The regent of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association is a woman named Mrs. Robert E. Lee IV — which I think is the most satisfying piece of information anyone could ever hope to come across. Notwithstanding her title, however, and the name of her organization, and indeed the powerful resonance of her own married name, Mrs. Lee is a thoroughly modern woman who favors elegant jacket-and-pants ensembles and brightly colored turtlenecks and outsized eyeglasses that are, curiously, shaded violet.
I met her not long ago, in a tastefully appointed pastel sitting room in the association’s administrative building. The offices are hidden from public view behind a towering hedgerow several hundred yards beyond George Washington’s mansion, which sits in turn on a bluff on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, sixteen miles south of the nation’s capital.
This has been a busy year for Mrs. Lee and the Ladies, who are chartered under the Commonwealth of Virginia as proprietors of our first president’s estate. It is the 200th anniversary of Washington’s death, and to mark the occasion the Ladies have embarked on a flurry of activities far surpassing anything they have ever undertaken before. They have launched no fewer than three touring exhibits, renovated the estate’s museum and restored Washington’s tomb, installed a “multi-media mood theater” that dramatizes the moment of Washington’s death, and added new thematic tours of the grounds. For the first time professional “re-enactors” have been hired, to roam the estate in period costume and give little lectures about everyday 18th-century plantation life to inquisitive tourists. More than one hundred Washington artifacts have been borrowed from collections across the country and placed in the house itself, so that, as the press release says, “the estate will resemble as never before the beloved private retreat that Washington knew at his death two hundred years ago.”
So now seemed as good a time as any to ask Mrs. Lee about the teeth.
Or dentures, rather — George Washington’s dentures, which are the centerpiece of one of the traveling exhibits, “Treasures from Mount Vernon: George Washington Revealed,” now at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and soon to travel to Atlanta, Richmond, and Chicago. The Ladies acquired the dentures from a descendant of Martha Washington in 1949. For fifty years, however, they have declined to put them on display, for a reason that explains a lot about the Ladies.
“It just seemed so personal, so — I don’t know — so private,” said Mrs. Lee, when I brought up the subject. She fingered her gold necklace. “Washington was a very dignified man, you see. Very proper, very reserved. I can tell you he would not have approved of having his dentures on display.”
So why now?
“It was something we thought long and hard about, I can assure you. And there was some resistance, and it was something we had to agree on as a group. But” — and here Mrs. Lee leaned forward from her wingback chair, suddenly animated — “we are in a crisis! The man is fading from the history books! People come here and know so very little about him — very nice people, hard-working people who bring their children here, trying to teach them about history. But there is a huge lack of knowledge about what an incredible man he was.
“You should see the children flock around the dentures. ‘Wow,’ they say. It lets them see Washington as a man. It makes it relevant and fun for them, and then maybe they’ll want to know more, do you see? George Washington has always been the example for all citizens to emulate, the man who embodied our Founding Principles, and maybe this will help us get that across.”
Mrs. Lee has resigned herself to doing whatever it takes to make George Washington fun. She went on: “And now sometimes I think, ‘Well, maybe he wouldn’t mind the dentures.’ I think, I really do, that he would approve of us doing what we needed to do so that we can make this the country we should be proud of — a country that needs him.”
Mrs. Lee looked aside for a moment. “There’s so much to do, to make people realize the essence of the man,” she said. “And no one else is going to do that. It’s our responsibility. If we don’t do it, who else will?”
Washington has not, as Mrs. Lee claims, faded from the history books, not entirely anyway, but he has receded over the past generations — a remote figure who grows ever more distant. “We impute coldness to him,” Richard Brookhiser, a recent biographer, wrote, “and we respond to him coldly.” The Ladies now endeavor to correct the misapprehension. The association is 146 years old. In many respects it remains an artifact more of the 19th century than the 20th, much less the 21st, and there’s something bittersweet in the Ladies’ attempt “to meet people where they are,” to use the can’t phrase of the day. For where people are now is a long way from where the Ladies have been, by tradition and resolve. Their effort to revive Washington, two hundred years after his death, tells us something about them, and something about him, and even more about ourselves.
Even before he died his home was a place of pilgrimage. Washington was, of course, the most famous man in America, certainly the most revered, and the richest, too. He had inherited Mount Vernon from the widow of his half-brother Lawrence and had steadily expanded both the house and the grounds, until the property stretched across 8,000 acres, down the Potomac river and back deep into the Virginia woodlands and then up again to the southern tip of Alexandria. At his death it comprised five separate, self-sufficient farms, numberless outbuildings, housing for three hundred slaves, and a twenty-two-room house designed by Washington himself, resting on a promontory above a bend in the river.
