ABSTRACT
WHILE THE NATION CELEBRATED Jamestown's tercentenary in 1907, Brnton Parish Church was being reconsecrated in nearby Williamsburg after a two-year restoration, one whose donors included Andrew Carnegie, Theodore Roosevelt, and King Edward VII. In his remarks, the Reverend William A.R.Goodwin told the assembled dignitaries of the illustrious history of the former colonial capital. To mark the occasion, Goodwin assembled a commemorative volume, in which he repeated his belief that "the spirit of the days of long ago haunts and hallows the ancient city and the homes of its honored dead; a spirit that stirs the memory and fires the imagination" of the living. At a time of social and economic flux, however, he declared that Williamsburg's inheritance held "priceless value," asking his audience "to guard these ancient landmarks and resist the spirit of rnthless innovation which threatens to rob the city of its unique distinction and its charms." He stressed, "No cost should be spared to preserve them." )
An influential member of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (1889), the nation's first statewide preservation organization, Goodwin was surely an important figure in preservation history. In his chronicle of the movement, the historian Charles B.Hosmer Jr. emphasized his courting of John D.Rockefeller Jr. as he convinced the magnate in 1926 to bankroll the most costly, trendsetting enterprise in the annals of historic preservation, the reconstrnction of Williamsburg. As such, according to Hosmer, he helped the movement make the transition from the APVA's supposed amateurism to Colonial Williamsburg's professionalism. Like many, Hosmer was awed by the project's architectural expertise, archaeological research, and business wizardry, all of which he used to define professionalism. 2 Yet a preservationist like Goodwin should be primarily understood as a skilled warrior in the cultural battles of his day, for the story of historic preservation is essentially concerned less with methodology, whether amateur or professional, than with a contest over the shaping of present and future. Cultural politics defines the meaning of historic preservation. After all, as Shakespeare said, "What is past is prologue"-but the question is, Whose past? 3
Goodwin's work falls into a well-established tradition, one that achieved national attention half a century earlier when the fate of George Washington's plantation was unclear. The modern preservation movement began in 1853 with the formation of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union, the first national preservation society in the United States. The MVLA's efforts are best understood in the context of the political, economic, and social conflicts of the day, which is to say the making of the era's cultural politics. Apparently, after a syndicate had proposed turning the deteriorated estate into a hotel with a racetrack and saloon to lure the nouveaux riches, Ann Pamela Cunningham rallied to prevent its corruption by founding the MVLA. "Pilgrims to the shrine of pure patriotism," she wrote in the Charleston Mercury, would find Mount Vernon "forgotten, [and] surrounded by blackening smoke and degrading machinery!-where money, only money enters the thought; and gold, only gold, moves the heart or nerves the arm." Like many southerners reared in an agrarian, aristocratic tradition, she pictured the North as a land of Mammon, where cities, factories, and debauchery prevailed. 4
In Cunningham's day, most women of property and social standing were influenced by the tradition of republican motherhood. While ladies safeguarded the home's moral authority, and their public activity was thus limited to that sphere, men were busy in the increasingly aggressive, but to many corrupting, world of business and politics. Influenced by domesticity and acting as a counterweight to the impersonal market economy, women developed the philosophy of personalism. Whether on an individual or social level, they sought intimate bonds where personal attachments were prized and fostered. Thinking that those sentiments were linked to material and natural things, women commonly focused their interests on the homes, furnishings, manners, and landscapes associated with the revered founders of the nation, leaders of their community, or patriarchs and matriarchs of their family. An artifact could represent such values as individual character, love of family, or public duty. Personalism was not limited to women, however. Even into the twentieth century, many gentlemen subscribed, but cynics dismissed their alleged romanticism as impractical and unscientific. 5
Further shaping Cunningham's crusade in the l850s was the vicious debate between the North and the South. Repudiating those who clamored to either limit or end slavery, she claimed that the agitators had forgotten the Founding Fathers and put the national union in jeopardy. She heralded Washington as a model for the ages. But as the unmarried daughter of a South Carolina planter, she left the public speaking to such gentlemen as Edward Everett, a former Massachusetts statesman, diplomat, and Harvard president. Having just retired from the Senate, he raised money for the MVLA by presenting an oration on the character of Washington some 130 times to packed lecture halls. He deplored his era's sectionalism, as well as Boston's politics and immigrants-as did Cunningham, who condemned the "degeneracy... who crowd our metropolis." They both revealed their disillusionment, if not disgust, with politics, and imagined a happier, holier time. Ofcourse, much oftheir thinking was the invention ofmythmakers and ideologues, but the MVLA would reify it through Mount Vernon, which it purchased in 1858.6
After the Civil War, Cunningham repeated her criticism through a number of tried-and-true guises, most obviously by deifying the Founders and sentimentalizing early American history. While tradition-minded ladies thus expressed their message through innuendo and analogy, their gentlemen openly used landmarks and heritage to combat perceived foes, whether populists, working-class radicals, or immigrants who challenged America's historical order. Cunningham's influence rippled through women's society and inspired others to form such groups as the Valley Forge Association (1878), the Ladies' Hermitage Association (1889), and the APVA. As was the case, gender segregation restricted women from the more powerful, male-only, historical and patriotic societies. Most preservation work would be regarded as women's task, but men influenced its ideological content.
