250 Years of American Genius and Skullduggery

Woody Guthrie, Portrait of President George Washington, 1938. Courtesy of American Song Archives, Woody Guthrie Center, Tulsa 

Anyone reeling at our President's attempts to rewrite history could do worse than to check out the Huntington's tribute to America's 250th birthday. "This Land Is…" is an original document-based view of the nation's first 250 years, free of MAGA meddling and drawn largely from the Huntington's extensive holdings of American history and literature. Organized thematically, it adds up to something less than a full itinerary of wars and Presidents. Yet throughout it's surprising, thought-provoking, and often entertaining.

C.F. Martin & Co. guitar owned and inscribed by Woody Guthrie, 1936. Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle

Woody Guthrie. The exhibition takes its title from Woody Guthrie's 1944 folk song. The centerpiece is a guitar that the performer inscribed with the words "This machine kills fascists." It was played in Los Angeles and is one of a succession of guitars so inscribed. 

Even in the 1930s, L.A. rents were high. Guthrie had a side hustle selling painted portraits of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus. The Washington shown here has real brio. 

Declaration of Independence, July 1776, with annotations by John McKesson

1776. The exhibition contains two early and annotated copies of the Declaration of Independence. The version above was printed for New York's state legislature and contains handwritten notes by secretary of state John McKesson, who tallied the New York vote to adopt the Declaration.  

Compared to other semiquincentennial shows, "This Land Is…" is less centered on East Coast founders and less reverential. The Huntington's archives has receipts on scandalous flim-flams ranging from the Walking Purchase to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to Japanese-American incarceration.

In the Walking Purchase of 1737, the sons of William Penn, namesake of Pennsylvania, produced a dubious deed to a tract of Indian land defined by the distance a man could walk in a day and half. The Penns cleared a path and hired athletes to run as far as they could. This allowed the Penn boys to swindle the Lenape nation out of 1200 square miles—an expanse the size of Rhode Island.

Contemporary manuscript copy of the Articles of Agreement and Confederation ("Fort Pitt Treaty"), signed Sep. 17, 1778

Also on view is a copy of the Fort Pitt Treaty, which promised the Delaware/Lenape nation its own U.S. state with representation in Congress. The Indigenous "14th State" never happened. 

An inkjet print by Alicia Rezendes reminds us that Wall Street's name refers to the first border wall, built by European immigrants to keep out the real Americans.

Surveyor's chain, about 1850

A hundred feet of surveyor's chain marks the role of map-making in transforming wilderness into real estate. 

Andreas Avelino Montano, King David Kalakaua and Lili'uokalani, Queen of Hawai'i, 1875

American Empire. America was the first colony to overthrow its shackles, and the first to become a colonial overlord itself. "This Land Is…" makes a case for the relevance of Haiti in the American story. It was Haiti's slavery-based agricultural wealth that permitted France to support the U.S. in the Revolutionary War, perhaps decisively. In turn the U.S. example motivated Haiti to revolt against France. French capitalists discounted the value of a plantation economy, leading cash-strapped Napoleon to sell the Louisiana Territory to Thomas Jefferson for a bargain $15 million. That purchase set the U.S. on the path to continent-spanning manifest destiny and a global empire. The Huntington exhibition documents U.S. incursions in Cuba, Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines.

Below, Toussaint Louverture has the show's most beautiful handwriting.

Toussaint L'Ouverture, letter to John Adams, Nov. 7, 1798

Mary Lee Bendolph, Image of Formal Presidents, 2009

Visual Art. If you're looking for Gilbert Stuart's Washington, you'll have to look elsewhere. There's only a small, somewhat arbitrary selection of artworks, including a mesmerizing Agnes Pelton Passion Flower (1945); a Gees Bend quilt by Mary Lee Bendolph, made as a gift for Obama's inauguration; and Cara Romero's Evolvers (2019—2025), a new acquisition.

Agnes Pelton, Passion Flower, 1945

Cara Romero, Evolvers (small detail), 2019 (image) and 2025 (print) 

Ansel Adams, Winter Morning, Yosemite Valley, California, printed on Hills Brothers coffee can, 1969

Otherwise obsessive about darkroom technique, Ansel Adams licensed one of his Yosemite photographs to be mass-produced on a Hills Brothers coffee can as a "limited edition." 

Octavia Butler, "Passion" from manuscript notes for Parable of the Talents (facsimile), about 1996

Octavia. The exhibition's literary component has manuscripts and rare editions by Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Thomas Pynchon. The star seems to be Octavia Butler, Pasadena-born maven of Afrofuturist sci-fi. Butler donated her papers to the Huntington, and they are now said to be the most studied of that A-list collection. Butler's disarmingly earnest memos to herself transmute character-building and self-motivation into concrete poetry.

Thomas Pynchon, edited typescript for Mason & Dixon, about 1996

Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again," typescript with notes, Nov. 16, 1935

Right-wing tropes such as "Make America Great Again" and "Take Back America" have roots in the literary left, as in this 1935 poem by Langston Hughes.

Oak Meadow

Oaks.  Outside, also linked to the anniversary, is a new Oak Meadow fronting the Boone and Virginia Steele Scott galleries. The pretext is that Congress designated the oak as America's national tree. California's native Coast Live Oak and Engelmann Oak are evergreen, while a Scarlet Oak from the Eastern U.S. will provide fall color.

"This Land Is…" opens with a preserved cross section of a 250-year-old Engelmann Oak felled by a 1993 storm at the Huntington. Splitting everywhere, held together with butterfly joints, it's a metaphor for America on its 250th. 

Cross section of felled Engelmann Oak on Huntington ground, preserved by Andrew Mitchell, about 1993