enshrining past lives: house museums and the lessons of objects

Essay Review Enshrining Past Lives: House Museums and the Lessons of Objects Patricia West. Domesticating History: The Political Origins ofAmerica 5. House

Museums. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999. 304pp. Cloth $40.00.

Louise Anderson Allen. A Bluestocking in Charleston: The L$e and Career of Laura Bragg. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. 288pp. Cloth $34.95.

Elizabeth Vallance

These two books tell many tales. Together they span a century of America’s social history from the Civil War to the 1950s: the dates are bounded in Patricia West’s Domesticating History by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association’s possession of George Washington’s home in 1860 and by the establishment of Booker T . Washington’s birthplace as a Nation- al Monument in 1956. Within this span, Laura Bragg’s story unfolds, in Louise Anderson Allen’s biography, in the early decades of the twentieth century. The books explicitly tell the tales of the politics-local, regronal, national-behind the scenes in the establishment and growth of a sample of American museums. They also explore the changing role of women in the early history of America’s museums. They recount collectively a tale of the evolving professionalization (and masculinization) of the museum- administration business. They tell tales of class differences in the creation and use of public museums, differences that still pertain today. And they recount the story of the sheer relentless hard work involved in establishing and maintaining a mission that can guide a museum.

But one interesting tale told here has to do with the role of house museums and other community-based museums in enshrining past lives in frozen moments of goodness. That is part of the job of history and art museums, whose collections are high-quality and/or telling artifacts from the past and whose programs aim to tell us about how those objects “lived” and what they meant at the time. House museums, and variations such as period rooms and “period places” like the restored Colonial Williamsburg or Lincoln’s Old Salem Village, are even more explicitly dedicated to por- traying a past-usually but not always a somewhat-distant, premodern, past. I have noticed in many county historical museums a tendency to focus the

Elizabeth Vallance, formerly Director of Education at The Saint Louis Art Museum, is Asso- ciate Professor of Art Education at Northern Illinois University.

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exhibits on a nostalgic distant past, often the Victorian age, the turn of the twentieth century, and possibly into the Depression. One notable excep- tion I recall is the county historical museum in Los Alamos, New Mexico, whose story leaps rather quickly from the prehistoric era to the main focus, the making of the atomic bomb. I would need data to know for sure the dates celebrated by most of our museums, but the fact that these are the periods I most recall from my many museum visits attests to the immense appeal to the premodern past, a past presented as somehow instructive, maybe enviable, an appeal carefully shaped by museum professionals and clearly remembered by visitors. Museums celebrate the interesting, the telling, the rare, the precious: that the Museum of Modem Art in New York includes Tupperware in its collection is a function of its unique mission of celebrating modern art and design. Mostly what we see, especially in house museums and community history museums, are the best and rarest of an often wondrous past, even if that past was fairly brief: Elvis Presley’s Grace- land in Memphis is one of the most-visited homes in America, and I see that the Florida house where Elian Gonzales spent five months is being transformed into a museum honoring the boy’s stay in the United States.

Think back to period rooms or house museums you have visited and try to characterize them in general terms. What we see in these environ- ments are objects that we still use, in updated form, today: furniture for public and private spaces, dishes, cookware, carpets, bedcovers, clothes and other textiles, lighting fixtures, doors, windows, toys, tools. We see these things arranged as if someone had just left the room-we may see a table set for breakfast, a card game seemingly in process, a desk open with a let- ter about to be written, a fire laid in the fireplace, lights on and filtering in ingeniously from “outside” the windows. We can imagine stepping into these rooms (were there not a velvet cord or an alarm system to prevent it) and as such we can make the leap to the “ordinariness” of these carefully preserved objects. If they are enshrined by having accession numbers and detailed records in museum files, protected by velvet cords or Plexiglas vit- rines, they are nonetheless presented in a context that allows us to see them in their real identity as functional objects, used and valued by their original owners. House museums take us many steps along the sometimes dif- ficult route that museum visitors must travel in their minds when seeing something fabulous under glass against the white walls of an art museum gallery. House museums demystify the object by returning it to its functional setting.

