History’s a Serious Thing in Lancaster, Pa.

A lovely city center, the Amish, and nearby Hershey are great, but Civil War history abounds.

N ow and then in my years at NR, I’ve grabbed a map, gassed up the old station wagon, and channeled my inner Jack Kerouac, sans the bebop, booze, and Buddhism. These always signal one thing. Road trip!

We’re blessed with a big, glorious, culturally vibrant country with good art and museums not everywhere but nearly so. I think it’s safe to say I’m the only critic writing for a national journal willing to hit the highway to see the sites. This week, in Pennsylvania, I’m covering art and heritage in Lancaster and Pittsburgh, with a stop in Hershey, surely the sweetest place on earth. Its dentists drive Bentleys. Then to Ohio, for Cleveland and Toledo. In both are premier art museums, but in Cleveland I can shake, rattle, ’n’ roll at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I’ll hit Youngstown, too, and its Butler Institute of American Art.

Exhausting? Yes, but Neil Young sang, “It’s better to burn out than fade away,” adding, “My, my, hey, hey,” since it’s a rock tune. Don’t worry. I’m ending with a visit to President McKinley’s house in Canton. It’s where he ran his iconic 1896 front-porch campaign. I hear the rocking chairs — a different kind of rock — are most therapeutic.

Lots of art, history, and heritage to cover.

I didn’t need to go to Gettysburg for Fourth of July spirit. This Fourth of July, historic Lancaster, Pa., about 60 miles west of Philadelphia, was a fine and topical place to be. It’s one of the country’s oldest inland cities and the market town for a prosperous, mostly agricultural and still very Amish county. It was also once the capital of the United States, though only for a single day. Lancaster is bustling and stately, can-do and laid-back. I consider it part of the great American heartland.

It’s got plenty of artists, but I focused on its history museums. I visited Wheatland, James Buchanan’s lovely house. Yes, that Buchanan (1791–1868), the 15th president and Lincoln’s snakebit predecessor, under whose watch six Southern states seceded. Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868) — the battering ram behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments — was Lancaster’s congressman during the Civil War. He chaired the House Ways and Means Committee, so he was central in financing the war. He also led the charge to oust Andrew Johnson from the presidency.

These two, living during almost exactly the same span of years, embody the Sturm und Drang of those days as well as ours. Buchanan was among our most experienced and disastrous presidents. Quoting, as I’ve never done, his successor Obama, he was “on the wrong side of history.” Stevens’s 14th Amendment is in the news this week. Affirmative action, the regime of systemic racism, stealth quotas, and manufactured mediocrity, lies near death thanks to this Lancastrian’s good work.

I’ll write about Wheatland in the next week or so. Right before July 4, I visited LancasterHistory, the local history museum that owns and interprets thousands of objects and documents from the county’s past. It situates local history in the bigger context of Pennsylvania and national history.

LancasterHistory is the very good and fortuitous union of the once-separate Lancaster Historical Society and Wheatland. Though next to each other, the two were entirely separate nonprofits. I don’t think the politics of historical societies are more vehement and petty than garden clubs’, but they’re up there. In Lancaster, the two organizations feuded, and, when they weren’t feuding, they refused to collaborate. The financial crisis in 2008–09 forced a reckoning.

Through good volunteer leadership, the two boards merged and got on the same page. LancasterHistory owns and runs Wheatland and the handsome, practical historical-society building, which was built in 1956 and expanded in 1998 and 2013. There’s a spacious, inviting exhibition space, a lecture hall, open storage, a library, and study space. The bad old days seem long gone. Lots of exciting things are happening. It’s painful, but more not-for-profits in small cities and towns should put old jealousies and grudges aside and merge.

The exhibition on view is smart and provocative. Lancaster in the ’60s examines conflict, resolution, and protest during four pivotal decades: the 1660s, the 1760s, the 1860s, and the 1960s. It’s a good way to package nearly 400 years into pieces for focused study. The exhibition begins with four giant maps, one contemporary to each decade. The 1660s map shows a wilderness. By the 1760s, the Native Americans are gone and the Germans have arrived. What many call the Pennsylvania Dutch aren’t Dutch at all but the descendants of immigrants from southeastern Germany. They brought not only new religious practices but exacting work habits and a unique aesthetic. The 1860s map shows a county with towns, farms, and businesses. The 1960s map shows a dense network of roads and highways.

The 1860s was, of course, a time of trauma. More than 1,500 Lancastrians died fighting for the Union. The war was all-consuming and, in the first week of July 1863, the stuff of high drama when Confederate troops invaded Pennsylvania. Gettysburg’s only 50 miles from Lancaster. Buchanan returned to Wheatland and to considerable scorn when he left office in 1861. As Lancaster’s — and Pennsylvania’s — only president, he was a celebrity, but most saw his rule as inviting secession and war. Stevens was a potentate in Congress. The exhibition balances the big historical events these two molded and art and artifacts from everyday life. It also presents Lancaster, not far from the Mason-Dixon Line, as a hub in the Underground Railroad.

