The times that try men's souls

We talked about justice last night, and I’ll come back to that eventually, but I’m more interested in a side conversation at the moment. We get a lot of side conversations in our meetings; my guess is that thoughts in the adolescent mind do not flow in a deep, wide river but instead are shot willy nilly from random points in the brain and sent to carom wildly against whatever they come in contact with. I have had to learn to deal with this over time, as I come from the business side of life where a premium is usually placed on keeping one’s attention focused on the matter at hand. Even business brainstorming sessions pale against the sturm und drang of team brainstorms: oldsters drizzle where young ‘uns thunder. No surprise there.

Anyhow, you can’t talk about no justice without you talk about ol’ Plato in there somewheres, which means that the subject of philosopher kings will arise, as it did last night. Trained professionals in the business of distinguishing moral right, and acting on it, seem so much more desirable in office than mere politicians, or at least that’s what Phil liked to say. (Caveman fans are aware that Plato’s first name was Phil; you now know that too.) Which last night led to the challenge, Name one politician you respect, which was met with numbing silence, or at least what suffices as numbing silence in a roomful of teenagers. Eventually we were able to dig down to some local types whom no one could indict for any particularly offensive peccadilloes and who seemed to be motivated by principle, but mostly there was a sense of our government being led by a fairly uninspiring batch of individuals, and of having been so for quite some time. Why is that? Is it that the intensity of modern media exposure renders all people as something less than heroic? Or is it that modern politics, by its nature (and including the prospect of all that media scrutiny), for some reason attracts people who are something less than heroic? Or is it something else?

What you need to do is compare to some other group, a control, so to speak. So we briefly mentioned the Founders. The Sailors briefly ticked off a few well known issues that seemed to indict them as well, and we moved on, but I’d like to concentrate on that a little. Were the Founders (formerly known as the Founding Fathers in less PC times) a unique group of individuals who accidentally came together and managed to create a long-lived experiment in self government, or were the times unique, allowing almost any well-intentioned group in place to eventuate roughly the same results? One could no doubt argue either way, but I tend to lean toward the former interpretation. I’ve read heavily into the literature, perhaps because I’ve been so interested in the results—the creation of the US—and therefore curious about the people involved. So let’s look at them.

In terms of starting the revolution, I’m less inclined to think that the body of people involved were that special. Plenty of people have started revolutions, and it’s the business of finishing revolutions that separates the potatoes from the monkey guts: you have only to look at the French or the Russians as major examples of that. But one thing that the Americans did early on was enlist the person of George Washington as the colonial military leader and, to some extent, colonial figurehead. GW had a certain reputation as a military man (although some would say that he wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest at the game) and also as the kind of guy people could accept as a leader. Flexner’s biography was entitled “The Indispensible Man” for a reason. GW’s character was perhaps a little dull (the liveliest the stories ever get are the rumors about Lady Fairfax) but it was also notoriously straight. He wasn’t one of the guys, shall we say, but you knew you could rely on him if you had to. So we did. And after a long bunch of fighting years, and, as Mark Twain put it, pulling a couple of jokers out from the bottom of the deck, GW finally managed a victory for the Americans. And here’s where GW demonstrates uniqueness, because when the war ends, he goes home. Previously winning generals in this sort of situation simply marched the troops into the capital and declared themselves the supreme ruler. Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and a few years after GW retired to Mount Vernon the Little Corporal put the imperial crown on his own head in Notre Dame. But GW didn’t expect nor seek power after the war. He sought home and farm. And he wasn’t dissembling. He really meant it. (As an aside, awe of generals, including those who don’t simply march from field to throne, seems to be a universal trait: even in the US we’ve felt that the heaviest hitters deserve to be rewarded with executive power: GW of course, but also most noticeably in big contests Grant and Eisenhower, not to mention Harrison and Taylor and Jackson and maybe some others that I can’t bring to mind immediately.)

The creation of the federal government in the summer of 1787 was a complicated affair bringing together the various state representatives to figure out some way of concocting a centralized power to solve for the issues of dealing with each other and foreign countries and suchlike. This assortment of regional interests required a leader everyone could trust, and GW was hauled in yet again, this time to run the constitutional convention. And as the idea of a strong federal government began to take shape, it quickly became clear that only one man could be expected to run it out of the starting gate. There are all sorts of stories about how GW did nothing to grab for the power, and those stories are true. He accepted it not as his due but as a trust given to him by the people. He wasn’t necessarily a reluctant president but neither was he an aggressive one. He was no idiot, and understood his own position in American politics. In fact, he realized that as first president, he would set the tone for generations to come and, perhaps more importantly, set the tone for the time of how, exactly, a non-royal should conduct executive power. Remember, everyone else holding his job at the time was a king or a queen of some sort. He was the one and only elected president in the world. And much of the world, most notably the kings and queens, were hoping that the whole American republican experiment would close out of town, because if the idea of self-government were to become a hit, then no doubt it would eventually send a road show to their towns and, well, put them out of a job. It’s nice to be king, you know?

So everything GW did for the next 8 years was the focus of the times, and of history. He was not a pushy executive; he believed that congress should make laws and that he should execute them, and he proposed no legislation nor offered no plans of action. His view of the presidency was anything but imperial, and deliberately so. And he understood that leaving after two terms would set a precedent. And even after he returned to Mount Vernon, presumably for the last time, he was available yet again to put down rebellion under his successor: once a general, always a general. And once a symbol, always a symbol.

Because of the qualities that made him the perfect, “indispensable” first president, GW isn’t very easy to warm up to. He is, however, inspirational, in that the more you know about him, the more you’re impressed by him, but he’s not exciting. You sense that he’s as human as the next yabbo, but he was in control of his passions—such as they were—and didn’t go about making a muddle of his life, unlike many of us, and certainly unlike many politicians today. We can’t sit around in present times and marvel at all the dirt about GW that has finally come to light because, plainly and simply, there isn’t any. The best we can do is brush away the Weemsian cobwebs of veneration, like the cherry tree, or the little legends like the wooden teeth (although it is true that he did have false teeth, and that the grim expression you see in the paintings of him from life are the result of dental distress) and learn a little more about the very real man who was, as Henry Lee eulogized, First in War, First in Peace and First in the Hearts of His Countrymen. It is quite possible that without the very specific individual known as George Washington, the United States of America would not exist today. So, at least with politician number one, strike a chord for the unique individuals team.

More politicians to come, heaven save us…