Dr Daniel Pitt is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Buckingham.
I’ve been having a bit of a busman’s holiday in the United States of America.
I am not writing this column from my study but in a library. It has wall-to-wall tartan carpet, and I am sat at a Tiger Oak desk with ornate brass knobs, with a banker’s lamp, and a bust of Abraham Lincoln for company. Apart from the bust, the library could be situated on the east coast of Scotland; however, it is the Russell Kirk Center’s library in the heart of rural Michigan. I have just arrived back from a sojourn to Dearborn and Detroit as I write.
G.K. Chesterton visited the USA in 1921 and wrote a book titled What I Saw in America. The book starts as a travelogue, but he then reflects on what a nation is. Chesterton, as I do, argues that a country’s distinguishing characteristics, its customs, and traditions should be conserved. I write in this spirit.
Whilst on our travels, my family and I visited the Henry Ford Museum, which is located in Dearborn. As I drove into the museum, I glanced across and could see Ford’s World Headquarters. As one could expect, as the industrial home of the American automotive industry, Dearborn is not a very walkable city. The paths are either crumbling or nonexistent as the motor car looms large.
As well as the home of the motor car, Dearborn makes the news for other reasons: it is the first and largest majority muslim city in the country. It made national news here in the USA for an anti-Islam protest, and the Israel-Hamas war has brought community tensions to the fore, as it has back home in Britain. As one resident said to a journalist, “we are all different cultures here”.
Indeed, there seems to be very little of Old America left in Dearborn because the motor car and multiculturalism have seen it off. Conservatives must find a way of directing the winds of change into the sails of cultural conservation and renewal. This is what I thought as I visited Greenfield Village, an outdoor museum that is part of the Henry Ford Museum. Russell Kirk called Greenfield Village “Dead America”, yet Dead America seems to come alive in Greenfield.
Greenfield Village spans 300 years of American history; it also conserves agricultural practices and craftsmanship that are not widely practised or practised at all in the USA. My visit got me thinking about the essence of conservatism and how we should conserve our heritage and culture.
Greenfield is meant to celebrate “ingenuity”, “innovation”, and “spark inspiration”; despite these buzzwords, it seems an ode to Old America that goes beyond the Revolutionary period. On the face of it, it is a rather conservative and noble endeavour. Visiting Greenfield is great fun. One can ride on a Model T, a steam train and an Edwardian carousel. Greenfield is highly walkable; it is beautiful. The buildings are of a human scale, and they are designed in the traditional, brick and wood aesthetic. The village’s visual beauty is there for all to see who are willing to pay for the experience. It is all very enjoyable, but all of this is unlike modern Dearborn.
Henry Ford meticulously dismantled original historic structures from across the USA and also from England and reassembled them piece by piece in Dearborn. For example, a chapel, settlement school rooms, shops, a post office, as well as buildings which have some historical note such as the Noah Webster Home, the home were An American Dictionary of the English Language was finished, and the Logan County Courthouse, where Abraham Lincoln practised law. I have nothing but praise for the saving of artefacts that would otherwise have been demolished, but history should be conserved in its place.
Ford himself fell in love with the Cotswolds. Ford and his wife, Clara, used to stay at Lygon Arms in Broadway, Worcestershire, during the interwar years. They purchased a cottage in Gloucestershire and had it dismantled, moved and rebuilt, and it is now the Cotswolds Cottage exhibition at the museum. The cottage seems rather sad and hollow, because it has been wrenched from its geographical and historical landscape. The genuine historical continuity has been removed. There is no furniture in it and no one is living in the cottage. Its personality has been extracted, and it is no longer living, but merely a dead shell in a museum.
Museums, however beautiful and delightful, cannot save our culture.
Yes, they are important cultural institutions, but our culture cannot be merely the preservation of dead artefacts. Historical buildings must be lived in, or integrated into daily life, if the culture is to continue to be transmitted from generation to generation. The Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum in Lichfield, which my family and I visited before travelling to the US, is a living museum that understands the importance of place. Removing a historic courthouse or church and placing it into an artificial village turns the sacred and a living culture into a static, dead exhibit. Albeit an exhibit that is immensely enjoyable to visit. Greenfield is a noble enterprise to keep dead America alive, and in a way it does an excellent job by keeping old ways of doing things alive. It also keeps the memory of Old America alive, but in a tourist-centric way that is artificial and removed from the societal and geographical context that gave birth to those memories.
Greenfield reinforced to me the natural human longing for a beautiful, well-ordered home. Greenfield provides fun, laughter, and intellectual stimulation. The employees were all lovely and very knowledgeable. It was a sanctuary for the day.
Yet, a civilisation must live and breathe; Greenfield Village is a delight but is a commercial commodity that is selling something that we have lost or are about to lose, because of prioritising the motor car and multiculturalism.
Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean must defend a living culture; however, much retreating from the world and dismantling what’s left of our civilisation may seem desirable. There is still much to be conserved in America and Britain.