If Reconstruction upended black legal, political and religious inequality, the WWFH overturned traditional assumptions about the HHM, namely the need for a fully- guided tour, period room furniture vignettes, and original artifacts. The chapter “The Rebirth of the Woodrow Wilson Family Home” details how the WWFH contested the outdated structure of HHMs. The small amount of Wilson and Reconstruction related material culture available forced the interpretative staff to redefine the role of furniture and collections in HHMs. If anything, the WWFH represents material culture philosophy coming full circle. Where museums were first designed to “focus on the rare and
41 Janice Williams Rutherford and Steven E. Shay, “Peopling the Age of Elegance: Reinterpreting Spokane’s Campbell House--A Collaboration,” The Public Historian 26, no. 3 (August 1, 2004): 32–33, 35–36, 40, 42, 45–46; Robert E. Pyatt, Tracie Rosser, and Kelly Powell, “Undergraduates as Science Museum Docents: Training Students to Be the Teachers Using Peer Led Team Learning,” The American Biology Teacher 71, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 16.
42 Anna Johnson et al., The Museum Educator’s Manual: Educators Share Successful Techniques, American Association for State and Local History Book Series (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2009), 2–3, 16, 20.
43 Scott A. Pattison and Lynn D. Dierking, “Staff-Mediated Learning in Museums: A Social Interaction Perspective,” Visitor Studies 16, no. 2 (July 2013): 118.
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exceptional” via objects, the WWFH uses minimal objects once again to place the emphasis on the rare and exceptional. Yet in this case, the rare and exceptional is presenting an accurate depiction of Reconstruction.44 This move away from an object- centered approach places the WWFH within the larger trends of this methodology’s decline in favor of a people-centered approach to interpreting objects.45 The Wilson home itself became the primary artifact, allowing for an interpretation focused on a specific place and period in time, Reconstruction-era Columbia. Most rooms contain a small number of objects owned by the Wilsons or related to the Reconstruction era.
Additionally, the home incorporates two digital interactives, Camille Drie’s 1872 map of downtown Columbia in the formal parlor and a family tree in the dining room. The informal parlor and final bedroom of the house contain exhibit films discussing the complex issues of constitutional changes, citizenship, and historical memory. Four supplementary videos on the home’s rehabilitation from 2005 through 2013 appear in the bathing room concluding the tour.
By creating a panel-driven Reconstruction exhibit, Historic Columbia resolved issues with only possessing five original Wilson family artifacts and the need for period room vignettes. Each exhibit room contains at least one exhibit panel. Weekend staff docent Halie Brazier “loved” the panels because, as a “very visual person,” they provided images for her to use on the tour and served as a quick-reference guide for names or details. She explained, “I love being able to see an image and either have the audience explain it or tell me what they see or say what’s different about it than what we would
44 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 2.
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normally see today.”46 However, the text panel heavy exhibit combined with the difficulty of the subject matter and traditional expectations of a guided-tour resulted in the decision to maintain the use of docents to interpret the twenty-first century museum with a semi-guided tour. Questions remain whether the semi-guided tour is the most effective way to experience the WWFH; however, the success of Louisiana’s Old State Capitol Museum suggests that using a structure as artifact and the “rich meaning” of its history as exhibit alongside multi-media and flexible guided approaches are successful tenets of a twenty-first century museum philosophy. The Capitol Museum is the only museum in the world devoted exclusively to Louisiana politics just as the WWFH is the only museum devoted to Reconstruction, and both come at their subjects first and foremost through the building.47
The next chapter “A New Way of Thinking: Docent Training and Learning about the Lost Cause” assesses the way in which museum administrators and docents changed their thinking to create a revolutionary HHM. Just as Reconstruction ushered in public education in the South, the WWFH reinvented Historic Columbia’s docent education and training process. Not only did the organization offer a variety of required workshops covering history, public history practices, and racial and cultural sensitivity, but it also evaluated and thoroughly vetted each docent to conduct tours. The majority of Historic Columbia’s volunteers did not complete the training process. Many docents immediately rejected the new home and training, often because they held a negative understanding of Reconstruction or attachment to the previous Wilson interpretation. A few docents grew
46 Halie Brazier, interview by Jennifer Whitmer Taylor, digital recording, January 27, 2016.
47 J. Daniel D’Oney, “Louisiana’s Old State Capitol Museum: Castle on the Mississippi,” in Defining
Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities, ed. Amy K. Levin (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2007), 78–79; Quote from Coleman, Historic House Museums, 17.
