When John Russell Pope was commissioned in 1935 to design a memorial to Thomas Jefferson, he had the inspired idea of taking the Roman Pantheon as his model. The serene geometry of a white marble dome would express the idealism and clarity of intellect of the author of the Declaration of Independence. But the Jefferson Memorial, dedicated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1943, was the last of its kind. Within a few years, the building of such a monument—an idealistic shrine to one of the Founding Fathers—would become culturally impossible. It was not so much that the architectural modernism of the postwar era was deeply antagonistic to the very concept of monument, although it was, but that America’s cultural leaders themselves would soon find precious little in our history worth monumentalizing. In their most extreme interpretation of that history, it offered nothing more than a long jubilee of theft, oppression, and hypocrisy in which the Founding Fathers were complicit, right up to their elbows.
This critical view may have come to prevail in textbooks but not in architecture. Hecklers are not builders. And public monuments require public funds, which can hardly be expected to flow freely into physical projects highlighting the negative aspects of American history. But now, with the opening in Philadelphia of a commemorative site called the President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation, the critical version of American history so often seen in museum shows and newly designed curricula in recent decades has at last manifested itself architecturally. To call the President’s House revisionist would be an understatement. It is as if its makers sought singlehandedly to atone for two centuries of positive or idealistic shrines by making a national monument to the sins and failings of the Founding Fathers.
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The brick townhouse that housed presidents Washington and Adams in the first years of the United States was built in 1768. When the United States capital moved to Philadelphia in 1790, President Washington leased it because of its size and proximity to Congress, which convened just a block away. The house’s run as the executive mansion of the United States ended when the White House was completed in 1800. Thereafter, the house languished and was unsentimentally demolished in 1832 to make room for a row of stores. They were demolished in turn a century later, and the entire block was cleared in the 1950s to create Independence Mall.
No reliable image of the house survived, nor was its location known with any exactitude. There was more agreement about the form of ancient Troy. And as with Troy, it took an amateur historian to find the real thing. Edward Lawler Jr., by profession a musician, had a longstanding interest in the house. Not satisfied with any of the existing literature, he made his own study of the documents and deeds and was able to pinpoint the house’s location and reconstruct its form. His groundbreaking 2002 article in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography was fortuitously timed, as the National Park Service was then in the process of redesigning Independence National Historic Park, on whose grounds the house had stood. Lawler’s most explosive revelation was that the area in which Washington housed his stablehands, most of whom were slaves, stood only five feet from the entrance to the new Liberty Bell Center. Flustered, the National Park Service conducted an archaeological dig and promptly found the foundations of the President’s House, enough of which remained to show its perimeter, interior divisions, and even the great bow window that Washington added to the Dining Room. The intact footprint of America’s first White House was still there.
Not for generations had there been such an important archaeological find in the field of American history. Here was the very crucible of the American presidency, where the executive branch of the United States government first came into its own, and where an extraordinary Cabinet including Jefferson and Hamilton took positions on the key issues that still constitute the crux of American political life: the division of government powers, the role of the president in conducting diplomacy, the role of the states in a federal system, the mission and nature of a national bank. All these issues were mooted and acted upon, and with fateful consequences, from within this slender townhouse.
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Whenever a building has completely vanished, or has been reduced to an archaeological excavation, there are two ways to make it speak to the general public. One is to make a facsimile based on physical evidence, documentary records, and historic photographs. This is the approach used famously during the 1930s to re-create Colonial Williamsburg, and more recently (and more controversially) to re-create German monuments destroyed during World War II. Although popular with the public, this approach long ago fell into disfavor among professional historians, who like to point out that such re-creations are at best pastiches in which frail shards of evidence are eked out with conjecture and improvisation. The making of facsimiles is now considered taboo. Preservationists have come to insist on a clear distinction between the surviving elements of the original building (to be reverently preserved) and any new construction, which must be clearly legible as a modern intervention.
The boldest example of this approach was by the architect Robert Venturi, who restored Benjamin Franklin’s house in Philadelphia in 1976. Apart from a few passages of foundation wall, nothing remained of the house, not a single image. Any reconstruction would be all guesswork. Instead, Venturi raised up a great metal lattice that re-created the house as a ghostly abstraction, staking out its basic dimensions the way a mime might suggest a box. Below this lattice he placed a slate floor, inscribing into it excerpts from Franklin’s letters that referred precisely to the activities and furnishings in the very spaces in which the viewer was standing. Visiting this ghostly trellis requires more than the passive theatrical experience of Williamsburg; one must bring an active imagination.
