Winter Recess

Yes, yes, we're behind, aren't we? I should be talking about Andrew Jackson by now, and we're not even through with James Monroe (who should be the easiest president for me to write about, considering that I live in the town he retired to and occasionally walk my dog past the James Monroe Museum).



So let's do what Congress does and take a recess. Here are two books for you to read: Paul C. Nagel's John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life and Jon Meacham's Pulitzer winning American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.

We'll pick back up in the new year.

The Boy Becomes the Man

It only took five months for me to start dreaming about presidents.

A few nights ago, I dreamed that a teenaged James Monroe and I were both in high school (a colonial high school, if I remember correctly; definitely not my actual high school). He and I ran around the school, pulling pranks on people.

When I woke from the dream, it was just before dawn. In the dark, I was neither relieved, as though I'd just woken from a nightmare, or disappointed, as though I'd just woken from a pleasant dream. Instead, I was confused. Why on earth had I dreamed of pulling pranks with James Monroe? Was it a subconscious translation of his lasting contribution, the Monroe Doctrine? Were we asserting our right to our hemisphere? Was it a reaction to having read about Secretary of War Monroe heading out to the front lines to scout the British during the War of 1812?

I think it's this: Monroe is the first president with a documented childhood. Oh, with the first four, we understand very basic things like dates of birth and schools attended, but there's rarely much about them as a child or young man. This is odd, because I think we're trained to understand childhood as formative--that the boy is a version of the man. Absent this key part of biography, we lose something--the satisfaction of the reader-as-parent, watching our subject grow and learn, knowing all along what he or she will become.

That's why, I think, Gary Hart opens his Monroe biography with Monroe "a young lieutenant, merely eighteen years of age, who earlier that year had been a sophomore at the College of William and Mary." He's crossing the Delaware to attack Trenton during the Revolutionary War. He's a boy still, but we know who he'll become--the last of the Patriot Presidents. We know he'll deal with national security in a way that no president has before him.

The painter Emanuel Leutze puts Monroe just behind Washington in his famous painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware." There's no historical record proving that Monroe was on the same barge, but the message delivered by the painting is clear: here is a man who will follow Washington into battle and into the Presidency.

Moving Back Into Montpelier

This was my first view of James Madison's Montpelier:



It was a rainy day, solidly unpleasant in the weather, and a large moving van blocked the front door (unloading A/V equipment for the day's Constitution Day festivities), but there was still something reassuring about it--the house felt like the kind of place that, after two terms as president, I'd like to retire. And this is, indeed, how Montpelier looked when Madison returned to it in 1817, after a presidency that saw the nation's capital burned in its first war as a sovereign nation.

What's remarkable is that Montpelier didn't look like this six years ago. While Mount Vernon stayed in the Washington family and was then passed onto the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, and Monticello had the good fortune to pass from Jefferson to a family who kept his house pretty much as it was, Montpelier was sold to settle debts and passed through a number of hands before ending up with the duPont family. When, in 1984, the heirs of Marian duPont Scott, following her wishes, donated the house to the National Trust, Montpelier had been added to until it was almost unrecognizable. In fact, when the Montpelier Foundation (who own the house now, having received it from the National Trust in 2000) began restoring it in 2003, their first order of business was to take off 24,000 square feet of house. Montpelier as it stands now is 12,000 square feet. Do the math; Madison's home was buried under something twice its size.



That project took the Montpelier Foundation five years. Now they've moved on to phase two of the restoration: bringing back the furniture. Imagine the impossibility of the situation; almost two hundred years after it was sold, re-sold, and handed down through heavens knows how many families, the Madisons' furniture is making its way back to their home piece by piece. And while in the 19th century, you could make an appeal based on patriotism or love of Washington or Jefferson, in 2009 those sentiments don't exactly run as strong as they used to.

And so a visit to Montpelier these days is to visit an empty house. Rather than teem with the stuff of Presidents past, Montpelier is an exercise in imagination. They're pretty sure they know which room the Madisons slept in, because the mantle of the fireplace is the most ornate. They think they've got the right color of paint on the walls, because they had to take twenty-something layers off to find the 1817 layer.

There are some aids to imagination, though, including a life-size statue (no short jokes, please) of the Madisons in the backyard, reading together. Cute and friendly, and not misleading like the statues of the Washingtons at Mount Vernon (which show Washington with his step-grandchildren; you have to know this to avoid assuming they're his kids and that GW didn't have any children of his own).