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resentful of the Reconstruction-heavy script and evaluation demands or challenged the interpretation by minimizing Reconstruction in their tours. The docents who excelled were women, educators, and advanced degree holders. Over time, some docents
embraced the changes once they saw the museum’s success or interpretation evolve based on feedback from docents. Docents came into the process with their own Lost Cause indoctrination but used the training and their tours to combat these preconceived notions. Remarkably, docents simultaneously reconstructed their memory of Reconstruction and taught visitors how to do the same. However, the long-term problems with docents that struggled with the unique tour style and complex material or opposed the Reconstruction interpretation fuels a debate about whether HHMs should rely on volunteer docents at all. The chapter “Aren’t I a Citizen: Interpreting Violence” places the WWFH within the context of HHMs, especially southern ones, and their tradition of limiting or
excluding narratives of non-elite whites. The WWFH incorporated historiography, census records, architecture, image analysis, and docent training to give unknown domestic workers and black female educators depicted in the butler’s pantry, dining room, and the education bedroom “agency.” But in the effort to illuminate the lives of working class domestics, some docents and visitors succumbed to the Downton Abbey effect, which blinded them to the unique racial circumstances that affected workers lives beyond their economic and social status. No docent overtly objected to the mandatory language and cultural sensitivity training. In fact, paid weekend staff, often with public history
backgrounds and education, welcomed it. However, some volunteers believed the session unnecessary while others received their first exposure to concepts such as “white
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that either use annihilation or relative incorporation to discuss black experiences, either eliminating these narratives all together or including them intermittently; however, as a radical HHM the WWFH fell short because the interpretation neglected scholarly knowledge on the violence and sexual exploitation women of color experienced during Reconstruction. Nor did the training adequately prepare docents to discuss this unsettling but necessary history.48 Nonetheless, script revisions, docent evaluations, and docent oral histories show that docents were at their most comfortable and successful overturning archaic memories through their interpretation of political and domestic terrorism. For some, discussing white violence against black citizens made them acutely aware of white privilege and their family and community ties to violence.
Docents and the interpretative team struggled to craft a narrative in the final exhibit bedroom that adequately dealt with Woodrow Wilson’s white supremacy. This crusade to improve the most difficult interpretative space in the WWFH comprises the chapter “Writing History with Lightning: Interpreting Memory and White Supremacy.” The team and docents continuously revised numerous introductions and conclusions for the space in an effort to convey the complexity of Wilson’s legacy and deconstruct Reconstruction memory nationally and in South Carolina. This included docents having some exposure to the historiography of Reconstruction and Woodrow Wilson’s place within it. The interpretation confronted Wilson’s stance on segregation and his viewing of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist blockbuster The Birth of Nation (Birth), topics other Wilson homes rarely addressed; but, lynching and white terror against black citizens are themes that connect the overthrow of Reconstruction, Birth and the epidemic of lynching
48 Jennifer Eichstedt, “Museums and (In)Justice,” in Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Hugh H. Genoways (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006), 127–29, 131.
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during Wilson’s presidency. Yet, lynching was deemed too controversial and graphic for the tour. Additionally, docents were reluctant to frame Wilson as a racist along the lines of fellow politicians in South Carolina such as Benjamin Tillman or “Cotton Ed” Smith. Again, the WWFH never quite crossed the threshold of radicalism, in this case speaking truthfully about white supremacy as it is understood in academia. Even though much improved, some aspects of the WWFH interpretation illustrated the powerful, even if frequently covert, hold white supremacy still maintains on institutions and interpretations. However, in the wake of the Charleston massacre in the summer of 2015 that left nine people slain at the hands of a white supremacist and nationwide student protests on college campuses addressing overt and institutional racism, Wilson’s memory and white supremacy came under attack. These events allowed Historic Columbia to address the issue of Wilson’s relationship with white supremacy minimized by the original reinterpretation. Workshops with docents generated new conversations within the institution outside of public view, which continued between docent and visitor in the public space of the WWFH.
