The timeline for the first training program was a logistical nightmare. Six training sessions launched in November 2013 lasted three months because Page 87 →of breaks for the holiday season and uncharacteristic winter weather in Columbia. Training began as the tour and exhibit was finalized, leaving docents to engage with an incomplete exhibit and tour script.⁵ To compensate, Historic Columbia circulated a fifty-page exhibit document for docents to reference. The organization also arranged a session with small groups to address general questions about the exhibit content and analyze exhibit images, such as a class of Black women attending USC’s Normal School and Wilson’s drawings from his childhood experiences during Reconstruction.⁶ Training also devoted several days to an “open house” viewing of the ongoing installation and walkthroughs of MoRE demonstrating the tour. To accommodate the schedules of volunteers, Historic Columbia offered two days a week as options for each session. Volunteers could also attend the weekend staff sessions. Weekend staff, who had full-time jobs or were history graduate students at USC, had an alternate weekend schedule. Docents concluded training by presenting a tour to staff and friends. In total interpreters had to attend and complete ten active training requirements.⁷

The first sessions used academic lectures and preassigned reading material to tackle the subjects of both Reconstruction and Woodrow Wilson. Holding these paired sessions trained docents to meet the dual interpretive needs of the house. The first session on Reconstruction identified for docents the various timelines for the era, different Reconstruction plans among the executive and congressional branches, three new amendments to the US Constitution, the gains made by Black Americans, and the Lost Cause. Docents analyzed images from the exhibit and political data that challenged the Reconstruction myth of Black politicians’ ineptness. These sources demonstrated an economically diverse, biracial coalition of Republican legislators.⁸ A ninety-minute presentation and Q&A by two USC history professors in the second training session reinforced two key interpretive ideas of the MoRE: that Reconstruction could be taught through time and place, via a teenage Woodrow Wilson’s experience in Columbia, and that the tour could speculate how the era shaped him. Long-time Historic Columbia consultant and MoRE scholarship committee member Dr. Thomas Brown spoke about Columbia during Wilson’s teenage years—the zenith of Reconstruction. Tour docents walked away with content to define Reconstruction and its goals, achievements, and demise as well as why this history matters.⁹ Fellow scholarship committee member and Wilson scholar Ken Clements argued that although Wilson never wrote a memoir or autobiography, docents could logically speculate whether Tommy Wilson wanted to emulate or compete with his father, his “first and most important teacher” who taught him the value of oration and leadership. Likewise, docent dialogue peppered through the tour could help visitors critically think about how Wilson’s relationship to Page 88 →women shaped his views on the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified during his presidency. He was a self-described “momma’s boy.” He criticized his female students and opposed women’s suffrage. Did he think of women as emotionally nurturing but intellectually inferior?¹⁰

Docent retention was an immediate problem. Twenty-six docents attended the first training session, but by the second session, attendance decreased by half. Some made up this work, while others in attendance began to drop the training program.¹¹ Docents understood the timing of training was unavoidable and that training takes time to do well but expressed their weariness of both the training length and break in continuity during the holiday season.¹² Volunteer docents were also far more likely to resist content in sessions on engagement and cultural sensitivity than weekend docents. This likely fueled the training exodus as well.

Volunteer docents interpreted the last two sessions on public engagement and cultural sensitivity by Dr. Daniella Cook, then assistant professor in the Department of Instruction and Teacher Education at USC, as more radical and less helpful than lectures or shadowing sessions. Cook was the only person of color who led training sessions, which were designed to encourage “thought and behavior that promotes greater interaction” between docent and the public.¹³ While she included twenty-first-century language and scholarship about race, learning was the central thread. Cook’s first session, “Engaging the Public,” offered techniques to facilitate twenty-first-century learning goals, including critical thinking. She introduced docents to six points regarding adult learning theory:

1. Adults have a need to know why they should learn something.
2. Adults have a deep need to be self-directing.
3. Adults have more experience, and of a different quality, than young people.
4. Adults must see a need to know or be able to do.
5. Adults enter into a learning experience with a task-centered, problem-centered, or life-centered orientation.
6. Adults are motivated to learn by motivators both extrinsic (i.e., promotion) and intrinsic (i.e., self-esteem).¹⁴

Cook’s presentation also included ideas on how docents could apply inquiry based learning and engagement theory strategies. Her coverage of Benjamin Bloom’s revised taxonomy model gave staff and docents tasks and verbs to describe the higher order of thinking skills (creating, evaluating, analyzing) and the lower order of thinking skills (applying, understanding, and remembering). By applying effective questioning, docents could draft a Page 89 →tour that promoted both learning and higher order thinking. Effective questioning required docents give visitors time to think and a specific function for each question, such as listing and grouping. Below are a few examples of Cook’s function questions:

1. Clarifying: Could you give me an example?
2. Refocusing: How does that refer to our earlier … ?
3. Summarizing: Can you put that into a single sentence?
4. Labeling: Can you suggest one or two words to label?
5. Interpretive: What are the differences between … ?¹⁵

Cook’s session illuminated the larger debate within small and mediumsized intuitions, which historically and economically depend on volunteer frontline labor, about the value of a compensated and professionalized front line. In the case of Historic Columbia and the Wilson house, this conversation centered on the volunteers and paid weekend staff often trained in public history best practices. Weekend staff docent Halie Brazier found that the strategies presented improved her tours by providing training in visitor services she did not receive as a public history graduate student focused on exhibit and curatorial skills. She normally told guests about historical content “in an entertaining way” rather than asking visitors about an object or image. Yet these training sessions were the most unpopular for volunteer docents despite being centered on adult learning and inclusivity best practices. Only 43 percent of them found these small group discussions the most useful aspect of training. Two volunteers ranked this style of group work and interactive exercises as what they liked least. Pris Stickney claimed that she preferred “getting the facts” and did not have as much “baggage” about Reconstruction as other docents, implying that these sessions were designed for her volunteer peers who had been indoctrinated in the Lost Cause and myths of Reconstruction in their childhood and thus had inherited racism.¹⁶ The session on language and cultural sensitivity, which dealt heavily with race and various forms of privilege, was one of the least meaningful for volunteer docents. The next chapter, on interpreting Black domestic workers, will address more fully these attitudes and how several white volunteer docents and visitors at MoRE updated historical traditions of whitewashing history within HHMs. They embraced what I call the Downton Abbey effect, which allowed them to use a popular British television show to erase unique racial circumstances that affected workers’ lives beyond their economic and social status.

As the February 15, 2014, opening of the MoRE drew closer, the training sessions changed format and focused on the tour itself. Prepping tours proved as challenging as previous training sessions. Docents varied in their Page 90 →level of training completion, and weather delayed the evaluation process conducted by volunteer coordinator Ann Posner and myself, whom as tour facilitator would lead half of the tours.¹⁷ In mid-January Historic Columbia held ninety-minute sample tours of each floor, led by members of the MoRE interpretive committee. The tours, to be followed by a Q&A period, accommodated twenty-five docents, but only eighteen signed up. Docent questions demonstrated the thematic challenges that lay ahead. They were fact oriented, concerning the price of the home, or logistical, concerning ticket sales and seating for guests, rather than expressing big picture ideas about Reconstruction as a civil rights movement or how the period might have shaped Wilson. Thirteen docents persevered, learning the tour in a less-than-ideal situation. Seven docents ultimately passed evaluation to become the original interpreters of the first museum of Reconstruction in the nation.¹⁸

The debate among MoRE docents over more interactive training sessions based on best practices demonstrates that they responded differently and benefited more directly based on whether they were paid, public historians, though there were some exceptions among the volunteers. Volunteer docents generally preferred lecture-style workshops and reading on their own. Most felt prepared to conduct tours and found shadowing one of the interpretive team’s tours essential to crafting a successful tour. Some embraced the structure of the tour, which limited putting too much of oneself into the delivery, while others found ways to make their tour their own. There were docents both paid and volunteer who found passing the training process and conducting tours incredibly gratifying. Other volunteer docents resisted training and the tour, covertly through conversation with one another and, to a lesser degree, overtly in their evaluations. This resistance bubbled under the surface despite the training program’s simplification for the second round of training following the opening.

