Persons of Stature and the Passing Parade: Egalitarian Dilemmas at Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg

immune to self-reflection when it comes to social class, just as American scholars shy away from analytic reflection on it. On the other hand, Americans love to talk about “identity,” and are seemingly expert in parsing its dimensions— national, regional, racial, ethnic, generational, religious, sexual. Indeed, features of social location and personhood that sociologists once routinely associated with class, such as “lifestyle” (or consumption patterns), educational attainments, and occupation, are more likely to be understood by contemporary Americans as markers of personal identity than as consequences of social forces. Identity is the central concept of American natives’ social theory because it pictures personhood as a function of individual choice. The social cohesion that identity generates is understood to be natural and automatic (of the “birds of a feather” variety) and, hence, apolitical. On the other hand, to talk too persistently of social class elicits accusations of unpatriotic politics, of fomenting “class warfare” and jeopardizing a unified national identity. The new critical literature on American history museums reflects this pattern of native social thought. The last two decades have seen an enormous burst of scholarship on museums of all types, in all parts of the world. This trend has brought together scholars from many disciplines and countries, both in universities and in museums, to reexamine the museum as a central institution of modern society. Museums, as institutions, became newly visible precisely at the moment when “the politics of culture” became an important issue in the humanities and social sciences (Whisnant 1983; Handler 1988; Williams 1991), and when “identity” came to rival “culture” as the central term for discussing what was at stake in those politics (Gleason 1983; Handler 1994). It was as if, some time in the middle of the 1980s, a light bulb went on in people’s heads: “Eureka,” they said, “museums represent culture! They collect and preserve artifacts that objectify collective identities. No wonder they are contested terrains, contact zones. If we want to study the politics of cultural identity, where better to do it than in the museum?”1 As the new critical literature on museums developed, two strands emerged. In the dominant strand, people studied the content of museum representations in relation to struggles (both inside and outside the museum) over identity. At issue was whose culture (or identity, or history) was portrayed (or marginalized), in what terms, and under whose control. In the second strand (which, though influential, was taken up by far fewer people), scholars focused less on representation than on presentation. They asked how museums, as authoritative social institutions, presented the cultural materials they controlled to shape the ideology and behavior of their audiences. Work in this vein did not ignore the cultural content of museum displays, but it was not interested in the celebration of identity as such. Rather, its overriding theoretical concern was hegemony in a class hierarchy: how did elites use institutions like museums to cultivate citizens who would behave in ways that reaffirmed the social status quo?2 Taking its cue from the second strand of museum studies, the present essay examines 5