The final core chapter “Engaging Reconstruction as a Civil Rights Movement for Twenty-First Century Visitors” treats visitor reception using evaluation data and docent interviews. The exceptional quality of the docents and the exhibit resulted in
overwhelmingly positive feedback from visitors. The vast majority ranked the tour as excellent, and nearly all were engaged. Many visitors were exposed to Reconstruction in depth for the first time and corrected their previous understanding of the period. A quarter of visitors walked away from the tour having a greater appreciation for people different from themselves and having their beliefs or thoughts challenged or changed.
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The exceptions included some Millennials as well as a few Lost Cause promoters and visitors expressing LGBTQ bias.The chapter and museum demonstrate Americans are ready and open to consuming Reconstruction history at heritage sites on the 150th anniversary of Reconstruction’s implementation.
The WWFH demanded relevancy as it eschewed its presidential shrine origins and the political, social and partial truths that style of interpretation avoided. Rather than be trapped in a cliché dollhouse-style interpretation with voyeuristic vignettes that serve as a “repetitive time stamp” set to the average afternoon typically depicted in HHMs, the WWFH answered the call for these sites to be “turned upside down and inside out” for the sake of survival.49 When the deteriorating home closed in 2005, the WWFH was guilty of all these charges. But with the WWFH’s reopening, Historic Columbia produced an exhibit and tour that when combined with the voices of public historians, docents and visitors serve as a guide to revolutionize the obsolete house museum. The process of this transformation from presidential shrine to Reconstruction museum simultaneously demonstrates the unique challenges of correcting alternative memory and the boundaries of discussing violence and oppression perpetuated against black citizens by white
Americans. The difficulty was not only in initiating conversations with the public but in promoting honest dialogues and best practices within the institution itself.
One docent “really wanted to be a part” of the WWFH, “in some way” as it transformed into the nation’s first museum of Reconstruction. Since college, the docent felt both North and South knew “very little” about this period of American history. The native South Carolinian recognized southerners espoused an interpretation that did not
49 The authors lay out five critiques of house museums. The new approach of the WWFH challenges three of these. Vagnone and Ryan, Anarchist’s Guide, 40–41, 142.
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accurately reflect the project of Reconstruction. Knowing the subject’s importance made the docent “really kind of excited.” This excitement and enthusiasm has yet to recede because located “in Columbia, South Carolina and the state that was the first to secede from the Union” is the “first museum dedicated to Reconstruction, which I think is wonderful.”50 Although the first museum of Reconstruction, it is also part of a growing movement to commemorate Reconstruction in the state. In his final days in office, President Barack Obama, with a stroke of his pen and the authority of the Antiquities Act, designated four properties, including buildings associated with Reconstruction’s first freedmen’s school Penn Center and a site where enslaved people listened as they were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, part of a federal
Reconstruction monument in Beaufort County. The Mitchelville Preservation Project on nearby Hilton Head Island is in its infancy but is working to commemorate the first self- governed freedmen’s community, which was destroyed in the hurricane of 1893. The WWFH and South Carolina currently lead the initiative to memorialize Reconstruction. All of these state and federal projects will learn from one another, and in turn will be able to show the South and the nation the value of commemorating Reconstruction.51
50 Docent Doe, interview by Jennifer Whitmer Taylor, digital recording, February 17, 2016. The author conducted an interview with one docent who wished to remain anonymous. That oral history will be cited as Docent Doe.
51 Jennifer Schuessler, “Taking Another Look at the Reconstruction Era,” New York Times, August 24, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/arts/park-service-project-would-address-the-reconstruction- era.html?ref=arts; Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, “The Perfect Spot for a Reckoning with Reconstruction,” The Washington Post, October 7, 2016, sec. Opinions,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-perfect-spot-for-a-reckoning-with-
reconstruction/2016/10/07/b884c1c0-7f60-11e6-9070-5c4905bf40dc_story.html?utm_term=.fcac7e29844c; Emma Dumain, “Just Under the Wire, Obama Establishes National Monument to Reconstruction Era in Beaufort County,” Post and Courier, January 12, 2017, http://www.postandcourier.com/news/just-under- the-wire-obama-establishes-national-monument-to-reconstruction/article_cb26b062-d91b-11e6-bf8b- 7fd195453416.html; Page Putnam Miller and Jennifer Whitmer Taylor, “Postscript to ‘Reconstructing Memory,’” Muster from the Journal of the Civil War Era, March 7, 2017,
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