Historic Columbia took the concerns of docents seriously and sought docent feedback once the training process was underway. The results of these inquiries validated much of the training process among the majority of all docents. However, data among volunteer docents pointed to a preference for lecture and self-learning. The organization disseminated a survey to docents before training began and after it ended. Docents also evaluated each session in a corresponding survey. Over 70 percent of docents reported being “very satisfied” with training, with the remaining being “somewhat satisfied.” Many docents who passed the training enjoyed the process, found it rewarding to learn a difficult tour, and were happy to learn about the lesser-known subject of Reconstruction.¹⁹ The majority of docents reported learning from Page 91 →reading the material, large group lectures, and planned activities with the group. Fifty-seven percent deemed the large group lectures useful. The lectures filled gaps in knowledge or provided a refresher on Wilson and Reconstruction, specifically as those topics pertained to Columbia and social changed.²⁰ Two volunteer docents cited they specifically prefer lectures over hands-on activities.²¹ Others saw room for improvement, such as allowing more time for speakers. There were criticisms of the speakers, as a few docents expressed feeling elitism from one of the specialists and wanting fewer lectures.²²

The vast majority of docents read recommended material and conducted research on their own to get a better grasp of Reconstruction and Woodrow Wilson. When asked about the most useful aspects of training across six categories ranging from lectures to small group discussions, 64 percent of docents selected “reviewing material on my own,” the most popular response.²³ Volunteer Kathy Hogan immersed herself in Marion Lucas’s Sherman and the Burning of Columbia, Richard Zuczek’s South Carolina study State of Rebellion, Walter Edgar’s South Carolina: A History, and Wilson’s 1901 essay “The Reconstruction of the Southern States.” Wilson biographies—especially A. Scott Berg’s, which had been recently published at the time of MoRE’s opening—were popular with volunteers. In addition to Wilson biographies, John Clark perused five recommended readings “to get a better feel for Reconstruction.” Sitting at his computer after training sessions, he would gather his thoughts and seek additional information. Trainers and supervisors should note his use of fiction to illuminate the period. He highly recommended the novel Freeman, by Leonard Pitts Jr., about a formerly enslaved man who returns to Mississippi during Reconstruction to look for his family. Clark found that the novel provided a “different perspective than Columbia” and gave him greater clarity on early Reconstruction, particularly military government and the challenges faced by the Union soldiers. This supplemented the MoRE’s focus on the socioeconomic and political developments between 1870 and 1874 during the Wilsons’ time in Columbia.²⁴

Training survey results showed that all docents felt prepared to some degree to lead tours and were more comfortable being challenged by visitors or talking about race by the end of their training. Over half felt completely unprepared before training commenced. However, training had not assuaged all fears. Two docents spoke of being “confident” going into their tours that they were “prepared” and ready to “deflect,”²⁵ but only 29 percent of docents surveyed felt “very prepared.” Furthermore, the modest gains made in comfort levels with respect to discussing race demonstrated docent anxiety over race-related conversations and foreshadowed interpretive problems that will be discussed in the next two chapters.²⁶

Page 92 →Docents agreed that shadowing an approved tour, a typical approach to training in HHMs, in order to see “how it is practically done in each room” was essential. Two volunteers considered it part of the training they liked most.²⁷ When giving shadow tours, trainers modeled techniques recommended by Daniella Cook and education programming consultant Annie Wright:

1. Use hand gestures.
2. Show rather than tell how the tour should unfold.
3. Avoid academic speech.
4. Ask visitors to “imagine for a moment” and then give them space to imagine.
5. Repeat visitor questions to answer clearly and concisely, expanding only if time allows.
6. Use previous and upcoming spaces to address questions and connect rooms and content.
7. Repeat new information to make it “stick.”²⁸

Some docents shadowed private and public tours more than twice to see a range of docent responses and techniques to incorporate. Volunteer Jean Morgan “split the difference between them all” and added her own signature interests.²⁹ Cook recommended Docent Doe’s “stellar” tour as “a great model for guides.” The docent wove “a clear, coherent story line between Reconstruction and the Wilsons,” encouraged visitors to explore and answer questions, displayed a “strong grasp of the content,” and used technology, such as the bird’s-eye map of Columbia, proficiently. Docent Doe liked giving the tour first to potential docents because the first crop “didn’t know what we were getting into” initially. The docent called leading those tours a “learning experience,” because some of the shadowing docents would bring up topics that visitors had not.³⁰

Docents practiced and crafted their tours in a variety of ways, illustrating diverse but successful techniques of value to HHM docents generally. Two docents wrote out their script by hand. Another rehearsed in front of a mirror. Two other docents, in contrast, avoided over-rehearsing. Volunteer Holly Westcott absorbed as much as she could and then spoke, hoping “something reasonable came out.” Practicing tours with friends built confidence in learning to adapt them to visitor interest. Hogan reasoned practicing was the only way to learn how to give the tour and reduce nerves about presenting the material to “diehard” white southerners. Two of these diehard friends accompanied her on her practice tour and did not object to the interpretation Page 93 →that challenged the Lost Cause, praised Reconstruction, and identified white Democrats as domestic terrorists.³¹

HHMs undergoing interpretive and/or exhibit changes will need to revise and shorten training after opening and should seek docent feedback to expedite the process and maintain their support. The second training offered by Historic Columbia was a swifter and more rigid program. Nearly 40 percent of first round trainees thought the process took too long.³² In addition expert faculty guests who had consulted on the interpretation and were eager to speak during the transitional first training would not be returning. As a result Historic Columbia streamlined the process into four sessions over two half-days.³³ The luxury of duplicate sessions disappeared. To accommodate docents who preferred to read materials, trainees received in advance a packet of materials with the adult tour script, Wilson frequently asked questions, panels and images, and lecture handouts. First, they attended a preview tour to showcase the format followed by two lectures given by interpretive staff, which provided an overview of Reconstruction and the Wilson family, President Wilson as a byproduct of the era, the home’s restoration, and exhibit planning. The final session on audience engagement expanded training beyond the shadowing and lecture model. It covered controversial topics and race-related issues via small group activities and demonstrations led by Dr. Porchia Moore, who at that time was a doctoral student in library sciences at USC specializing in museum inclusivity. Finally, docents shadowed at least two tours with paying guests, one of which had to be with the tour facilitator, before entering the rigorous evaluation process. Docents who were not approved resumed shadowing, but if they failed a second time, they had to retake the entire Wilson training if they desired to continue.³⁴

The traditional format of HHMs relies on a docent to do the majority of the speaking on an hour-long tour, a professional habit that is hard to break. Evaluations are standard in HHMs, but the requirements vary from site to site. Historic Columbia raised the bar for evaluations and required volunteers to master challenging material, a time-consuming process that risked scaring off the valuable volunteer base. Evaluations demonstrate that the greatest problems plaguing the Wilson docents as they began tours concerned pulling back their narrative as part of the semiguided tour and asking visitors engagement questions. But other issues with technology and choices in language manifested themselves as well. As a result staff evaluators remodeled Page 94 →the evaluation form to address specific benchmarks after the first wave of assessments. A successful evaluation required docents to hit content points on the Wilsons and Reconstruction and offer room statements, engagement questions, and transitions unique to each room. The new evaluation form included inclusivity and interactive checkpoints for certain spaces to ensure docents intertwined Black and white narratives of Reconstruction, incorporated gender, dealt with controversial topics effectively and comfortably, and displayed a level of ease working with interactives. Extra note-taking space allowed evaluators to list specific parts of tour content that needed attention. Annie Wright, a consultant for the reopening who created the original evaluation document, thought the revisions better monitored how docent training transferred to the tour and encouraged tour consistency.³⁵

Evaluations also revealed that docents struggled to master the revised narrative and interactive exhibit components. Of the nineteen docents evaluated, seven had difficulty remembering the order of the rooms in the home or which information and themes went in each room. One docent performed the second-floor portion of the tour out of order. Other docents offered Wilson material in certain spaces that was better suited or assigned to other rooms.³⁶ Nine docents introduced incorrect content, mostly misstatements, or omitted critical information about Reconstruction, a requirement for each room.³⁷ Two volunteer docents actively resisted learning the new content that replaced the Wilson shrine narrative. In addition, over a quarter of docents ignored or seemed uncomfortable demonstrating the technology to visitors. This illuminated a generational ambivalence about twenty-first-century learning models for the HHM. Some retirement-age volunteer docents rushed visitors through the experience of digital play with the bird’s-eye map. They failed to demonstrate its smart-touch features such as search by topic or abandoned visitors who needed assistance in order to have a richer experience.³⁸ Four docents, three of whom also struggled with the map, made no attempt to present the interactive pertaining to the Wilson family tree.³⁹ A few docents also avoided hands-on objects as well. One audience member had to ask a docent if the reproduction stereoscopes included for visitor interaction could be touched, and another guest fumbled to work it with no instruction from the guide. Some docents bypassed the stereoscopes altogether.⁴⁰

