UPDATING GEORGE WASHINGTON
FERGUSON, ANDREW
UPDATING GEORGE WASHINGTON By Andrew Ferguson The regent of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association is a woman named Mrs. Robert E. Lee IV—which I think is the most satisfying piece of information...
...Lee, I wandered out to the piazza, the great porch with its surpassingly beautiful view of the Potomac, where Washington had entertained Jefferson and Adams and Lafayette...
...a sheet of stickers with the legend "Ask Me About George Washington...
...It was something we thought long and hard about, I can assure you...
...If we don't do it, who else will...
...At his death it comprised five separate, self-sufficient farms, numberless outbuildings, housing for three hundred slaves, and a twenty-two-room house designed by Washington himself, resting on a promontory above a bend in the river...
...We're past the debunking stage...
...Blank stares...
...Washington was a very dignified man, you see...
...But we've substituted a new set of icons for the old, and the strange imbalance in the historical knowledge of American students reflects the substitution...
...And so he recedes, taking his place as one among the many "people who made a difference," filling the ranks somewhere between Mother Jones and Gordon Hirabayashi...
...Even before he died his home was a place of pilgrimage...
...As you'd expect, it is loaded with gimmicks—an envelope of wheat seeds, so students can grow a crop just as "George" did...
...Comparisons to Moses and Jonah were common...
...Lee leaned forward from her wingback chair, suddenly animated—"we are in a crisis...
...In the 1800s his biographers routinely capitalized the personal pronoun "Him" in referring to their subject...
...I still have the history textbook I used in the fourth grade," James Rees says, "and it has ten times more pages devoted to Washington than the textbook used in the same class at the same school today...
...Over the next several years her campaign spread northward, and the coffers swelled...
...You can't debunk misconceptions when they've got no information at all...
...I sat on a Windsor chair beneath Washington's bedroom window—the bedroom where he died, two hundred years ago—and leafed through a packet the PR lady had given me...
...If we don't do it," Mrs...
...The bulk of the property—without the slaves, who had been freed in Washington's will—passed to a series of nephews with little interest or skill in farming...
...In 1996 NAEP found that only 17 percent of fourth graders were "proficient" in American history...
...How are intellectuals to grapple with such a man...
...So I said, 'But I guess we could always use the wood to make some teeth.' Nothing...
...When they pass through Mount Vernon's small museum, visitors have their attention directed to a pair of Washington's oddly shaped violet sunglasses...
...There's this idea that leadership is changeable— that every generation redefines for itself what leadership means...
...I can tell you he would not have approved of having his dentures on display...
...Washington is scarcely mentioned in Beard's book...
...The Ladies now endeavor to correct the misapprehension...
...The mansion rooms have been refashioned to make a more "immediate experience...
...After I left Mrs...
...She composed a series of open letters "To The Ladies of the South" and posted them to newspapers from Richmond to Savannah...
...This has been a busy year for Mrs...
...Those who go to the home in which he lived and died wish to see in what he lived and died...
...Given the multicultural enthusiasms of their teachers, it should be no surprise that children know more about, say, Harriet Tubman than Tom Paine...
...More than one hundred Washington artifacts have been borrowed from collections across the country and placed in the house itself, so that, as the press release says, "the estate will resemble as never before the beloved private retreat that Washington knew at his death two hundred years ago...
...At first, though, there was only one lady—an invalid from South Carolina called Ann Pamela Cunningham...
...Notwithstanding her title, however, and the name of her organization, and indeed the powerful resonance of her own married name, Mrs...
...scratch-off quiz cards like the kind you get from McDonald's or the Lotto dealer...
...The Ladies acquired the dentures from a descendant of Martha Washington in 1949...
...It's our responsibility...
...And there's a poster, too, colorful and splashy, to replace the portrait that not so long ago hung in every classroom...
...By then annual attendance had begun, for the first time in memory, to dip below one million...
...But still, I said, with all the re-enactors walking around, and the special multi-media programs, don't you worry about getting trapped in the show biz...
