This long weekend my family took one of our patented mini-cations. (One of the great benefits of living in New Jersey is that there are several really interesting places within a four hour drive of our house.) This time we revisited Baltimore, site of our first family vacation when our daughters were still infants.
We had a blast in the Charm City, but my wife really wanted to see Mount Vernon while we were in the area, and President's Day (when entry is free) seemed like the perfect time to go. We are both history teachers with a critical understanding of the past, so we were also a little wary of how the site would be interpeted, especially because it is held in a private trust.
I had last been there 33 years ago in 1987 when I was a budding history nerd and pretty much overwhelmed at being where George Washington had stepped. This time around I knew a lot more about Washington, as well as the deeper context around his life and times, especially slavery. My daughters, who have been getting a more critical view of American history than I got as a child, even questioned why people thought he was a great person, since he had enslaved others. (A fair question!)
We saw the mansion, but also the slave quarters and places where enslaved people worked, something that had been totally excluded my last time there. My children experienced the visit less as a celebration of a great American, but more like a visit to a historic plantation, and I am glad for that. It took me years to expunge the mythology that had been implanted in me during childhood, it will be easier for them to get a clearer view of the world without having to clear away all that garbage. I was glad to see the experience of slaves represented there, when it had been totally absent in my childhood. However, that experience was not nearly foregrounded enough. Enslaved people were the vast majority of those who had ever lived at Mount Vernon.
One thing remained constant from both visits: the gorgeous view of the Potomac River from the back lawn of the mansion. It was something I remembered well from my first visit. The weather today was clear and sunny, and unseasonably warm. It made that view about as sublime as you could possibly imagine.
As we walked down to the farm area and the replica slave quarters, I thought some more about that view. Washington got to enjoy it, but I wondered how his enslaved workers experienced it. Were they allowed to linger and look at its beauty on a gorgeous Sunday when they didn't have to work from sunup to sundown? Was that back lawn off limits? Did the servants who worked in the house steal an extra glance at it in the course of their days?
Another thing I noticed was a small but substantial number of people wearing MAGA gear, including some teens in a school group wearing bright red bucket hats with the MAGA slogan. The "father of his country" was a slave owner, so how could I surprised that his home would be visited by those who wish to maintain a white nationalist order? Mount Vernon's imperfect reckoning with Washington's past well reflects the failure of that reckoning in the coutnry writ large. We will continue to feel the consequences.
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