The tour’s attention to Reconstruction required precise language. Some docents excelled at this, while others slipped into coded language that reinforced an outdated interpretation of Reconstruction—which was noted and discussed by the evaluators. Coded language on race will be discussed in the next chapter, but negative, universalizing statements about carpetbaggers were the most common non-race-related example. Docents described Page 95 →carpetbaggers as “capitalizing on” Reconstruction and that they “took advantage” of the situation. Even after being corrected by evaluators on these myths, one docent replaced the language with problematic synonyms. Said docent referred to carpetbaggers as “white opportunists” and scalawags as “collaborationists.” The docent replaced an incorrect reference to the Union presence during the Wilsons’ time in Columbia as an “occupation” force with a “substantial” federal presence. In reality the largest number of troops stationed in South Carolina occurred before the passage of the 1868 state constitution. By late summer of that year, the army maintained only three posts in the state, in Columbia, Charleston, and Aiken.⁴¹ But for every docent relying on ingrained Reconstruction language, there were others who used precise words to convey historically complex phenomena. One docent tackled the myth of the carpetbagger head-on in the political conversation sparked by the formal parlor. Other docents discussed the federal troop presence without using the word occupation and described Reconstruction as a “failed revolution” or situated it within the mindset of the New South.⁴²

Notwithstanding language challenges, the most significant obstacle to mastering the semiguided tour was consistent inclusion of engagement questions. Most docents favored engagement questions designed to make audiences think critically about the exhibit or prompt exploration; however, two docents were uncomfortable with reflective questions, which they claimed resulted in awkward silences. Engagement required a common skill set cultivated by docents—distilling whether some visitors prefer active listening. Following their training, docents identified new skills—forming and asking engagement questions and giving time for visitor response. Inquiry-based learning required questions that moved beyond simple yes or no responses but were not so open-ended that they were overwhelming. One docent rightly observed that the home lends itself to asking questions in a way other HHMs do not, but docents have to gauge the best timing to ask a leading question and where to insert them in the tour. Weekend docent Halie Brazier found that people generally answered as she intended and was “pleasantly surprised” how the questions advanced her narrative. Volunteer Bernadette Scott found tailoring questions to the interests of the group strengthened her own tour. Another docent who gave a stellar evaluation tour modeled strong engagement techniques—repeating questions to make sure everyone heard and understood them and frequently inviting guests “to imagine” how Wilson felt as a teenager growing up and how (white) women felt about Black men voting when they could not.⁴³

Even the most prepared docent struggled with full engagement. Nearly a dozen docents ran into some problem with posing engagement questions on their tours.⁴⁴ Of the eleven major engagement points existing in the exhibit Page 96 →rooms, three docents hit four or fewer of them.⁴⁵ Docents also reverted from opened-ended to yes or no questions. Similarly, others who heavily incorporated objects into their narrative or who had guests show great curiosity about an object missed opportunities to craft questions about material culture. Over a quarter of the docents performed only “fair” on the evaluation section or needed work on asking different levels of engagement questions—such as those that centered objects, invited guests to share from their own lives, or required deeper critical thinking based on the exhibit themes.⁴⁶

Engagement evaluation results are partly a result of low visitor turnout during the workweek. Audiences trickled in, hindering the training program and its evaluation process. The lack of visitors limited docents’ ability to practice engagement questions, which likely contributed to their struggles with this technique during their evaluations. Because of this problem, Robin Waites, the executive director of Historic Columbia, Cook, and other evaluators requested that full-time staff act as the visitor audience. Waites also invited employees at other museums to get a sneak preview and serve as tour guests. The most successful docent at encouraging participation had an audience of five, suggesting to the consultant that future training and practice should incorporate an audience “to connect with supported engagement.”⁴⁷ For her evaluation Brazier brought in a half dozen coworkers who wanted to see the house. She thought it created a “more authentic” experience than awkwardly addressing the evaluator because she saw the reactions and fielded questions of uninformed people. When visitor attendance declined after opening, it also became difficult during shadow tours to demonstrate genuine engagement between docent and visitor and pull-back techniques that gave visitors time to explore. As such, when a small group tour was prearranged, volunteer coordinator Ann Posner contacted trainees.⁴⁸

As troubling as the engagement questions predicament was mastering the techniques of a semiguided tour. A dozen docents could not sustain the semiguided tour throughout their evaluation, frequently giving too much exposition and running well over the tour’s allotted seventy-five-minute time limit. Some added general knowledge about the home and the Wilsons and others brought friends on the tour, which may have extended the conversations. Either docents failed to encourage their audience to explore or talked so excessively that guests felt compelled to stay with them.⁴⁹ One docent never defined the semiguided tour but told guests to move “as you want to.” Another docent’s closing monologue segued from Wilson’s passion for women to a recitation of a love letter he had written to his wife Ellen ten years into their marriage about a “storm of love making.” On the opposite end of the spectrum, a single docent went “too far into the realm of self-guided,” inviting guests to “take a look at” an artifact with no lead-in or description. Page 97 →This was the only time during the nineteen evaluations that a docent was encouraged to add more to a “bare bones” tour.⁵⁰ Whether because of their nervousness, the compulsion to fill silences, or their struggles with historical content, some docents fell back on the information presented in the panels. This left no motivation for the visitor to read the panels or investigate the objects displayed. In one case a visitor wanted to use the stereoscopes, but the docent resumed their narrative and guided the visitor to a related panel.⁵¹ Many of these same docents as well as a few others provided summaries of exhibit film content that were redundant, most often by detailing the Reconstruction amendments in the family parlor rather than letting the citizenship film do the work for them.⁵²

Docents received tips and strategies to facilitate the self-guided design, such as looking for cues from guests. For example, one woman was about to explore the interactive Wilson family tree when a docent interrupted her to discuss the family picture. Evaluators encouraged docents to embrace rather than fight the silence that the semiguided tour generated. Docents were to show restraint after giving required thematic points, using their wide breadth of knowledge to supplement visitor interest on a case-by-case basis after inviting visitors to read panels and study objects. The volunteer coordinator scheduled those docents who were strong enough to pass the evaluation protocol but needed to improve their pull-back techniques for slower traffic days to give them time to practice in a low-pressure environment.⁵³ The most common concerns illuminated by the docent evaluations were failure to fully engage the audience; to maintain the semiguided style for over an hour; to demonstrate the interactive features of the twenty-first-century museum; to rely on panels appropriately; or to use precise, historically informed language. However, the most contentious training issue for docents was the evaluation process itself. Of the substantial portion of the volunteer docents who walked away from the process, a few did so because the interpretation challenged their negative view of Reconstruction and positive impression of Woodrow Wilson.

