Memorializing America at Mount Vernon
This week, Michelle Obama announced the new White House dinner service. This is not an honour granted to every Presidential couple, but only ordered when the previous set needs replacing. The design is modern and elegant, as we would expect from the First Lady, but it also features an edging of Kailua blue, inspired by the ocean waters around Obama's home state of Hawaii. This is, therefore, a dinner service invested with autobiography, which will pass Obama's unique blend of American experiences onto his successor.
I was particularly struck by the announcement of these new Presidential objects as it coincided with my visit to Mount Vernon last Sunday. I've been agog to investigate this American example of my favourite genre of museum since Lydia Brandt spoke about it at the MGHG conference last year, as a house museum shouldering a lot of national expectation.
Mount Vernon is about 15 miles outside Washington DC, the ancestral farming estate of the Washingtons, where George lived both before and after his presidency. It is an impressive Palladian-style house, with an elegant two-story piazza looking over the Potomac River, and surrounded by gardens, out buildings and farm land. The rooms have been reconstructed using furniture and fittings owned by, or similar to those owned by, the Washingtons, and include some strikingly vibrant colours and delicate neo-classical ceilings. The working spaces - salt house, store house, wash house, stable, blacksmith's shop etc - have been accoutred likewise, and carefully interpreted to show how they were used by both free and enslaved workers. In the house and Pioneer Farm a succession of guides, both costumed and 'plain clothes', explain the history of different spaces.
It is an impressive site. Clearly large and comfortable enough for a wealthy Virginian farmer who became the USA's first president. As the place to understand the character and achievements of the founding father of the American dream, however, it is very small. I was struck in Lydia's talk by her discussion of how the Ladies Association that established, and still runs, Mount Vernon saw themselves as helping to make it a place that would shape future American citizens, moulding them through Washington's influence. Indeed, the house is now accompanied by a large and richly filled museum and education centre, which looks at Washington's way of life, possessions and relationships, alongside the wider history that he took part in and shaped. The museum puts nice emphasis on Washington's use of objects to assert his status and authority, including the first presidential dinner service. He understood the power of material culture as performance.
So much of this was though, I felt, missing in the house, where you are marched through in an endless stream of timed entrances, guides at sporadic points repeat a set series of statements about things you can see, and most rooms are roped off so only partially visible. To me, the house felt sad and fragile, unable to bear the weight of expectant patriotism or curiosity brought by the crowds of tourists, but equally not allowed to be experienced as what it was, a private domestic and agricultural space, from which Washington greeted the world.
Two points of comparison brought this home to me. In one room of the education centre, 'A Leader's Smile' is a small display around Washington's dentures. Although a vigorous and healthy leader in the most part, Washington suffered from chronic dental trouble, and only had one remaining tooth at his inauguration. He spent a fortune on dental work and fittings, including the set of dentures made from a mixture of human and animal teeth and vegetable ivory, which is on display here. This is a touchingly small and personal object, bringing you so close to the ordinary human body that George Washington inhabited and, for me, presenting exactly the same fragility as the house, only on a smaller scale.
What contrast, then, a visit to the Lincoln Memorial on the Mall in DC. This enormous structure must be twice the size of Mount Vernon, a monumental neoclassical building, with a front colonnade not that dissimilar to Washington's piazza. Inside a similarly monumental Lincoln looks down in blazing white from a throne at the centre of the space, with large inscriptions in side aisles of his famous addresses. Again an impressive site, and one that struck me particularly as strong and spacious enough to hold the expanse of Lincoln's legacy in a way that Mount Vernon can't for Washington. I have written before about how culture and museums in America always seem that bit bigger and brighter than in Europe. Mount Vernon is the intriguing exception.