Do you give people what they want or what they need?

I’ve finally got round to registering for the Washington Post and found a fascinating story in their recent archive.

STURBRIDGE, Mass. — Historical fact: In the 1830s, many rural New Englanders followed a religion so strait-laced that they did not celebrate Christmas.

Accordingly, at Old Sturbridge Village — an outdoor museum where an 1830s town has been re-created down to the cider mill and the Gloucester Old Spots pigs — they used to ignore the holiday as well.

Used to. Until, in the past few years, attendance started to slip.

“How many times can you tell the story, ‘They didn’t celebrate it’?” asked Susanna Bonta, a museum spokeswoman.

Now, in December the village gets a makeover that might make a Puritan — or a historian — blanch. There is a Christmas tree (not popularized in the United States until the 1840s), a visit from Santa Claus (who didn’t take his current form until after 1850) and a series of nighttime tours showing the village lit by (electric) candlelight.

Later in the article Mark Leone is stark

“They get farming, stability, barns and sheep, and that is irrelevant,” said Mark Leone, a professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, who thinks that these museums should undergo radical changes to embrace high-tech media and to show a less sanitized picture of the past.

I don’t live there, so I couldn’t say. Is agriculture irrelevant to America? England tends to look to the Tudor period as its golden age, Britain as a whole perhaps to the Second World War. What period does America see as defining its shape? I can agree with Leone on making the past less sanitised. There’s a variety of interpretations you can make about the past and it’d be nice to see some of the more gruesome ones make an appearance.

But what if the past itself is fundamentally unsatisfying? What if people don’t want any view of their agrarian past? How do you react to that? Can you bend to accomodate modern prejudices and hope to slip in some real history on the sly? Is compromise fundamentally wrong? Should you stick to your guns and if the museum closes then that’s society’s loss.

…and on the other side is “giving people what they need” sound? There’s quite an assumption built into the statement. Historians reinterpret the past in their own era, why shouldn’t the public be allowed to do the same? – Even if that leads to pilgrims celebrating Thanksgiving with Coke?

Seeing as I don’t work at any of the museums then it would be easy for me to take the hardline and insist that the history is sacred and should not be compromised. On the other hand it might be that the choice is simply between poor museums and no museums. I’m glad it’s a problem I’m not having to deal with. —–