The majority of volunteer docents eschewed the new tour and exhibit mostly because of the new evaluation process. However, some volunteer docents also held a negative view of Reconstruction and/or attachment to the previous Wilson interpretation. Only docents who gave MoRE tours consented to oral history interviews, though all docents were invited. Those who found the training or interpretation controversial quietly demonstrated their disapproval by not participating in interviews. As such, museums should expect to be challenged by their docents when stricter evaluation standards Page 98 →are implemented or the sites undertake a difficult or controversial exhibit or tour, especially one that dramatically revises history for white Americans or presents the nation’s white supremacy. The backlash to these narratives is visible nearly every day in political discourse. Most recently the (limited) teaching of Critical Race Theory sparked imagined threats among Republican state legislators, and Governor Ron DeSantis proposed the erasure of Black American studies from Florida’s history curriculum in January 2023.⁵⁴

The issue of evaluations greatly divided the docents. Nevertheless, those who passed understood its purpose. This was the first time that formal evaluations, rather than a more casual approval process, had been required to conduct tours for one of Historic Columbia’s four HHMs. Docents noted the lack of consistency in rigor and questioned whether the organization thought the MoRE was special or if the evaluations foreshadowed changes to come for the volunteer docent program. Stickney recalled that docents she spoke with did not like evaluation changes and perceived them as “very negative.” For some docents the evaluation itself made them hesitant to participate.⁵⁵ Clark speculated that, with “people giving their own time” and not wanting to be “judged,” the intimidation of an evaluation or defensiveness over “constructive criticism” could lead people to “walk away at any point.” Evaluations of training and completion rates corroborate this conjecture. Only 14 percent of docents found “getting feedback on my practice tours from staff” useful, ranking the process last in most useful aspects of training alongside role playing in a group. Fifteen docents finished the first four training sessions, and four had one session to make up in the month before opening. Seven of them dropped the training before the evaluation process. In addition three more stopped training after failing their first evaluation.⁵⁶

Some docents grew resentful of the Reconstruction-heavy script and evaluation demands and thereby minimized Reconstruction on their tours. The two docents most eager to give tours struggled the most with the evaluation process and made the tour about Wilson. They had both given specialty hardhat tours of the Wilson home during its closure and renovation and desperately wanted to work opening weekend. Their devotion to the shrine themes of the previous tour made them a concern for staff, who ultimately decided that the opening with its staging of docents throughout the house would limit both docents’ interpretive interactions with guests until they could pass the evaluation. Three volunteer docents in total ignored the new script and thematic organization of each room. Instead they relied on old tours with encyclopedic monologues about Wilson’s education or the architecture of the home.⁵⁷ When volunteer coordinator Ann Posner retired, two of the three docents asked her replacement to add them to the Wilson schedule. Though Page 99 →they were encouraged to shadow more tours to learn the content and missed transitions, neither docent attempted another evaluation.⁵⁸

One docent who was fixated on the Wilson shrine remained—an eager trainee who was evaluated four times. However, their evaluation failures went beyond being a Wilsonphile to open resistance to the new techniques. The docent expressed that the tour ventured “too deep in the weeds on Reconstruction” and, as a result, privileged Wilson and used some language rooted in a white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction.⁵⁹ They grew more disgruntled with each evaluation, unable to restrain the impulse to drift into long asides about Wilson’s early life pulled from the old WWFH interpretation, biographies, and the Wilson boyhood home tour in Augusta, Georgia. They injected themselves into the narrative by sharing personal Wilson anecdotes. A particularly long one was about their visit to Wilson’s birthplace in Staunton while driving a moving van. The presidential library staff feared the docent was retrieving Wilson’s birth bed, on loan from Historic Columbia while its house was closed. The docent refused to explain the semiguided tour, wove a long narrative that stymied visitor self-exploration, and rarely used engagement questions. They offered basic thematic transitions with no complexity: “Now we’re going to talk about …” and “I will meet you in the next room.” They also made inappropriate jokes and refused to eliminate them. One was that the normal school was not teaching students how to be “normal.” To reinforce that the constructive criticism stemmed from institutional policy, four different people evaluated the docent, and often teams of two or three people evaluated the same tour.⁶⁰ By the third evaluation the docent’s body language was unfriendly and their tour half-hearted.⁶¹ The docent presented their strongest performance for the fourth evaluation, though they still struggled with the semiguided nature of the tour.⁶² Not long after passing, the docent stopped volunteering to pursue business interests.

In contrast to the docents committed to shrine interpretation, a few docents went too far in the opposite direction and lost the Wilson narrative on their tours. One volunteer, excited to talk about Reconstruction, failed the evaluation because the Wilson content was inaccurate or missing.⁶³ Post-approval, a weekend staff docent consciously chose to minimize the Wilson content. Docents deliver a room statement for each space that introduced its use for the Wilson family or a connection to their history as well as a theme related to Reconstruction. She pled guilty to omitting at times “what the room does for the family.” She rejected the notion that the docent had to put Wilson in when Historic Columbia is “really getting at Reconstruction.” For example, in the informal parlor, she bypassed the room statement on an after-dinner conversational setting for the Wilsons to explore citizenship. Page 100 →Reconstruction was the most important part of Historic Columbia’s work with the MoRE, she felt.⁶⁴

The resistance of other docents ranged from indecisiveness to outright opposition because the requirements of the tour intimidated them or they were skeptical of the new dual interpretation of Wilson and Reconstruction. Education coordinator James Quint worried that Historic Columbia had erred in placing “this house tour on a pedestal” and, as a result, had “intimidated some folks, especially a number of the volunteers.”⁶⁵ Three strong MoRE volunteer docents wanted to complete training but would not commit to giving tours initially. One of them felt that Historic Columbia assumed she would assist with the new tour. Similarly, new volunteer docents felt encouraged by Historic Columbia to learn the Wilson house first to meet the organization’s scheduling needs. Holly Westcott sensed the lack of interest among seasoned docents upon her arrival as a volunteer.⁶⁶ For example, longtime volunteer Pris Stickney had no interest in giving Wilson tours before or after the reinterpretation. She presumed that “nobody wants to know about Reconstruction. … They come here to see Woodrow Wilson”—that is, the president. However, she decided that she owed herself and the organization the experience of training after serving on the MoRE committee in an early phase of reinterpretation. She was “won over” by learning Reconstruction history and used her change of heart to bring other reluctant docents along. The main complaint she heard was that the house was just “different.” Volunteers had loved the house and its shrine tour.⁶⁷ Other volunteers, according to MoRE docent Jean Morgan, refused to do tours because they disagreed with viewing the house and Reconstruction through “twenty-first-century eyes.”⁶⁸ Like Stickney, John Clark also urged reluctant volunteers to try the tour. He reassured those intimidated by the new semiguided tour and exhibit that he found the tour easier because of the panels.⁶⁹

The encounters with other volunteers that Stickney, Morgan, and Clark described confirm that the combination of resistance to and the challenging nature of the tour led to low volunteer completion rates. Within three months of the February opening, Posner had lost hope for five docents. She continued to court ten partially trained docents, inviting them to come shadow on busier days and setting up makeup sessions designed to assist them through the process. Only three were approved in the next year.⁷⁰ Three successful long-term docents completed training but declined tours before the evaluation process. One of them pulled what Posner called the “volunteer trump card.” The docent was so “out of sorts about the whole thing” that she warned she could always volunteer somewhere else. One new volunteer simply did not complete training due to time constraints, even though the Page 101 →“unique” and “thought-provoking” MoRE tour that he shadowed was “first class all around” and made him “proud to be a part of Historic Columbia.”⁷¹

Docents with years of experience or attachments to previous interpretations that initially resisted tour changes will, with encouragement and continued exposure, come to embrace it. Teachable moments about restoration and preservation, according to Jennifer Pustz, can “help steer” docents “from the nostalgia to the interpretive benefits of the restoration.”⁷² Historic Columbia made valiant attempts to acknowledge and correct docent concerns. As a result of post-opening feedback sessions led by Cook, the organization circulated a revised script inspired by docent feedback and visitor evaluation results, created a virtual tour of the second floor for guests that physically could not go upstairs, and remade a controversial exhibit film about Wilson and the memory of Reconstruction, which is discussed in the final chapter. Docents appreciated the upgrades to the script and films, even if revisions did not meet everyone’s individual requests. After seeing the revisions to the Wilson film, a reluctant docent commented that she was now interested in learning the tour. Historic Columbia debuted the revised film in April 2015 at a training session demonstrating the tour’s evolution since opening. Existing volunteers who started Wilson training and some of the resisters were invited in hopes of bringing them on board.⁷³

Despite concerns about the evaluation process, most of the MoRE docents, even if nervous or disapproving of evaluations in general, understood why this process was necessary for quality control and representing the site well. One docent felt compelled to make a good impression and believed the site needed docents “who really knew what they were talking about and were capable of giving the tours.” As volunteer Kathy Hogan explained, the home was “not just about furniture” but “American values.” Historic Columbia needed “to make sure that people understand that.”⁷⁴ MoRE docents clearly recognized that the unique format and tour required deep knowledge of content and a strong delivery.

