Page 219 →Conclusion
The Public’s Response to the MoRE
The Museum of the Reconstruction Era tour opens with a simple question: “When I say the word Reconstruction, what comes to mind?” The inquiry is a best practice in interpretive questioning, because it allows for a variety of answers, asks the visitor to draw on their own knowledge and personal experience, opens opportunities for dialogue among visitors, and provides useful information to the docent, namely the visitors’ working knowledge about the period. Most visitors knew that Reconstruction followed the Civil War, but few, according to docents, seemed to know much more than the term carpetbagger. When the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Wyoming evaluated visitors to determine what reinterpretation content would interest them, nearly half associated “Buffalo Bill” Cody with his Wild West Show even though it was not mentioned by evaluators. Visitors possess strong attachments to the history lessons they learn in popular culture, even after a tour. However, the MoRE’s introductory exchange established that the visitor takeaway would be “a better understanding of this misunderstood period when the South rebuilt itself economically, socially and physically.”1 This precise language conveyed the wide reach of Reconstruction in the postwar South and planted the seed for a conversation about memory, where visitors learned neither history nor their own education were immune from bias. MoRE visitors stepped onto the porch not as “blank slates” but with an “entry narrative” composed of their own experiences and memories, “like baggage,” which the MoRE tried to unpack.2
Historic Columbia designed MoRE at the WWFH to convey a narrative about the importance of time and place. The biracial space the Wilsons and their employees occupied became a lens to explore the biracial democracy and labor system created by Reconstruction. This approach sought to correct the historical amnesia surrounding Reconstruction, which public history reviewers of the site thought successful. Visitor evaluations and docent oral histories demonstrate that the vast majority of visitors approved of dismantling the shrine and learned from the reinterpretation, primarily because they knew so little about Reconstruction. Like the MoRE docents reconciling the white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction that they were taught with the new information of the tour, a significant portion of visitors changed their thinking and gained a new appreciation for others. A reviewer Page 220 →for the Public Historian praised in particular the domestic servant space in the pantries built on historiography, census records, and architecture. Similarly, the reviewer for the Journal of American History commended the Red Shirt room exhibit for explaining the political demise of Reconstruction and white violence, bolstering docents’ assertions that they thrived in the space. The digitized 1872 map of Columbia and exhibit films were popular based on docents’ experiences and reviews. However, some constructive criticism emerged about the limited number of artifacts, timing, the Wilson family tree interactive, and the amount of Woodrow Wilson information on the tour. The dual narrative divided the MoRE’s two formal reviewers and received minimal complaints from visitors. Despite these critiques, evaluation data and docent experiences prove that the majority of museumgoers are, as one visitor put it, “hungry” for Reconstruction history and open to a modern thematic historic house museum.3
Consultant Annie Wright professionally designed the MoRE visitor evaluation. She looked to other institutions’ evaluations for inspiration, including the Smithsonian Institution and the National Endowment of the Arts. Docents administered the final Survey Monkey evaluation on a tablet at the end of the tour, but paper options were also offered on two clipboards. Wright constructed the evaluation to capture audience engagement and the information the interpretive team thought the audience should receive. Stellar evaluations measure three visitor responses to interpretation: cognitive, related to learning and processing information; affective, reflecting attitude and emotions; and behavioral actions. The MoRE evaluation measured behavioral responses to the guide, cognitive responses about changing one’s thinking, and affective responses such as gaining empathy for different people. Two small changes could improve the evaluation responses: incorporating questions that offer a range between two opposing statements, such as whether the presentations were enjoyable/unenjoyable, and ranking on a scale of one to five whether the content made visitors angry, which would determine how much of the interpretation violated their preconceived notions of Reconstruction.4 Docents appreciated receiving visitor evaluation data, and the results reinforced best practices. Docents corrected deficiencies as data changed month to month and worked to convert acceptable results into the best categories, such as moving visitors from being engaged at many points to being fully engaged.5
The first two chapters of the present study established that the MoRE, preserved in the 1920s as part of a larger white women’s club movement, shed its shrine origins and showcased the WWFH as the primary artifact, opening the door for a place- and period-centered interpretation of Reconstruction-era Columbia. MoRE visitor evaluations overwhelmingly indicated that the Page 221 →vast majority of visitors were engaged and welcomed the dismantling of the shrine, its period vignettes, and the fully guided tour. Nearly 3,000 people, 85 percent of them adults, came to the MoRE within its first year of opening. A quarter of visitors, or 648 individuals, submitted evaluations.6 Nearly everyone who visited the MoRE approved of the overall quality and were engaged.7 A quarter of the 324 evaluation comments reinforced the high quality of the museum and tour and the positive experience it yielded.8 Over a dozen visitors commented on the preservation efforts, including the beauty of the home and how the restoration helped them understand historical events of the 1870s.9 The most important attraction for visitors to historic or heritage buildings is the building itself, which arouses emotion. In one study of two HHMs, “the perception of the building” was one factor in visitors feeling “happy, pleasant, and stimulated.”10
