Ethnic heritage for WASPs?

Chris Bertram posts about Restoration and the urban environment :

In recent weeks the hit TV programme on British TV has been Restoration, which invites viewers to vote for the dilapidated country house, castle, factory or mausoleum they most want renovated. Patrick Wright has been a shrewd observer of the "heritage industry" since the publication of his landmark On Living in an Old Country in the mid-1980s. He has a good essay in the Guardian on the ambivalence of restoration and on the often-attached social snobbery.(emphasis added, check-out links in original)

(What an idea! Viewer-participation for historic preservation! Only in England! It would be interesting to develop a TV show to straw-poll other major public investments.)

But as to snobbery --- indeed.

A few years ago I visited splendid Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. (Irony in link intentional and an indication that even historic preservation evolves.) As I wondered about, and particularly in the obligatory founders' hall, I was struck by the benefactors' names: I wish I could get the rhythm down but there was a certain 17th century air to them all. And then it struck me: I was in an ethnic heritage museum for WASPs. Ethnic heritage is big in the USA nowadays. Yes we are a "melting pot" but also a salad in which each ingrediant contributes to the whole but also keeps the flavor of its own historic identity. I like it: the mutual respect for "the other" and also for "the past."

And yes, social exclusion and snobbery have a bit to do with historic preservation, if looked at from the most cynical perspective: I mean who designed & developed those 18th and 19th century treasures? Certainly not immigrants who arrived in North America in 1880. No of course not, it was the WASP grandees of North and South. And please don't forget it.

But overall, historic preservation effort seems to me a very valuable thing (and Mystic Seaport in particular is terrific if you like ships, boats etc) in that remembrance of the past fosters social stabilty and continuity, (especially if there is recognition that many such structures were actually "built" by cheap immigrant labor or literally, slaves.) Now of course if one does not want social continuity...

As to the article referenced by Bertram, it's interesting if too British for me to really get.

But it has some nice observations, such as:

And so it is with Restoration, which concentrates on the historical building as a single endangered structure, and sees conservation as a wholly good cause: a secular version of church-going, which only a satanic monster would question.

Comments

[Chris Genovese]

Is the salad metaphor yours? I like it. Moving from the Great American Melting Pot to the Big American Salad seems apt in more ways than one.

But maybe we should hope for the Tasty American Stew, where each ingredient maintains a recognizable identity but blends a bit with all the others.

[dave p.]

"(especially if there is recognition that many such structures were actually "built" by cheap immigrant labor or literally, slaves.)"

Ideally, the history of a given place will include the cheap immigrant labor or slaves. I haven't been there, but Somerset Place, a historic plantation in Creswell, North Carolina, focuses on the slaves who lived and worked there, and only briefly covers the family who owned it. A very refreshing change, and a more interesting aspect of the place's history, really.

Along those lines, the most memorable of the castles I visited in France (and among the least famous) had inside it a display, with captivating illustrations, of what medieval life was like, not only for the castle residents but for those of the surrounding town.