The reopening of the Wilson home revealed that the majority of volunteer docents either refused to conduct or felt incapable of conducting the MoRE tour. Given this, public history professionals must consider whether volunteers make the best docents for distilling the complex narratives required for twenty-first-century museums. Administrators should expect to lose docents who are not paid and/or not trained as educators or historians. Mediocre HHM docents ruin a visitor’s experience in stellar HHMs and may generate negative publicity. The best interpreters elevate the average HHM from Page 102 →forgettable to memorable. The primary problem stems from the fact that volunteers who provide tours or care for the home and collections are fiscally essential for many underfunded museums. Without them HHMs would have to close their doors. Half of Pustz’s respondents in her study on interpreting domestic workers in HHMs had twenty or fewer part-time volunteers, but others had hundreds. Only a quarter of the HHMs paid all their guides. One third used all volunteers. The MoRE reflected a third of HHMs that used both volunteers and paid docents but relied mostly on volunteers.⁷⁵ Operating budgets aside, HHMs should consider if unpaid volunteers with limited public history training should be placed in frontline interpretive positions. If so, the MoRE interpreters illuminate key characteristics that define the successful docent, whether professional or volunteer, who is capable of giving complicated interpretations. In addition the training and tour forced these same docents, regardless of paid status or training, to come to terms with their own indoctrination in the Lost Cause and white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction.

In the context of learning and expressing complex ideas about race, gender, and politics, the most successful volunteer docents at the MoRE were history majors, educators, holders of advanced degrees, or a combination of these characteristics. A large majority of the sixteen docents who filled out the author’s preliminary survey, eleven of which went on to participate in oral histories, were history majors and/or held advanced degrees. Five volunteer and four paid docents majored in history.⁷⁶ Despite previous exposure to Reconstruction, three specifically spoke of learning more about the subject in training, especially on the local level. Two strong volunteers believed they knew more about Reconstruction going in than others had.⁷⁷

Most docents who excelled in giving the tour held advanced degrees. Two paid weekend staff docents were history PhD candidates at USC, exposing them to a large body of Reconstruction historiography.⁷⁸ Five weekend staff docents had or at one point were earning master’s degrees in public history from USC. The visitor focus of Brazier’s docent experience working for Historic Columbia brought her new frontline expertise, which differed from the heavy emphasis on research, exhibit design, and collections of her degree. Guiding tours required “translating all of that scholarship” into a performance and tapping into her customer service background.⁷⁹ Among the volunteers, one held a master’s in US history and two earned PhDs, including one in English. John Clark’s PhD in political science with an emphasis in international relations and work for a congressman and South Carolina governor Dick Riley gave him critical thinking and analytical skills related to historical and political events and the ability to handle a variety of audiences and inquiries diplomatically.⁸⁰ Five others held master-level degrees, including Page 103 →three related to teaching or school administration and one in library sciences and hospital administration.⁸¹

HHM experts agree, and MoRE docents confirm, that strong interpreters often have a relationship with education and performing. According to Jennifer Pustz, some of the best docents are retired teachers who transfer their classroom experience into public interpretation. In the case of the MoRE, two docents were librarians, but most were former teachers.⁸² Among those docents taking the survey and conducting oral histories, five served as secondary teachers. Five also taught on the college level, including Clark, who spent a brief spell at Columbia’s historically Black college, Benedict. Volunteer coordinator Ann Posner recruited retired principal and volunteer Bernadette Scott to undergo training because, as an educator, she “naturally” incorporated a “twenty-first-century learning model” on her tours. After retiring from teaching and a position as a school district social studies coordinator, Kathy Hogan saw the MoRE as a “wonderful opportunity” to use her professional talents to give back to the community. Jean Morgan, a French teacher who “always loved history,” explained the “logical pairing” of teachers as volunteer docents was rooted in the “desire to inform people” about things they do not know. Morgan’s need to “latch onto a thread and follow it and see where it leads to” stemmed from her teaching.⁸³

Perhaps most significantly, the tour forced many white docents, regardless of age or paid status, to come to terms with their own indoctrination in the Lost Cause and white supremacist memory of Reconstruction in their homes and classrooms. Oral history evidence suggests a cathartic experience for many of the MoRE guides. Docent narrators hailing from South Carolina and the South were particularly cognizant of how states’ rights and Confederate memorialization had crept into their education. Six spoke on the record, three of whom grew up in the upstate, a hotbed of Klan activity during Reconstruction and to some degree today. Five spoke openly about being taught the Lost Cause throughout their K-12 history curriculum.⁸⁴ It is important to note when speaking about Lost Cause and Reconstruction memory, docents conflated the two into the language of the Lost Cause.

Clark was the most vocal volunteer about his exposure to these Civil War and Reconstruction narratives. He grew up in Kingstree, South Carolina, between Florence and Charleston, in the same community as Michael Allen. At the time of MoRE’s reopening, Allen, a community partnership specialist and three-decade veteran with the National Park Service, was working extensively in Beaufort on commemorating the Port Royal Experiment, South Carolina’s unique Reconstruction experience. His job was inspired partially by an overgrown lot he had passed daily in Kingstree. He did not learn until adulthood that the property once belonged to Stephen Atkins Swails. Swails Page 104 →joined the famed Black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts, fought for equal pay with whites, and was the first Black line combat officer commissioned in the nation’s military. Formerly employed by the Freedmen’s Bureau, he was a multiple-term mayor in Kingstree during Reconstruction and a political and business boss in Williamsburg County. He helped pass the 1868 constitution and served six years as the first Black president pro tempore of the state senate. The state militia and Red Shirts made numerous threats on his life as he campaigned for Republicans in the 1878 election. As a result the native Pennsylvanian left South Carolina for the District of Columbia and worked as a clerk for the Department of the Interior, though he returned regularly until his death in 1890 to visit his family and attend to state Republican politics and his legal practice.⁸⁵ Kingstree ignored this remarkable local hero for more than a century, which is not surprising given what Clark revealed about how Reconstruction was taught to him.⁸⁶

In 1957–58 Clark used the state history textbook by Mary C. Simms Oliphant as a student in his all-white eighth-grade history class. He learned that the “Yankees and the Carpetbaggers and freed slaves ran the government and it was corrupt.” In this story corruption and excessive drinking plagued the state legislature. The “Ku Klux Klan was a good organization” and needed even if it was unsavory in the 1950s. The Klan rode with their white sheets and hoods and made “blacks think they were ghosts and scared them away from voting. And we all got chuckles out of that.” The Klan and Red Shirts, the statewide paramilitary force that used fraud and violence to return white Democrats to power in 1876, bled together. According to Clark, “I don’t remember a real clear distinction.” He learned that Wade Hampton, aided by the Red Shirts, “saved South Carolina from the horrible Reconstruction when everything was corrupt and white people had basically lost their rights.” He understood there was violence, but it was framed contextually as morally right.⁸⁷ Wade Hampton’s stature has declined significantly from the days of being nationally recognized as “the most important figure in late nineteenth-century South Carolina.” His biographer Rod Andrew Jr. argues that the hero worship produced by Hampton’s amateur biographers and friends went too far, yet his villainy in the twenty-first century is also an oversimplification. The tragedy and humiliation in Hampton’s lived experience led him to seek vindication, which played out in his contradictory rhetoric and actions during Reconstruction that pledged some measure of legal and civil protections for Black citizens. A paternalist at heart, Hampton believed it was both a privilege and duty for wealthy, educated men to rule and care for the inferior white women and Black people of South Carolina. He appointed Black citizens to state office and at times could check white South Carolinians’ worst impulses. Nonetheless his moderate racial Page 105 →views, in comparison to some peers, were secondary to restoring and vindicating white leadership and a far cry from advocating for racial equality.⁸⁸ Commemorative efforts to remember Hampton via statues and the naming of buildings and streets began not long after his death on the twenty-fifth anniversary of taking formal control from Gov. Daniel Chamberlain on April 11, 1876. Not only did Hampton and his memory revive Confederate sentiment among veterans, but his Red Shirt campaign also fed the “the social memory of Reconstruction” and contributed to its white supremacist construction.⁸⁹ As Clark became “an inquiring adult” and avid reader, he explored Reconstruction further. Looking back at his segregated childhood, the interpretation he learned in that eighth-grade classroom made sense. Though at the time he was skeptical of the inequality around him and his all-white classroom, “we were taught colored people were happy the way things were.” Fifty years later, he felt guilty that he “didn’t think about it more” as a teenager.⁹⁰ The MoRE, Clark reflected, “conflict[s] with what I was taught then.”⁹¹