But the most interesting part of Montpelier for me was Madison's study, where he researched and wrote the Constitution. Despite the lack of furniture or historical guides, the tour guides at Montpelier know exactly where Madison's desk was, thanks to the ink splotches on the floor. I stood there, on a cold, rainy morning, alone in the room, looking down at blots on the floor, and felt the same frisson I'd felt at Yorktown Battlefield; here is one of the places where America, with all its flaws and beauties, its contradictions and its ideals, became possible.

It's a giving time of year, and while charities that help the living are of utmost importance, it's also important to remember that donations are down everywhere. If you've got a few extra bucks in your pocket after gift-giving, you might consider donating to the Montpelier Foundation. It's not every day you get to help bring a President's furniture home, or build a center to teach people about the Constitution, or just improve a house by taking away from it.

On Republican Governors of Virginia

Well, if the polls are any indication, it looks like Virginia will have itself a Republican governor-elect at the end of the day today.

In honor, or perhaps trepidation, of Robert McDonnell's upcoming four years at the helm, it seems only appropriate to announce our next biography, that of a former Republican governor of Virginia (but written by a Democratic senator from Colorado): Gary Hart's James Monroe.

Before we start with the last Founding Father to run the country, though, we'll take a trip to James Madison's house, Montpelier.

A Question of Greatness

Alright, four presidents in, and I feel it's about time to ask: when is anyone going to be any good at being president?

The four biographies we've read so far, without an exception, point out that their subjects were better at whatever they were doing beforehand than being the chief executive. Jefferson himself even goes so far as to keep being president off of his tombstone, opting instead for his roles in writing the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statutes of Religious Freedom, as well as founding the University of Virginia.



Washington does a decent job as president, but nothing special; his job as Commander-in-Chief is to hold the country together in its fragile newness. Adams not only signs the Alien and Sedition Acts--pretty indefensible, no matter how hard any biographer might try--but he also manages to become the first one-term president. Jefferson violates his party's principles (no advocate of small government is going to be OK with buying a whole lotta territory without Congress's approval); not to mention the fact that Jefferson hates being president so much he essentially bails four months before the end of his second term, leaving Madison (the president-elect) to run the country (oddly enough, Wills's biography of Madison points this, but Bernstein's biography of Jefferson doesn't mention it at all). And you don't get to be a great president if the nation's capital gets burned to the ground on your watch (again, a Republican has to realize that one of his party's platforms--no standing army--might not be without its disadvantages).

And these are the Founding Fathers! The guys we look up to as Paragons of Presidential Prestige!

Maybe it's because of the newness of the whole thing; they're making it up as they go along. After all, no one was campaigning for the post--such a thing was considered disgraceful then--but they did do enough backchannel work to get the jobs. Perhaps, with only a few people to talk to about being president and very little American history to learn from (not to mention how little republican democracies had ever existed), we should expect some stumbles.

Garry Wills points out something interesting about Madison in the closing chapter of his biography; that despite the bungling of the War of 1812--despite the fact that "he accomplished not a single one of the five goals he set out for the war to succeed"--Madison still managed to hand the reins over to James Monroe, a member of his own party.

"Given all these factors," Wills writes, "historians have not boosted Madison, considered as president, out of the average rank. On the other hand, they do not count him a failure--and they cannot. He was too popular at the end of his second term. He must have been doing something right." The emphasis is mine--if you're considering Madison as a Founding Father, he does pretty well.

Wills continues: "Despite the problems and setbacks of his chosen course, he never panicked. He was coolest at the darkest times. Admittedly, he was helped in this by his very flaws. In his provincialism and naivete he continued to underestimate the British, thinking they must have been badly harmed by his embargo."

What's more American than taking your flaws and turning them into advantages for you? Madison may not have been a great president, but he got the country through its first official war, rebounded from the burning of Washington, and managed to secure a peace with England that's lasted since. And that's good enough to get you on some currency.

The Littlest President

I had this idea, a while ago, that the first four presidents--Founding Father presidents--could easily be compared to the Beatles. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are obviously the Lennon-McCartney of the group; they do a lot of good work together, they love each other, fight a bunch, then make up. George Washington is George Harrison; quiet, underrated.

That, of course, means that James Madison is Ringo. Because he's short. And fourth.

This is unfair. Madison does some pretty incredible things both before he's president and later during his presidency. He writes a third of the Federalist Papers. He's the Father of the Bill of Rights. He's as insistent as Jefferson--maybe even more so--about the separation of church and state (and as Garry Wills points out, organized religion hasn't flourished nearly as well in any other industrialized country as it has in the US). He gets the country through its first war ever, and in doing so, sets it on its way to eventual world power.

Of course, to do so, he has to reverse his course on almost everything. But, as Wills points out pretty often, consistency isn't his strong point, and several times, one of Madison's faults will turn out to be his strong suit (and vice versa).

