THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501271100
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
A DECADE AGO, the Valentine Museum of the Life and History of Richmond, located on Clay Street smack-dab in the middle of the Virginia capital, began a reinterpretation of the city's past that pulled no punches.
The sweet scent of magnolias, reported the Valentine, was not the only odor that had long imbued the city.
Valentine exhibits such as ``In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond'' prominently displayed such concrete evidence of the city's racist antecedents as slave leg irons. By contrast, just down the block rose the traditionally stolid Museum of the Confederacy and the newly restored, chiffon-festooned White House of the Confederacy. The Valentine stood out among such romanticized bastions in ``the holy city of the Lost Cause'' like a firework at a faculty tea.
Further, amid an industrial municipality built upon tobacco, where Philip Morris remained the major employer, the Valentine portrayed the background and progress of manipulative cigarette advertising.
Other gutsy presentations by the museum focused not at all on the august equestrian generals memorialized in stone about the streets of Richmond but on resident African Americans, women, Jews, evangelical Christians and ordinary working folk.
Noted unapologetic Valentine director Frank Jewell, self-servingly but truly: ``These exhibitions have brought Richmond and the Valentine national and international acclaim in newspapers, magazines, professional journals and television, both for their unflinching focus on topics once deemed too incendiary to discuss publicly or dismissed as insignificant.''
One substantive fruition of the Valentine's search for ``new'' history is At the Falls: Richmond, Virginia, and Its People by Marie Tyler-McGraw (University of North Carolina Press, 361 pp., $39.95 hardcover, $19.95 soft). Tyler-McGraw, a Ph.D. and fellow at the National Museum of American History, joined the museum staff with the principal responsibility of chronicling the Valentine's uninhibited scholarship for the general reader. With the help of the museum staff, she has produced a powerful book.
City histories tend to make stuffy reading and are generally relegated to library reference sections for the reluctant consultation of students or to historic-site gift shops as weighty but unread souvenirs for tourists. At the Falls deserves a wider currency. Interestingly written and illustrated, it reads like a general-interest magazine but reports like a professional journal. It has a crisp, occasionally wry but always engaging voice.
``The Lee Monument Association,'' writes Tyler-McGraw, ``was formed from the governing board of the Hollywood Memorial Association and hoped to be as successful as that group had been in raising money for a memorial. But this group of women from prominent families had to contend with the ambitious founder of the veterans' organization - the unreconstructed Confederate general Jubal Early - who tried very hard to wrest control of the Lee Monument Association from the women's group and once threatened to gather a band of veterans and blow the statue up if a Frenchman was permitted to design it.''
Richmond's past is arguably a core sample of the South, from Patrick Henry's fiery ``give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death'' speech at Henrico Parish (later St. John's) Church in 1775 to the claptrap white-supremacist pomp of the Ku Klux Klan carrying Richmond for Herbert Hoover in the 1920s.
Here is Gov. Lindsay Almond rallying the ``massive resistance'' troops in 1955: ``Let there be no misunderstanding, no weasel words on this point - we dedicate our every capacity to preserve segregation in the schools.'' And here is Gov. Linwood Holton walking his daughter into predominantly black John F. Kennedy High on the first day of classes in 1970.
In 1991 the Valentine itself became history when it entered into an agreement with the Ethyl Corp. to use the Tredegar Iron Works on the Kanawha Canal for new museum galleries and historic attractions depicting the life of the city. Valentine Riverside opened in May 1994, converting an industrial site to tourism and giving a $22 million start to development along the water. Having borrowed at least $8 million from Crestar Bank to develop the park, the museum is already reportedly $54,000 behind in interest payments.
But, as the unblinking Valentine would be first to testify of any other Richmond enterprise, nobody's perfect.
MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College.
ILLUSTRATION: Jacket lithograph from "VIEW FROM CHURCH HILL," THE VALENTINE,
RICHMOND
Jacket photo by CHUCK SAVAGE
by CNB