Is George Washington Vanishing From History?

In honor of President's Day, Kathleen Parker wrote a grim piece about America's loss of historical perspective, and growing ignorance of history. Grim, except for the upbeat message of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Guild. It really is worth reading in its entirety, but here are some of the grimmer paragraphs:

Tests, surveys and studies further confirm America’s increasing ignorance. A test of high school seniors, for example, found that only one in ten was proficient in American history. A survey of fourth graders found that seven of ten thought the original 13 colonies included Illinois, Texas and California.

Six of ten couldn’t say why the Pilgrims came to America. Only seven percent of fourth graders could name “an important event” that took place in Philadelphia in 1776. When seniors at the nation’s top 55 universities were asked to name America’s victorious general at the Battle of Yorktown, only 34 percent named George Washington.

These depressing statistics, which Mount Vernon executive director James Rees rattles off with thinly disguised ennui, shouldn’t be surprising considering that Washington today receives one-tenth the coverage in textbooks that he received 30 years ago. Rees tells of one textbook that offers fewer than 50 lines of text about Washington, but 213 about Marilyn Monroe.

Meanwhile, the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington, a reproduction of which used to hang in nearly every American classroom, is long gone. As is the historical background and context critical to future generations’ conduct of the nation’s business.

213 lines of text about Marilyn Monroe, and 50 about George Washington.

Historian Marcus Cunliffe observed that history had not been kind to Washington. A century had been spent turning him into some kind of marble monument, and the next century spent in trying to reduce the monument to rubble. One extreme or the other. It's too bad. Because neither version does justice to the man who, viewed as a man, is surely one of the greates figures of world history. When James Thomas Flexner reduced his magnificent four-volume biography of Washington to a single volume, to try to make it more accessible to the average American reader, he subtitled it "The Indispensable Man." It is no overstatement.

Without George Washington, it is unlikely that the American Revolution would have resulted in independence. Without George Washington, the Constitution would certainly never have been ratified. And without George Washington, the new nation would most likely not have survived its infancy.

It has been fashionable for some years now to belittle Washington's military ability. "He lost more battles than he won,and won the war only because the British got tired of it." Probably both true statements. But the first is true mainly because most of the major battles were fought early in the war. In the latter part of the war, the fact is that Washington's veteran Continental Army troops were a match for the British regulars, and the British avoided battle whenever possible. And the British got tired of the war because they could not bring it to an end. Why? Because of the generalship of George Washington.

Washington understood the British, and he knew that as long as he had an army in the field, the British had not won the war, no matter how many cities they occupied. As Colonel of the Virginia militia, Washington had fought alongside the very British officers who were his opponents in the Revolutionary War. At Braddock's disastrous defeat in the French and Indian war, where Washington's hastily arranged and stubborn rearguard action was credited with saving Braddock's army, the colonel commanding the advance party was Thomas Gage. The same Thomas Gage who would later assume command of the British forces during the Revolution.

Washington was no strategic genius, and noone knew it better than he. The famous letter in which he doubted that he would be "equal to the task" wasn't an exercise in posturing. At 43, Washington was very objectively honest with himself about himself. He also surely believed, honestly and correctly, that he was better suited for the job than John Hancock, the other most likely candidate.

Washington understood battlefield tactics and he had a sheer genius for logistics. Twice he caused his entire army to disappear, literally, overnight. After the disastrous Battle of Long Island, using local sailors and fisherman and an armada of small boats, he extricated the army over water, leaving the stunned British to renew their attack against his empty camps the next morning. And, in 1781, he pulled his army out of New York and marched it all the way to Virginia before the British knew he had decamped. Once in Virginia, with a French fleet to keep the British from evacuating by sea, he laid siege to Yorktown and forced the surrender of Cornwallis' trapped army.

He never made the same mistake twice, and he learned as he went, and by the midpoint of the war at places like Brandywine and Monmouth Courthouse his Continentals had both stood firm against heavy British assaults in pitched battle, and driven British regulars from the field before them.

At the end of the war, as the officers of the unpaid army were preparing to march on Philadelphia and demand that Congress make good on its promises, Washington appeared uninvited and told them in no uncertain terms that there would be no march on Philadelphia, that the army would disband. The soldiers went home, trusting Washington to deal with Congress for them. The Europeans stood in utter amazement when, instead of declaring himself king, he sent the army home and surrendered his commission as commanding general to congress, establishing the American custom by which no general has ever siezed power in this nation.

As it became apparent that the Articles of Confederation were a failure, and the Confederation degenerating into a gaggle of disunited and bickering states, delegates gatherd to discuss changes. They immediately decided, to have Washington preside, to meet in secret, and to devise an entirely new government. None of them had any such authority from their states. What emerged was the Constitution of the United States, a document both eloquent in its simplicity and monumental in its vision, featuring a relatively strong executive branch with a single man at its head. That arrangement would never have been acceptable but for the fact that all knew that man would be Washington.

The later writings of both the founders themselves and the political leaders throughout the states make it clear that few really believed there would ever be another "President". Most assumed Washington would serve for life, and either designate a successor in a sort of quasi-monarchy, or hold things together long enough for the states to figure out a new arrangement. Just as he had stunned the world by surrendering his commission, Washington stunned the world by not running for a third term, forcing the federal government to actually establish a precedent for peaceful electoral succession while he was still alive. He was keenly aware of the importance of that act.

Washington was one of the few Founders who understood how important the federal government would be to the survival of the United States. Most leaders of the day considered the Federal Goverment almost irrelevant, the real power being in the states. John Jay resigned as chief justice to become Governor of New York. And Washington may have been instrumental in placing John Marshall, a fellow Virginian, in the position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court as a counterbalance to Thomas Jefferson, whom Washington knew during his second term was conspiring with Aaron Burr to create a political party in order to subvert the federal intent of the constitution and sieze control of the national government, turning it into a sort of bigger state government.

Long before the revolution, Washington was probably the first of the tidewater plantation owners to realize the need to shed economic dependence on the "factor" system which transported wealth from America back to Britain. He set up his own forge and workshops for the manufacture of goods like clothing and pottery, creating tiny models of future American industry. He invented the round threshing barn, a working reproduction of which is operated at Mount Vernon today. The conventional view is that Washington married his money. Mount Vernon was a third-rate plantation when he inherited it, unexpectedly, upon the early death of his beloved older bbrother. To be sure, Martha Custis was a propertied widow, and it could be said that Washington "married well". But he made most of his money in land speculation.

The truth is, without any expectation of an inheritance because of the application of primogeniture, Washington had to learn a trade. He became a part-time soldier, and a full-time surveyor, and was as much frontiersman as Virginia aristocrat. He made long journeys into the wilderness of Virginia's western holdings, and bought vast tracts of land far from civilization, which later made him very wealthy. Washington was well known to frontiersmen and settlers along the Ohio River. He loved to dance, he could, when he so chose, drink and curse with the best (or worst) of them, and he loved to play cards. For money. He kept meticulous accounts, and he always collected...and paid promptly.

In so many ways, Washington truly was the father of his country. And so much more important to the history of the United States, and the world, than was Marilyn Monroe. It's sad, really. People don't know what they're missing in failing to get to know him.