...And believe me, this is not good...
...Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It was to the second half of the century what Beard's book had been to the first— the work that set the course for two subsequent generations of historians...
...Miss Cunningham's plan seemed to work...
...the Ladies have worked hard to assemble a mailing list of social studies departments, in hopes of pushing them to teach their kids about the father of their country...
...You should see the children flock around the dentures...
...In fact, we're so overrun with icons that the word itself has become a cliche...
...their familiarity with, their reverence for, the Father of their country was simply assumed...
...Washington has been privatized...
...A special program this spring will demonstrate that Washington was a proto-environmentalist...
...But Beard goes on, revealingly: "It does not appear that in public document or private letter he ever set forth any coherent theory of government...
...Almost as good as Armageddon...
...The Ladies do what they do because they have asked themselves an unsettling question, and because they know the answer...
...Lots of things...
...He is unde-bunkable...
...And this is the most important thing: They must learn about this man...
...I suppose it has to do with lots of things," he said...
...It is all intended to create at Mount Vernon an "all new Mansion experience," as the PR materials say, and it can easily be made to sound much worse than it is...
...Honesty...
...But there's something else that worries me...
...Her farewell message is still read aloud when the Ladies meet for their annual Grand Council...
...But there is a huge lack of knowledge about what an incredible man he was...
...And fewer than one in three knew that New York was one of the original thirteen colonies, while seven out of ten listed California, Texas, or Illinois...
...He had inherited Mount Vernon from the widow of his half-brother Lawrence and had steadily expanded both the house and the grounds, until the property stretched across 8,000 acres, down the Potomac river and back deep into the Virginia woodlands and then up again to the southern tip of Alexandria...
...Well, that's not the way we thought of it for most of our history...
...It just seemed so personal, so—I don't know—so private," said Mrs...
...a docent told me excitedly...
...He couldn't bring himself to say yes...
...Lee, when I brought up the subject...
...For fifty years, however, they have declined to put them on display, for a reason that explains a lot about the Ladies...
...On this day a few years ago, he recalls, two dozen or so fourth graders had gathered on the estate grounds for a tree-planting ceremony...
...James Rees well remembers the moment when he knew he had a problem...
...The farm was a shambles and the house close to ruins...
...Lee has resigned herself to doing whatever it takes to make George Washington fun...
...Every so often the federal government's National Assessment of Educational Progress releases a report on the ignorance of American schoolchildren, provoking near-universal tut-tutting among educators and in the popular press...
...Lee had said, "who will...
...But he is dismissible, as the work of academic historians over the past eighty years makes plain...
...Textbooks aren't much help...
...But you have to understand, Mount Vernon can no longer be just a shrine...
...Spooook-eeee...
...His portrait hangs on every wall and he is almost canonized in the affections of our people...
...Lee and the Ladies, who are chartered under the Commonwealth of Virginia as proprietors of our first president's estate...
...In the eighth grade, 80 percent identified the song "O Freedom" with the civil rights movement...
...Any such modernizing steps, however, have always been undertaken only after the most careful consideration...
...I thought: We're all the way back at ground zero...
...He was never without visitors—a steady stream of fellow politicians, foreign dignitaries, old friends, and unknown well-wishers who felt compelled to see the great man in the flesh and whom the great man, in his hospitality, felt obliged to entertain...
...When he had occasion to dwell upon the nature of the new system he had indulged in the general language of the bench rather than that of the penetrating observer...
...The task was appropriate to the times and to the visitors who made the trip...
...Unlike the wholly sympathetic treatment given the other PWMD—such as Frederick Douglass, of course, and "Mother Jones," and the Japanese-American activist Gordon Hirabayashi—the view of Washington is mixed...
...In many respects it remains an artifact more of the 19th century than the 20th, much less the 21st, and there's something bittersweet in the Ladies' attempt "to meet people where they are," to use the cant phrase of the day...
...Lee looked aside for a moment...
...Viewed a certain way, he seems almost uninteresting...
