Unfortunately, the curators chase the equality mirage; what they wish had happened isn’t what happened. I was in Philadelphia this week for a family Christmas visit but also for anniversary visits to museums. It's the 100th birthday of the Barnes Foundation and the tenth anniversary of its vexed relocation from Merion to the center of Philadelphia. I enjoyed the Barnes's new Modigliani exhibition – more on that next week – and Dr. Barnes's taste, collection, and philosophy are unique. More on these next week, too.
The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia is only five years old. The museum is aiming at the Semiquincentennial, or Sestercentennial, or whatever we decide to call the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026. What happened in 1776 is the museum's core subject.
Museum of the American Revolution plaza and building exterior. (Museum of the American Revolution)
The building's architect was Robert A. M. Stern's firm, and it looks like a boring Stern building. That's fine, though not ideal. It's vaguely Georgian Revival and doesn't compete with the museum's mission. A grand, elegant spiral staircase at the center of the entrance courtyard gives us a clearer sense of the aesthetic of the period rather than the façade, which I think is unassuming. The first floor is spacious and easy to navigate. A handbell choir performed by the grand staircase. A lovely greeting indeed.
I visited this past Saturday. The museum hired an artist to cut silhouettes of visitors gratis. I was impressed and delighted. And a willing subject. I now have a 2022 silhouette to complement a silhouette done at the 1964 World's Fair. You've thickened over the years, I thought, but such is life. Between the warm welcome from the staff, a bell chorus of Christmas carols, thoughtful, easy way-finding, and a new work of art, I was in love with the place even before I read a label or saw an artifact or imagined a shot heard around the world.
And the first object is a blockbuster. It's George Washington's sleeping and office tent from the Revolutionary War. It's linen and wool and was made in Reading, Pa., in 1777 or 1778. It's 14 by 23 feet and has interior linen walls. Washington, we learn in a good introductory film, worked and, off and on, lived in the tent. The Continental Congress commissioned Washington in 1775 to command an army besieging British troops in Boston. He wrote to Martha to tell her he'd return to Mount Vernon for good in a few months. Aside from one short visit, he was gone for nearly eight years. He got home to Martha on Christmas Eve in 1783, having fought and won a war that changed the world and dramatically resigned his generalship.
The tent came to Philadelphia in 1909 when W. Herbert Burk, an Episcopal minister, founder of the Valley Forge Historical Society and collector of Washington memorabilia, bought it from the daughter of Robert E. Lee and Mary Custis Lee. She used the money to benefit Confederate widows. Mrs. Lee, coincidentally, was Martha Washington's great-granddaughter and owned Arlington House, the estate that became Arlington National Cemetery. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the mansion was built in the 1810s as both a Custis home and a repository for Washington memorabilia.
The tent is kept on a stage behind a curtain and shown for a few minutes after the video. It's a dramatic introduction to the museum. As artifacts go, the tent's a sensation. I have two quibbles. First, the video tells us almost immediately that Washington owned slaves, a fact likely 99 percent of visitors know already. The champion of liberty was also a slaveholder, we're told, though the audience doesn't hear that most of Mount Vernon's slaves belonged to Martha, the rich widow George married, and were entailed to her children, or that Washington freed his slaves at his death. The past's complicated.
Second, and this is a theme that runs here and there through the entire museum, we don't hear much about leadership. The museum has an enormous amount to say about diversity and covers lots of historical-timeline ground, but what about leadership characteristics of essential figures, Washington in the forefront? What made the men and women who created our country?
When the museum opened in 2017, it was correctly slammed for presenting equality, a word used hundreds of times in the museum's history of the Revolution, as a concept meaning what the curators would like here and now rather than what it meant in 1776. The museum's vision statement aims to ensure that the promise of the American Revolution endures, a tall order and aspirational, if vague and immune to deliverables. Equality is a squishy thing.
Equality and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in Revolutionary times were rhetorical and rallying cries but also serious philosophical goals and far more radical than they are now. In fact, I thought life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, while not invisible at the museum, is vastly underplayed.
