“It was late in November, and all through the garden,” the sound of a canned turkey gobble fights to overpower the narratorial voice-over but fails to reach a meaningful enough decibel level to register as anything more than a mistake in audio mixing. The narrator continues: “People came to see the president give a turkey a pardon.” The image of a turkey is projected against the cross-sectional diorama of the White House, its head and wattle occupying the miniature version of the Blue Room dead-center. The voice continues to monologue about the various holiday traditions of the White House. Another photograph appears: Nancy Reagan and Mr. T dressed as Santa Claus. By the end of the presentation, I have learned little more than the fact that holidays are celebrated at the White House. Another presentation begins. Actors playing enslaved laborers fill the screens in a sepia-toned shadow play underscored by a solemn acknowledgement of their role in the construction of the White House. Despite the serious sentiment, they’re inescapably compressed both in size and time given the limitations of the self-guided museum tour model. In the end, they are afforded the same weight as the turkey.
The People’s House: A White House Experience is a $56-million venture from the White House Historical Association that opened in September 2024 with the goal of offering a radically more accessible experience of the president’s mansion than the limited availability of walking tours. Said Stewart McLaurin about the mission of the museum: “Our founder, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy famously said: ‘The White House belongs to the American people.’ But we also know the very real challenges with making the actual White House open to everyone.” But a startling disjunction has become obvious from Trump’s meetings in the actual White House with the moneyed technocratic tax bracket. Seeing the real thing still inescapably costs more money than most people can dole out.
The museum’s exhibits were constructed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a familiar name in interactive museum experiences like D.C.’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—both good museums, which is why the state of the People’s House is so confounding. Passes are free with timed entry, so as not to overwhelm the touch screens that most of the exhibits are accessed through. This is by design; for one thing, even a cursory look into RAA’s more recent museum work shows a prevalence of screens as a vehicle for dispensing information to visitors. The museum’s website also invites guests to snap pictures in front of inferior reproductions of iconic parts of the building, like the Rose Garden, the State Dining Room, and the colorful rooms of the State Floor, largely displayed through projection with the “ambience of an Apple store.”