Colonial Williamsburg 2.0

Andrew O'Hehir observes how the "Republican Disneyland" now confronts America's imperfect past:

This might sound far-fetched, but Colonial Williamsburg, in its subtly transformed 21st-century mode, feels like a covert battleground in America’s culture wars. It’s where an overwhelmingly white and conservative audience meets the post-Howard Zinn cutting edge of history. (How much attention they pay, and how much they like it, is another question altogether.) If your ideas about the place are based on that grade-school trip you took with your grandparents, I can assure you that the effect is pretty different now. Beneath its manicured and bewigged surfaces, Colonial Williamsburg is trying to break free of its stodgy traditions and bring its visitors face to face with the internal conflicts and contradictions of the Revolutionary War era and their ripple effects across politics and society today.  ...

Historians Richard Handler and Eric Gable dubbed Williamsburg the “Republican Disneyland” in 1997, and the label stuck because it rings true to this day, long after the blithe racism of Williamsburg’s early programming has been transcended. I saw more National Rifle Association, Marine Corps and Tea Party-type bumper stickers in our first morning at Williamsburg than I see in New York City in a year.  ...

Every article ever written about Colonial Williamsburg brings up the overwhelming whiteness of the visitor population. Given that the venue was literally segregated during the Jim Crow era (blacks were admitted only one day a week, and the actors playing slaves lived in separate quarters), made no effort to include programming on African-American life until the 1980s, and cannot avoid focusing on the single most painful aspect of African-American history, it’s not exactly shocking that black people aren’t breaking down the doors.  ...

It’s possible to ignore the messaging at Colonial Williamsburg and just admire the clip-clopping horses, the cutesy handicrafts and the rather anodyne pronouncements of George Washington, who projects just the air of reserve and rectitude you expect. But over the course of a Williamsburg day, we are repeatedly reminded that the magnificent Enlightenment rhetoric of the Revolutionary age came with asterisks, and did not apply to African-Americans, women or Indians (described in the Declaration of Independence as “merciless savages”).