He was never without visitors — a steady stream of fellow politicians, foreign dignitaries, old friends, and unknown well-wishers who felt compelled to see the great man in the flesh and whom the great man, in his hospitality, felt obliged to entertain. When Washington died, followed by his wife two years later, the stream of visitors swelled to a flood. The bulk of the property — without the slaves, who had been freed in Washington’s will — passed to a series of nephews with little interest or skill in farming. By the 1850s, the crowds of travelers and pilgrims had brought the estate’s owner, John Augustine Washington, to the edge of bankruptcy. The farm was a shambles and the house close to ruins. He cast about for a buyer, with an asking price of $ 200,000, but was turned down by both the federal government and the Commonwealth of Virginia. In a desperate moment, he considered an offer of $ 300,000 from an entrepreneur who proposed to turn the estate into a roadside attraction. He couldn’t bring himself to say yes.
The Ladies rescued Mount Vernon. At first, though, there was only one lady — an invalid from South Carolina called Ann Pamela Cunningham. Alarmed by a letter from her mother, who on a trip north in 1852 had stopped at Mount Vernon and noted the waist-high weeds and the peeling paint, the fallen shutters and the collapsing portico, Miss Cunningham resolved that Mount Vernon would be saved, by private subscription if necessary. She composed a series of open letters “To The Ladies of the South” and posted them to newspapers from Richmond to Savannah. The thought of personal publicity horrified her, so she signed her first letters “A Southern Matron.” But her ardor for the cause was unmistakable, and infectious. If the men of America would not do their duty, she wrote, then their wives and daughters would do it, for the sake of posterity:
While it would save American honor from a blot in the eyes of a gazing world, it would furnish a shrine where at least the mothers of the land and their innocent children might make their offering to the cause of the greatness, goodness, and prosperity of their country! [Exclamation, of course, in the original; one of many.]
Miss Cunningham was indefatigable despite her infirmity. Over the next several years her campaign spread northward, and the coffers swelled. Shortly before the Civil War, she was able to present John Augustine with a substantial down payment on the $ 200,000 purchase price, the balance to be paid off in three years. He moved out on Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1860, emptying the decaying house of all its furnishings except for the famous Houdon bust of Washington, a terrestrial globe the president had used in his New York office, and the key to the Bastille, presented to George Washington by Lafayette. The estate he ceded to the Ladies had dwindled to 500 acres, including the mansion where Washington had lived and died.
Originally there were twenty-two ladies, or vice regents as they are called, one from each of the twenty-two states. Today there are thirty-three, a number limited by the lodging space available on the Mount Vernon grounds, where the Ladies gather several times a year for four-day meetings to do the association’s business. The association is self-perpetuating, which is to say that when one Lady retires the other Ladies choose her successor. Early on Miss Cunningham stipulated that a vice regent “should be of a family whose social position would command the confidence of the State, and enable her to enlist the aid of persons of widest influence.” The tradition holds — particularly with regard to “influence.” For a vice regent’s duties include preeminently the raising of funds. The association’s literature boasts that it has never taken a dime in government money; it has relied instead on the kindness of the very best strangers. When the Ladies decided to wire the house for electricity, for example, Thomas Edison did the job. When they thought it was time to get a fire engine, Henry Ford had one built and offered it free of charge.
Any such modernizing steps, however, have always been undertaken only after the most careful consideration. When Miss Cunningham retired as regent, in 1874, the weeds had been cut and the gardens restored, the house had been painted and partly, but painstakingly, refurnished, and the crowds continued to pass through the gates. And yet she worried for the future. Her farewell message is still read aloud when the Ladies meet for their annual Grand Council.
Ladies, the home of Washington is in your charge — see to it that you keep it the home of Washington! Let no irreverent hand change it; let no vandal hands desecrate it with the fingers of ‘progress’! Those who go to the home in which he lived and died wish to see in what he lived and died. Let one spot, in this grand country of ours, be saved from change!
This was the Ladies’ sacred charge — they refer to it as a sacred charge — and it impressed itself on every aspect of their work for a century and more. With the help of the developing sciences of forensics and archaeology, the restoration of the gardens and the house proceeded as accurately as possible. When verisimilitude conflicted with comfort and questions of taste, however, the Ladies favored delicacy. There were no chamber pots in the bedrooms, no slag heaps outside the kitchen, no pig dung littering the service roads, as there would have been, of course, at the estate “where Washington lived and died.” The Ladies created an idealized, pristine version of Washington’s home, for their intent was not so much to instruct as to uplift. Mount Vernon was a shrine, a place of pilgrimage. The task was appropriate to the times and to the visitors who made the trip; their familiarity with, their reverence for, the Father of their country was simply assumed. His virtues — of self-denial, sacrifice, patriotism, disinterestedness — were the virtues that every American was thought to aspire to. To know the story and character of Washington was part of what it was to be an American.