Visitor evaluations also confirm that the training process discussed in chapter 3 was successful: MoRE docents, and their handling of the information in an engaging and respectful way, were the most important component of the tour. The mandatory tour evaluation that followed workshops on history, public history best practices, and racial and cultural sensitivity ensured that capable and knowledgeable docents delivered the MoRE tour. The training proved that docents need not be professional public historians but that paid docents, often public history graduate students, and well-educated volunteers, primarily with careers in education or the humanities, were best suited to convey the complex, narratively rich tour. Cecelia Moore, who reviewed the exhibit for the Journal of American History, noted that the semi-guided tours by trained volunteers and paid staff were important to keeping visitors following the narrative. And in commending everyone’s work, she also correctly imagined “that there were a number of difficult conversations among curators, board members, and volunteers—some of whom must have an emotional stake in the previous, non-Reconstruction-based interpretation of the house.”11 Research suggests that visitors have positive feelings toward a heritage site if they have positive employee-visitor interactions, especially when seeking help or information. Cognitive and emotional interest theories indicate that museum components, such as texts and objects, are more interesting when the visitor understands them. These components also become more enjoyable when they encourage positive emotions, especially when supplemented with “humor, remarkable stories, or surprise.” Docents are critical not only in providing the supplemental anecdotes but also in nurturing a fleeting interest into an experience that connects with the visitors’ motives or values.12
MoRE docents had the full attention of more than two-thirds of evaluators on the tour. Visitors also ranked “what the tour guide told” them as Page 222 →the most interesting type of information, more than double its closest competitor, the panels.13 Visitors praised docents in the evaluation’s comments section, most commonly describing them as knowledgeable. Guests stressed their docents were extremely educated and well informed.14 Several visitors left detailed commentary that spoke to how docents were engaged and demonstrated superior quality. Docents created an informal space to answer questions and encourage dialogue and displayed enthusiasm and confidence when sharing knowledge. One visitor wrote that the docent educated them “on the difference between the past and ‘history,’” offered a new perspective, and inspired future research into the topics.15
Despite stellar evaluations in general, visitor feedback also demonstrated the contradictions and varied preferences of those who experience twenty-first-century HHM exhibit elements, namely limited artifacts, panels, question-driven conversations, and interactives. After docents, the text and photographs in the panels were the second most popular form of information for visitors, closely followed by artifacts. However, the docents were twice as popular as panels and preferences toward the three choices of artifacts, panels, and interactives fluctuated dramatically, representing the “participatory power” of visitors to allow content and interactives to pull them toward what they find interesting and to retrieve the interpretation.16 In the comments section of the evaluations, over twice as many visitors wanted more artifacts than those who liked the restrained use of objects.17 Guests needed these objects to balance the thirty-eight panels and wanted more time to read them. Tour and program coordinator Heather Bacon-Rogers claimed that the sheer number of panels and their college sophomore reading level overloaded 75 percent of visitors on her tour. Other docents had difficulty gauging how much time visitors wanted to spend with the panels but encouraged them to read panels even if docents were speaking.18 Docent and visitor comments suggested that asking how much time visitors desired would be helpful on the visitor evaluation.19
One surprise from the visitor evaluations was that questions, at 10 percent, underperformed as a source of visitor engagement, as did interactives, defined as hands-on reproductions and digitized technology.20 Visitor comments and docent testimony validate that some interactives, especially the digitized 1872 map of Columbia, were incredibly popular, but the family tree failed to engage audiences.21 That the MoRE docents’ demonstration of the family tree and encouragement to explore did not result in prolonged visitor engagement speaks to the interactive’s design. Studies on active recruitment reveal that visitors spend significantly more time with interactive exhibits when invited and observed by personnel. Docents blamed the sometimes unresponsive touch screen, unfriendly user design and format, and the Page 223 →lengthy text descriptions of family members. One visitor suggested it needed “color.”22 The lower results for questions was unexpected given that a common problem visitors have with museums is that these spaces do not inspire dialogue between friends and strangers about