Seacoast History Blog #114 
May 21, 2011

I’m happy about the graffiti murals enlivening downtown Portsmouth this summer. And I’m happy about the controversy sparked by the murals. The “battleground” as the newspaper so indelicately put it, gives us a chance to see clearly where the lines are being drawn between what has been called “Old Portsmouth” and “New Portsmouth.”  What we are seeing is the last gasps of the Colonial Revival view of history. That nostalgic belief tells us that the past was great and the future is scary. It was beautiful and comfortable and glorious back then. Historic Portsmouth should therefore be about clipper ships and lighthouses and gas lamps along brick-lined streets. Momma was home cooking supper. Daddy was working at the Yard. God was in his Heaven and all’s right with the world. And anyone who says otherwise, just wasn’t there.  (Continued below)

The truth is that history, like life, is messy. There is no single simple vision of the past.  The Colonial Revival movement, started around 1876 at the centennial of the Revolution, was about a modern mechanized urban society looking back on what seemed – to those who were not there – like a more innocent rural society. Today’s “revivalists” are looking back on a kinder, gentler Portsmouth that never really happened. It carefully blots out the horrors of war, racial discrimination, pandemics, crime, poverty, poor education, and a host of evils. It remembers, instead, the slower pace and more polite society of our ancestors mixed with warm childhood memories and a sadness for one’s own fading mortality.

The controversy, faint as it may be, over the street art in Portsmouth, is less a protest than a prayer. Those who fear the temporary graffiti art, fear change. And fearing change is not a bad thing. Technology is pushing us into new realms faster than we can absorb the changes. Slowing down is always a good idea.

Those who fear the downtown art also note a frightening sense of disrespect an irreverence that seems to have taken over American culture. It’s true. We have become a foul-mouthed, cynical, angry nation in many ways. The revivalists don’t see art around town. They see the desecration of old buildings with fearsome images. And worse, they see the majority of us celebrating those images.

It has to be a frightening thing to feel the world you grew up in disappearing. I feel it myself more and more. I can’t fathom, for example, why people find Adam Sandler funny, or consider rap a musical genre, or attend a movie without earplugs. I understand fewer and fewer of the post-modern commercials on television. I don’t know any of the winners of the Grammy awards. I don’t understand why people watch American Idol. I hate R-rated dirty twenty-something comedies. I don’t see the point of Facebook or comprehend the practice of body tattoos and piercings. I don’t understand why little girls all look like hookers and I miss the old used bookstores.

But I do understand how history works, and I know that, while Portsmouth needs to celebrate its past, it also needs to find its future. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to the cries of Old Portsmouth. They are members of an endangered species, and it is important that we listen. Our future is permanently tied to telling stories of the past. But it is just as important that we tell those stories honestly and correctly. Sure, we built beautiful clipper ships with billowing sails. But some of those sleek ships were used to transport slaves.  Sure we brewed Frank Jones Ale, but Frank Jones was no philanthropist like the late Joe Sawtelle who gave more back to this city than he ever took. The only thing Frank Jones ever did for Portsmouth, one of his contemporaries said, was to get little kids drunk.

To every thing, there is a season, and this season, its’ time for some in-your-face graffiti art. It will be gone before we know it, like the clipper ships and the bordellos. Hopefully, the Colonial Revival movement is all but gone as well. We really needed a surge of Americanism during our transition to the 20^th century. It was a way to remember the past and to teach them nasty immigrants what being an American was all about. But what we need now, instead, is a deeper, more honest look at what really happened in our past.

The problem with the Colonial Revival was that it cherished a false view. It was as make-believe as a riverboat ride through Disneyland. It glorifies the past without any real understanding of history. And it keeps us stuck in one place. It defines “historic” Portsmouth as a brick four-story Market Square dotted with wooden Georgian mansions -- and nothing more. And yet it refuses to see what was going on inside those buildings. It refuses to remember any time before or any alternative view. It is a one-trick pony – a theme park, a roadside attraction, a quaint and quiet village, a safe, nostalgic dream of how things might have been.

Anyone who really knows Portsmouth history knows better. This was a hard-knuckle seaport where things were rarely safe and constantly changing. And this is a city that is fast becoming more interesting, more diverse, more connected, and more influential than it has ever been. We can handle a few scary paintings for a few months. Old Portsmouth need not worry. We won’t forget the past. The Old Town by the Sea “brand” is safe. But this time around, we’re going to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

© 2011 by J. Dennis Robinson and SeacaostNH.com. All rights reserved.