History - Past and Perspective
George Washington’s Rules for the Radically Right

George Washington’s Rules for the Radically Right

How did George Washington, a man with about five years of schooling, manage to inspire his army to face a global superpower and win? The strong moral character he developed. ...
Selwyn Duke

If George Washington gives up power in the wake of American independence, “he will be the greatest man in the world.” Thus remarked our first president’s adversary, King George III, after being told that Washington would likely follow his victory by retiring to his Mount Vernon home. Yet the king’s incredulity would be met with a striking reality: Washington would relinquish power twice. Once “at the end of the revolutionary war, when he resigned his military commission and returned to Mount Vernon,” wrote the Cato Institute in its 2006 piece “The Man Who Would Not Be King,” “and again at the end of his second term as president, when he refused entreaties to seek a third term. In doing so, he set a standard for American presidents that lasted until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose taste for power was stronger than the 150 years of precedent set by Washington.”

The reason my essay on “killing our heroes” was entitled “Where Have You Gone, George Washington?” (The New American, April 4, 2016) is that our first president is the closest thing to a real-life storybook hero we may find in American history. Though the Cherry Tree tale concerning a six-year-old Washington telling his angry father “I can not tell a lie: I cut the tree” is itself a fib, conjured up by Washington biographer Mason Locke Weems, there is a reason a woman, quoted by historian Karal Ann Marling, stated, “If the tale isn’t true, it should be.” For the  myth perfectly encapsulates the man. As the University of Virginia American Studies website puts it,

The American public may have known that Parson Weems’ story of young Washington and his cherry tree rang false, but for the citizenry of the early United States of America, the idea behind the fable declared what they believed was true: Washington equaled honesty. I have no desire to hold onto my power, Washington told the people, and then he kept his word, proving no intention to deceive.

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