to live among the people as commoners,
they did not abandon the privileges that
allowed them to sup familially with queens.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the many people at
Colonial Williamsburg and Monticello with whom,
over the years, we have carried on conversations and
debates about those two museums and about the
creation of public history in general. We are also
grateful to Jason Jackson and the two anonymous
Museum Anthropology readers who provided us
with helpful criticisms as we revised this paper for
publication.
Notes
1. The term "contested terrain" has become ubiquitous in
the museum studies literature; as far as we know, the
term was first used in Edwards (1979). We take the term
"contact zone" from James Clifford (1997:188­219), who
borrowed it from Pratt (1992).
2. Many of the edited volumes in which the new museum
scholarship appeared contain work in both of the "strands"
we identify (for example, Benson et al. 1986; Blatti
1987). Of the two seminal volumes edited by Ivan Karp
EGALITARIAN DILEMMAS AT MONTICELLO AND WILLIAMSBURG 17
and his associates, the first fits more easily into the first
strand (Karp and Lavine 1991), the second (Karp,
Kraemer, and Lavine 1992) into the second. Examples of
primarily textual readings of museum representations
can be found in Sherman and Rogoff (1994). In different
ways, the works of Bourdieu and Darbel (1966), Duncan
and Wallach (1978), Ames (1986), Bennett (1995), and
Jacknis (2002) are crucial to the second strand; for a critique
of too-mechanistic models of hegemony, see Penny
(2002). For a recent assessment of the current state of
museum studies, see Marstine (2005).
3. We have spent more time exploring CW than Monticello,
although the impetus for this essay came from a paper
early in our research when we compared what we had
learned from initial encounters at the two institutions.
Gable worked at Monticello as a "Visitor Services
Specialist" from March 1988 to November 1988. Handler
conducted preliminary fieldwork at CW in the summer of
1989. We originally planned a comparative study of the
two museums, but were denied permission to work at
Monticello (CW gave us permission to work there and
facilitated our research). With funding from the Spencer
Foundation, we carried out two years of fieldwork at CW
in 1990 and 1991, assisted by Anna Lawson, who wrote
her doctoral dissertation on Black history at CW (Lawson
1995).With further funding from the National Endowment
for the Humanities, we wrote a monograph about the production
of history at CW (Handler and Gable 1997).
Although we have not conducted systematic fieldwork at
either museum since the early 1990s, we continue to visit
occasionally, to send our students to both sites, and to discuss
the issues raised by our work with the many
museum administrators and workers, at both institutions,
with whom we have maintained contact.
4. The phrase "Jefferson the Man" seems to have disappeared
from Foundation rhetoric, but as of the end of
2005, it continued aptly to describe Monticello's presentation
of him. The website, for example, presented
Jefferson in terms of these categories: agriculture and
gardening, architecture and design, books and letters,
food and cooking, and science, exploration, and travel.
5. It is a paradoxical fact of the "facts" of the way paternity is
defined as a legal concept, coupled with ongoing criticisms
(by,for example,some of theWhite descendants of Jefferson)
of the Foundation's recognition of the DNA research, that
the evidence is always presented with this judicious qualification.By
contrast,the Foundation does not feel the need
to qualify Jefferson's relationship to his White daughters,
even though there is inevitably a"low probability"that they
are bastards and not his children at all in a biological sense.
His White offspring are merely his "daughters."
6. Under the heading "Physical Descriptions of Thomas
Jefferson," the Monticello website gives 19 descriptions
of Jefferson by contemporaries; only three fail to mention
that he was "tall" (www.monticello.org/reports/people/
descriptions.html, accessed most recently on March 26,
2006).
7. We say "with no apparent favoritism" because, as we
learned through interviews, these events (they recur routinely)
are stage-managed: it is not possible to know
exactly who the millionth person is, but in-house statistics
can indicate the day at which that number will be
reached. Managers then pick the type of person they want
for publicity purposes: in the 1950s and 1960s, this was
an attractive woman from out-of-state. For a similar
event at Monticello, see the 2004 press release "Monticello
passes 25 million mark in all-time attendance" (www.
monticello.org/pressroom/showArticle.php?id=63,accessed
most recently on February 24, 2006).
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Eric Gable is an associate professor of anthropology
at the University of Mary Washington.In addition to his
work in museum studies, he has written extensively on
the contemporary experiences of the Manjaco people
of Guinea-Bissau, West Africa.
Richard Handler is a professor of anthropology at the
University of Virginia and is the editor of the University
of Wisconsin's Press' History of Anthropology series.
His most recent book is Critics Against Culture:
Anthropological Observers of Mass Society (University
of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
EGALITARIAN DILEMMAS AT MONTICELLO AND WILLIAMSBURG 19