DATE: Sunday, August 17, 1997               TAG: 9708070759

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   76 lines

CHALLENGING HISTORY AT WILLIAMSBURG

When I first encountered Colonial Williamsburg 20 years ago, having resided in Arizona and other points west, my first impression was of an early American movie set.

After all, a bewigged Jack Lord, who later gained fame in TV's ``Stoney Burke'' and instant recognition in ``Hawaii Five-O,'' had a featured role in the attraction's signature orientation flick, ``Williamsburg - The Story of a Patriot,'' shot on the premises.

And I was fairly accustomed to buckboard-and-clapboard Old Tucson, where western films were made and tourists came to watch, hang out, eat and buy stuff.

John Wayne himself had trod that turf, also under a rug, and he would come to the Historic Area as well for a Christmas television special not long before he died.

But I was quickly disabused of the notion of Colonial Williamsburg as strictly stagecraft.

This place was, all the brochures, spokesfolk and official advertising informed me, a museum.

It was ``living history.''

Forget Jack Lord and John Wayne; George Washington slept here.

And a million visitors come annually to this reconstructed context for the founding of America that includes posh homes, craftspeople and a precision fife-and-drum corps.

But the informed among those transient observers still perceive a certain tension between the educational and entertainment elements of Colonial Williamsburg, an uneasy alliance between shrinelike celebration and show biz.

An invigorating analysis of the ambiguities of this interesting American enterprise is The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Duke University Press, 260 pp., $49.95 hardbound/$16.95 paper) by Richard Handler and Eric Gable.

Handler is an anthropology professor at the University of Virginia; Gable is a sociology and anthropology professor at Mary Baldwin College. Their collaborative study took six years and was funded in part by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The rigor of the authors' research is matched by the engaging readability of their prose.

``If visitors can mistake Colonial Williamsburg for a theme park,'' they write, ``they have not been convinced of its reality, its historical authenticity. Further, instead of seeing Colonial Williamsburg as an altruistic cultural institution whose lofty mission is public education and historic preservation, they have mistaken it for a commercial enterprise, a business that sells phony experiences to make a profit. To see Colonial Williamsburg as a theme park, then, is doubly injurious, for such an interpretation violates both the foundation's historical integrity and its civic purpose.

``Colonial Williamsburg has, in short, an image problem.''

Two hundred painstakingly evaluative pages later, the authors conclude that, in fact, the message has been and remains the medium, to turn McLuhan around.

Colonial Williamsburg is ``a Republican Disneyland.''

It emphasizes the upper crust and glosses over slavery, they argue. It is not as authentic as it pretends to be. It patronizes its patrons.

It reinforces preconception and discourages critical thinking.

The New History in an Old Museum compellingly accomplishes the reverse.

``When unionized hotel and restaurant workers compared the (Colonial Williamsburg) corporation to a plantation, they were recognizing, we think, the connection of past slavery and present-day social hierarchies,'' the authors note. ``The comparison was explicitly drawn for us only once, by an archaeologist who worked for the foundation. He said (and here we must paraphrase him because we did not record his remarks verbatim), look at 18th century Colonial Williamsburg, half black, half white, with the blacks in menial, subservient positions and the whites in control.

``It's just like Colonial Williamsburg today!''

Anyone who would delve deeper into the complex significance of a showplace than simply taking the guided tour will be well served by the analytical perspective of this illuminating book. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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