content. The MoRE’s semi-guided presentation designed for questions and conversation reflected Nina Simon’s participatory five-stage “me-to-we” design. By the end of the MoRE tour, a skilled docent could guide members of the group into feeling like a “close-knit team,” where they have moved from consuming and asking questions about content to interacting with the docent and their fellow visitors socially about content and interests.23 Docents admitted that some visitors preferred to listen rather than ask questions. Whether the visitors preferred this learning style, lacked interest, were committed to a white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction, or opposed the interpretive approach was less clear. However, popular points for audience questions occurred during discussions of the political parties, elections, the Klan, and Jim Crow’s rise, including voting restrictions and poll taxes.24
Chapter 3 also argues that the training process helped MoRE docents come to terms with their own exposure to a white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction and unlearn it. Subsequently their tours often educated visitors on the power of this narrative and, in some cases, the audiences’ own indoctrination. Docent experiences and evaluations illustrate that most visitors had no idea about the promise of Reconstruction and the violent white Democratic response.25 Although John Falk argued that prior interest and knowledge were vital predictors of what and how much knowledge a visitor walked away with, evaluations of MoRE visitors refuted this. Most visitors exited the tour thinking it was excellent and that they had learned a great deal of new information. These results confirm a previous study that found prior knowledge and interest had little direct effect on what exhibits fascinated visitors. What mattered most was cognitive accessibility, and to a lesser degree a pleasant emotional response. Visitors were more likely to enjoy and find interest in an exhibit if they understood the content.26 Docents described the thrill of giving the tours when, as weekend docent Casey Lee labeled them, these “A-ha!” or “light bulb” moments occurred. Docents clarified for visitors how to correct an outdated Reconstruction narrative, that the Democrats and Republicans of Reconstruction were not the same parties of today, and how the Red Shirts’ violence was commemorated.27 For those horrified visitors who were open and attentive to the narrative, weekend docent Jennifer Gunter explained, “you’ve just undone … what they’ve known their entire life and all of sudden you’re telling them they were wrong, their parents were wrong, their teachers were wrong. That’s a lot to grasp.”28 Like MoRE docents, visitors Black and white also began to consider their Page 224 →own family history and their ancestors who lived in the state during Reconstruction.29 Non-southerners made connections with Klan and segregation material, often overturning the myth of southern exceptionalism in their own minds. Volunteers met visitors who lived in a Klan stronghold like Indiana, had been in a sundown town, or had worked in law enforcement that infiltrated klaverns.30 Docents reported non-southerners began to see de facto Jim Crow segregation in their own communities, realizing segregation was “not just a southern phenomenon.”31
“Aren’t I a Citizen?,” the chapter devoted to interpretation techniques that illuminated the lives of unknown domestic workers, argues that historiography, census records, architecture, image analysis, and docent training were essential. Lauren Safranek, who published her MoRE review in a special issue of Public Historian devoted to HHMs, cited the pantries as “one of the most memorable and poignant sections” of the tour. Even though information was lacking in this space about employees, the space produced a “textured” experience driven by the “home as an artifact” that highlighted the “larger experiences in Columbia during Reconstruction.”32 Her assessment reflects an interpretation produced by numerous debates between docents and staff about how best to represent the lives of domestic workers. The Downton Abbey effect was one manifestation of the interpretive tension between class and race.
MoRE docents excelled in producing a compelling narrative of domestic terrorism in the Red Shirt bedroom, a process detailed in chapter 5, and used the tragic narrative to question their own privilege as white docents discussing violence. They described the space as the most compelling in the home and the one in which they felt most confident because of the overwhelming evidence of Reconstruction’s brutal end via voter intimidation, mob violence, and fraud by white Democrats. Reviewer Cecilia Moore thought the MoRE did an “admirable job” helping visitors understand the political complexity of how conservative forces resisted federal changes and used violence to intimidate Black voters.33
As chapter 6 on the historian’s craft discussed, visitor evaluations overwhelmingly showed that guests learned interesting new information and that a significant portion changed their perceptions. However, by presenting multiple narratives and voices with complexity and tension that spanned Reconstruction through the Great War, the tour allowed visitors to contextualize their experience within a larger, diverse story of America and come to understand themselves and others better.34 One quarter of visitors had their beliefs or thoughts challenged or changed and gained appreciation for people not like themselves. These results are especially important given that 88 percent Page 225 →of visitors were white and the exhibit was equally devoted to the Black experience during Reconstruction.35 Visitors also gained insight into Woodrow Wilson and his influence beyond World War I and the League of Nations. A few walked away with a diminished respect for the president because of his racism.36 Evaluations and docent oral histories revealed that visitors came to the MoRE with open minds and walked away thinking about Reconstruction and its memory. The large number of visitors with open minds was the most pleasant surprise for docents. These open minds were the product of a lack of information not misinformation. If anything, giving an unusual but pleasant tour to more than a dozen bikers taught weekend docent Halie Brazier to overcome her own bias about who constitutes an open-minded visitor.37
