Volume 46, Number 4 · March 4, 1999
Mr. W. on Show
By Edmund S. Morgan
The Great Experiment: George Washington and the American Republic October 6, 1998-June 6, 1999; and the Morgan Library, New York, September 16, 1999-January 2, 2000
an exhibition at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California,
The Great Experiment: George Washington and the American Republic
by John Rhodehamel, foreword by Gordon S. Wood
Huntington Library/Yale University Press, 176 pp., $27.50
On October 6, when 'The Great Experiment' opened, people were lined up by the hundreds outside the great hall of the Huntington Library where it is on display until next June. Before it is packed up and moved to the Morgan Library in New York in September, probably as many as half a million will have come to see it, including thirty or forty thousand schoolchildren. What do people get out of viewing an exhibition of words on paper in glass cases? There are a few portraits and engravings, a bust, a statue, some illustrations from books, some odd pieces of silverware, china, and furniture, but the exhibition hinges on about fifty documents, mostly letters, written by George Washington. His writing is clear, if a little faded, legible enough even to someone not familiar with eighteenth-century handwriting. But the documents are under glass, where only one side of a page can be shown, and no one of them is crucial to an understanding of the man's life and career. His writings in the thirty-nine volumes published by John C. Fitzpatrick from 1931 to 1944 include 17,000 items. The definitive edition underway at Charlottesville since 1968 will include many more. The Huntington itself has five hundred. So what we have on exhibit is a very small sample indeed. And yet it is a safe bet that more people will look at the sample, probably reading only scraps here and there, than will make their way through any larger selection in print or through a biography of the man, even the excellent brief one (about 45,000 words) by John Rhodehamel for his catalog of the exhibition he curated.
Review, 3911 words
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