One can make a persuasive argument for either tactic, the literal facsimile or the abstract abstraction, but not for both. To combine them both in the same building is to undercut the virtues of each and to make a cartoon. Yet this is precisely what the firm of Kelly-Maiello, the architects for the National Park Service, have done. They have re-created the lower story of the President’s House, complete with a quartet of carved marble fireplaces, but only to waist height. Above this the house dies away into an array of abstract window frames. It is as if a full-tilt literal reproduction of the house was undertaken, but abstraction became the order of the day when the money ran out.
Even more embarrassing, what purports to be a rigorous, scientific projection of the outline of the house is nothing of the sort. The proportions of the superstructure have been shrunk slightly so its rooms do not precisely align with the foundations below. Weirdly, the architects have played fast and loose with the only solid information we have about the house, which are its dimensions. It turns out there’s actually something worse than a facsimile of a vanished building: a facsimile of an excavation.
But the real scandal of the President’s House is not in its confused and inaccurate construction but rather in its didactic material. And therein hangs a tale. For once concrete physical evidence had been found of the housing of slaves on the site, the National Park Service decided it had to work assiduously to ensure that the story of slavery was not left out of the interpretation of the site. To do this, and to draft the wall texts that would interpret the site to the public, the prominent historian Gary Nash was enlisted. This was the same Gary Nash who had been tasked by the National Endowment for the Humanities to draft new national standards for the teaching of American history in 1994—and whose work on it was taken to task by Lynne Cheney, who was chair of NEH when Nash received his assignment. In a celebrated Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “The End of History,” Cheney showed that those standards systematically presented American history in the worst light possible, consistently downplaying the achievements of constitutional government and free enterprise while placing America’s sins front and center (she noted, for example, 19 mentions of McCarthy and McCarthyism, none of Thomas Edison or the Wright Brothers).
The upshot was that a revised version of the standards was published two years later in which some of the more flagrant omissions were corrected, although a defiant Nash refused to concede any merit whatsoever in the criticism of the standards, blaming them on a cabal of Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and the Republican Congress of 1994. In a sense, what has come to pass at the President’s House might be thought of as Nash’s revenge.
As historical sites go, the President’s House is uncommonly verbose. Nash has swathed its walls with numerous text panels, artist’s renderings, and flat-screened video monitors that constantly stream re-enactments of life in the house. The only moment of visual rest is the granite wall near where the slave quarters stood and on which are inscribed the names of Washington’s nine slaves. Visitors who approach from the east will first encounter this mournful slab, and most will find it deeply moving. It raises the specter of slavery in a vivid and appropriate way and, given the proximity to the Liberty Bell, in the most poignant of locations.
Indeed, slavery permeates every aspect of the President’s House, every panel and every room, even the state dining room where Washington held his celebrated public levees. By bringing his slaves to Philadelphia, the prologue to the exhibition tells us, Washington “exposes the core contradiction at the founding of this nation: enshrinement of liberty and the institution of slavery.” Nash uses “core contradiction” as a synonym for hypocrisy, which is his charge against the Founding Fathers.
No presidential actions are cited unless they pertain to race relations or reveal something shameful. Thus Washington’s primary achievements shown here are the signing of the Fugitive Slave Act and a meeting with a delegation of American Indians, while John Adams is noted for meeting the Haitian envoy and for signing the Alien and Sedition Acts, those early tests of free speech and the right to argue against the government. (These mark the only appearances of Adams, who, as someone who owned no slaves, seems not to have been useful as polemical fodder.)
Were they not so stridently one-sided, the panels would be a valuable source of historical information. For example, one learns that out-of-state slaves who were held in Pennsylvania could claim their freedom after a residency of six months and that Washington deftly circumvented the law by regularly rotating his slaves back to Virginia. He seems to have done it furtively and with an evident sense of guilt; at any rate, he manumitted all his slaves upon his death, an action that is buried in the mass of written materials that clutter the dense walls.
The focus on slavery to the exclusion of all else is not due to Nash alone. The National Park Service was intensively lobbied by local activist groups, including the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, whose demands were charmingly terse: “a culturally-dignified, historically-complete, prominently-conspicuous, physically-dramatic, formally-official, and timely-installed commemoration on the grounds of the President’s House to honor, primarily, the nine enslaved African descendants.” With such a vocal pressure group constantly criticizing the work in progress, a revisionist historian with an ax to grind, intense secrecy surrounding the whole process, and no countervailing force in the form of traditional historians or an engaged public, one can easily see how quickly the interpretation spilled over into one-sided tendentiousness.