In ths , house museums do a great service, for a problem that museums both create and must overcome is what I call the enshrinement effect: museums seem to take best care of their objects when they do take them out of context, placing them in humidity-controlled galleries under glass with brief labels identifying their material, date, and provenance. The enshrinement of once-ordinary objects is an effect of mixed value. On the

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one hand, museum professionals want visitors to see and learn to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of all objects, to become critics in their own rights, to be able to find artful qualities everywhere. In these respects the enshrined ordinary objects may offer object lessons. But objects under glass risk being too remote, too unbelievable as things in their own rights, with a distance created between the perceiver and the perceived that may forever teach the visitor that things of beauty are best seen at a distance. House museums bridge this enormous gap. They put that gorgeous soup tureen on a din- ing-room table, and they place the family portrait over an actual mantel. They remind us that everything in any museum (save some modern paint- ings painted in hopes of entering art-museum collections!) once had other lives.

Good history museums also do this, in the vignettes in which they display the objects of everyday life, and they do this with immense clever- ness, recreating corners of rooms or simplified settings that suggest context. The same impulse lies behind the dioramas that natural-history museums have used for decades to suggest the habitats in which animals or early humans lived. We need context, and if art museums are generally at one extreme, removing objects from context to celebrate their aesthetic qualities and craftsmanship, house museums are a t the other extreme, putting objects back where they seem to belong. The different tasks required of visitors in these two settings are beyond the scope of this book, but West gives us solid grounding for a later comparative study.

A house museum, of course, is also a kind of shrine, and the poten- tial power of this impact accounts for the creation of many of them. Patri- cia West’s fine book gives us four case studies of the creation of house museums, each of which originated in a belief in the power of buildings as metaphors, of buildings as symbols that might bridge gaps between a troubled present and an imaginedly better past (or, in the case of Booker T . Washington’s birthplace, a bridge between a troubled, segregated present and the example set by one Afncan American who showed that these obsta- cles can be overcome through quiet personal effort). This is a fascinating set of stories. West explores-in chronological order of when they opened to the public-George Washington’s Mount Vernon; Louisa May Alcott’s family home, Orchard House; Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello; and the birthplace (in replica) of Booker T. Washington.

The role of voluntarist women is a powerful tale especially in the first two cases, before museum work became professionalized and dominated by men. The indefatigable Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association won a long bat- tle to acquire and open to the public George Washington’s home and did so at the height of North-South tensions: women had a “lofty mission to rescue perishing memories” by saving “sacred” historic houses and could gloss over unpleasant details such as Washington’s slaveholding. Ann Pamela

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Cunningham, the moving force behind Mount Vernon, once observed that “women are intended for the ornament and blessing of life ... therefore, the Mount Vernon Association ... must instinctively shrink from all participation in the disorder and disunion by which the present time is characterized’’ (p. 3 2 ) . In her farewell address, Cunningham said, “Ladies, the home of Washington is in your charge .... Let no irreverent hand change it; no van- dal hands desecrate it with the fingers of progress .... Let one spot in this grand country of ours be saved from change ... let them see that, though we slay our forests, remove our dead, pull down our churches, remove from home to home, till the hearthstone seems to have no resting place in Amer- ica, let them see that we know how to care for the home of our hero” (p. 36).

Mount Vernon had, of course, been the home of a Southerner, moving toward house-museum status during the strife of the Civil War, and Cunningham and her group had early shifted their appeal from one of “southern honor” to demonstrate, in West’s words, “the ability of women to rise above and perhaps even ameliorate political conflict.” The movement for Mount Vernon reflected a generalized “mid-nineteenth-century faith in the moral power of the home environment” (p. 2): “To women preservationists, the success of the MVLA confirmed that the rescue of ‘sacred’ historic houses was within the proper, domestically based ‘sphere’ ofwomen’s activity” (p. 36). As such, it might (though of course it did not) ease the strife between North and South. In this respect, it was the proper work of women, and it was a deliberate vehicle for aiding the present by enshrining a past that all could revere.