The final chapter examines the revision of the exhibit film The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson and Reconstruction and connections it made between D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation and Wilson’s presidency and Reconstruction memory. The tour and docents faced significant challenges in effectively discussing white supremacy in the final space, especially when associated with a well-memorialized figure, with primarily white audiences. Time constraints, visitor fatigue, difficulties discussing racialized violence, the complexity of concepts such as the Lost Cause, and the complicated intersection of history and media involved in discussions of Birth of a Nation converged to present unique challenges and imperfect solutions. Nonetheless, exhibit films were the most popularly mentioned interactives by visitors.38 Cecelia Moore praised the films for conveying that a “major theme” of the MoRE was that, after the Civil War, Americans fought to define their country and themselves locally, regionally, and nationally. The battle shaped subsequent movements in the twentieth century and today.39 Where Moore embraced the rhetorical question of how Reconstruction “might have influenced the world view of the future president,” Safranek believed the MoRE’s greatest flaw was no “clear connection between Tommy Wilson and Reconstruction.” Given the dual narrative, its “absence” was “too big to ignore,” even if “reliable documentation” was lacking. She left with unanswered questions about the Wilson family’s politics during Reconstruction and how his teenage experience shaped his politics and leadership. The case and exhibit film on the legacy of Birth hinted at this but left the visitor “in the dark” with “too much unsaid.”40 The artifact that best represents Safranek’s criticism of the dual narrative is Tommy’s birth bed. Even Moore called the bed the “most glaring inconsistency” in the home. The review continued: “It dominates the room, yet remains mostly uncurated, while arrayed around it are displays about carpetbaggers, Birth of a Nation, and Wilson’s presidency.”41
Page 226 →As the first Reconstruction museum in the nation, the MoRE offers a blueprint of the challenges and rich rewards that will accompany commemorating Reconstruction in public spaces. Both exhibit reviewers understood that the reinterpretation was daring given institutional size, available artifacts, and diverse exhibit elements. For Safranek the exhibit presented “provocative ideas” and was “trying to accomplish laudable and worthy interpretive goals.” Moore called the attempt to convey the “nuance and complexity” of Reconstruction as well as its promise “a bold undertaking” and a “mostly successful endeavor.”42 While all docents, staff, and consultants made significant contributions to this intrepid enterprise, executive director Robin Waites and her leadership made the interpretive turn possible. Waites retired in 2024, choosing to leave “on a high note” after twenty years at the helm of Historic Columbia. She departed on her own terms, having checked everything off her list of personal goals and creating new ones she never imagined. She left a far more inclusive organization behind than the one that wealthy white Columbians founded to frame their own narratives. She had no executive experience managing human resources, budgets, or boards yet grew the organization dramatically. She inherited six full-time staff, a $300,000 budget, six historic buildings, and fourteen acres of poorly maintained grounds. She more than tripled the staff and increased the budget to $2.5 million. She oversaw the rehabilitation of all property gardens to both provide educational opportunities, increase revenue, and offer green space downtown. In addition to the groundbreaking and award-winning interpretation at the MoRE, Waites lead the reinterpretation of every building except the Robert Mills House and Gardens and expanded the website, which also includes collections. The Waites era boosted Historic Columbia’s preservation profile, garnering the support of the once-reluctant Chamber of Commerce, and included a vast array of progressive projects often part of partnerships that amplified multivocal local history: collecting and preserving Columbia’s Jewish and queer history, documenting of the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, and placing the Black public high school Lakeview on the National Register of Historic Places. Waites also cofounded City of Women, an annual event honoring women from the past and the present, and the Columbia SC 63 Project, which focuses on the civil rights movement in Columbia. Cofounder Bobby Donaldson, historian of southern and Black history at the University of South Carolina, used the language of Reconstruction to describe her work, “reconstructing” how Columbians view slavery and civil rights for marginalized people. Her vision ultimately prepared Historic Columbia to join national dialogues on the Confederate flag and Black Lives Matter with its expertise. Because of her, the MoRE changed what visitors and docents knew about Reconstruction and, to some degree, themselves.43 Page 227 →This will ripple into the community as these individuals continue conversations with friends, family, and acquaintances.