But, as Wills also points out, he's got the problem of following those other three guys. He's never going to crack the top ten. And even though Ringo wrote some decent songs ("Don't Pass Me By" comes to mind), he's always going to be overshadowed by John, Paul, and George (Harrison, not Washington).

Outgunned!

Everything I've written below about Jefferson and Monticello is done so much better, and with lovely art to boot, by Maria Kalman in her blog for the New York Times.

The Colonel and Monticello

It has occurred to me already, four months into this project, that writing a biography of someone is an act of love. You become attached to the person, reading his or her letters and diaries and journals, tracing steps across the continents. You start to think that you really know your subject, and certainly you do, more so than 99% of the rest of the populace. It's your job--your duty, even--to translate his or her life into modern-day language, to revivify them. That's a heavy thing to have to do. You might get a little defensive sometimes about the flaws of the person you love.

Or a lot defensive, in the case of Jefferson. Witness the man who led our tour of Monticello; if he told us his name at the beginning of the tour, I forgot it the moment another staff member addressed him as "The Colonel." This is where we met him, on the steps of Monticello:



I was very excited about the steps of Monticello--you see, one of the things I've always liked about Jefferson is his inventiveness--stands that let him read five books simultaneously, closet space in the high, formerly wasted upper space of the house, little lazy susans that allow food and wine to appear magically in the dining room. The ceiling of the front porch of Monticello is the first chance you get to experience this kind of genius:



It's a compass attached to the weathervane; Jefferson the agrarian scholar can step out on his porch during a storm and learn the direction of the wind without getting wet. Brilliant!

We skipped it without a mention, and went inside. Now, to be fair to the Colonel, he did point out Jefferson's days-of-the-week clock in the entry hall, and a few other gizmos, but this set a tone. In side the entry hall, the Colonel pointed out a mastodon tooth of Jefferson's as proof of his scientific curiosity, but did not mention my favorite Jefferson fact: that he told Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for mastodons while they explored the Louisiana Purchase, as Jefferson was sure they still roamed out there somewhere.

No mention of this from the Colonel. We were doing a Great Lives of Great Men tour today.

And then, in the next room, it kicked into a higher gear. The Colonel had been discussing something or other--Martha Washington, I think, since we were in her receiving room--when, apropos of nothing:

"Now, this business between Mr. Jefferson and a slave of his is NOT scientifically proven, and even if it was true, it doesn't change A WORD of what he wrote in THAT DOCUMENT!" the Colonel yelled, and pointed to a copy of the Declaration of Independence on the wall.

Wait, what? Where did that come from? No one had mentioned Sally Hemmings at this point, and even if we had, it was the official position of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation--the people who own Monticello and the Colonel's employer--that Jefferson fathered at least one child with Sally.

The feeling in the room had shifted. When the Colonel asked for questions, one man raised his hands and asked why Jefferson had died bankrupt (quick answer: he loved spending money), something the Colonel had mentioned in his run-up to the explosion.

"I won't answer that here," he said. "Let's let the man remain solvent while we're under his roof."

Yep, we were definitely in the realm of hardcore subject love. The "Mr. Jefferson" cinched it for me; this guy had to be a graduate of the University of Virginia (ahem, sorry, "Mr. Jefferson's University") back in its all-male days. Nothing like seeing your idol, your model yanked down off his pedestal to make you defensive about him.

The Colonel gives a tour of Monticello that won't be available in a dozen years: the uncomplicated, brilliant genius of the Revolution. A guy who didn't fund the newspaper enemies of his own President (as TJ did while Washington's Secretary of State), a guy who didn't sleep with his slaves, and certainly not a guy who put his genius to work to avoid the more problematic aspects of owning other human beings. Those clever lazy susans I mentioned earlier? They let food and wine reach the table without requiring a single slave to appear in the room.

Sigh. It's been a difficult week for separating the man from his work (paging Roman Polanski and John Phillips). I'm ready to move on to James Madison, who's complicated for a whole other set of reasons.

We went to Monticello, part one

Oh, you mean the other Monticello. The one on the back of the nickel? The most famous private residence in America? The house that looks like a single story but is actually two?

Yeah, we went there. More on that later. But on our trip to Canada at the beginning of August, we ran into this:



Is there any other president you'd want to evoke in naming your restaurant? Richard Nixon's California Cuisine? James K. Polk Salad Bar? Jefferson is an epicure, among the million other things he also is, and so this actually makes a little sense. The man had a massive wine collection--big enough to write about, 200 years after the fact. I remember learning as a child that Jefferson had introduced the tomato to America, eating a bunch of them to prove that they weren't poisonous (they are related to nightshade, after all). So a restaurant isn't too far off the mark.