Orchard House, too, was born of women’s efforts to smooth over strife with an environment that could call up a memory of a simpler time. Orchard House opened as a house museum in 1912, during the turmoil wrought by both the industrial revolution (and its attendant unhealthy cities, waves of immigrants living in unhealthy tenements, and heavy Victorian taste) and the women’s suffrage movement. Orchard House was the home of Louisa May Alcott, whose domestic novel Little Women epitomized a cozier, homier, simpler time of agreeable family life. Interesting background to this story is the phenomenon of regular “Sanitary Fairs” run by women in northern cities during the Civil War, which provided polemical displays of historical objects and upper-class domestic interiors that were idyllic memorials to assumed colonial American domestic prowess. These Sani- tary Fairs popularized the concept of the period room, the recreated inte- rior that could teach through its arrangement of well-chosen objects, and their success was one ingredient in a growing movement to create permanent museums of American history. “History became more popular than ever, especially as economic upheaval and increased heterogeneity fueled middle-class interest in a mytholopzed American past that was stable, vir- tuous, and above all, culturally uniform. Historical societies more than dou- bled in number between 1870 and 1890” (p. 42), many moving into historic


homes as headquarters. Historic houses became house museums at the rate of about two per year by the 1890s. Even then, it seems, we were looking back to a partly imaginary “morning in America.”

What fascinates me most is the belief of many reformers during this period in the “morally uplifting power of objects in the home environment” (p. 81, attributed to housing reformer Robert DeForest) and in the perceived moral superiority of “plain but substantial” furniture. This moral basis of domestic taste fueled a revival of Colonial style in reaction against the dust-catchmg, highly-ornamented furniture of the Victorian upper class- es and then of the contemporary working class. “House museums were especially well suited as models for the correct display of meaning-heavy domestic ‘relics.’ Their mythological function was located in their capaci- ty to embody an apparent resolution of the period’s conflict between a nos- talgia for a primitive ‘golden age’ and the celebration of progress” (p. 87). This use of “correctly encoded artifacts” (p. 89) is exactly the use to which objects are put whenever they are on public view: as vehicles of conspicu- ous consumption in shops, home-decor catalogs, and eventually homes, as icons in house-museum settings, and under glass in art museums. Objects do have meanings. House museums make them easier to decode, but in ret- rospect we can appreciate the irony that the celebrated inhabitants of Orchard House lived on the proceeds of the unmarried working daughter, and that the Alcotts, a transcendentalist and a passionate suffragist, were scarcely living the life of a “typical, old-fashioned American home,” as a magazine article as late as 1957 described the house. As West wryly observes, “That a museum dedicated to the iconoclastic Alcotts could be infused with this meaning is a testimony to the force of will of the original shapers of the institution’s public role” (p. 68).

Each of the other two houses covered in West’s book has its own revealing story. In the hypernationalistic era following World War I, “the utility of the house museum as patriotic medium and the desire to turn away from European aesthetics toward ‘Americana’ fostered a boom in both the creation of historic ‘shrines’ and the collection of American antiques” (p. 93). By 1921, the president of the American Association of Museums, worrying about “disquieting tendencies,” argued that American museums should “inspire and cultivate more wholesome and saner interests and truer ideals” (p. 95): Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan and John D. Rockefeller’s restoration of Colonial Williamsburg date from this period, and there is a gripping tale to be told-partly here, partly else- where-of these “notional villages” and America’s continuing fascination with a safe, clean, and orderly image of its imagined past. (On my one visit to Lincoln’s Old Salem Village, the paths a t night were oh-so-beautifully lined with lovely luminaria). Monticello was “rescued” during this post- World War I period, again thanks to activist volunteer women, though ulti-

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mately it would be administered by a man who was a trained architect and art historian, reflecting the by-then increasing masculinization of the museum movement and of house museums generally. The New Deal increased government’s involvement in creating house museums, and the creation of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1949 attested to the success of the movement to preserve old buildings, whether as metaphors or simply as important historic documents.

By the 1950s, with battles over desegregation gathering steam and the civil rights movement beginning to emerge, the Booker T . Washing- ton National Monument was designated with overwhelming support from a Congress eager to celebrate Washngton’s historical image as a “race lead- er who told his people to accommodate themselves to the realities of white power” (p. 154). Its founder and first director, Tuskegee graduate Sidney Phillips, argued that “the American people need constant, and where possible, permanent reminders of the principles for which this land of ours stands .... Booker T . Washington’s teachings ... indicate a manner in which the impoverished section could work through all its people to get upon its feet. They sought to build goodwill among people of all races and creeds” (quoted on p. 154). Philips may also have been influenced by Tuskegee’s “Negro home improvement” programs which sought to replace the morally and physically unhealthy one-room cabins among the poor black farm- ers of Alabama-an impulse parallel to the earlier Sanitary Fair movement in the north. This historic place was an anointed official Monument status to invoke variously the values that both races needed to celebrate. This hap- pened despite the fact that the cabin was a largely reconstructed replica, far nicer than the actual slave cabin that Washington had described so vividly in his autobiography: the home of a slave, not much of traditional value had ever been in it, and nearly nothing had been saved, a condition which had stymied the National Park System’s standards for decades. Interestingly, Philips’s recreation of this cabin did for Washington’s birthplace what the Orchard House administrators did for Colonial America: it celebrated a wholesome clean simplicity that did not really reflect its original habitants’ lives. As West argues in her concluding chapter, house museums, purged of complicating features-reference to slave-holding in Mount Vernon’s case, and the dirt floor and glassless windows in this case-“looked for all practical purposes like progenitors of the single-family suburban home so often posited as the linchpin of social stability” (p. 161) during the 1950s.

