Fight to Save Staff-Led Capitol Tours Heats Up
A frenzy over whether staff-led tours of the U.S. Capitol will continue began earlier this month. At issue is a proposal from the Architect of the Capitol that would require all Capitol tours to be led by professionally certified tour guides once the new Capitol Visitor Center opens in November 2008. Unlike the smaller tours currently led by Congressional staff and interns, visitors would be put into groups of 40, given earphones and shown a video.
The main argument for doing away with staff-led Capitol tours is that everyone knows the interns and young staffers get things wrong, and sometimes even blatantly make things up. As The Hill rightly pointed out last week, the ubiquitous story about John Quincy Adams pretending to fall asleep in the "whispering room" so that he could eavesdrop on conversations is entirely false, yet it continues to be a popular trope of staff-led tours. Many professional guides in the Capitol Guide Service are offended by the misinformation they hear coming from Congressional staffers.
For many though, it seems tradition outweighs accuracy. A bi-partisan coalition of 41 senators are now lobbying the acting architect of the Capitol, reports the Politico, to save the staff-led tours. And we received a Facebook invitation just this morning from GWU graduate student Ethan Pollack, imploring us to join to a group called Save Staff-Led Capitol Tours!.
Photo by Grundlepuck
From the group's description:
The Capitol Visitors Center is finally scheduled to open next fall at a cost of $621 million, revised several times from an original estimate of $265 million and an opening date that has been pushed back more times than anyone cares to remember.If this proposal goes through, no longer will hill staffers be able to mislead the public into believing that:
1. King Kamehameha arrived at the capitol naked and was sent back to Hawaii to be clothed.
2. John Quincy Adams often pretended to sleep while listening in on his political opponents via the whispering phenomenon in the National Statuary Hall.
3. The Statue of Liberty fits in the Rotunda (only true if you don't count its 150 ft base).
What these professional tour guides call "lies", we call "fun rumors". What they call "deceiving the public", we call "making sure that that family's 5-year-old doesn't die of boredom". Join this group and protect the sacred right of the hill staffer to conduct fun, state-specific, and occasionally inaccurate informational tours of the capitol.
What do you think about the fate of staff-led tours of the Capitol?