For those of you who might have forgotten one of the reasons George Washington was regarded as such a great man, here's a reminder. And also, here's a little history to go with it, courtesy of The Washington Post.
This speech has been in the history books, but
At the end of the war, Washington was held in such high regard, and people were so weary and shell-shocked, that they were eager to return to what was familiar; so there was a popular desire to crown Washington as king.
Hard as it is to believe that Americans wanted to crown Washington king, even more difficult to believe, in the shadow of history at least, was how Washington the general turned down the request and decided to leave public life. He had decided to move the cult of the individual out of the way of the more democratic form of rule that was, as of yet, untested, untrusted, and still unstable.
Indeed, economic and regional tensions would pull at the inadequate Articles of Confederation, requiring a "Constitution 2.0" – what we now call our revered Constitution, which would become the template for just about every other democratic constitution and movement in the world, from French revolutionaries to Haitian slave revolts, all the way down through history to even Ho Chi Minh (whose declaration of Vietnamese independence was modeled on the American one) and even our former Communist enemies, which still call themselves "democratic republics."
Little do we remember that pure "democracy" was considered a bad and scary word, even well into the times the writing of the present American Constitution, and Senators were generally required to own a certain amount of land as members of a propertied elite, to offset the "riff-raff" of the "democratic" representatives who constituted the lower house of Congress.
Also, little do we remember the public distress over how to define and maintain a sense of "republican virtue" and commitment to the republic over personal, material "interests" in a society in which political participation was increasingly open to the masses. Traditionally, only those educated gentlemen with wealth and the privilege of leisure were thought to be able to be "disinterested" from the concerns of the dirty, material world; what James Madison did was find a way to make "interests" balance to make an overall fair whole.
Such was the genius of men like Washington, and the idea of "democracy" was out of the bag, although it wouldn't take the modern form we now recognize – along with the word "democracy" being celebrated – until the 1830's and the time of Jackson.
Washington, Jefferson, and many other Founders were slaveholders, and women were denied (in most states, but not all) the right to vote, Pandora's Box had been opened. Even the very idea that no one has any inherent political rights over another is very American, although very uncomfortable, unusaual, and economically impractical at the time.
Some might point to this as a mere "contradiction," which it was, to some extent; but many historians of the United States also see this as part of a larger question, an unresolved issue that would only be able to be resolved through violence; in this way, John Quincy Adams called the Civil War "the last battle of the American Revolution," which was a very apt way of understanding the single issue in the Constitution that wouldn't go away – the problem of slavery.
Although its ultimate solution could not have been found at the time, in the circumstances of material interests and the limits of moral courage at the time, the ideas and actions of people such as Washington were indeed momentous ones not just for all Americans, but for people around the world.
And George Washington never cut down a cherry tree. He should be remembered for making the historically unprecedented act of laying down power when it was most crucial to do so, and for returning to public life when it was requested of him to define and assert the authority of the President and the federal government.
He's more than just the old white dude in a wig.