...Fourteen percent of eighth graders were proficient, 11 percent of twelfth graders...
...Very proper, very reserved...
...Or dentures, rather—George Washington's dentures, which are the centerpiece of one of the traveling exhibits, "Treasures from Mount Vernon: George Washington Revealed," now at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and soon to travel to Atlanta, Richmond, and Chicago...
...His virtues—of self-denial, sacrifice, patriotism, disinterestedness—were the virtues that every American was thought to aspire to...
...Ladies, the home of Washington is in your charge— see to it that you keep it the home of Washington...
...In current textbooks Washington has not been traduced so much as passed over—not ignored, exactly, but placed off to one side, like an old piece of cumbersome statuary that one can't quite bear to part with, out of some dimly felt obligation...
...We will never do that...
...one of the young historians shouted in the dark...
...The association's literature boasts that it has never taken a dime in government money...
...Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor /The Weekly Standard...
...In fact, it might be said that the idea of George Washington, not always the man himself, was what counted...
...They have sought to understand the Founding in ways that make no room for Washington's particular greatness...
...She fingered her gold necklace...
...Their effort to revive Washington, two hundred years after his death, tells us something about them, and something about him, and even more about ourselves...
...It's just this"—he sighed—"this whole 20th-century mindset...
...Good judgment...
...We don't...
...Today there are thirty-three, a number limited by the lodging space available on the Mount Vernon grounds, where the Ladies gather several times a year for four-day meetings to do the association's business...
...Among their innovations are two new Web sites, in which you can take a "Pioneer Farmer Quiz" and "Meet the Mount Vernon Animals...
...For where people are now is a long way from where the Ladies have been, by tradition and resolve...
...They need to know why he was great...
...They have added a team of media and marketing specialists to their skeletal staff...
...Incorruptible, fearless, impatient with abstraction, sometimes prosaic, he falls outside the categories that professional historians have lately used to account for our past...
...His Farewell Address was read annually in special sessions to both houses of Congress...
...Rees is the resident director of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, the highest ranking non-Lady on the premises...
...They have launched no fewer than three touring exhibits, renovated the estate's museum and restored Washington's tomb, installed a "multi-media mood theater" that dramatizes the moment of Washington's death, and added new thematic tours of the grounds...
...Washington was indispensable to the country's Founding—became, indeed, the rock on which the country was built—because of his ability to unite his bickering countrymen, to still their passions by his very presence and resolve their disputes with utter disinterest, to embody their highest aspiration...
...When verisimilitude conflicted with comfort and questions of taste, however, the Ladies favored delicacy...
...But the times did...
...He lacked the incendiary brilliance of Jefferson, the sophistication of Madison and Hamilton, the rhetorical imagination of Thomas Paine...
...They've issued a CD/ROM about Mount Vernon with the unpleasant title "Dig Into George...
...But"—and here Mrs...
...If they don't— what will happen...
...Originally there were twenty-two ladies, or vice regents as they are called, one from each of the twenty-two states...
...And these were not dumb kids...
...We don't want to do that," she said...
...Mount Vernon was a shrine, a place of pilgrimage...
...So why now...
...Lee claims, faded from the history books, not entirely anyway, but he has receded over the past generations—a remote figure who grows ever more distant...
...Rees and the Ladies understand that, as we move into the 21st century, it's the least they can do to reconcile themselves to the 20th...
...Hof-stadter was a historian of ideas...
...And I suppose it has to do with the end of the great man theory of history, too...
...There's so much to do, to make people realize the essence of the man," she said...
...For modern historians, these qualities have proved much more attractive, and worthy of study, than the stolid, tenacious statesmanship of Washington...
...When I saw it the other day, with a class of fourth graders, it was a big hit...
...Even before he died, the popular view of Washington was elevated far beyond anything we can imagine today...
...The association is self-perpetuating, which is to say that when one Lady retires the other Ladies choose her successor...
...And if they are forced to use the tools of a time that finds them and their passions anachronistic, well then, they will...