In South Carolina in the twentieth century, Mary C. Simms Oliphant was arguably the single individual most responsible for spreading the tenets of the Lost Cause and a negative interpretation of Reconstruction.⁹² Among the twenty books she penned on the state’s history, her textbook A Simms History of South Carolina, first drafted by and named for her famous historian grandfather, was used in schools from the late 1930s until 1985. Upon her induction into the state’s Hall of Fame in the early 1980s, Governor Dick Riley, whom Clark worked for, said, “We think of her as the lady that wrote our history book. We loved history because of her.”⁹³ Oliphant’s belief in the Lost Cause and the failure of Reconstruction never wavered, even if her overtly racist language became more coded after the 1960s civil rights movement and academics overturned the Dunning School that reinforced her interpretation. She could no longer write that Reconstruction was “the darkest and bitterest period the State has ever known,” but that premise endured through her use of the textbook equivalent of dog whistles.⁹⁴

Oliphant framed Reconstruction as “a tremendous problem” that unleashed an uneducated electorate and ruined race relations in the state. Reconstruction freed “thousands of uneducated and irresponsible slaves” (though the 1970 textbook edited out the word irresponsible).⁹⁵ Mostly illiterate and “unused to freedom” and citizenship, the formerly enslaved sought leadership from “the Union conquerors.” As a result white leaders passed Black Codes to keep order and limit freed people’s equality. Non-southerners and Republicans misconstrued these laws as an effort to “put the Negroes back into slavery” and politically seduced these new Black voters and potential officeholders. “Conservative white South Carolinians,” Oliphant wrote, were held hostage by “an unlawful Assembly, maintained Page 106 →by federal bayonets.” She villainized native white Republicans most, writing that the quiet nature and dignified behavior of Black politicians from South Carolina made them “men of better character than the white scalawags.”⁹⁶ In Oliphant’s 1970 textbook, the section “Feeling between whites and Negroes” noted that the “worst part of Radical rule” was dismantling the “old feeling of friendship and confidence” between Black and white South Carolinians. In the 1932 edition, she claimed that most of the enslaved demonstrated “their love for their masters by … loyally serving the wives and children of the absent soldiers” during the Civil War. The Freedmen’s Bureau, carpetbaggers, and scalawags turned the “ignorant and child-like negroes” against white people.⁹⁷ In Oliphant’s revised text, war hero Robert Smalls, who continued to hold office and political appointments through President Wilson’s election, became the lens for the “Progress of the Negro.” She praised “his kindness to the family of his former master when they were left destitute after the war.” She ignored that Smalls purchased the home of his owner (and likely father) in an 1863 tax sale and that his descendants lived there ninety years.⁹⁸

Oliphant and other textbook producers shaped generations of schoolchildren, including the MoRE volunteer docents, with their Lost Cause interpretation and white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction history. As baby boomers, docents grew up with these texts and their contents, which were reinforced in oral traditions in the home and community. Oliphant’s success is akin to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who decorated the public square with Confederate flags and monuments and filled museums and archives with Confederate culture.⁹⁹ Not until 1985, when state standards required the integration of Black history into the classroom, did the Board of Education replace Oliphant’s eighth-grade textbook.¹⁰⁰ Bureaucratic state educators praised the enormous influence of her textbook when she died three years later.¹⁰¹ Journalists of Clark’s generation recalled reading it. Of all the authors and institutions that promoted the Lost Cause, Will Moredock called Oliphant “his favorite malefactor” in romanticizing the South and promoting white supremacy for generations of South Carolinians.¹⁰² Oliphant’s most prominent recent critic is her own granddaughter, Felicia Furman. In 2015 the historic preservationist rejected the textbooks as “racist to the core.”¹⁰³ Bruce Baker, part of the last generation that used Oliphant’s textbook, argues that the removal of her books represented the beginning of an ongoing transition to better public understanding of Reconstruction. Unlike Baker, most people who learned from textbooks like Oliphant’s never receive a correction to these lessons or stories from family. MoRE docents such as Halie Brazier and Heather Bacon-Rogers are part of this transitional millennial generation, who received a trickle-down interpretation from Oliphant’s textbooks last published the decade of their birth.¹⁰⁴

Page 107 →Other volunteer docents recollected similar indoctrination in their homes and education. Decades earlier Holly Westcott conducted research on the Georgetown, South Carolina, planters club the Indigo Society. That was her introduction to the post–Civil War world as “a matter of reconstructing a society—of figuring out how life could be lived post-slavery.” She realized the process “involved a lot more than I had been taught in history classes previously.”¹⁰⁵ One docent from “an educated family” recalled that nearly all of them “believed in the memory that was created of the Lost Cause.” The docent attended pep rallies in high school with the Confederate flag, where “we’d sing ‘Dixie’ all the time.” The docent concluded, “The interpretation is exactly what we [white southerners] said it was.” They created it, and a good many northerners accepted the idea that state’s rights caused the Civil War and that Reconstruction failed because it was corrupt and the state was controlled by ignorant Black politicians. Thus the docent emphasized the new information they learned into the tour: the military “wasn’t a real oppressive presence,” there were massive rebuilding and municipal services offered, white children often did not attend public schools, and USC integrated its campus and normal school. The docent laughed, “And that’s what makes it so exciting that it’s here. This is the first place. And maybe that’s the way it should be. That the South is the first place that has a museum dedicated to Reconstruction, the real facts about Reconstruction.” For this docent Reconstruction was part of southern history, even if “it may be uncomfortable” to some. Reconstruction also was critical to the MoRE “if you want to talk about the house, the family and the era in which they lived and how that might have affected them.” White southerners “would never admit” that they “are ashamed of the legacy,” the docent chuckled. The MoRE’s presentation of Reconstruction was not only vital to the tour and dismantling a white supremacist narrative, but it also showed potential in helping white southerners accept an uncomfortable legacy of white supremacy.¹⁰⁶

The power of the Lost Cause and the white supremacist memory of Reconstruction extended beyond volunteers over fifty to millennial and generation X weekend staff docents who received less overt messaging in their education. Brazier still hears the Lost Cause narrative and people discounting slavery around her and in her hometown of Lexington, South Carolina. Just outside of Columbia, Lexington was also home to white teenager Dylann Roof, who spewed Lost Cause rhetoric in Mother Emanuel AME Church before he killed nine Black worshippers in the summer of 2015. Brazier still catches people saying the Civil War was about state’s rights and not slavery. She remembered schools teaching, if not the Lost Cause, then “at least Lost Cause light” in the 1990s. Even in college she “wasn’t really paying attention enough” to question interpretations. She continued, “This house definitely Page 108 →challenged those notions and made me really think about my own education and the way that we talk about [Reconstruction].” The tour was “something different” interpretively and “challenging to what I had grown up learning.” She continued, “I got to stretch myself and learn something new or supplement what I knew.”¹⁰⁷ It took time for her to process the new content and explain it to audiences, but once she did, the tour became her favorite to give.

Though decades separated them in age, two docents used the tour to come to terms with their own family’s connection with white supremacy. In Heather Bacon-Rogers’s asking of visitors to consider the possible racist actions of their ancestors rather than succumb to “white guilt,” the tour and programs coordinator revealed, “this house makes me question too what my family was doing.” She reflected, “I’m telling audiences about these horrible things that are going on. Do I have these horrible things in my past too?” Bacon-Rogers’s miseducation on the history of Reconstruction was less egregious than previous generations or people she has had on the tour. As she recalled it, Black people were not portrayed as ignorant, but Reconstruction was framed as a “waste” with no positive outcomes and was violent for no reason. She grew up in Aiken County on the border of Edgefield County. She knew families that went back five generations in Edgefield, white families present during Reconstruction when white locals incited a violent riot against the Black community. She exclaimed, “Why did I not know this? The next county over.” In her mind, “that [violence] was going on but not right next door.” She learned this information from the tour. Realizing she had been taught misinformation in school, the tour mobilized her to engage “with the subject matter and to find out what I had missed out on by being educated in small-town South Carolina.” While Bacon-Rogers wondered about her family’s white supremacy, volunteer Walt Hall felt compelled to share and to some degree defend his Red Shirt family history. When transitioning to the Red Shirt campaign, he centered the Red Shirts intimidation of voters, though he believed the Klan to be more violent. He revealed that his Confederate veteran grandfather rode with Hampton from Edgefield to Columbia, forming an army by the time they arrived.¹⁰⁸ When he first shared this ancestry, he was encouraged to incorporate this personal element in his tour if he so desired. One staff member found that Hall’s “family’s history as an aside” in the room detailing political terrorism added to the tour.¹⁰⁹