The 1960s section is a challenge since, for many, it’s living history. It’s well done. The divisive Vietnam War is the centerpiece, as is the civil-rights movement, which means not only the end of Jim Crow’s rule but the expansion of women’s rights. Newspaper front pages, women’s fashion, and good photography set the mood. Economically, Lancaster was bustling. Armstrong World Industries, headquartered in Lancaster, employed thousands. The RCA plant in Lancaster was a pioneer in television technology.

Those of us who experienced the 1970s understand how quickly good things can collapse and bad things can get entrenched. There’s a big bulletin board at the end of the exhibition. It’s got pins and paper lettering. It asks us, “What will Lancaster be like in 2060?” Someone spelled out, “Jesus will be back.” Back in style or back in person? “Wierd but cool,” offered a visitor with spelling issues.

I spent some time in open storage and saw Stevens’s red wig. He fancied himself a ginger! Leading to the library is a gallery of grandfather clocks made in Lancaster. German style is heavy, but Time is serious business.

The big news for LancasterHistory is the drive to develop Stevens’s house in the center of Lancaster into a new museum. It’s a $19 million project exploring Stevens’s role in developing and pushing the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. It’ll restore his law office and home and examine the abolition movement in Lancaster, including the Underground Railroad. Temporary exhibition space is a big part of the plan. Centerbrook Architects is designing the project. I hired them as the architects for the Addison Gallery’s renovation and addition from 2008 to 2010 when I was the director there. LancasterHistory’s in very good hands.

The project has an unusual hook. It’s called the Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History and Democracy. Who’s Smith? Lydia Hamilton Smith (1813–1884) was Stevens’s part African-American housekeeper, assistant, confidante, and caretaker. A free mixed-race woman, Smith became an entrepreneur and local philanthropist. She was integral in Lancaster’s branch of the Underground Railroad. During preliminary excavations of the site, tunnels were found, indicating that escaped slaves might have hidden there. Smith ran Stevens’s Washington home, too, and eventually bought and managed a boardinghouse next to the Willard Hotel there.

Was she Stevens’s mistress? We don’t know, yet.

Stevens and the so-called Radical Republicans get a bad rap. New Englanders invented American history as an academic field in the mid 19th century, but scholars with a strong Southern bias based, of all places, at Columbia University, set the tone well into the 20th century. They presented Stevens as mega-Radical, a fanatic, dangerous, John Brown type with a Dartmouth degree and a perch in Congress. Stevens wasn’t warm and fuzzy. Born with a clubfoot, he was no matinee idol.

I can’t wait to see what develops. LancasterHistory has a few challenges. They’ll raise the money. Lancaster’s rich. The Amish keep the Mercedes dealerships humming. Lancaster is a very civic-minded place. One challenge is pulling off the Smith part of the team. Stevens is a historical figure of serious accomplishment and consequence. Smith isn’t. She was, in her lifetime, a behind-the-scenes person whose father was Irish and mother partially African-American. To me, for now, the balance isn’t there, but we’ll see.

For the Stevens/Smith Center, the lingo of the diversity, equity, and inclusion racket is to be avoided like not one plague but all ten Plagues of Egypt. I read with interest and enthusiasm LancasterHistory’s project statement. One gallery will be Freedom, Democracy, Equality, Belonging. “Belonging” is a DEI pop term and means that everyone is supposed to feel valued, accepted, heard, and seen. It’s often used by HR types to describe an empowered staff. Whether the staff’s empowered or beleaguered is of little interest to the visitor. Museums are in the business of scholarship and teaching. Making everyone, staff or visitors, feel valued, accepted, heard, and seen is, as Don Quixote sang in the musical, the ultimate impossible dream. A history museum presents and interprets history. It’s not in the therapy business.

The scholarly committee is nine Ph.D.s — history professors — and a lawyer who teaches at the University of Virginia. Talk about a blob. I’d reduce it to three or four. Fourteenth Amendment studies are ideologically contested. No better example is last week’s Supreme Court decision deploying Stevens’s amendment to forbid the regime of racial preferences that has ruled college admissions more and more like a despot, or a deity, over the past 50 years. Affirmative action — systemic racism, stealth quotas, and manufactured mediocrity — will have to be blasted from admissions offices. With the 14th Amendment in flux, it’s important for the scholarly committee to be balanced. Donors should insist on it.

LancasterHistory will tell a fascinating story. The Reconstruction period was a fiasco, establishing and enabling Jim Crow and dashing Stevens’s dreams for a hundred years. I hope the narrative makes room for the many failures in leadership and all that happened in the years immediately after the war’s end in 1865. Were there more brave and dogged men like Stevens, men of noble principle, things would have gone differently. That leadership — individual leadership — makes a difference is the best lesson to be taken from the Stevens/Smith Center.