...only 41 percent associated the dropping of the atomic bomb with the end of World War II...
...Like Beard, Hofstadter passes over Washington in his account of the Founding...
...The older they got, the dumber they got...
...She had insisted that Mount Vernon never change, and it didn't...
...In time the religious elements fell away, but the veneration continued undiminished...
...Let no irreverent hand change it...
...Unlike other Founders, Washington has never been subjected to a successful debunking...
...There were no chamber pots in the bedrooms, no slag heaps outside the kitchen, no pig dung littering the service roads, as there would have been, of course, at the estate "where Washington lived and died...
...Robert E. Lee IV—which I think is the most satisfying piece of information anyone could ever hope to come across...
...Praise for Washington was partly a kind of self-congratulation for their own brilliance in choosing a president who would lead them to success...
...The rise of social history—filling up history with all kinds of people who'd been ignored before means there's less room for old heroes...
...We impute coldness to him," Richard Brookhiser, a recent biographer, wrote, "and we respond to him coldly...
...It would take someone with more nerve than I to challenge the Ladies as they struggle, however clumsily, to return Washington to his rightful place, at the center of our historical memory...
...And I suddenly realized why...
...And yet she worried for the future...
...Shortly before the Civil War, she was able to present John Augustine with a substantial down payment on the $200,000 purchase price, the balance to be paid off in three years...
...His birthday was celebrated as a national holiday, marked by parades and fetes and speeches and balls, and his portrait hung, if not, as Whitman observed, on every wall, at least in every classroom, staring down from above the chalkboard like a stern and unsleeping principal...
...in short, because of his character...
...George Washington has always been the example for all citizens to emulate, the man who embodied our Founding Principles, and maybe this will help us get that across...
...She went on: "And now sometimes I think, 'Well, maybe he wouldn't mind the dentures.' I think, I really do, that he would approve of us doing what we needed to do so that we can make this the country we should be proud of—a country that needs him...
...The more secular fables of Parson Weems—inventor of the cherry tree—passed into the McGuffey Readers and then into the imagination of every schoolchild...
...And Washington was not, as Beard noted, a man of ideas, certainly not a thinker of the sort that historians nowadays favor...
...It is the 200th anniversary of Washington's death, and to mark the occasion the Ladies have embarked on a flurry of activities far surpassing anything they have ever undertaken before...
...He moved out on Washington's birthday, February 22, 1860, emptying the decaying house of all its furnishings except for the famous Houdon bust of Washington, a terrestrial globe the president had used in his New York office, and the key to the Bastille, presented to George Washington by Lafayette...
...Washington was, of course, the most famous man in America, certainly the most revered, and the richest, too...
...The qualities Washington possessed just aren't as appreciated as they were...
...People like to complain that we live in an iconoclastic age...
...He has been detached from the national patrimony—if we can be said to have a national patrimony any longer...
...The Ladies rescued Mount Vernon...
...To my inexpert eyes, the lesson plan looked professional, well-organized, and, for some reason, a little sad...
...But her ardor for the cause was unmistakable, and infectious...
...The New York Times, for example, wrote in a front page story in February: "The directors of Mount Ver-non . . . have inaugurated a $3 million public relations campaign to reposition [Washington] as a national figure with what the spinmeisters call 'heat.' Think Leonardo DiCaprio, Diana and Elvis Presley...
...The custom only intensified in the century that followed...
...He cast about for a buyer, with an asking price of $200,000, but was turned down by both the federal government and the Commonwealth of Virginia...
...Washington has not, as Mrs...
...He was a man of "ordinary talents," the students learn, "not completely successful as a military man nor as a president...
...The upshot was that Mount Vernon had at last got down with the slammin' nineties: another info-entertainment option among the dozens on offer in the Capital region—a little bit Williamsburg, a little bit Busch Gardens...
...Exclamation, of course, in the original...
...Rees came to Mount Vernon in the mid-1980s...