Bunker Hill Bible, printed by Adrian Watkins, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1755, leather, paper, ink, and silver. (Museum of the American Revolution)
The historical exhibition is huge – 16,000 square feet – and tells the Revolution's story from the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 to the ratification of the Constitution in 1787. It puts core questions to visitors, front and center. How did people become revolutionaries? How did the Revolution survive its darkest hours? How revolutionary was the war? What kind of country did the Revolution create? These are bracing questions. They tell us that our us versus them binary and our conception of the American Revolution as linear are about to be challenged. That's good, and the museum does it well.
The museum defines British America as a huge place with a dispersed, disparate population. Graphics, text, and objects imagine London's and King George's relationships with the colonies and what it meant to be a subject rather than a citizen. Inequality was assumed to be natural. Colonists, some two million, were completely unrepresented in Parliament yet were accustomed, and this varied by colony, to considerable local rule.
A revolution and a new country were inconceivable even in the early 1770s. Taxes decreed from London embittered colonists, but this hostility built slowly. There's plenty of good, in-depth information on how the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act (which taxed printed material), and the Townshend Acts (which taxed imports) raised hackles and temperatures. London responded to resistance in the form of the Boston Tea Party and boycotts with the Intolerable Acts in 1774. These authorized quartering troops in private homes, closed Boston harbor, and banned both mass meetings and the prosecution of British officials in local courts.
There's a good in-depth look at atrocity propaganda from both sides. One widely distributed broadsheet showed the Boston Massacre, another a British official tarred and feathered by a colonial mob. Steps away is a bird's-eye view of the battle at Lexington and Concord, step by step. There's a Bible a patriot bought in gratitude for surviving the Battle of Bunker Hill. Muskets and powder horns abound. There are pieces of the bronze equestrian statue of George III famously toppled in Lower Manhattan on July 9, 1776.
Red baby booties made from the coat of a British officer, wool, 1780s. (Museum of the American Revolution)
I loved the pair of red baby booties made from a British redcoat brought home by a Patriot soldier after the war. Small theater niches show short videos. The audience for the video on the Declaration of Independence sits in reproduction Windsor chairs as if we were there watching what was a hot, contested debate.
The museum does far too many programs on slavery and misrepresents slavery as a central and cruelly disregarded matter in the 1770s and '80s. It's a fact – ignored by the museum – that revolutionary heavy hitters, especially in the 1780s, set the abolition of slavery, a thing old as humanity, as a two- or three-generation priority. The country we know – the guarantor of peace and prosperity – wouldn't have happened had the abolition of slavery been tried in the days of the Revolution.
Provincial that I am, all my life I've stuck to a postage stamp, at least as a voter: Connecticut, northwestern Massachusetts, Manhattan, and ye olde Arlington in Vermont. The museum covers lots of bloodied acreage, but Vermont and the Green Mountain Boys don't figure. Ethan Allen, Seth Warner, and Remember Baker are local heroes. The Battle of Bennington, won by the Boys, set the stage for the triumph at Saratoga, or so we say.
Okay, the Battle of Bennington actually happened in Hoosick in New York, and Vermont didn't exist, but . . . still. We're marginalized, and our voices aren't heard. And what about Connecticut? It's the Constitution State, the Nutmeg State, named for our cheating merchants, the Land of Steady Habits, but also the Provision State. No battles were fought there, but Connecticut's privateers seized hundreds of British supply ships, emptied their hulls, and sent the bounty to Patriot troops.
It's a Philadelphia museum, and we New Englanders look at the Revolution as a local issue. This is a gift to me, as I learned so much about the war in the South, for instance. I'd never heard of the Battle of Cowpens in 1781, which was decisive. I think the museum needs to focus on the Revolution as a civil war. My family was entirely Patriot, as far as I know, but the dirty wars between local Loyalists and Patriots, fought town by town, need to be addressed.
Last year the museum got its millionth visitor. This confirms that people are hungry for good, layered history as opposed, say, to the junk history most kids in school get. I doubt the museum will ditch its expensive graphics and video program for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If it does so, however, I'd focus more on the leadership qualities that won the war and our freedom and less on the equality hustle. Equality is a mirage. Individuality and equality don't play well together. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the province of individuals.
I think the museum is a must-visit place. There are lots of muskets, so it feels like a gun museum sometimes. But over time art museums will – and should – lend their best things to this new museum so it can offer a better sense of the aesthetics of the times.
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Unfortunately, the curators chase the equality mirage; what they wish had happened isn't what happened.
Brian T. Allen is National Review's art critic.