Culture | Hymn to the republic

The Museum of the American Revolution

A new museum re-examines the birth of America

|PHILADELPHIA

FOR people who pride themselves on keeping their eyes on the future, Americans often seem mired in their own history. Here the past is never safely buried, but is continually exhumed to shape and reshape the present. Political battles are waged through contested narratives that have been centuries in the making.

The new Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, which is only two streets from Independence Hall, the nation’s birthplace, will help shape people’s understanding of the founding struggle for many years to come. David McCullough, a Pulitzer prize-winning historian and long-time champion of the project, believes it will serve as an exemplar for an age sorely in need of a moral compass. He hopes that learning more about those who were engaged in the desperate struggle for liberty—in particular the example of George Washington—will inspire current and future generations. “Character, it’s what counts most of all. [That is] what’s taught in the story of the revolution,” he says.

The museum tries hard to break down the barriers that separate the 18th century from today. Its handsome new classical brick-clad building engages in friendly dialogue with the historical buildings around it. Inside, the conversation between old and new is amped up a couple of decibels. On one side are Revolutionary-era artefacts, including weapons of war like a musket commissioned by Washington from a Philadelphia gunsmith, as well as everyday objects and political texts, including a page from the Pennsylvania Evening Post of July 6th 1776, with the first published text of the Declaration of Independence.

Fleshing out these stories are tableaux with life-size mannequins that recreate telling moments: the toppling of a statue of King George in New York; a meeting of the leaders of the Oneida Indian Nation as they debate whether to join the colonists’ struggle. The story of the nation’s founding springs to life in an atmosphere that more closely resembles a theme park than a traditional archive. In one gallery visitors are thrown into the heart of the action through a multimedia restaging of the Battle of Brandywine, complete with fog machine and ground-shaking effects.

One thing is clear: this is not your grandfather’s museum, either in the story it tells or in the way it tells it. Scott Stephenson, head of collections, exhibitions and programming, says he does not want to present history as a pious sermon but as “a richer, messier tale”. This messier tale exposes the hypocrisy of people who fought in the name of liberty while denying it to others. The stirring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence can ring a bit hollow as visitors contemplate shackles small enough to bind the limbs of the youngest slaves.

Still, there is plenty that is uplifting on display as well: stories of heroic sacrifice, including harrowing tales of the bitter winter at Valley Forge or of scrappy Minutemen facing off against hardened veterans at Lexington and Concord. The museum celebrates high ideals that were not always lived up to in practice but that paved the way for future advances in human rights.

The way that history and its symbols are so often the subject of a struggle is captured here by the saga of the museum’s star attraction: Washington’s headquarters tent, which served as the general’s mobile home throughout most of the war. Passed down through the family of Washington’s widow, the tent came into the possession of Mary Custis Lee, the wife of Robert E. Lee who commanded the army that attempted, in the 1860s, to tear apart the nation that Washington had worked so hard to stitch together.

When General Lee’s Virginia home was overrun by Union soldiers, the tent was brought back to the capital and put on display to serve as a patriotic rallying-point. Forty years later it was returned to the family, and later sold to raise money to support the widows of Confederate veterans. Now, treated as a sacred relic, Washington’s wartime headquarters forms the centrepiece of a new museum dedicated to the continuing American argument over the meaning of its past.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "A hymn to the republic"

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