Boo hoo hoo
I took the tour of Monticello last year and found it to be amazing. And I was happily surprised to see that they had taken great care to show Jefferson in all his genius but also all his moral obtuseness. I thought it was so well done, balancing his tremendous global influence on the ideas that we all hold dear about democracy, equality and freedom with the jarring inconsistency of his aristocratic background and dependence on enslaved people to make it possible. They handled all of it and the multi-racial people on my tour, from all over the world and the US, all seemed to be on the same page as I was.
But naturally, the wingnuts are having a fit. (When are they not?)
Monticello is going woke — and trashing Thomas Jefferson’s good name in the process.
The Charlottesville, Virginia home of the Founding Father and America’s third president is one of our best-known national monuments, familiar from its appearance on the nickel since 1938.
But the hilltop mansion designed by Jefferson himself, once preserved as a tribute to the author of the Declaration of Independence, now offers visitors a harangue on the horrors of slavery.
“The whole thing has the feel of propaganda and manipulation,” Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the libertarian Brownstone Institute and a recent visitor, told The Post. “People on my tour seemed sad and demoralized.”
The new emphasis is the culmination of a 10-year effort to balance the historical record, officials of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the estate, have said.
But visitors complain that employees go out of their way to belittle Jefferson and his life.
“The tour guides play ‘besmirchment derby,’ never missing a chance to defame this brilliant, complex man,” Stephen Owen of Enochville, NC, wrote on Facebook.
“Half of the comments on Jefferson were critical,” wrote William Bailes of Chester, Virginia in an online review after visiting in June. “Even my 11-year-old daughter noticed the bias.”
Well, yeah. That’s historically accurate! He was a brilliant, complex man who also had a mercurial personality —- and he owned slaves!!! And he knew it was wrong so he deserves that criticism!
Tucker described his guide last month as “surly and dismissive” of Jefferson’s accomplishments.
“Someone asked if Jefferson had built a machine in the house, and the guide said, ‘Nah, he never built anything, he was just a tinkerer,’” Tucker recalled.
“It was ridiculous. He was the architect of this house and of the University of Virginia — what are you talking about?”
Oh what nonsense. On my tour they spent half an hour, at least, talking about his genius inventions and architectural accomplishments, including the house. I doubt this one was much different.
More whining:
In the past, the managers of Monticello sanitized Jefferson’s history for the 25 million tourists who have flocked there since it was opened to the public in 1923. References to slavery were few, and signs labeled “Servants’ Quarters” marked sites where Jefferson’s slaves once lived.
“Our goal is to present an honest, inclusive history of Monticello in all its aspects as well as Jefferson’s contributions to the founding of the country,” Jenn Lyon, a Monticello spokesperson, said.
But on a visit this week, The Post found, the grievance has become the predominant theme at Monticello, from the ticket booth in the visitor’s center — decorated with a contemporary painting of Jefferson’s weeping slaves — to its final gift-shop display.
Not even the president’s world-famous music room, an octagonal space carefully restored to its 18th century grandeur and decorated with Gilbert Stuart’s original presidential portrait and classical busts, is safe from revisionist disapproval.
A grim modern painting of a faceless figure with a matte black head now looms over the room, positioned so that it directly confronts visitors as they enter the mansion.
The huge 4-foot-by-5-foot work, a new addition to Monticello’s collection, was “commissioned in honor of Juneteenth last month,” said Susan Woodward, The Post’s guide on Wednesday. “It’s quite provocative, I do believe,” she added.
The figure’s “hands and face of featureless tar” represent “the faceless lives of all who served in bondage, witnessing but never recognized,” an identifying card explains.
The anachronistic artwork is just one of many jarring signs of over-the-top politicization at Jefferson’s beloved home.
Guides begin their outdoor tours of Monticello’s gardens and grounds by invoking the Native Americans who once lived on the land.
“How does that land come to be in European possession?” a guide named Justin asked an unresponsive group of vacationers from Germany. “A lot of violence, right?” he prodded.
Placards with conversation starters on the topic of civil rights festoon a patio outside the snack shop. “Is ‘all men are created equal’ being lived up to in our country today?” one reads. “When will we know when it is?” it continues — supplying a negative answer to the first question.
It’s an educational tour of a place that represents both the best and the worst of America embodied in one person. I’m sorry if that’s not comfortable for people but they need to grow the fuck up. That anachronistic painting (which I didn’t see last year) sounds like a very sophisticated way to express the continuity of the inequity that sprang from slavery.
It goes on to complain about the books in the gift shop by Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates without mentioning that there are literally thousands and thousands of items in that huge shop that have to do with everything from horticulture to architecture to various foods and clothing and everything else you can imagine. But I guess they couldn’t see any of that because they were so offended by some Black authors opining on the Black experience in America on the site of a former slave plantation.
They also complain about the use of the word “enslaved” to describe the well … enslaved people and they object to warnings on some of the exhibits, such as those on the quarters where Sally Hemmings and her children (Jefferson’s children too) lived could be hard to take, which they were. After looking at the upstairs of the lavish mansion and then seeing where she lived, you can’t help but be a bit shaken.
I wondered when I went through it if wingnuts would be offended by all this historical reality and of course they are. They still want to celebrate the confederacy so naturally they’d hate any attempt to tell the true story of one of the most important American founders, incorporating all of his contradictions.
But Jefferson is America, warts and all, and they have so little real patriotism that they just can’t face the fact that we have never been a perfect union but had some ideals worth pursuing. They can’t accept that it’s the job of real patriots to at least keep trying to live up to them.