ON THE AVENUES: Deity building, American-style.

ON THE AVENUES: Deity building, American-style.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

To begin, I recommend “Washington: A Life,” Ron Chernow’s recent biography of George Washington, but with appropriate cautionary notes, prime among them being that these many years later, there exists no sure, non-speculative way to know what was in the mind of a man who was Colonial America’s most impenetrable sphinx.

Whenever Chernow is able to augment scant primary testimony with contributing evidence from record provided by outsiders, the results are good. He is especially skilled at evoking the time of Washington’s childhood and early adulthood in colonial Virginia; in these instances, Chernow corrals an impressive array of surviving accounts, and weaves it masterfully.

Unfortunately, as the narrative progresses, the author frequently opts for pure guesswork, which amounts to the usual litany of phrases like, “He must have felt,” “Perhaps it was the case” or “Maybe there came a twinge of regret.”

Chernow cannot resist them, and in honor of our eternally prurient bedazzlement with sex, most of this amateur psychology comes in periodic analyses of Washington’s purported dalliances with Sally Fairfax, wife of a fellow planter further up the social chain of the Virginia planter’s aristocracy than Washington himself.

Was the Father of Our Country in love with Fairfax, both before, during and after his marriage to the immensely wealthy widow Martha Custis? Can we read between the lines of frequent classicist references in his letters? Was the relationship consummated?

(As a side note, perhaps no other prominent male Colonial figure profited as early and as often from his richer and better placed relatives marrying properly, and then dying prematurely. Washington inherited early and often.)

As for love and carnal happiness, there remains not a scintilla of evidence to suggest wayward, greased naked play between Washington and Fairfax, occurring in the fetid grove out back of the slave quarters at any of his four or more plantation properties.

Nor do we know whether they met illicitly in a rough-hewn cabin located somewhere in the middle of the tens of thousands of acres Washington connived to be awarded as compensation for his service in the French and Indian War -- not that Washington would have left used condoms for “Smoking Gun” to find.

That’s because Chernow persuasively describes a man with an unusually defined sense of self, possessed with propriety from a very early age, constantly obsessed with how he appeared to the eyes of others, and performing the nuanced role of Geo. Washington at all times. While we cannot know about Fairfax, it is clear that Washington anticipating the personal “brand building” of later times.

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It certainly helped to be “Geo. Washington the Mythic Deity” when debt was high and pocket change fleeting, as was the case throughout his adult life, reflecting the land-rich, cash poor existence of the founding baronial planters. Periodically, Washington was obliged to pause from nation-building to hector his tenants and collect rents, but even this tenure as Slumlord Papa, borne of the aforementioned calculated grab of prime acreage in “new” western territories, did not help the household ledger to balance.

Washington and family customarily lived large, simultaneously complaining and indulging incessant impositions from guests. With most pre-war finished goods imported very expensively from England, therein is found a significant (and grubby) portion of the rationale for independence.

Later, while serving as the country’s first president, Washington launched what we would refer to now as a “buy local” campaign to reduce America’s dependence on imported goods. How would he view our addiction to China and Saudi Arabia today?

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In terms of military accomplishment, Washington had a lopsided losing record, with more defeats in battle than victories.

This lifelong devotee of the theater achieved martial success not as a tactical genius, but as a thespian, portraying himself as the calm rallying point amid the storm, one underfunded by an inept, willfully impotent political structure that he freely criticized for effect, his stature remaining constant as each year’s Continental army came and went after their bare-bones, one-year enlistments expired, and overall, always just barely staying alive – living to stall and sometimes fight another day, and waiting stolidly for the Brits, who never committed themselves entirely to the cause of keeping the Colonies, to grow weary of their losses.

It worked … when the French came aboard.

All the while, Washington carefully hoarded all letters and dispatches in huge trunks for the purpose of burnishing posterity’s judgment of his performance. However, what succeeded in uniform was less beneficial in civilian’s clothes, and at this juncture, with a new nation imploring its idol to serve, matters become more factual, and also muddied.

Chernow’s persistent characterization of the early Federalists versus Republicans struggle as a fundamentally unfair fight, pitting the lofty and irreproachable ideals of Washington and Alexander Hamilton against the shrill, self-serving machinations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, grows tiresome as the pages turn.

Granted, America’s political honeymoon of intellectual content over supercharged hyperbole barely lasted through Washington’s first administration (he was twice unanimously elected by the pre-suffrage Electoral College), but the author’s propensity to depict Washington’s saintliness wounded by the evil, conniving Jefferson veers ever close to sheer hagiography.

More balanced accounts surely exist, and readers are asked to recommend such choices.

In the end, tottering on the edge of an insolvency compounded by his many years of military and political absence, and unable to square the circle of slavery either theoretically or at Mt. Vernon, Washington endeavored to enjoy a truncated two-year retirement before dying at the age of 67.

Had his doctors (and Washington himself) not extracted multiple pints of blood in search of an elusive cure, he might have survived a bit longer. As it stands, his departure from humanity’s mortal coil merely set into motion the process of deification that continues more than 200 years later with founding father pop psychology, in which Chernow’s biography snugly finds a place.

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As an addendum, it appears likely that Washington, who fancied himself the thinking’s man’s planter and agriculturist, managed to grasp early on that slavery was a losing proposition economically, and perhaps to a lesser extent, also was unacceptable in the sense of human rights as informed by the inescapably and hypocritically Christian atmosphere of the age.

While humane by the standards of his contemporaries, Washington generally internalized his views and did nothing more about slavery until just before his death, when a revised will stipulated the freeing of his slaves – that is, only those owned by Washington himself, as opposed to “dower” slaves legally attached to his wife’s estate.

I am familiar with the exculpatory apologetics: Those folks simply could not be expected to think outside the constraints of their milieu, etc, etc.

And yet, when it comes to deities, I prefer mine to be a tad more prescient. By knowing and not acting, Washington falls short, although two centuries of worship constitute a hard habit to break.