Mount Vernon Jumps on the Phoniest of Militaristic Bandwagons

Public history in meltdown ...

A quick follow-up to my latest paying-subscriber post on the historical, ethical, and political problems—the religio-fascist narrative tinge—that emerges from pretending that the US Army is 250 years old, and that its origins are synonymous with those of the Continental Army:

I’m startled, even somewhat shaken, to see Mount Vernon, the major historical site that was the home and business headquarters of George Washington, and has long been a major public-history institution and center of Washington-related studies, jumping on this phoniest of ahistorical bandwagons, as I learned when coming across this tweet:

And this one:

I've already covered the many errors in conflating two existentially separate and different organizations, and why the errors really do matter, so I won't review that here. The thing is that while I've long bellyached about Mount Vernon’s approach to public history, I do know that the scholars working there, highly credentialed, take founding US history seriously, if differently from how I take it.

And so I’m astounded, maybe naively at this point, that the institution has gone so all-in on a vacuous heritage claim made by the Army for official purposes and contradicted by all of the historical facts regarding the important role of George Washington himself.

In its tweets, Mount Vernon has even changed the name of the force their guy took command of in 1775. They know what that force was really called. They seem to expect the public not to know.

What’s driving this abject collapse of intellectual honesty? How is the public expected to engage with the realities of our national history, when institutions like this go out of their way to refuse to do so? Every time I think I’m no longer capable of being disappointed in our intellectual establishments, they find a new way of surprising me.