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Jewish World Review April 14, 2009 / 20 Nisan 5769 Do we really need interactive exhibits to bring Jefferson to life? By Anne Applebaum http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Odd though it sounds, I can confirm that there is deep satisfaction to be had in watching one's child clutch the pen of Thomas Jefferson's "polygraph machine," steady it with his grubby hands, and carefully draw two identically wobbly circles. The machine in question wasn't really Jefferson's own, of course; it is a copy, part of the children's exhibit at the new Monticello visitor center, which officially opens April 15. Whether it was new or old, my 8-year-old couldn't have cared less. He instantly understood the principle of the thing — the pen is attached to a metal contraption, which is itself attached to another pen — as well as why Jefferson called it "the finest invention of the present age": In an era before Xerox machines, the polygraph automatically made copies of his written correspondence. For a man who wrote some 19,000 letters, this was a real time-saver. When I first visited Monticello more than 30 years ago, there was no polygraph machine to play with. Inside the house, one could gaze, in silence, upon the original. One could also hear the guide's reverent description of how Jefferson had invented it, along with the seven-day clock in the hall, the dumbwaiter that brought wine from the cellar, and the revolving bookstand. Nowadays, the tour guides agree — disappointingly — that Jefferson's only original invention was a rather dull plow. All the quirkier gadgets at Monticello were either adapted or copied from something else. Other aspects of the Monticello visit have changed. In the new exhibition halls and on the house tour, a lot more is said about the people whom our guide called the "enslaved residents" of the estate. Some of them, it turns out, built those gadgets by hand. Others helped bring Jefferson's architectural, agricultural, and culinary visions to life. One of them, Sally Hemings, may have been the mother of some his children. The foundations of slave cabins are clearly marked in the garden, and the remains of slave pottery and tools, recent archeological finds, are prominently displayed. It makes for a different experience from the one I remembered. Nowadays, hagiography is out. Historical reconstruction is in. Silent contemplation of the great man's possessions is out. Recent scholarship about those possessions is firmly in. Interactive games and objects are in, too. This is not unique to Monticello — Mozart's house in Vienna has undergone a similar transformation — but it is particularly striking at the home of our third president. The piety that once surrounded all relics of all Founding Fathers has given way to galleries where adults can press buttons to read Jefferson quotations and then see the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence those quotes inspired as well as a "discovery room" where children can build mini-Monticellos with wooden blocks. Some people won't like it, and I understand their skepticism, at least in theory. The words "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are part of our national DNA. Do we really need to reread that famous preamble on a screen or to hold the polygraph in our hands in order to understand how it works? Actually, we do. Monticello's longtime curator Susan Stein reckons that many Americans who visit the house no longer know Jefferson's words, let alone the way they have echoed around the world. Besides, as an Easter-weekend activity, Monticello now has a lot of competition: amusement parks, Monsters vs. Aliens, Grand Theft Auto. Every generation rewrites its history books, so why shouldn't every generation redesign its museums, too? In practice, the new Monticello exhibitions are superb. The honest discussion of slavery makes Jefferson more complicated, more interesting, and more real than he used to be. The displays of his meticulous account books and daily weather records show off his appetite for knowledge as well as his persnickety love of detail. The high-tech exhibits take some getting used to, but at least they are aimed well above the eighth-grade level to which most American museums aspire. There is something for everybody: In one room, I watched a Muslim woman reading about Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom on one wall while some children gleefully stamped on the floor in order to make Jeffersonian quotations appear on the wall opposite. I won't say, "Jefferson would love it," because, given his love of rural peace and quiet, I suspect he wouldn't. Still, it seems appropriate — and rather a relief in these gloomy times — to report on the successful modernization of a place that was, after all, built as a monument to progress. Jefferson's ideas have kept up with the times; it's great that his house has, too. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. APPLEBAUM'S LATEST Gulag: A History   Nearly 30 million prisoners passed through the Soviet Union's labor camps in their more than 60 years of operation. This remarkable volume, the first fully documented history of the gulag, describes how, largely under Stalin's watch, a regulated, centralized system of prison labor-unprecedented in scope-gradually arose out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution. Fueled by waves of capricious arrests, this prison labor came to underpin the Soviet economy. JWR's Applebaum, a former Warsaw correspondent for the Economist and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, draws on newly accessible Soviet archives as well as scores of camp memoirs and interviews with survivors to trace the gulag's origins and expansion Sales help fund JWR. Comment on JWR contributor Anne Applebaum's column by clicking here. Previously: 04/07/09: No Nukes? No Thanks: Obama's odd obsession with universal nuclear disarmament 03/31/09: What's Loud, Unnecessary, and Costs $75 Million? 03/23/09: Ctrl-Alt-Diplomacy 03/03/09: European Disunion 02/24/09: Who cares what Hillary Clinton says to China's leaders about human rights? 02/17/09: Witless protection 02/10/09: Our Ticket Out of Afghanistan 01/27/09:Why some foreigners can't believe Obama won the presidency fair and square 01/20/09: A Flight Test for All of Us 01/14/09: Europe's New Cold War 01/07/09: Pointless Peace Proposals 12/30/08: The magnificent rhetorical legacy of the Founding Fathers 12/23/08: Do riots in Athens portend demonstrations in Paris and Cincinnati? 12/16/08: Breach of Trust: Bernard Madoff's massive fraud will cripple American capitalism 12/09/08: In praise of charismatic politicians 12/03/08: Moscow's Empire of Dust 11/20/08: Getting Past Mythmaking In Georgia 11/12/08: In Praise of Political Rock Stars 10/03/08: Election Day myths you must resist 09/30/08: Not just a metaphor: Lehman Brothers was economic's 9/11 09/04/08: Class of '64 08/28/08: Did Hillary really help the Barack cause? 08/27/08: ‘Show of Power,’ Indeed 08/19/08: What Is Russia Afraid Of? 08/13/08: When China Starved 08/11/08: Two of the world's rising powers are strutting their stuff 08/05/08: How Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago changed the world 07/29/08:‘The Hour of Europe’ Tolls Again … But are European politicians up to the task? 07/15/08: Why Does Obama Want To Campaign in Berlin? 07/01/08: Citizen Athletes: How did a guy who can't speak Polish end up scoring Poland's only goal of Euro 2008? 06/24/08: Why do we expect presidential candidates to be kind? 06/17/08: Pity the Poor Eurocrats 06/12/08: Is the World Ready for a Black American President? 05/28/08: The Busiest Generation: America seems to value its children's status and achievements over their happiness 05/20/08: Leave Hitler Out of It: The craze for injecting the Nazis into political debate must end 05/13/08: A Drastic Remedy: The case for intervention in Burma 05/07/08: A Warning Shot From Moscow? 04/23/08: Radio to stay tuned to 04/17/08: China learns the price of a few weeks of global attention 04/01/08: Head scarves are potent political symbols 03/26/08: The Olympics are the perfect place for a protest 03/19/08: Could Tibet bring down modern China? 03/12/08: Have political autobiographies made us more susceptible to fake memoirs? 03/05/08: Why does Russia bother to hold elections? 02/20/08: Kosovo is a textbook example of the law of unintended consequences 02/06/08: A Craven Canterbury Tale 02/06/08: French prez' whirlwind romance reminds voters of his political recklessness © 2008, Anne Applebaum

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