‘CSI’ at Mount Vernon

James Rees can pinpoint the moment when he knew things weren’t going too well, George Washington-wise. Mr. Rees is the director of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, the 154-year-old organization charged with preserving Washington’s sublimely picturesque estate, 10 miles south of the nation’s capital.It was the early 1990s, and Mr. Rees was addressing a group of school kids at a tree-planting ceremony. He thought he would open with a few jokes playing off the familiar Washington myths.“I said, ‘Well, it’s a good thing this isn’t a cherry tree — you never know who might come and chop it down!’ And there was no reaction. Nothing.“So I said, ‘But I guess we could always use the wood to make some teeth.’ Nothing. Blank stares.”Anyone who has ever tried to talk history to a class full of teenagers knows the spine-chilling effect of those blank stares. But for Mr. Rees, whose job is to evangelize his fellow Americans about the virtues of the father of their country, the stares rang like a fire bell in the night.Traditionalists may worry about the fashionable habit of debunking American heroes, but, Mr. Rees suddenly saw, “we’re way past the debunking stage. These kids didn’t even know the myths to debunk. We were at ground zero.”Mr. Rees told me this story a decade ago, when he was well in to plotting an elaborate counter-strategy to remedy the widespread ignorance of — and worse, indifference toward — the life and character of George Washington.Last October the strategy bore fruit, with the opening of a vast new visitors complex at Mount Vernon: Two new museums, two large theaters, an education center, multiple shops, and restaurants — all of them, needless to say, high-tech and state-of-the-art, at a total expense of $110 million in private money.President Bush gave an address there this week to mark Presidents Day — the bastard holiday invented so Americans could honor the men who built their country with three days of shopping rather than the customary two.Aside from being a lavish birthday gift for Washington — on February 22 he turns 275 — the modernized Mount Vernon will likely become a landmark in the presentation of public history in America.Some Washington buffs will be of two minds about it. We mossbacks have always revered Mount Vernon not merely as Washington’s beloved home but also as a model of curatorial taste and modesty.The estate was resolutely retrograde: there was only the mansion itself, augmented by a small museum, set among acres of lawn and gardens and ringed by red-brick walkways, unspoiled by creepy re-enactors in period dress or by the flash and rumble of high-tech pedagogy.Its very plainness was an invitation to commune with the spirit of the “indispensable American.”That experience is still available for anyone who seeks it. Entering the gates, a fuddy-duddy can bypass the new complex and head straight to the mansion, to rest on the famous piazza with its breathtaking view of the Potomac.Most visitors won’t do that, of course. Moving into the new complex, much of it built underground to preserve the rolling landscape, they will find instead a series of experiences meant to dazzle and entertain — and, incidentally, instruct as well.A new movie, its Hollywood budget evident in every frame, offers a stylish and painless overview of Washington’s life as a warrior. Then visitors can enter one of two museums. The first is built on the traditional model: quiet rooms filled with artifacts identified by well-written and informative wall text.The other, far more elaborate, is called an “education center.” It is designed for our post-verbal generation. Images jump, sound tracks purr and growl, lights flare and dim to alter the mood. It has the ethos of a theme park: Mountvernonland.A mock forensic lab, modeled on TV’s “CSI” series, reconstructs Washington’s physical appearance. A cartoon movie wordlessly depicts his boyhood. In a recreation of the colonial wilderness, animatronic birds twitter from silicon trees and squirrels cutely skitter. Snow billows from a hidden snow machine onto visitors in a Valley Forge display.It’s all “immersive” and “interactive,” as curators say, and relentlessly ingenious — a testament to the manipulative powers of theme-park technology. No school child will pass through this education center with a frozen stare.But what will they learn? By its nature, the new Mount Vernon must depict Washington’s life with a bias toward drama and action — those elements that best lend themselves to high-tech adaptation.Yet Washington’s greatest achievements were political. He created a country less from what he did than from who he was and from what he believed.Mr. Rees and his designers have tried to dramatize these essential elements of character and philosophy, without much success. They have been stymied by an unforeseen limitation of our dazzling technology in the digital age. Its inherent vulgarity, its relentless stimulation of emotion and bypassing of the intellect, can’t convey the stuffy virtues of the pre-modern past.To judge by the delighted response of visitors, though, Mr. Rees and company have succeeded in doing what they felt they had to do instead: to draw the attention of a distracted public to a man whose greatness the public can’t afford to forget.It’s a high ambition and a worthy cause — and it makes an impressive birthday present, too, as even a fuddy-duddy has to concede.Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.

‘CSI’ at Mount Vernon

‘CSI’ at Mount Vernon

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