The Political Road to Reconstruction in the HHM and Where to Go from Here
Edith Galt Wilson’s efforts to preserve shrines at Woodrow Wilson’s birthplace and their home in Washington, DC, serve as a reminder that HHMs’ engaging political and social issues as part of a new turn in the HHM movement is not new. The message is. For Patricia West, who traced the first century of HHMs, these homes were always political, shaped first by the period politics of their origin and then the public role they perform, such as exemplifying patriotism, loyalty, and good citizenship. Sometimes founders hid the politics of the house beneath a “creation myth” of shrines and “romantic patriotism”; but even the establishment of the HHM movement itself was political, because both conservative and activist women, “enmeshed in the ‘cult of domesticity,’” were highly visibly practicing “domestic religion” as applied to the HHM in the male public sphere. This made HHMs “documents of political history.”44
Journal of American History reviewer Cecelia Moore noted that the MoRE was “ahead of the trend” in Reconstruction commemoration, since the National Park Service took several years to get its Beaufort site off the ground.45 However, national recognition of Beaufort could be the tipping point in correcting disparities between Reconstruction scholarship and public knowledge. Although few know Beaufort’s foundational role in Reconstruction, the other major problem is that white violence and national complicity were always center to an accurate telling of Reconstruction. White Americans have yet to come to terms with this. As Kate Masur and Gregory Downs forewarned, commemorating Reconstruction meant “remembering how frequently white Americans resorted to violence and corruption to disenfranchise black voters and passed discriminatory laws to block African American economic and social equality, while the U.S. government stood by passively.”46
Patricia West has called for “administrative history” to acknowledge the political tensions and historical context that shaped the evolution of HHMs. Professionals have both “the right and responsibility” to engage “new scholarship, new communities, and new agendas.”47 And hopefully the context of those endeavors would be evaluated in the future. The MoRE answered this call. Like all political HHMs, the MoRE was founded for political reasons. But the MoRE reinvented the “culture of reconciliation,” using cultural tourism to change the memory of Reconstruction and narrative about the reconciliationist President Wilson. Reconciliation through disruption is one way HHMs can heal old wounds of national tragedy and promote greater Page 228 →equity. The Matilda Joslyn Gage home discussed in the introduction and Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, North Carolina, are part of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a global network nearly two hundred strong in over four dozen countries. Similar to the MoRE, these two homes and fellow coalition site the Centro Cultural y Museum de la Memoria in Uruguay all have an “uncomfortable relationship” with their houses. In the latter, fear is an emotion welcomed, and “dangerous memory” is employed as a “new weapon” to transform the structural artifact into “safe containers” for community discussion and navigating social issues and rights. The country house of late nineteenth-century dictator Máximo Santos claims to be a “memory museum, not a history museum.” A space of political power, in this case a dictator’s home rather than a president’s teenage home, is used to process the modern struggle for democracy and the legacy of authoritarianism in Uruguay. Although the MoRE keeps Wilson in view, the Centro Cultural substitutes a 1973–84 dictatorship for Santos’s reign. Like the MoRE, it devotes a room to the memory of state terrorism. Less structured than the semiguided Wilson tour, Centro Cultural visitors can begin their tour in any room.48 Masur and Downs argued that the Beaufort NPS designation would show the world “how important it is that we continue talking about the fundamental questions of democracy, race and citizenship that trouble our politics to this day.”49 The future of the MoRE’s reinterpretation is bound by these same contemporary political and social issues as well. Currently it is slowly revising the memory of Reconstruction for its docents and audience, giving them a new historical perspective on America’s promise and shortcomings. All South Carolinians and Americans would benefit from this exchange.
Exhibit reviewers to various degrees understood the contemporary social issues that the MoRE’s reinterpretation addressed. While Safranek hinted at the political implications and climate the MoRE operated in, Moore was more sympathetic to the undertaking. Moore saw both the short and long game the MoRE was playing. She submitted her review before the Charleston massacre yet situated her review as the United States approached the precipice of that historical moment. The events in Ferguson following Michael Brown’s death had yet to play out fully, but they were national news. Using Wilson’s words, she remarked that Reconstruction remained a “‘banked fire’ in Columbia,” as evidenced by the Confederate flag flying at the capitol—yet to be lowered in the wake of the Charleston shooting at Mother Emanuel AME. But Moore was encouraged as a historian that the public was willing to engage in conversation about our divisions. Social tension combined with the growing popularity of films placing race front and center suggested to her that the public was prepared to learn how central race was to American Page 229 →history and contextualize contemporary problems within that past. Public historians were in unique positions to offer this lesson. The MoRE provided such a space, which could also show historians how dialogues about Reconstruction operate in public settings.50
