Perhaps no historical figure has been subjected to more revision than George Washington, the first national hero. Building on the collections transferred from the Patent Office in 1883, Smithsonian curators have collected countless objects associated with Washington. Ranging from locks of hair to a marble statue, from his battle sword to an egg poacher used at Mount Vernon, these objects reflect the various ways Americans have imagined and remembered Washington as both man and myth.20
After the Revolution and especially after his death in 1799, Washington was glorified by the American people. Mason Locke “Parson” Weems’s enormously popular Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington (1800) was hagiography rather than biography, crammed full of fabulous tales of his valiant deeds and saintly character. Yet not everyone shared this view of the “Father of His Country,” particularly those who worried that their own contributions were being eclipsed by the Washington mythos. In his letters to Dr. Benjamin Rush, written between 1805 and 1813, John Adams railed bitterly against the deification of Washington, a man whose intelligence and education, Adams believed, did not measure up to the standards for great men set by the Age of Enlightenment. Rather than a man who achieved fame by his own merits, wrote Adams, Washington the hero was the creation of “puffers,” an illusion rendered by “masks and veils and cloaks” and “aristocratic tricks”21:
The great character [Washington] was a Character of Convention.… There was a time when northern, middle, and southern statesmen and northern, middle, and southern officers of the army expressly agreed to blow the trumpet of panegyric in concert, to cover and dissemble all faults and errors, to represent every defeat as a victory and every retreat as an advancement, to make that Character popular and fashionable with all parties in all places and with all persons, as a center of union, as the central stone in the geometrical arch.22
Whether such a calculated collusion actually occurred or was simply the fantasy of a neglected and frustrated founding father, Washington did indeed become the icon of the early republic. “It is noteworthy that every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home, just as we have images of God’s saints,” observed Pavel Svinin, a Russian diplomat who visited the United States in 1811–13.23 Washington’s idealized image—paraded on the streets, painted on household wares, and hung above mantels—helped connect Americans to the new nation and to one another.
Relics of George Washington, National Museum (now the Arts and Industries Building), 1891. Prominently displayed in the North Hall, the personal effects of Washington and other founding fathers were among the first things visitors saw when they entered the National Museum. The historical relic collection remained on exhibit at the Arts and Industries Building until 1964, when the Museum of History and Technology opened across the National Mall. (photo credit 12.1)
By the mid-nineteenth century the country had begun to outgrow the image of Washington as a classical superhero. The movement to restore Mount Vernon, which began in the 1850s, signified the quest for a new, domesticated image of Washington that responded to new social needs and tastes. At a time when the nation was struggling with territorial expansion, rapid industrial growth, and sectional tensions, many Americans looked to home and family life for comfort. In the process they sought a more intimate and sentimental relationship with their national father figure.24 Instead of tall tales and grandiose oratory that elevated Washington to mythic proportions, the public became fascinated with details about the human side of the hero. These personal details, embodied in artifacts such as kitchen utensils, china platters, bedroom furniture, shoe buckles, and false teeth, drew crowds of pilgrims to Mount Vernon, to the museum at the Patent Office in Washington, D.C., to the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, and, with the transfer of the Patent Office’s Washington relics in 1883, to the Smithsonian Institution.
Fire bucket, about 1830. The first national hero, George Washington became a powerful and popular icon of American identity. The Latin slogan on this fire bucket—Veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered)—evokes the Roman leader Julius Caesar, with whom Washington was often compared. Lacking a lengthy history of their own, early Americans often used classical symbols to represent the new nation and its political ideals. The Smithsonian added this fire bucket to its American folk art collection in 1955. (photo credit 12.2)
The search for a more complete view of Washington continued into the twentieth century. Biographers attempted to separate the image from the man, peeking behind the public facade to expose the private self. For historians like Paul Ford, author of The True George Washington (1896), the purpose of humanizing Washington was to make him more sympathetic and accessible. In transforming Washington from lofty icon to ordinary citizen, Ford and others hoped to inspire patriotism by creating a more practical role model.25 But some biographers had a different motive for uncovering the true Washington: debunking. The disillusionment, cynicism, and distrust of leaders engendered by World War I played out in such books as William E. Woodward’s George Washington: The Image and the Man (1926), which criticized Washington as materialistic, undemocratic, and, worst of all, ordinary: “He was the American common denominator, the average man deified and raised to the nth power. His preoccupations were with material success, with practical details, with money, land, authority … and these are the preoccupations of the average American. He was great in all ordinary qualities.”26
Since Woodward invented the verb in 1923, debunking has become an increasingly popular pastime.27 Today, as America’s national conscience contends with the civil rights movement and its aftershocks, Washington’s name is coming down from public schools in protest of his ownership of slaves. In a way this is nothing new: back in the 1840s and 1850s abolitionists also objected to having a southern slaveholder as a national icon. Yet Washington has not gone away; he has not been forgotten or discarded. His image is entwined with and absorbed into the fabric of the nation. The story of George Washington—the story Americans have invented, passed down, debunked, defended, and reinvented—is the story of America. Through him the nation has celebrated its ideals and confronted its shortcomings.
George Washington, sculpture by Horatio Greenough, 1840. To commemorate the centennial of Washington’s birth in 1832, Congress commissioned Greenough to create a statue to be displayed in the Capitol Rotunda. As soon as the marble statue arrived in the capital city in 1841, however, it attracted controversy and criticism. Greenough had modeled his figure of Washington on a classical Greek statue of Zeus, but many Americans found the sight of a half-naked Washington offensive, even comical. After the statue was relocated to the east lawn of the Capitol in 1843, some joked that Washington was desperately reaching for his clothes, on exhibit at the Patent Office several blocks to the north. In 1908 Greenough’s statue finally came in from the cold: Congress transferred it to the Smithsonian. It remained at the Castle until 1964, when it was moved to the new Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History). The marble Washington has held court on the second floor ever since. (photo credit 12.3)