Even before he died, the popular view of Washington was elevated far beyond anything we can imagine today. He was shrouded in religious imagery. Comparisons to Moses and Jonah were common. The custom only intensified in the century that followed. In the 1800s his biographers routinely capitalized the personal pronoun “Him” in the referring to their subject. The chapel at Valley Forge, built at the end of the 19th century, dedicated one wall to stained glass tableaux from the life of Jesus, the wall opposite to the life of Washington. In time the religious elements fell away, but the veneration continued undiminished. The more secular fables of Parson Weems — inventor of the cherry tree — passed into the McGuffey Readers and then into the imagination of every schoolchild. “The name of Washington,” wrote Walt Whitman, “is constantly on our lips. His portrait hangs on every wall and he is almost canonized in the affections of our people.”
Well into our own century, Washington’s memory was kept alive by countless commemorations. His birthday was celebrated as a national holiday, marked by parades and fetes and speeches and balls, and his portrait hung, if not, as Whitman observed, on every wall, at least in every classroom, staring down from above the chalkboard like a stern and unsleeping principal. His Farewell Address was read annually in special sessions to both houses of Congress. Mount Vernon was the place where this spirit of veneration could be imbibed most directly, and by the mid-1960s attendance had reached 1.3 million a year. Miss Cunningham’s plan seemed to work. She had insisted that Mount Vernon never change, and it didn’t. But the times did.
James Rees well remembers the moment when he knew he had a problem. Rees is the resident director of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, the highest ranking non-Lady on the premises. Rees came to Mount Vernon in the mid-1980s. By then annual attendance had begun, for the first time in memory, to dip below one million. On this day a few years ago, he recalls, two dozen or so fourth graders had gathered on the estate grounds for a tree-planting ceremony.
“And I started making jokes,” he told me recently, “you know, playing off some of the Washington myths. I said, ‘Well, it’s a good thing this isn’t a cherry tree, or it might be in danger — you never know who might come chop it down.’ And there was no reaction. Nothing. So I said, ‘But I guess we could always use the wood to make some teeth.’ Nothing. Blank stares.
“Now, I knew these kids’ teacher — a very bright woman. In fact, she’s a descendant of George Washington. And these were not dumb kids. There were kids from a privileged background. But it suddenly occurred to me: These kids don’t even know the myths. We’re past the debunking stage. You can’t debunk misconceptions when they’ve got no information at all. I thought: We’re all the way back at ground zero.”
And so we are. Every so often the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress releases a report on the ignorance of American school-children, provoking near-universal tut-tutting among educators and in the popular press. In 1996 NAEP found that only 17 percent of fourth graders were “proficient” in American history. The older they got, the dumber they got. Fourteen percent of eighth graders were proficient, 11 percent of twelfth graders.
But of course we knew that. What’s interesting is the particular from this ignorance takes. Among fourth graders, for example, 87 percent could identify Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; fewer than half could identify the Bill of Rights. And fewer than one in three knew that New York was one of the original thirteen colonies, while seven out of ten listed California, Texas, or Illinois. In the eighth grade, 80 percent identified the song “O Freedom” with the civil rights movement; only 41 percent associated the dropping of the atomic bomb with the end of World War II.
People like to complain that we live in an iconoclastic age. We don’t. In fact, we’re so overrun with icons that the word itself has become a cliche. But we’ve substituted a new set of icons for the old, and the strange imbalance in the historical knowledge of American students reflects the substitution. Given the multicultural enthusiasms of their teachers, it should be no surprise that children know more about, say, Harriet Tubman than Tom Paine. Black History Month — a sound idea pursued with unusual zeal in the public schools — has pretty much swallowed up the social studies curriculum for the month of February (social studies being the rubric under which “American history” is taught, when it is taught at all). Mean while, Washington’s birthday, once universally observed in the schools and used as an excuse to dwell on the Founding Fathers, has been bundled with Lincoln’s in the portmanteau “Presidents’ Day.” Falling within a month devoted to a celebration of African-American history, President’s Day is more often than not merely an occasion to teach the young scholars that Washington owned slaves and Lincoln freed them.