Annette Gordon-Reed once asked a question about Sally Hemings’s relationship with Thomas Jefferson so profound that her answer became the catalyst that spurred Monticello toward an narrative that includes Jefferson-Hemings descendants. In the wake of racially charged events in 2015 engulfing the nation, Gordon-Reed wondered, “What if Reconstruction hadn’t failed?” Freed people may have become landowners and voters. Black and white students might have been educated together. Further, “what if American historians during the aftermath of Reconstruction had not been white supremacists?” Maybe those same integrated students would have learned “another narrative about black people’s place in America.” Reconstruction would never have become a “tragedy” that harmed “the good and innocent white people of the South.” Furthermore, Gordon-Reed argued, D. W. Griffith would never have visually presented the literary and historic Lost Cause and white supremacist Reconstruction interpretations in Birth of a Nation, such as the State House scene of Black legislators “with their bare feet up on their desks during sessions, eating chicken and watermelon while taking the occasional swig of alcohol.” Instead the Dunning School “echoed his sentiments,” substituting “faux scholarly detachment for the director’s cinematic pyrotechnics on the race question.” This led to “disfranchisement, Jim Crow, and, for extremists, lynching.” The ripple effect of these losses reverberated in the struggles for equality today.51 What if HHMs had not been born of this same ideology? It might not have taken 150 years to present an interpretation that offered what reviewer Cecelia Moore called a picture of Reconstruction’s “promise and opportunity” instead of the narrative of “defeat and despair” given by the victors of the political and cultural battle to destroy Reconstruction. Visitors to the MoRE see the era as “still open to possibility” and can imagine a different outcome where the Klan and Red Shirts did not win with violence and Jim Crow never existed. This was a far “different picture” of Reconstruction than most visitors would “recall from high school history class.”52
The MoRE can treat national scars by serving as a resource for learning about the first civil rights movement and contemplating the first expressions of African American political, economic, and social independence following emancipation. Watching Black successes in politics, business, and the legal system and then bearing witness to these rights being stripped away in blood and with terror make the path from white supremacy during Reconstruction to its current state in the twenty-first century clearer and more familiar. Page 230 →The devastation unleashed by Dylann Roof in Charleston or the murder of Heather Heyer by James Alex Fields Jr. during the white nationalist violence incited over monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 transform from shocking, isolated incidents to an absurd pattern that reminds the nation Reconstruction remains unfinished.
It took over a century to build and entrench a white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction. Even as historians began to chip away at the narrative, the memory continued to endure in textbooks, monuments, historic sites, and popular culture, especially film. Filmmakers persist in their engagement with Birth of a Nation—not just DJ Spooky and his Rebirth of a Nation featured in the MoRE exhibit. Robert Zemeckis, “simulating Griffith’s simulations,” gave Tom Hanks a cameo as Nathan Bedford Forrest in the reproduction of Birth of a Nation that begins Forrest Gump.53 Quentin Tarantino confessed to Henry Louis Gates Jr. his obsession with and desire to “deconstruct” Birth of a Nation. Both scholar and director found Thomas Dixon’s influence, via his original work The Clansman, to be “evil.” Tarantino opined that it compares only to “Mein Kampf when it comes to its ugly imagery.” The director blamed Birth not just for rebirthing the Klan but for “all the blood that was spilled” until the early 1960s. He argued that if Dixon and Griffith were “held by Nuremberg Laws, they would be guilty of war crimes” for their creation.54 Nate Parker attempted to reset Birth of a Nation by giving his film about Nat Turner’s rebellion the same name.55 Reconstruction-era films in Hollywood are unicorns, but the 2016 summer blockbuster season brought Free State of Jones. While the film was panned by some for its reliance on the “white savior” trope, the director Gary Ross consulted historical monographs and historians, including Victoria Bynam, David Blight, and Eric Foner. Ross even footnoted the film.56 However, it would be nice to see a Reconstruction film not told through a white male lens.
The white supremacist narrative that inspired Birth’s depiction of Reconstruction in South Carolina saved Wilson’s home, kept the Confederate flag flying at the State House over fifty years, motivated the gunman in Charleston, and killed the first NPS attempt to create a Reconstruction monument in 2002. As Woodrow Wilson wrote in his 1901 essay on Reconstruction: “It is a wonder that historians who take their business seriously can sleep at night.”57 The MoRE can facilitate the hard conversations about white supremacy and its myths that shape the modern era. It can guide the dialogues about white supremacist symbols and important historical figures and presidents with inexcusable flaws and what place they should have in public spaces that define what it means to be an American, southern or otherwise.
The MoRE is a start in shattering the white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction once and for all and mainstreaming positive images of Reconstruction Page 231 →that have circulated since its destruction. One of the most visible presentations of a Black countermemory of Reconstruction was the Southern Negro Youth Congress major convention in Columbia, October 18–20, 1946. Reconstruction permeated much of the meeting. Over one thousand delegates of the congress, part of the larger Southern Popular Front, filled Township Auditorium, the building that almost resulted in the demolition of the MoRE and ultimately led to its preservation. On the auditorium’s walls hung photographs of Black Reconstruction-era politicians. A biracial crowd of seven hundred listened to W. E. B. Du Bois give his speech “Behold the Land” at Benedict, one of Columbia’s Reconstruction-era historical Black colleges. The speech looked backward to Reconstruction at the moment a modern civil rights movement was gaining greater traction but also looked to a future that still may not fulfill America’s democratic promise. Du Bois’s speech praised the power of young people, which historian Patricia Sullivan saw reflected in Black Lives Matter. The convention was largely forgotten until USC’s History Center, as part of their loftier goal to present public programming on Reconstruction’s legacy, and the Center for Civil Rights History and Research organized a seventieth anniversary event. In the same chapel Du Bois spoke in, his Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer David Levering Lewis delivered “Our Exceptionalist Quagmire: Is There a Way Forward,” a speech reflecting on “Behold the Land” in light of contemporary racial and political issues.58 Commemorative events for the next decade, such as those shaped by a new national monument in Beaufort or those celebrating countermemories of Reconstruction, will build on this momentum.