Three additional docents, two of whom were from Virginia, claimed the South as home.¹¹⁰ Jean Morgan and other southern docents received a similarly biased education as their cohort from South Carolina. She laughed about how her textbooks said the enslaved were happy and well treated because they were property and masters did not mistreat property. She admitted Page 109 →in hindsight that that interpretation “now seems ridiculous.” Lessons were “southern-centric” with a view that Reconstruction was “evil.”¹¹¹

Docents from outside the South suffered from a lack of information rather than a white supremacist narrative. Stickney, a “Midwesterner through and through,” grew up in suburban Chicago and Milwaukee. She remembered “learning the term carpetbaggers and that’s about it.” She perceived that Reconstruction happened and was bad. After she listened in on a follow-up training meeting where docents talked about what they had learned in school, she concluded that bias had to have some impact. She said, “They had a lot of stuff thrown at them growing up that I didn’t have. And I don’t think you can totally leave that behind.” When she delivered her practice tour to a good friend, Stickney could tell by her friend’s physical response that she was hearing a different interpretation than the one learned in school. Rather than needing to overturn indoctrination, several non-southern docents learned Reconstruction for the first time (or the first with any depth) during training. Volunteer Anne Weir did not receive this content in Michigan, while Katy Menne grew up with no “strong opinion about the Civil War or Reconstruction.” Only Wisconsin native Cyndy Storm spoke of learning Reconstruction from a northern perspective. In this narrative the federal government tried to rebuild the South and incorporate African Americans into the society and economy, but the effort was deeply resented by white southerners. But neither of Storm’s two general survey college courses in US history spent much time on Reconstruction.¹¹²

Volunteer Kathy Hogan, a New Jersey native educated in Maryland before settling in South Carolina, was an exception to this trend of light Reconstruction coverage outside the South. The civil rights movement heavily influenced her Catholic schooling, which she credited with shaping her activism and profession as a social studies teacher. When she came to South Carolina, she waited fourteen years to enter a social studies classroom. She thought, “They won’t be open to my understanding of history. I can’t teach about the Civil War and Reconstruction the way that South Carolinians would expect.” She was happy when she overcame this fear and returned to the classroom. It led to a position as social studies school district coordinator, where she and academic historians, including Valinda Littlefield of the USC history department, helped write the state’s 2011 standards and select support documents for US history to ensure classrooms were historically up-to-date with scholarship.¹¹³ State law requires that the Board of Education revise social studies standards every seven years. The 2011 standards apply to the time of the MoRE opening and docent interviews. Hogan, who retired in 2013 from Lexington/Richland School District Five in Irmo, South Page 110 →Carolina,¹¹⁴ “was delighted to see” that the MoRE’s interpretation “reflected what the state is requiring students to be taught about the era.” The 2011 standards covered Reconstruction in third-, fifth-, and eighth-grade US history as well as the eleventh-grade course United States History and the Constitution. Reconstruction themes in US history included presidential and congressional Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau, economic impacts, successes and failures, and “subversive” or “discriminatory” groups. Third graders also were expected to understand “positive and negative effects of Reconstruction” in South Carolina, including the development of public education and sharecropping, rebuilding, and “racial advancements and tensions.” Fifth graders received a positive interpretation of Reconstruction as an effort to rebuild and the “great hope” and incredible change it inspired. Students expanded their knowledge on the themes mentioned above, including the goals of Reconstruction and its constitutional amendments and white southern resistance, both initial resistance and the subversive groups that increased in prominence after the removal of federal troops in 1877. The eighth-grade course South Carolina: One of the United States packaged Reconstruction through the Progressive Era. Previous grade goals remained, though new language included Black Codes and emphasis on Black political, educational, and social opportunities. The role of state political leaders codifying Jim Crow and establishing “a system of racial segregation, intimidation, and violence” first appeared. The eleventh-grade Constitution course underscored the Reconstruction amendments, Reconstruction’s effect on the South and federal government, and its end, including anti-Black factions, competing national interests that undermined it, removal of federal protection, and the disenfranchisement that followed during Jim Crow. Bloom’s revised taxonomy heavily shaped the course, as it did Daniella Cook’s training session for the MoRE.¹¹⁵

Hogan spoke of the “considerable controversy” over the Reconstruction interpretation in the classroom. She recalled that results of benchmark testing showed teachers were not meeting the standard and current interpretations. Teachers were not “purposely misinterpreting” Reconstruction but were instead teaching what they were wrongly taught with Dunning School–style education materials, thus demonstrating the long reach of Oliphant’s textbooks and others like them.¹¹⁶ The MoRE’s mirroring of the state curriculum was no coincidence. Historic Columbia chose to interpret Reconstruction not just because of Wilson’s light footprint in the home and the opportunity to interpret an often misunderstood part of American history but also because teachers expressed a need for this history.¹¹⁷

Hogan believed the 2011 standards to be a dramatic improvement, yet criticism of Reconstruction standards in both 2011 and 2018 endured, despite Page 111 →their more accurate telling of Reconstruction a century in the making. The primary issue was specificity. In his analysis of 2005 and 2011 standards, teacher Charles Vaughan surveyed twenty-one writers of the South Carolina standards to gauge respondents’ opinions of Western historicism and political correctness. He also evaluated standards and required materials like textbooks and support documents. Vaughan calculated that 79 percent of the standards advanced a narrative of progress and exceptionalism at the expense of issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality. He blamed political correctness on both the left and right for creating a climate where teachers avoided historical controversy for fear of offending a particular group.¹¹⁸ A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center analyzed South Carolina’s state standards from 2011 and found eight “key concepts” missing, though slavery and Gullah culture were introduced in the third grade. Yet Chanda Robinson, a secondary social studies consultant in Richland County who worked on the 2011 standards with Hogan, received complaints from some teachers about the high level of specificity.¹¹⁹ In a reversal seven years later, the 2018 standards came under scrutiny for lack of specificity, which the Board of Education countered with hundreds of pages of support documents. For example, key figures from the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement were absent, as were nineteenth-century figures such as Robert Smalls. Michael Allen, by this time retired from the National Park Service, was concerned about Smalls’s exclusion as a representative who helped bring public education to South Carolina. The lack of content was a response to a 2016 state law requiring that South Carolina graduates possess skills such as self-direction, global perspective, communication, and analysis.¹²⁰ Despite these critiques, much of the same thematic content from 2011 standards remained, such as the discussions of constitutional amendments and Black Codes and emphasizing how Reconstruction impacted a wide range of groups. Perhaps most important, new indicators stressed Reconstruction as a turning point foundational to civil rights as well as unique state elements, such as the Port Royal Experiment and the 1868 state constitution. In the high-school-level Constitution course, however, Reconstruction history was part of one standard focused on expansion and the natural rights of citizens from 1803 until 1877 and largely reduced to the response of legislative and judicial branches to sectional strife and reunion from 1830 through 1877.¹²¹

Volunteers and professional docents steeped in history, holding advanced degrees, and often working in education performed the tour effectively and used it to reconcile their misinformed Lost Cause and Reconstruction education. But the question remains whether volunteers are best suited to conduct a challenging interpretive tour. As tour and programs coordinator, Bacon-Rogers had total confidence in the “grade A” volunteers who could adapt to Page 112 →give each of the four HHM tours that Historic Columbia offered. Of the five dozen or so guides unwilling or unable to give the Wilson tour, only 25–30 percent retained her confidence in being able to conduct house tours in general. The MoRE training became a “litmus test” for Bacon-Rogers in determining docent excellence because it revealed which volunteers were exceptional in their ability to learn the information and handle controversial topics and conflict. She called for a more intense screening process to ensure quality and perhaps paying a small wage for the three-hour shifts volunteers worked.¹²² Clark also suggested payment may be the key when he discussed volunteers’ objections to the evaluation process. He said, “You’re dealing with people giving their own time. They can walk away at any point. They can quit giving tours if they’re not happy.” For Clark volunteering should be “enjoyable and relaxing,” not time intensive.¹²³ Although professional docents tend to be paid low wages, they work more frequently than volunteers, allowing them to hone their skills, and are more receptive to interpretive changes. They also require less supervision than volunteers but might have less availability if the position is not full time. Whether performed by a volunteer or paid docent, interpretation often requires extra, unpaid labor and an emotional, caretaking interpersonal connection with visitors that is simultaneously devalued for its feminine qualities.¹²⁴

