The George We Forgot (Cont.)

Mount Vernon is a 16-mile drive from Washington, D.C., the final stretch heading down the tree-lined George Washington Parkway with the Potomac River rolling peacefully on the left. Through the gate, a building on the right houses a learning center and auditorium, the two main gift shops, a food court (Pizza Hut, Mrs. Fields, a deli) and, for the fancier diner, the 18th-century-toned Mount Vernon Inn. Beyond this area lies the mansion; outbuildings that include slave quarters, a kitchen and animal pens; and a trail that winds past gardens, family tombs, a slave memorial and burial ground, a wharf and the Pioneer Farmer site with a recreated 16-sided barn of Washington’s invention.

But the first stop is at the ticket windows, where a sign informs you as to “the approximate wait to enter the mansion” (35 minutes at 9:30 a.m. on a Friday in June). Adult tickets cost $13; additional options include a $9 Potomac cruise and a $2 visit to the nearby grist mill and distillery—Washington owned perhaps the largest whiskey operation of his era—which began selling whiskey again in July. After the purchase, the door to the orientation and education centers is just a few feet away.

To preserve the original landscape, 65 percent of the 66,700-square-foot complex was built under the four-acre pasture just inside the estate’s main gate.

Entering the orientation center, you encounter life-size bronze statues of George and Martha Washington and two grandchildren, positioned as if striding toward their guests, leaning slightly forward as if in welcome. (Whoever thought visitors would respond to these was on to something. People entering the building make straight for the Washingtons for a photo op, with children particularly likely to mug for the camera—even jumping up to slap the now-defenseless general on the face, in one Bart Simpson-esque instance.)You can stop and see the introductory films and a miniature replica of the mansion, head up to the mansion or walk a few dozen yards to the museum and education center, whose entrances are side by side within a large, circular hall.

Those who planned the education center faced daunting questions: Which pieces absolutely had to go in a mosaic that would portray the real George Washington? How much could they squeeze into a finite space, and how much learning would most visitors want to put up with? There are gaps. You won’t learn about Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin or even Washington’s close aide Alexander Hamilton. Washington’s feelings for Sally Fairfax, wife of his friend and neighbor, are not discussed; Martha herself makes only brief appearances. In a New York Times review, Edward Rothstein wrote, “[W]e scarcely learn how Washington succeeded in unifying delegates at the Constitutional Convention or what the defining achievements were in his presidency (aside from matters of title and protocol). Issues raised by the Whiskey Rebellion and the founding of the National Bank and ideas about westward expansion are summarized, literally, in a handful of political cartoons. . . . There is a side to Washington that is missing. Why did Gilbert Stuart, who painted one of the most famous portraits, describe him as ‘fierce,’ and why did Abigail Adams, the [subsequent] first lady, call him ‘very dangerous’?”

Rees said the mission was to focus on Washington himself: “We tried to be brutal with our text,” in terms of keeping a strict focus. “Williamsburg does a beautiful job with life in the colonial era. A new museum will be built at Valley Forge. Most other founders have their own home. We definitely hope our education center will inspire people to go to other places and deepen their knowledge.” As for any love affairs or Washington’s relationships with other founders, such as the famous rift with Jefferson, Rees said, “We don’t know a lot about those personal relationships, so we didn’t feel comfortable saying much about them.”

Perhaps the most challenging issue facing the education center—and Mount Vernon itself—is that George and Martha Washington owned more than 300 slaves. The estate’s perspective is this: Washington was born into a slaveholding society; he came to question slavery over time, though with an emphasis less on its morality than on its declining usefulness as a labor source; he felt he couldn’t force emancipation on the fragile union of the founding era; freeing his workers was a complicated proposition, since so many had intermarried with those of his wife—as dower property, they belonged to Martha’s estate and not to her personally—but he freed his slaves in his will, hoping it would set an influential example for others. (It didn’t.)

According to Ann Bay, Mount Vernon was probably the first historic plantation to interpret slavery, beginning in the 1960s with the restoration of the slave quarters. A gallery in the new education center offers biographies of some African Americans on the estate and general information on their lives, including the mere five ounces of fish and mound of cornmeal they received each day. A History Channel video features talking heads such as historian Ira Berlin; the president of Black Women United for Action, which does programs with Mount Vernon; and descendants of Washington’s slaves. The commentators answer four questions from their varying perspectives: Was Washington good to his slaves, what was it like to be a slave at Mount Vernon, why did Washington wait till his death to free his slaves and what was the legacy of that emancipation?

Dennis Pogue, director of preservation, noted that in the 1980s the strong interest of focus groups spurred the estate to deal with the topic more extensively—“Slavery was a mandate, not just the interest of a bunch of pointy-headed museum people. But it is still an area I frankly feel we could do more with.” To that end, Bay said that the estate has an “ambitious plan” for the coming years. “The role of slaves and their contribution to the nation will be integrated everywhere—the house, the pioneer farm site, where we’re about to open a reconstructed slave cabin. We’ve had a slave life tour for a long time, since the mid-’90s. We try to just stick with the facts. The slavery gallery is one of the things we wrestled with. We didn’t want to apologize for George Washington. We wanted to present the truth about him and let people come to their own conclusions.”

Rees feels that the new buildings cover as much territory on this and other important subjects as possible. “The education center has a great deal of variety. If you like bells and whistles, we have bells and whistles. If you like videos, artifacts behind glass, we have those as well. But most importantly, we have the man who was not only the most powerful of the 18th century but the most fascinating. People are astounded by how many things he accomplished, how varied his interests were. As much as we like to take credit for the experience, both educational and entertaining, it’s really Washington himself who makes these new facilities excite and astound people.”

