Books in Brief
General Washington’s Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 by Stanley Weintraub (Free Press, 224 pp., $25). In 1783 the greatest military in the world had been outwitted and defeated at the hands of a popular rebel leader. Yet, at the moment of victory, when a continent lay at his fingertips, the leader gave up power and voluntarily returned to private life. Napoleon, having seized a crown and a continent and lost both, would later lament: “They wanted me to be another Washington.”
“General Washington’s Christmas Farewell” tells the story of the American reoccupation of New York. It describes the famous scene of Washington taking leave of his officers at Fraunces Tavern and culminates with Washington’s appearance at Annapolis to return his commission to Congress. Washington’s brief speech on the occasion, Stanley Weintraub tells us, was “the most significant address ever delivered to a civil society.”
Unfortunately, that significance is not explained in Weintraub’s charming account. Missing are accounts of key letters and writings (such as Washington’s circular address to the states in June, or his farewell orders to the Army in November) and explanations of essential events (such as the Newburgh crisis in March). These connect Washington’s thoughts with his actions and reveal the larger republican project of which Washington’s military resignation was part. Without all this, the Christmas farewell seems merely, as Weintraub says, a “piece of consummate theater,” in “a moment of consummate drama,” by “a practiced actor making his final exit.”
Even in telling great stories, writers often fail to see the real drama in history. There is almost a sense of inevitability, as if the big questions had already been answered, that limits their viewpoint.
“Few who are not philosophic spectators,” Washington once observed, “can realize the difficult and delicate part which a man in my situation had to act.” Such is the problem with most Washington scholarship, and more generally with studies of great statesmen.
–Matthew Spalding
Affirmative Action and Racial Preference: A Debate by Carl Cohen and James P. Sterba (Oxford University Press, 394 pp., $30). Nothing breeds enmity like affirmative action. The arguments on both sides of the issue of whether to give preference by race are familiar. Notre Dame philosopher James Sterba writes that, given the varying reactions to the Supreme Court’s June decision validating preferences in university admissions, “The controversy surrounding affirmative action and racial preference in the United States is sure to continue for some time to come.”
Carl Cohen agrees. He surmises that the Michigan affirmative action decisions–one striking down a regimented point system and the other allowing diversity preferences–will foster further confusion and underhandedness as they pull against each other. Cohen, whose freedom of information request led to the lawsuits against the university, attacks both the “wrongness” and the “badness” of preferences. Though perhaps original only in couching it in those terms, Cohen’s attack is a professor’s cry against the decline of standards necessitated by the admission of students who don’t deserve it. “University representatives always say that the striving for excellence is their governing principle,” Cohen writes. “But this is no longer true in America’s premier universities, and it has not been true for decades.”
Sterba, who is more embracing of affirmative action than the University of Michigan dared be, answers the objection to lowered standards with the attitude Cohen sees as part of the problem. He says candidates admitted should be those “whose qualifications are such that when their selection is combined with a suitably designed educational enhancement program, they will normally turn out, within a reasonably short time, to be as qualified.”
–Beth Henary