Textbooks aren’t much help. “I still have the history textbook I used in the fourth grade,” James Rees says, “and it has ten times more pages devoted to Washington than the textbook used in the same class at the same school today.” In current textbooks Washington has not been traduced so much as passed over — not ignored, exactly, but placed off to one side, like an old piece of cumbersome statuary that one can’t quite bear to part with, out of some dimly felt obligation. The recent high school textbook United States History: In the Course of Human Events, published by West Publishing, is a case in point.
As the historian Walter McDougall noted in a recent review, the authors of United States History choose to divide their subject into eleven units. Three of these recount the three hundred years from the settling of America through the colonial period and the constitutional convention to the end of the 18th century; four units cover the fifty years from the end of World War II to the present. And Washington is there, sure enough, with his very own page — as one of the book’s more than 120 “People Who Made a Difference.” Unlike the wholly sympathetic treatment given the other PWMD — such as Frederick Douglass, of course, and “Mother Jones,” and the Japanese-American activist Gordon Hirabayashi — the view of Washington is mixed. He was a man of “ordinary talents,” the students learn, “not completely successful as a military man nor as a president.”
“When the Revolution succeeded,” the authors write,
[Americans] felt justified in their choice of a leader. Praise for Washington was partly a kind of self-congratulation for their own brilliance in choosing a president who would lead them to success. In fact, it might be said that the idea of George Washington, not always the man himself, was what counted.
Unlike other Founders, Washington has never been subjected to a successful debunking. He is undebunkable. But he is dismissible, as the work of academic historians over the past eighty years makes plain. They have sought to understand the Founding in ways that make no room for Washington’s particular greatness. In An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), the most influential work of American history in the first half of this century, Charles Beard undertook the first mass debunking, casting the Framers as reactionary capitalists intent on insulating their riches from the grasping proles. Washington is scarcely mentioned in Beard’s book. “George Washington’s part in the proceedings of the convention,” Beard wrote, “was almost negligible” — an odd statement about the man who was, after all, the convention’s presiding officer, and without whom there might not have been any convention at all.
But Beard goes on, revealingly: “It does not appear that in public document or private letter he ever set forth any coherent theory of government. When he had occasion to dwell upon the nature of the new system he had indulged in the general language of the bench rather than that of the penetrating observer.”
Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It was to the second half of the century what Beard’s book had been to the first — the work that set the course for two subsequent generations of historians. Like Beard, Hofstadter passes over Washington in his account of the Founding. Hofstadter was a historian of ideas. And Washington was not, as Beard noted, a man of ideas, certainly not a thinker of the sort that historians nowadays favor. He lacked the incendiary brilliance of Jefferson, the sophistication of Madison and Hamilton, the rhetorical imagination of Thomas Paine. For modern historians, these qualities have proved much more attractive, and worthy of study, than the stolid, tenacious statesmanship of Washington.
The historian Paul Longmore put it well: “His gift was not the formulation of ideas, but their incarnation.” Washington was indispensable to the country’s Founding — became, indeed, the rock on which the country was built — because of his ability to unite his bickering countrymen, to still their passions by his very presence and resolve their disputes with utter disinterest, to embody their highest aspiration; in short, because of his character. How are intellectuals to grapple with such a man? Viewed a certain way, he seems almost uninteresting. Incorruptible, fearless, impatient with abstraction, sometimes prosaic, he falls outside the categories that professional historians have lately used to account for our past. And so he recedes, taking his place as one among the many “people who made a difference,” filling the ranks somewhere between Mother Jones and Gordon Hirabayashi.
Sitting in his sunny office at Mount Vernon on a recent late-winter morning, I asked James Rees about this steady diminishment of Washington. How does he explain it?
“I suppose it has to do with lots of things,” he said. “The rise of social history — filling up history with all kinds of people who’d been ignored before means there’s less room for old heroes. And I suppose it has to do with the end of the great man theory of history, too. Lots of things.
“But there’s something else that worries me. The qualities Washington possessed just aren’t as appreciated as they were. Honesty. Good judgment. Modesty — my God, who in late-20th-century America gets credit for being modest anymore? And believe me, this is not good.
“There’s this idea that leadership is changeable — that every generation redefines for itself what leadership means. Well, that’s not the way we thought of it for most of our history. The qualities that made a great leader then were good for all time. But we don’t think that way anymore. It’s just this” — he sighed — “this whole 20th-century mindset.” And with a wave of his hand he tried to dismiss the depredations of the span of a hundred years.