In each of the four cases that West studies, house museums glori- fied-to greater or lesser extents-the periods they sought to document, and they did so in the name of teaching values that the times seemed to need. That this could be done even with a slave cabin is a powerful state- ment about the political impulse behind the house-museum story.


If house museums’ missions, as West argues, “were manufactured out of human needs bound by time and place,” how would they measure up against Laura Bragg’s first principle of museum work, that “a finished museum is a dead museum” (Allen, p. 156)? Louise Anderson Allen has given us an unusually thorough portrait of an early museum professional. Bragg worked chiefly in two museums. The Charleston Museum, where she spent twenty-two years, is the source of the book‘s title, but she also directed the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and neither was a house museum. Both were history, natural-history, and art museums, “culture museums,” in Bragg’s terms, museums whose collections and temporary exhibitions could be used to teach the community about its own history and about the wider world.

Bragg’s is the compelling story of a well-educated and progressive New Englander, deaf from the age of six, who went to Charleston with a degree in library science to become the librarian and education director (and eventually director) of a museum immersed in a conservative, segregated city. Bragg created traditions for her museums that we now take for granted in museum education: her “Bragg boxes” of traveling artifacts took the museums to the schools, even to African-American schools; she devel- oped programs for teachers and for schoolchildren; she gave public lec- tures; she staged public openings for controversial art exhibitions. She sounds like a modern museum director, and indeed she was, in the 1910s- 1930s, an atypical woman and an atypical museum professional. She never married, maintained “Boston marriages” with a succession of devoted women companions, was the country’s first woman director of a public museum, traveled widely throughout the South and the Northeast, spent her long vacations working and studying in museums and libraries, taught a museum studies course at Columbia University, was active in the American Asso- ciation of Museums (hosting its national meeting in Charleston in 1923), consulted actively with a number of other museums, and lived to the age of 96, long enough to have had a full career trajectory of learning, immense success, and eclipse-and all of this despite quite frail health that laid her low sometimes for months at a time. Until a few months before her death, she was still a teacher, teaching society women on Wednesday mornings and holding a Sunday Salon at her home. She started as an educator, and she became a museum director, but she was always an educator.

Bragg believed several things about museums and their educational missions: Museum exhibits should create understanding, not just teach facts; the exhibit should interpret an idea rather than simply display an object. A museum exhlbit design should be a good composition following the laws of pictorial composition. A group of objects should carry a progressive story, not necessarily chronologically but with continuity of ideas (cf. pp. 144- 145). These are principles that every museum educator and every exhibition designer now takes largely for granted, but it must have been a bit


astonishing to encounter their embodiment in a progressive northerner living in a southern town.

Bragg was a crusader for the educative power of objects and of their proper interpretation. She was a crusader for public access to museums, opening the Charleston Museum to African Americans at a time when this was simply not done. Eventually her success enticed a northern museum to hire her just as she was getting crossways with her board, and her “temporary” departure to work a t the Berkshire Museum lead ultimately to her removal from Charleston. She left the Berkshire after eight years, coming home to Charleston to a long period when she was not even welcome in the museum she had rebuilt; the last decades of her life were a long, sad time of regrouping into reduced circumstances. Hers is a story of museum leadership, its political perils, and a strong personality both creating and surviving change. This is a story worth knowing, and it is told thor- oughly by Allen.