Washington’s dentures, incidentally, warranted their own gallery, with a time line on his painful dental history and a set of his false teeth—not wooden but constructed of lead and animal and human teeth. Rees said, “His dentures are the most famous teeth in the world. For many years, we thought, ‘We wouldn’t want ours shown.’” But the staff finally realized that Washington’s oral travails caused people to feel an empathy with him.

Rees’s conclusion: “I think our new buildings prove you really can blend education and entertainment in an effective manner, and that people having fun are much more open to learning at the same time. I think so many people in our field are still afraid to blend those two things. I think they’re afraid that we’ll make history seem trivial, when in fact it sometimes makes history feel relevant.”

Peter R. Henriques, a retired professor of history at George Mason University who served on a committee that helped plan the education center, feels that some aspects could have been tweaked: For example, the introductory film might have focused less on Washington’s time in the French and Indian War, however exciting. But “After Indiana Jones,” he said, “it’s hard to keep people’s attention with a Shakespearean play. The immersion in Washington whets people’s appetites to learn more.” His fellow historian Ellis concurred. “You could go there and find little mistakes, but it would be nitpicking. [The center] succeeds in recreating Washington’s world and using technology to expose people to the personal side and general context. I’d give it an A/A-.”

Education at Mount Vernon doesn’t stop with films and exhibits. Programs include one-week summer institutes for teachers, school tours, a “distance learning classroom” offering nationwide broadcasts, curriculum materials and an education section on the website that Bay plans to “ramp up.” The education staff number about 80, many of whom are part-time interpreters. The estate also co-sponsors, with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Washington College, the $50,000 annual George Washington Book Prize, one of the richest in the academic field, to encourage scholars to study Washington’s era.

Education is, in fact, a mission throughout the estate—even in the four museum stores, which sell everything from “I Cannot Tell a Lie” magnets ($5.50) to flags flown over Mount Vernon ($28), Civil War paraphernalia, mirrors patterned on those in the mansion (one costs $2,850) and an 8-page foldout ($5) with samples of house paints sold elsewhere, based on 120 hues found in and around the mansion. Julia Mosley, director of retail, said that most items promote the estate’s mission by including detailed mini-histories of how the article ties into Washington’s era—whether toys, the annual Christmas ornament or even the George Washington bobblehead doll, which, she admitted, she “thought long and hard about.” But the doll includes three paragraphs of information on Washington, and “Many parents say, ‘Oh, my child collects these. I’d rather see George Washington on his shelf than the latest, greatest baseball player.’”

Formal education in its various formats only goes so far, however; the staff agree that the mansion remains “the crown jewel.” They cite historical novelist Elswyth Thane: “To understand Washington, to truly believe him, one must come to Mount Vernon.”

The mansion, of course, is of another era. Its 2½ stories rise majestically at the far end of a “bowling green” lawn surrounded by a circular path. On one side, a piazza where Washington loved to entertain overlooks the Potomac; on the other begins the trail leading to many of the estate’s sites of interest. You may have to wait in line a while to enter the house, but the interpreters inside are adept at delivering their spiels of one to two minutes—slightly varied each time—and then prodding visitors along to the next room with the gentle suggestion, “As you exit. . .” The mansion is where you walk into the same study in which Washington began each day before dawn, where you peer into the bedroom that Martha immediately vacated after he died in it, where you see the spot where George Washington—not some curator—hung the key to the Bastille, given him by Lafayette. It takes perhaps 20 minutes to complete the mansion tour; the usual overall site visit is 2½ hours. Rees wants to change that. “Our goal is to make a Mount Vernon visit as close to a full day as possible, that people plan on a full day and leave well-rounded.”

Staff members point to several reasons why the public doesn’t yet realize it should spend a day with George Washington. Brown noted: “I think Washington got his due for decades, probably 150 years. Why that changed is a complicated issue. The way we teach history has changed dramatically, from people and individual accomplishments to teaching about social movements. We’re in a time of deconstructing leaders and wanting to humanize them, and I think that detracts from bigger-picture accomplishments.” Rees added, “Some of it was easy to understand. There’s a lot more history than there used to be, and it covers a lot more perspectives. There’s less military and presidential history covered, in particular.” Yet another issue is how vacations are chosen. “Fifty years ago,” Brown said, “Mom and Dad decided what to do,” and they often picked something educational. “There are a lot more choices now about what to do on vacation; kids play a larger role in deciding. There’s less and less firsthand exposure to places that teach these [historical] lessons.”

Even Washington’s iconic monument in the national capital named for him fails to provide much of a portrait: Unlike the Lincoln and Jefferson monuments, it offers the city’s millions of tourists no majestic statue, no eloquent sound bite from a great man’s writings.

According to Brown, Mount Vernon’s new approach is working. “We do monthly visitor surveys; the reaction has been very, very high. The overall satisfaction with the Mount Vernon experience is 4.8 on a 5-point scale.” The percentage of people who come because of the new facilities has varied seasonally from about 27 percent to 50 percent. The impact has been substantial: a 60 percent rise in visitation in the first few months after opening, with a 12 percent increase in FY 2007 as compared to 2006. But it will take longer to see change in some cases. “A school group from Idaho won’t change their plans [this year] because we just added a new facility.”

Rees already has his eye on the next stage. His plans include “becoming the equivalent of a presidential library for George Washington. We need to be the place everyone thinks about whenever they have any question that relates to Washington and his times. We’re doing a strategic planning exercise; no doubt there’ll be another capital campaign.” Gay Hart Gaines said that the overall vision is to spark a “rebirth of excitement about this great man,” with Mount Vernon as “the epicenter of everything George Washington.”