...Falling within a month devoted to a celebration of African-American history, President's Day is more often than not merely an occasion to teach the young scholars that Washington owned slaves and Lincoln freed them...
...These were kids from a privileged background...
...Well into our own century, Washington's memory was kept alive by countless commemorations...
...four units cover the fifty years from the end of World War II to the present...
...By the 1850s, the crowds of travelers and pilgrims had brought the estate's owner, John Augustine Washington, to the edge of bankruptcy...
...The Ladies created an idealized, pristine version of Washington's home, for their intent was not so much to instruct as to uplift...
...And with a wave of his hand he tried to dismiss the depredations of the span of a hundred years...
...The historian Paul Longmore put it well: "His gift was not the formulation of ideas, but their incarnation...
...But we don't think that way anymore...
...let no vandal hands desecrate it with the fingers of 'progress...
...When Miss Cunningham retired as regent, in 1874, the weeds had been cut and the gardens restored, the house had been painted and partly, but painstakingly, refurnished, and the crowds continued to pass through the gates...
...People come here and know so very little about him—very nice people, hard-working people who bring their children here, trying to teach them about history...
...So now seemed as good a time as any to ask Mrs...
...and an encouragement to the kids to "write a letter to George Washington and get a reply from Mount Vernon...
...I said, 'Well, it's a good thing this isn't a cherry tree, or it might be in danger—you never know who might come chop it down.' And there was no reaction...
...Meanwhile, Washington's birthday, once universally observed in the schools and used as an excuse to dwell on the Founding Fathers, has been bundled with Lincoln's in the portmanteau "Presidents' Day...
...She fixed me with a stare that could have come straight from Miss Cunningham...
...We are always very conscious of going too far," Mrs...
...In An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), the most influential work of American history in the first half of this century, Charles Beard undertook the first mass debunking, casting the Framers as reactionary capitalists intent on insulating their riches from the grasping proles...
...The man is fading from the history books...
...And no one else is going to do that...
...We have to get the children interested before they can learn about George Washington...
...Black History Month—a sound idea pursued with unusual zeal in the public schools—has pretty much swallowed up the social studies curriculum for the month of February (social studies being the rubric under which "American history" is taught, when it is taught at all...
...Nothing...
...For the first time professional "re-enactors" have been hired, to roam the estate in period costume and give little lectures about everyday 18th-century plantation life to inquisitive tourists...
...Mod-esty—my God, who in late-20th-century America gets credit for being modest anymore...
...And Washington is there, sure enough, with his very own page—as one of the book's more than 120 "People Who Made a Difference...
...To know the story and character of Washington was part of what it was to be an American...
...Lee is a thoroughly modern woman who favors elegant jacket-and-pants ensembles and brightly colored turtlenecks and out-sized eyeglasses that are, curiously, shaded violet...
...The association is 146 years old...
...The name of Washington," wrote Walt Whitman, "is constantly on our lips...
...It's like he was a punk rocker...
...The thought of personal publicity horrified her, so she signed her first letters "A Southern Matron...
...I don't even like that word, shrine...
...When the Ladies decided to wire the house for electricity, for example, Thomas Edison did the job...
...Thousands of the packets have been sent to fifth-grade teachers around the country...
...Alarmed by a letter from her mother, who on a trip north in 1852 had stopped at Mount Vernon and noted the waist-high weeds and the peeling paint, the fallen shutters and the collapsing portico, Miss Cunningham resolved that Mount Vernon would be saved, by private subscription if necessary...
...it has relied instead on the kindness of the very best strangers...
...George Washington's part in the proceedings of the convention," Beard wrote, "was almost negligible"—an odd statement about the man who was, after all, the convention's presiding officer, and without whom there might not have been any convention at all...
...But it suddenly occurred to me: These kids don't even know the myths...
...fewer than half could identify the Bill of Rights...
...Mount Ver-non was the place where this spirit of veneration could be imbibed most directly, and by the mid-1960s attendance had reached 1.3 million a year...
...In fact, she's a descendant of George Washington...