Professionalizing interpretive frontline staff would meet the need among public historians for placement on the job market. The service and knowledge economies began their boom a half century ago in the early 1970s, and interpreters teach the nuances of history to inform and engage the public, yet this work remains undervalued both intellectually and in its compensation by knowledge producers and management.¹²⁵ For example, Brazier worked weekends at Historic Columbia because she could not find full-time public history work after earning her master’s degree. Many public historians excel as interpreters and provide valuable support to exhibition and curatorial staff. With museums strapped for cash, hiring new staff seems impossible, but institutions should consider the overall benefit, in terms of accuracy and productivity, in having two full-time staff versus ten volunteer docents. When snowstorms brought the evaluation process to a halt and left staff scrambling to conduct tours and evaluate docents under the stress of opening a museum, no member of the staff raised concerns that four weekend staffers conducted MoRE tours before being formally approved.¹²⁶ Bacon-Rogers, who managed weekend staff, explained that they could be fired if they presented an outdated narrative or lack professionalism. Furthermore, they were younger, between the ages of twenty-three and forty-five, and often in academia and thus constantly learning and educating themselves. They read and utilized the supplemental information circulated and conveyed Historic Columbia’s Page 113 →approved research and information, which is not always assured with volunteers. They also shared information they encountered and sought permission to incorporate it. Bacon-Rogers thought weekend staff should be included in more workshops with the volunteers as a resource for helping docents answer complex questions and enhance their tours. Weekend staff docent Erin Holmes came to understand the necessity of training after listening to some of the older docents during the training process. Nonetheless, as a trained historian, she would have preferred to learn the content on her own.¹²⁷

MoRE weekend staff in many respects reflected what Amy Tyson classified as a “new class of paraprofessionals.” In her analysis of interpreters at Historic Fort Snelling, she defined paraprofessionals as service workers and cultural producers whose “work display” demands a more personalized, interactive style of service than, say, fast-food employees as part of a new Taylorized knowledge service economy, “wherein knowledge and services of all kinds (including emotions) are being subjected to a new kind of scientific management and oversight.” These paraprofessionals often face a corporate culture that lauds the “customer service superstar,” which relies on interpreters’ belief that their work is important and a privilege, even if they at times feel underappreciated and underpaid. The superstar culture promoting a strong individual identity stymies a collective identity among interpreters, who struggle to create a class consciousness that demands professionalization, support, and fair pay in a saturated market with institutions marred by privatization, reduced state and federal support, and contingent labor. Tyson calls for retaining good cultural workers and treating them with dignity rather than as “disposable commodities.” To do so institutions need to foster a culture of participatory democracy for frontline workers by providing training and identifying individual skills.¹²⁸

Lastly, Historic Columbia suffers from the larger trend in HHMs of volunteer recruitment declining along with attendance. Staffing was an immediate concern and became the most consistent and largest logistical conundrum for the organization. As noted earlier, several docents felt pressure to learn the MoRE tour as a result. Bacon-Rogers argued that placing volunteers who did not agree with the interpretation or were incapable of learning such a complex tour into the MoRE defies the organization’s mission. But turning guests away would be “equally bad for business.”¹²⁹ Thus staff, including myself as tour facilitator conducting half of the tours each day, filled numerous gaps in the volunteer schedule during the week.¹³⁰ Historic Columbia eventually staggered its tour schedule, offering tours of two houses rather than four each hour. This somewhat eased docent fatigue.¹³¹ However, Historic Columbia needed a small, reliable team of two to four full-time docents to professionalize tours and resolve scheduling conflicts.

Page 114 →The interpretive landscape of Historic Columbia evolved in the last decade, partly a reflection of the frontline training problems outlined here and partly a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In May 2023 visitor experience manager Heather Bacon-Rogers, formerly the tour and program coordinator, counted on one hand the volunteers who currently gave Reconstruction tours. Bacon-Rogers, who managed, trained, and hired much of the frontline staff, including some volunteers, recalled that most MoRE volunteers were “originals,” such as Cyndy Storm and Margie Richardson. Storm delivered her tour every Friday, the only MoRE tour slated that day. In the wake of COVID, Historic Columbia streamlined its tour schedule further, resulting in the need for less docents to cover the MoRE. The organization offered each of its four HHMs once a day and adopted an online reservation system.¹³²

Covid was also a factor in the mass exodus of volunteers. Docents concerned about safety and exposure never returned, even after Historic Columbia implemented a mandatory masking policy. Katharine Allen, director of outreach and engagement, reasoned that long-term absences hurt retention because volunteers, many of them retired, were less likely to return and more likely to move on to other activities. Volunteers declined across the organization—not just in interpretation. However, Historic Columbia did not actively recruit to replace these volunteers. Post-COVID, Historic Columbia expanded its professional frontline staff to rely mostly on paid interpreters. Paid weekday guides, according to Bacon-Rogers, arrived with a working knowledge of history, a good grasp of Reconstruction, and confidence in discussing difficult topics. Historic Columbia simplified training again with the shift in interpretive labor. New docents shadowed the house three times, went through the house on their own once, and then gave the tour to Bacon-Rogers. She recalled this frontline staff was different than the volunteer docents of 2014, whose outdated education required a reeducation in modern interpretations of Reconstruction. Those volunteers “needed so much more background, so much more information.”¹³³

Lastly, volunteer docent fears that the MoRE foreshadowed a new interpretive mission at Historic Columbia were correct. In 2018, on the bicentennial of its construction, the Hampton-Preston Mansion reopened as a museum focused on urban enslavement and the groups of people who lived in the space throughout its history. The interpretation, which decentered the Hampton-Preston family and situated their success as enslavers and supporters of slavery, once again contributed to volunteers leaving the organization and demonstrated the strength of a professionalized frontline staff. Governor Hampton’s grandfather, Wade Hampton I, believed by his contemporaries to be the largest slaveholder in South, purchased the home in Page 115 →1823. The origin of the Hampton family’s prestige originated with him, and by the time Wade Hampton II assumed control in 1840, there were over 12,000 acres of land and 460 enslaved people in their possession. Within a decade the number of enslaved skyrocketed to 3,000. Hampton was rumored to be far kinder to his “wards” than his father, who had a reputation for cruelty. In 1860 the family enslaved seventy-four men, women, and children on the mansion grounds in Columbia alone.¹³⁴ Historic Columbia adopted a training style similar to that for the MoRE, with outside experts as speakers and emphasis on how to discuss slavery and the Lost Cause. According to Allen, the tour dove deeper into the Lost Cause than did the MoRE. Allen explained that those volunteers who could not accept change or the work required to deliver a tour on slavery left. However, paid interpreters understood that “this is our mission. These are values. This is the type of tour we give.” Professional docents wanted to be part of the interpretation. In some cases those docents and even one or two volunteers sought out Historic Columbia because of a tour experienced.¹³⁵

Strikingly, regardless of age or professional public historian status, docents walked away from MoRE training and tours with a profound sense of the impact of the Lost Cause and Reconstruction mythology in their own lives. Those from South Carolina and older docents who grew up with Jim Crow, both de facto and de jure, seemed most cognizant of these narratives’ power. The MoRE is not just changing how visitors think about Reconstruction. It changed the way its docents thought about how history has been crafted and defended in their world to support white supremacy. Without a doubt, volunteers and paid professional staff are capable of giving complex HHM tours rich in social, gender, and racial history. But in the case of the MoRE, only a minority of volunteers were willing to attend the training required to learn this kind of tour and master its content. In Bacon-Rogers’s experience, well-educated docents, regardless of professionalization, gave stronger than average MoRE tours and were more likely to remain volunteers. However, she believed the key characteristic was not education but rather an “openness to new study and to learning new material.”¹³⁶ As the next chapter demonstrates, interpreting racial violence and oppression poses problems for everyone. However, the vocal and coded opposition to elements of language and cultural sensitivity training as well as an exhibit film interpreted by some as portraying Wilson as a racist came from retired white volunteer docents, indicating that age and white privilege pose problems on the front lines of interpretation. Page 116 →