GEORGE WASHINGTON
The making of an American Symbol
Barry Schwartz
New York: Free Press, 1987
250 pp., $22.50
Was George Washington perfect? If so, how could he have been, unless (unlikely?) he were a saint, or (blasphemous?) a god? If, on the other hand, Washington had faults and limitations, what were they? Did his contemporaries spot these weaknesses? If not, why not? If they were aware of his blemishes, did they pretend not to notice?
Those are questions that come up in every serious discussion of the man who, in the words of Henry Lee's famous obituary tribute, was "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." Our ancestors, of course, were readier than we are to believe in the possibilities of human greatness. The twentieth century is credited with inventing the "debunking" biography. The previous century tended to follow the rule of de mortuis nil nisi bonum - speak nothing but good of the dead. The tradition of biography they had inherited stressed the virtues of the person under review. Sexual or other possible scandals were ignored.
In such a tradition, no American hero has benefited more than George Washington. The pattern of pious anecdote was set even during his lifetime and given popular shape within a few years of his death n the little biography produced by "Parson" Mason Locke Weems. Weems, for example, bequeathed to posterity the immortal story of the hatchet and the cherry tree, as well as the vignette of General Washington praying alone in the snow at Valley Forge. Weems was in fact acquainted with Washington, though nowhere near as closely as he claimed. Along with other Americans of the time, Weems established the view that Washington was well-nigh perfect. In this respect he was an almost unique human being. In order to take the measure of this wondrous creature, you did not look for similarities between him and other warrior-statesmen of history. What you emphasized was dissimilarity, contrast. Julius Caesar, Cromwell, Marlborough, Napoleon were great soldiers formidable leaders, yes; but, in relation to Washington, they were disastrously flawed.
Thus from the cherry tree tale grew the belief that Washington "could not tell a lie." He became the yardstick, the benchmark of good conduct, against which to set the behavior of subsequent generations of his countrymen. During the 1970s one cynical joke was to point out the contrast between President Washington - he could not tell a lie - and President Nixon - who supposedly could not tell the truth. The same joke was current a century earlier, during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. February 22, the birthday of Washington, is also that of Senator Edward Kennedy. For whatever reasons, his staff refrains from pointing out the link.
This insistence upon the transcendent virtues of General Washington gradually made him a somewhat inert, even boring figure, so far in front of everyone else that it hardly seemed worthwhile to try to emulate him if you were an average American child. We can see Ralph Waldo Emerson wrestling with the problem of how to draw inspiration from so monumental a personage. Having acquired a portrait of Washington to hang in his Concord dining room, Emerson Said: "I cannot keep my eyes off of it. It has a
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