I would love to know what Bragg would have said about the four house museums covered in West’s book. She surely saw many house museums and very likely saw some of these. If house museums enshrine somewhat idealized and sanitized pasts to make them accessible to our collective memory, what are the dangers of such museums being finished in their frozen moments and, therefore, in Bragg’s terms, “dead”? How can a house museum remain alive and vital? How can house museums best use new historical scholarship without violating their underlying missions? How can a house-museum setting follow Bragg’s precepts of exhibit design and still accurately reflect a time or taste that might not have done so in real life? What do the best house museums do best? Do house museums automati- cally “interpret” more than simply “display,” by virtue of their complete settings, and what educational approaches can help them interpret better? What is the impact of the living-history guides who are so typical of house museums-do they provide the continuity of idea that objects alone might not? And can they, in costume, provide critical interpretations? (Recorded tours provide the opportunity to do so without violating the integrity of apparent “characters,” but Graceland does not show us Elvis’ last bloated years, and I wonder if its new audiotour producers considered referring to them). What would a Bragg box or traveling exhibition about a house museum include -what sort of pre-visit context would be most enlightening for visiting children? And what messages, both explicit and tacit, are possible to be heard from house museums, and how might they be shaped?

Most of all, our consideration of the stories told in these two books might lead us to ask how house museums’ mission of cherishing the past can be used for critical purposes. Even museums that seem to celebrate the lives once lived there can be used as documents stimulating critique. One of the most powerful such critiques has been done through objects alone


by the marvelously iconoclastic Fred Wilson, whose installations use objects to challenge the meanings being constructed by other objects in an exhibit. The ones I remember best were the simple addition of slave handcuffs to a display of Colonial silver objects (in the Walters Art Gallery’s “Min- ing the Museum” exhibition in the 1990s) and, in a historic house in the South, tucking a Ku Klw Klan hood into a baby carriage. Laura Bragg was a progressive and she wanted exhibitions to tell coherent stories. What would she have said to the stories that Wilson’s guerrilla tactics (done with their museums’ consent) call up in alert viewers? Was Bragg that progressive? Few are, even today, but I cannot help but believe that she would have appreciated the “livingness” of such an exhibit. Much less radically, I have often wished that a house museum would exhibit life as really lived-with laundry and dust on the floor, dishes stacked in the sink, mail piling up- and now, having worked with these two studies of museum work, I wonder when and how we should invite visitors to imagme deconsecrating these so-perfect shrines. How can we lead visitors to create, and test, wholly new understandings of the lives and times represented in these settings? And if the museums themselves do not invite this critical look at their collections, how might teachers prepare students to use traditional exhibits more crit- ically when they visit them? The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association might have been horrified at the thought, but somehow I think Laura Bragg might have had some suggestions, even if they did not go as far as Fred Wilson has lately done.

Are there any notable gaps in these two books? Together they are a useful complement to our understanding of how we have come to celebrate and sanitize our past in the houses it left behind, and how women helped shape America’s museums in the decades before the blockbuster and the high-profile (usually male) director. West’s study is especially strong. She chose an interesting range of house museums to explore and her four case studies illustrate a continuum of museums’ changes in mission and in leadership. West deliberately stops short of telling us how the houses were redecorated, how the decisions were made to display things just so, though these choices seem central to the “far from neutral” (p. 162) nature of house museums. Still, I appreciated the straightforward reporting, the lively writ- ing, and the mix of examples. This book will go a long way toward illumi- nating the roles that existing and future house museums have played and can play today.

Allen’s book, less sparkling, has about it a bit of the this-and-then- this style of biography, proceeding year by year, with odd redundancies, sometimes with details we do not need (such as what Bragg cooked for Christmas dinner and when she acquired two new endtables), with several oddly placed lengthy discourses about what Bragg knew of female sexual- ity and what she denied about her own-not irrelevant to this story of a


strong, educated outsider, but oddly timed. Allen tells us frustratingly little about the content of Bragg’s work or its impact then or later. She cites occasional exhibitions or projects as examples, but we do not have a full pic- ture of Bragg’s museums or of exactly how she ultimately changed them: what were the collections a t these two museums like, and what topics did the many Bragg boxes cover over the years, and how? Exactly what exhibitions did she herself create at her two main museums, and how did the attendance change with them? What evidence is there that her public really learned and grew with her?

So I still wonder what Bragg would have thought of the four house museums that West chronicles. And I wonder what interesting projects she might still have had in mind, when she died too soon at the age of 96. I hope that she once met some of the women working behind the scenes in the house-museum movement early in her own career; I would love to see the rooms in which those conversations took place and to know what objects surrounded these women as they spoke. What tales those objects could tell.

enshrining past lives: house museums and the lessons of objects

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