...But of course we knew that...
...When the Revolution succeeded," the authors write, [Americans] felt justified in their choice of a leader...
...This was the Ladies' sacred charge—they refer to it as a sacred charge—and it impressed itself on every aspect of their work for a century and more...
...Let one spot, in this grand country of ours, be saved from change...
...The Ladies may not be happy with the vulgarity that this sometimes requires, but they are resolute, as I say, in their determination to make Washington "fun" and "relevant...
...Three of these recount the three hundred years from the settling of America through the colonial period and the constitutional convention to the end of the 18th century...
...Now, I knew these kids' teacher—a very bright woman...
...The recent high school textbook United States History: In the Course of Human Events, published by West Publishing, is a case in point...
...The chapel at Valley Forge, built at the end of the 19th century, dedicated one wall to stained glass tableaux from the life of Jesus, the wall opposite to the life of Washington...
...It makes it relevant and fun for them, and then maybe they'll want to know more, do you see...
...It lets them see Washington as a man...
...But he is not always so fatalistic...
...one of many.] Miss Cunningham was indefatigable despite her infirmity...
...Early on Miss Cunningham stipulated that a vice regent "should be of a family whose social position would command the confidence of the State, and enable her to enlist the aid of persons of widest influence...
...The qualities that made a great leader then were good for all time...
...When Washington died, followed by his wife two years later, the stream of visitors swelled to a flood...
...With the help of the developing sciences of forensics and archaeology, the restoration of the gardens and the house proceeded as accurately as possible...
...How does he explain it...
...in the bedroom where Washington died, the tools doctors used to bleed him rest on the bed, bloody towels are wadded on the floor, and a pan filled with theater blood sits on the nightstand...
...In a desperate moment, he considered an offer of $300,000 from an entrepreneur who proposed to turn the estate into a roadside attraction...
...Ours, however, demands intimacy and craves familiarity...
...Among fourth graders, for example, 87 percent could identify Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech...
...I met her not long ago, in a tastefully appointed pastel sitting room in the association's administrative building...
...Sitting in his sunny office at Mount Vernon on a recent late-winter morning, I asked James Rees about this steady diminishment of Washington...
...And there was some resistance, and it was something we had to agree on as a group...
...We need him...
...And the Ladies have become a special-interest group, pleading a pet cause, just as NOW agitated for a Susan B. Anthony dollar and Indian rights groups lobbied to put Sacagawea on a postage stamp...
...What's interesting is the particular form this ignorance takes...
...Lee told me...
...Earlier generations didn't demand that their heroes be "humanized...
...And I started making jokes," he told me recently, "you know, playing off some of the Washington myths...
...When they thought it was time to get a fire engine, Henry Ford had one built and offered it free of charge...
...And so we are...
...The tradition holds—par-ticularly with regard to "influence...
...The "multi-media mood theater" mentioned earlier, designed by a British firm responsible for the "Viking-land" amusement park in Norway, is dazzling in its high-tech simulation of Washington's death...
...Lee about the teeth...
...As the historian Walter McDougall noted in a recent review, the authors of United States History choose to divide their subject into eleven units...
...The estate he ceded to the Ladies had dwindled to 500 acres, including the mansion where Washington had lived and died...
...For a vice regent's duties include preeminently the raising of funds...
...If the men of America would not do their duty, she wrote, then their wives and daughters would do it, for the sake of posterity: While it would save American honor from a blot in the eyes of a gazing world, it would furnish a shrine where at least the mothers of the land and their innocent children might make their offering to the cause of the greatness, goodness, and prosperity of their country...
...The over-hyped Times story was greeted with chagrin at Mount Vernon, and staffers, understandably defensive, hasten to correct its misimpressions...
...The offices are hidden from public view behind a towering hedgerow several hundred yards beyond George Washington's mansion, which sits in turn on a bluff on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, sixteen miles south of the nation's capital...
...Wow,' they say...
...He was shrouded in religious imagery...
Vol. 4 • April 1999 • No. 28