But he is not always so fatalistic. Rees and the Ladies understand that, as we move into the 21st century, it’s the least they can do to reconcile themselves to the 20th. Earlier generations didn’t demand that their heroes be “humanized.” Ours, however, demands intimacy and craves familiarity. The Ladies may not be happy with the vulgarity that this sometimes requires, but they are resolute, as I say, in their determination to make Washington “fun” and “relevant.”
They have added a team of media and marketing specialists to their skeletal staff. Among their innovations are two new Web sites, in which you can take a “Pioneer Farmer Quiz” and “Meet the Mount Vernon Animals.” They’ve issued a CD/ROM about Mount Vernon with the unpleasant title “Dig Into George.” A special program this spring will demonstrate that Washington was a proto-environmentalist. The mansion rooms have been refashioned to make a more “immediate experience”; in the bedroom where Washington died, the tools doctors used to bleed him rest on the bed, bloody towels are wadded on the floor, and a pan filed with theater blood sits on the nightstand. When they pass through Mount Vernon’s small museum, visitors have their attention directed to a pair of Washington’s oddly shaped violet sunglasses. “It’s like he was a punk rocker!” a docent told me excitedly. The “multi-media mood theater” mentioned earlier, designed by a British firm responsible for the “Vikingland” amusement park in Norway, is dazzling in its high-tech simulation of Washington’s death. When I saw it the other day, with a class of fourth graders, it was a big hit. “Spooook-eeee!” one of the young historians shouted in the dark. Almost as good as Armageddon.
It is all intended to create at Mount Vernon an “all new Mansion experience,” as the PR materials say, and it can easily be made to sound much worse than it is. The New York Times, for example, wrote in a front page story in February: “The directors of Mount Vernon . . . have inaugurated a $ 3 million public relations campaign to reposition [Washington] as a national figure with what the spinmeisters call ‘heat.’ Think Leonardo DiCaprio, Diana and Elvis Presley.” The upshot was that Mount Vernon had at last got down with the slammin’ nineties: another info-entertainment option among the dozens on offer in the Capital region — a little bit Williamsburg, a little bit Busch Gardens.
The over-hyped Times story was greeted with chagrin at Mount Vernon, and staffers, understandably defensive, hasten to correct its misimpressions. “We are always very conscious of going too far,” Mrs. Lee told me.
But still, I said, with all the re-enactors walking around, and the special multi-media programs, don’t you worry about getting trapped in the show biz?
She fixed me with a stare that could have come straight from Miss Cunningham. “We don’t want to do that,” she said. “We will never do that. But you have to understand, Mount Vernon can no longer be just a shrine. I don’t even like that word, shrine. We have to get the children interested before they can learn about George Washington. And this is the most important thing: They must learn about this man. They need to know why he was great. If they don’t — what will happen? We need him.”
After I left Mrs. Lee, I wandered out to the piazza, the great porch with its surpassingly beautiful view of the Potomac, where Washington had entertained Jefferson and Adams and Lafayette. I sat on a Windsor chair beneath Washington’s bedroom window — the bedroom where he died, two hundred years ago — and leafed through a packet the PR lady had given me. Thousands of the packets have been sent to fifth-grade teachers around the country; the Ladies have worked hard to assemble a mailing list of social studies departments, in hopes of pushing them to teach their kids about the father of their country. As you’d expect, it is loaded with gimmicks — an envelope of wheat seeds, so students can grow a crop just as “George” did; a sheet of stickers with the legend “Ask Me About George Washington!”; scratch-off quiz cards like the kind you get from McDonald’s or the Lotto dealer; and an encouragement to the kids to “write a letter to George Washington and get a reply from Mount Vernon.” And there’s a poster, too, colorful and splashy, to replace the portrait that not so long ago hung in every classroom. To my inexpert eyes, the lesson plan looked professional, well-organized, and, for some reason, a little sad.
And I suddenly realized why. Washington has been privatized! He has been detached from the national patrimony — if we can be said to have a national patrimony any longer. And the Ladies have become a special-interest group, pleading a pet cause, just as NOW agitated for a Susan B. Anthony dollar and Indian rights groups lobbied to put Sacagawea on a postage stamp. It would take someone with more nerve than I to challenge the Ladies as they struggle, however clumsily, to return Washington to his rightful place, at the center of our historical memory. And if they are forced to use the tools of a time that finds them and their passions anachronistic, well then, they will. The Ladies do what they do because they have asked themselves an unsettling question, and because they know the answer. “If we don’t do it,” Mrs. Lee had said, “who will?”