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Even on its own limited terms, however, the President’s House fails to do what Nash intended it to do. His goal seems to have been to express the laminated complexity of its history, its different constituencies and variegated meanings. This is the attitude on display in his preamble to the exhibition, which begins by admonishing us that “History is not neat. It is complicated and messy.” That thin gruel is merely a breezy version of the ideas put forth in a 1995 article in which Nash praised “the multi-layered, multi-faceted social history of the last generation that has transcended semi-official versions of this country’s development.” He contrasted this nuanced history, offering multiple voices and perspectives, with traditional curricula, which he dismissed variously as “self-congratulatory history” or “happy-face history.” He might have been thinking of the hagiographic accounts of Washington, including Parson Weems’s apocryphal fable (Father, I cannot tell a lie; I did cut down that cherry tree).
Nash’s contempt for hagiography, however, extends only to the patriotic variety; other forms are apparently acceptable. One wall text, for example, informs us about Washington’s cook Hercules, reputedly the finest chef in Philadelphia. Hercules, we learn, was “skilled, strong and determined,” the sort of pious platitude familiar from inspirational juvenile literature. He may well have been all those things, but we will have to take Nash’s word for it. As for Washington, whose own skill, strength, and determination are all copiously documented, he has nary a word. History may indeed be “complicated and messy,” but on issues touching on Washington, it could hardly be more pat.
In the end, the President’s House’s claim to offer up a “complicated and messy” history presents one as lucid and reductive as a medieval morality tale. But of all the voices excluded from the interpretation, the silence of the building in which they appear is most lamentable. For as garrulous as Nash’s panels are, they say virtually nothing about the house itself. While they use it as their point of departure, they have nothing to offer about the specific meaning of its spaces and forms and seem oblivious to the peculiarly vivid lessons that physical objects can impart and that can be conveyed by no other means.
For example, by far the most interesting element is the bow window that Washington added to the south of the State Dining Room, a favorite neoclassical form that terminated the room in an elegant 180 degree arc. This ensured that when he entered the space for public receptions, he would have the sun at his back, a dramatic wall of light behind him. This was his principal alteration to the house, and with it he transformed his stylish merchant’s house into a formal building of state. This was the origin and prototype for the Oval Office of the White House, which would be designed in a few years for Washington. But this pioneering feature goes unmentioned. Indeed, in a shocking gesture of indifference, the architects utterly disregarded it, building a bulky three-sided polygon above the foundations of the graceful semicircle below, as a visitor can easily confirm.
Washington’s bow window is not merely an architectural footnote of interest only to the specialist. It is a richly expressive testimony of his serious effort to establish what the tone and character of the American presidency should be. It is part and parcel of his brooding over when and how he should present himself to the public, which centered on the State Dining Room. It was here that he instituted the practice of conducting weekly levees in which ordinary citizens might be introduced to him. His concern was to balance accessibility and dignity, and he cultivated the habit of holding papers in his right hand so that it would not be tactlessly grasped by an overeager supplicant. In other words, this room is the crucible in which the American president’s peculiar identity as citizen executive, rather than sovereign ruler, was forged. To relegate it to a theater for showing an amateurish video of a Washington impersonator signing the Fugitive Slave Act is to throw away one of the great teaching opportunities of this spectacular archaeological find.
In the end, all these omissions and emphases tend to the same effect, which is to brand the American enterprise as something intrinsically flawed. It is not so much a memorial as an exposé. The issue of slavery deserves a prominent place at this site. But the President’s House should not have become by default a national monument to it. For if the slave quarters to the rear tell an important story, so does the executive mansion at the front of the site. For that story is of how a military hero who conquered a continent and was universally acclaimed would voluntarily step down to become a citizen executive, situated not in a palace or building of state but a kind of private house. One should contrast that experience with Napoleon a decade later. And that the democracy whose establishment Washington oversaw, whatever its flaws, proved to be a self-correcting instrument.
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This is not the first time that a partisan faction has laid claim to a monument that belongs to all Americans. In 1854, the nativist and violently anti-Catholic Know-Nothings took control of the unfinished Washington Monument and occupied it for several years. They even added several feet of masonry, which was later found to be unsound and had to be removed. Something similar has happened at the President’s House, whose meaning has been appropriated by two narrowly based constituencies with special interests and grievances. This is not to say that their claims have no merit, only that they have not been balanced against competing claims. American history is not the property of historians but is the common heritage of all citizens.
The President’s House in Philadelphia, honorable in its intention but misguided in execution and offensive in its omissions, has failed badly. It should be dismantled, its worthy but out-of-place text panels moved to the park’s visitor’s center, and the site rebuilt from scratch. As presently configured, it can only cause ill-feeling and resentment, even among those whose sentiments it was meant to flatter.
