Founding Sphinx
Our greatest Founding Father has also seemed the most inscrutable, until now, as a new biography reveals Washington's humanity
By GIL TROY
Raleigh, N.C. News & Observer, Sunday, November 21, 2004
For a bunch of dead white males in wigs and tights, the Founding Fathers are pretty hot stuff these days. In an age of anti-heroes, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton continue to loom large and help authors reach the best-seller list. Even the curmudgeonly John Adams attracted the popular historian David McCullough, boosting Adams' reputation and filling McCullough's coffers.
If any historian deserves credit for the Founders fad, it is Joseph Ellis. His 1997 blockbuster, "American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson," racked up major awards and big sales, helping to reawaken yet again Americans' love affair with their forefathers. Ellis plumped this trend, and won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2001 for his next book, "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation."
Now Ellis, who teaches at Mount Holyoke College, turns his attention to the most towering yet enigmatic founder. "His Excellency: George Washington" is a gem -- a model biography that combines meticulous research; penetrating psychological insight; a broad, visionary historical view; and a delightfully vivid style. Through its pages, Ellis details Washington's super-human accomplishments while exploring the many paradoxes that surround his character.
Despite his towering presence in our history and his ubiquity in our wallets, Washington suffers from what Ellis calls "the Patriarchal Problem." He seems "distant, cold, intimidating." He's admired but not adored. By contrast to Thomas Jefferson, beloved by both Ronald Reagan and William Jefferson Clinton, the Father of our Country appears more inaccessible. In his epigrammatic way, Ellis writes, "Jefferson was like one of those dirigibles at the Super Bowl, flashing inspirational messages to both sides. Washington was aloof and silent, like the man in the moon."
In his "attempt at a lunar landing," Ellis goes beyond the "marble," reacquainting Americans with Washington's true greatness as well as his inevitable human weaknesses. He argues persuasively that the reserve that makes him appear so remote, especially to moderns, is what helped him dwarf his peers and his successors.
Washington could be considered his generation's Comeback Kid. He had, to coin a phrase , something of a genius for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat; it is not much of an exaggeration to say that his greatest strength as a general was in knowing how to retreat -- a skill he mastered as a young Virginia colonel in the frontier.
During the Revolution, following crushing defeats against the well-trained British troops, amid the cold and misery of the Valley Forge winter, Washington helped maintain his troops' morale -- so they could fight, or flee, another day. Blazing a trail that other indigenous insurgents would follow, the Americans won the Revolution by outlasting the British, allowing the faraway power to lose interest while the homegrown citizens persevered. "A central lesson of his life," Ellis writes, was "survive and you shall succeed."
Moreover, Washington's Zen-like leadership approach led to a string of negative achievements, from presiding over the Constitutional Convention in relative silence to allowing his brilliant young charges Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton to flourish -- and clash -- during his presidency.
Tall, dignified, statuesque even before he was marbleized, Washington played his historic role brilliantly. Surrounded by short, foppish blabbermouths, "Washington's sheer physicality made his reserve and customary silence into a sign of strength and sagacity." On Dec. 22, 1783, a formal dinner and dance in Annapolis, where the Confederation Congress was sitting temporarily, honored "His Excellency" as he went off to what ended up being only a temporary retirement after his generalship.
"His Excellency," a perfect title, captures Washington's greatness, the towering, formal reputation he cherished and guarded zealously, as well as the limits on ambition and honorifics he was principled enough to want and shrewd enough to accept. To his credit, Ellis writes, Washington "had sufficient control over his ambitions to recognize that his place in history would be enhanced, not by enlarging his power, but by surrendering it."
The humbled British monarch George III put his finger on this when he was heard to say that, if Washington could resist making himself king, he would be "the greatest man in the world." Characteristically, in 1783, by refusing to join a proposed officers' coup, the Newburgh Conspiracy, what Ellis calls "the Last Temptation of Washington," the Revolutionary general distinguished himself by differentiating between his personal power and the Revolution's ideals.
Ellis contrasts Washington's humility -- and embrace of republicanism -- with Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin, Mao and Castro, who "made themselves synonymous with the revolution in order to justify the assumption of dictatorial power." In demonstrating how democracies can have strong, charismatic leaders who know when to retire and respect regulation rotations of power, Washington the cool pragmatist made his singular contribution to American political philosophy and good governance.
"His Excellency" is biography, not hagiography. And Ellis has got Washington's number. He chronicles a man who could be cheap, greedy, petty and snarky. He recognizes that Washington's "postured reticence" was "an essential fabrication," obscuring and controlling "a truly monumental ego with a massive personal agenda." But unlike so many modern biographers, with Ellis, recognition of character flaws does not diminish affection for his subject. Washington's struggle to control his imperfections, especially his ego, helps gives the book the dramatic tension and psychological insight of a great novel -- and ultimately only enhances appreciation for Washington.
Gradually, amid what could be the three most significant moments in American history -- the Revolutionary War, the writing of the Constitution and the launching of the new government -- George Washington's biography became entwined with his nation's history. Steady, unyielding, placing the people's interests ahead of his own -- and thus benefiting personally as well -- Washington help shepherd the colonists from fighting for independence toward creating a nation. "He was that rarest of men: a supremely realistic visionary, a prudent prophet," Ellis writes. "His genius was his judgment."
Ellis attributes Washington's good judgment to the fact that, unlike so many of his peers, he was a man of action rather than a thinker, a decision-maker not a ditherer. His instinctual understanding of "how power worked in the world" and how men sought to advance their own interests, led him to tame the power granted him, without exploiting it. In his personal evolution from the master of Mount Vernon frustrated by British prerogatives to Revolutionary icon granted a virtual carte blanche at critical crossroads in the nation's life, his faith in the sovereign power of the people as the ultimate check on government only grew. Thanks to that tenet learned by experience, Washington helped translate Revolutionary ideals and Constitutional compromises into a workable, stable government, serving a united, if occasionally quarrelsome, people. Washington thus emerges as the ultimate American pragmatist, more Thomas Edison than Albert Einstein, and first in war because he would not waver; first in peace because he would not overstretch; and, thus, then and now, first in the hearts of his grateful countrymen and women.
Gil Troy is professor of history at McGill University. His latest book, "Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s," will be published this spring.
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