Historic Columbia continues to provide programming and collaborate with local institutions, such as USC, to commemorate Reconstruction’s sesquicentennial. It perseveres in promoting Reconstruction narratives with expert speakers, like Neil Kinghan, author of A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina, and walking tours of Reconstruction sites. The most exciting development is that Historic Columbia secured a Reconstruction-era ballot box from South Carolina. It came with a handwritten note revealing that the donor’s great-grandfather blew on the ballots to separate extra votes while he counted. With the South Carolina State Museum, Historic Columbia built a vitrine to display the box with the existing tissue ballot in the Red Shirt room and designed a new double panel on voter suppression.59
Historic Columbia updates the MoRE regularly as well to meet the interpretive needs of visitors. The organization revised the citizenship video in the family parlor and hired Black contractors for the work. Visitors and docents complained that a young boy’s narration, meant to represent a childlike Tommy, was difficult to understand. A few visitors complained there were misleading images of civil rights and LGBTQ issues today being linked to the Reconstruction’s Fourteenth Amendment and issues of citizenship. The critique demonstrates the challenges facing queer-centered HHMs.60 A Proposition 8 protest sign against a ban on same-sex marriage in California, which was struck down in federal district court in 2010, provoked backlash from two visitors who refused to frame LGBTQ rights within the perimeters of this amendment and thought it unrelated to South Carolina.61 Two HHMs that masterfully broach conversations about the LGBTQ community through innovative interpretations are the Matilda Joslyn Gage Home and the Pauli Murray Center. Gage’s home ingeniously managed to create a dialogue about transsexuality using a single image of the parlor in which L. Frank Baum married Gage’s daughter. The image’s placement in the only restored room in the home conveys that Gage helped inspire the Oz series, which had a transgendered character. The Murray Center presents the “classic hero narrative” through Murray’s achievements as a writer, educator, lawyer, feminist, poet, and the first Black female Episcopal priest. Her representation as a queer woman of color “feels like a revolutionary act” and heals wounds through an intersectional historic home demonstrating her philosophy that the lived experience is not defined by one social construct. The center provides a safe space to discuss Murray’s story and contemporary issues rather than a traditional guided tour of period rooms.62
Figure 20. A newly acquired ballot box from Sumter County used in the 1876 election joined the tissue ballot and red shirt in 2024 on display in the bedroom devoted to domestic violence and election fraud. Ballot box, 1876. Courtesy of Historic Columbia.
Other MoRE revisions include removing the final exhibit film prominently featuring DJ Spooky and The Birth of Nation and replacing it with a new film. Intended to facilitate the transition from the Red Shirt bedroom into the final space and ease visitor fatigue, the film will offer a clear narrative on the historical continuity of Reconstruction to the present.63 The film will link Reconstruction and the long civil rights movement by plugging the multimedia exhibit An Advocate of the People on display at the Modjeska Page 233 →Monteith Simkins House, also administered by Historic Columbia. The late nineteenth-century, one-story cottage was home to Simkins, a premier human rights advocate in South Carolina from the New Deal until her death in 1992. Whether any Birth of a Nation footage or analysis will be included in the film is not yet clear, though the parts of the exhibit that discuss the film will remain. New content will include information about the Wilson administration’s firing of federal employees like Civil War hero Robert Smalls, who served five terms in the US House of Representatives during and after Reconstruction before becoming collector of the Port of Beaufort.64
The most important modification Historic Columbia made to the MoRE was the name change from the Woodrow Wilson Family Home. A persistent criticism of the HHM was that it was perpetrating a bait and switch, replacing a Woodrow Wilson shrine with a Reconstruction exhibit. Moore somewhat agreed in her review but argued that visitors who came knowingly to a presidential site still received a narrative about Wilson’s youth and “genteel white southern society.” In exchange they also had “to consider uncomfortable information about how the nation has somewhat failed to live up to its promise.” Moore and Safranek disagreed on how effective the dual narrative was. Moore felt the Wilson study used it well to illuminate the role the Wilson men played in Presbyterianism at the time and a larger theme that religion influenced public debates about race and citizenship. While she believed the dual narrative worked well in the pantries, overall, Safranek found it an “imperfect method.” The character of Tommy Wilson gave the home and curators a “safety net” to present a “strong and positive stance” on South Carolina’s Reconstruction history and provide “guard against the potential for visitors to reject completely” an unexpected experience. A Wilson home and Reconstruction museum occupying one space, essentially two different museums with “dueling messages,” was a recipe to confuse and cloud visitor expectations, especially those that came expecting a period home or extensive Wilson family history.65 Visitors’ reactions to the dual narrative were mixed in the evaluation comments. Those that mentioned the importance of a museum devoted to the Reconstruction history praised the home for the “intelligent, thoughtful manner” in which it presented a complicated, conflicted, progressive, and emotional time period and its lingering impact today. The comments also commended the dual narrative and contextualized the interpretation with other presidential homes.66 The dual narrative left some visitors wanting a better flow, more information, and answers to unresolved questions. After more artifacts or furnishings, the second most recorded criticism in the comments section of the visitor evaluation was wanting more material about Wilson’s family and presidency, including their relationship with Black servants, the segregation of federal offices in Washington, DC, Page 234 →and how his childhood in the Reconstruction South impacted his “social or political thinking.”67
Historic Columbia changed the name of the Woodrow Wilson Family Home to the Museum of the Reconstruction Era to ensure guests understand the home is no longer a shrine to Wilson before they purchase the tour tickets.68 In 2014 the organization’s staff and docents initially feared a political backlash or potential confrontations over the facts of Reconstruction with visitors familiar with the white supremacist narrative or who supported the “Heritage, Not Hate” movement.69 A hostile response never manifested itself, because state and county appropriations emphasized the need for preserving the home and archeological research on the grounds. Hidden beneath the so-called bait of Wilson’s name, funding in the years leading up to the relaunch and afterward placed little emphasis on Reconstruction.70 Nonetheless most docents experienced the discomfort of a rare encounter with unapologetic Lost Causers or defenders of Redemption who rejected the material.71 In these cases docents established authority through their confidence in the facts and remained cool. They did not let these inaccurate responses go unnoticed, sometimes asking where the guest got their information or offering a correction and suggestions for reading material.72 The vast majority of evaluations corroborated that docent fears of pushback were mostly unfounded.
Visitors thought sensitive or controversial issues were treated extremely well, and a small but significant portion of visitors entered the museum believing Reconstruction and issues of race, gender, and violence were appropriate topics for discussion and not controversial.73 Only four people dismissed the tour as too “political” or “politically correct,” three on the evaluations and one in the press. One wrote, “Negative. Disappointing. An unfortunate social experiment. Waste of an opportunity to have something good. The museum house deserves a finer tour, and the people who visit deserve better, too.” Another visitor wrote a letter to the editor published in the State newspaper expressing upset that the interpretation was “an excuse to glorify the days of Reconstruction following the War Between the States, which were probably the darkest days that this state has ever experienced.”74 Volunteer Jean Morgan encountered two guests who seemed to be on a fishing expedition to prove Historic Columbia was misappropriating government funds to advance a progressive agenda or at worst posed a security threat. One woman politely explored the exhibit, but her companion wrote in a notebook throughout the tour, including copying exhibit text. She asked questions about the restoration funding, whether a staff member was always present on site, whether visitors could visit the home unaccompanied, and why Morgan gave tours.75
Page 235 →The challenge for the MoRE and other Reconstruction sites will be reaching audiences of the same size and influence as groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Attendance, rather than the quality of the MoRE content, director of research Kat Allen argued, remains a problem. Nonetheless, Allen and tour and program coordinator Bacon-Rogers believe the MoRE is the biggest draw of Historic Columbia’s four houses for out-of-town visitors and that the name change lures more people to the site. When the Richland County Council unanimously approved the name change, a Black member, Joyce Dickerson, reconsidered taking a tour, where previously she had bypassed the site when it centered on Wilson’s formative years.76 The site also competes with other institutions such as the local zoo and Columbia Museum of Art. However, MoRE visitor evaluations suggest that another factor is generational. Millennials desire a different interpretive experience than previous generations and a less traditional guided tour. They favor interactives and questions at higher rates than average, are more open-minded, and often prefer the self-guided portions.77
The battle for a new memory of Reconstruction must be waged in the public sphere, for this is where the dominant white supremacist narrative was so successfully crafted and maintained. Public historians and their peers in academia may have to accept that it could take another century to dismantle the indoctrination that our professional ancestors and cultural makers created. But the work must be done. MoRE reviewer Cecelia Moore suspected that Wilson the historian “would have been fascinated by how Reconstruction … continues to dictate how Americans think about individual rights, citizenship, and nationhood.” In his Reconstruction essay, Wilson asked, “How deep did the revolution go?”78 That would make for a great engagement question on the MoRE tour. Page 236 →