What's interesting about this Monticello is its menu, which seems to be a mostly creole/cajun palate, something that surprised me. Two possible connections, though: Jefferson did make the Louisiana Purchase, and Jefferson was a Southerner through and through. No matter how aristocratically we may think of him now, he viewed himself as a Virginia planter (although plantation owner is more accurate) before anything else. His home reflects that; more soon on it.

Lions and Tigers and Henry Clay, oh my!

I feel like we're stepping into the unknown. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson--sure, everyone knows those guys: patriots! statesmen! on money!

But James Madison seems like the end of the diving board--from this point, it's a long stretch to the next familiar president (Lincoln, although you might make a case for Jackson). And I feel, too, like we're about to head through a mysterious area of American history, that of post-Revolution to the Civil War. I know a little bit about this time period, but it's all leftovers from high school: the Missouri-Maine Compromise, the War of 1812, and, umm...umm...

One thing I had hoped this project might do was to create a sense of continuity to American history, a path from Washington to Obama that told a story about this country. Now that we're done with the exciting opening scenes, it's time to move into the ordinariness of everyday governing.

Towards that end, we're reading Garry Wills's James Madison. A short biography for a short president (oh, don't worry--that's only the first of many short jokes to come).

Hard at work, even on vacation.

The American Falls on the left, Horseshoe Falls on the right, Jefferson in between, as seen from the Canadian side. Librarians: it is against the rules to take library books out of the country, or is that just rental cars?

"It was my understanding that Jefferson left the party a long time ago..."

That's a paraphrase of what former vice-president Dick Cheney (and the first VP to shoot a guy since Aaron Burr, TJ's veep) said about former Secretary of State Colin Powell, discussing how Cheney didn't think Powell was really a Republican anymore. But the same could easily be said about Thomas Jefferson, the first Republican president. Compare this list of facts to what you know about today's Republican party; Thomas Jefferson

--loved the French. Drank French wines.

--spent government money on art (Houdon's sculpture of Washington in the Virginia capitol building).

--was, among his many accomplishments, proudest of (it's one of the few things listed on his self-designed tombstone) his authorship of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. In fact, he

--founded the University of Virginia so that schools could teach free of religious influence.

--was a big fan of science, and used government money to fund the Lewis and Clark expedition.

--used powers not necessarily reserved for the Executive branch in order to make the Louisiana Purchase, circumventing the Constitution to do so (although he did draft an amendment that would have made it OK, time was ticking).

Now, this list is a touch biased. Parties evolve (I'm grateful that the Democrats are a far cry from Andrew Jackson, too). But it's interesting to see how political parties--which come into existence for the Adams-Jefferson battle of 1796--have evolved away from their origins. Jefferson might have been the first president to campaign on a platform that changed when faced with the realities of the office, but he wasn't the last.

Uncirculated Proofs

Apparently, this is very difficult.

The people who design coins (who, if they're not called "numismatographers," should be) have hailed this Jefferson nickel as a masterpiece of the numismatographer's art. The reason most people on coins are in profile is that's because it's the easiest way to show someone--there's not nearly as much three-dimensionality as a head-on or three-quarters view.

That's got to be a metaphor for the biographer's art, right? It's easiest to present a flat version of your subject, tougher to make her/him more three-dimensional, to accept the difficulties in reconciling a lived life with ink on the page. It's easier to think of Jefferson as the architect not only of Monticello, but also of America, writing the Declaration of Independence. It's nice to think of him as the guy who started the University of Virginia as a public institution, a reaction to the church-influenced education he experienced at William and Mary. It's pleasant to imagine Jefferson waving goodbye to Lewis and Clark from the steps of his house, telling them to keep an eye out for mastodons while exploring the Louisiana Purchase.

That's the Jefferson I grew up with--he was my favorite president as a kid (a writer!), and one of my earliest memories is reading the text of the Declaration on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial in DC. But we've learned more about Jefferson (well, "learned" probably isn't right--a lot of these things were discussed when he was vice-president and later president) as the years have gone on, making the man more complex, more rounded. The sheen is of that nickel now, but it still spends, and while there are numismatists who value highest the uncirculated proof, the pristine, shiny coin, I'm more interested in the story it tells in its movements.

Wrapping up Adams

One of the things I'd like to do with this project is involve my local library as much as possible (this may get difficult later one, but I'll try as best I can). So even though I've got access to a university library and interlibrary loan, I'm still walking downtown and checking out books for two weeks. So, despite my Netflix account, when I checked out McCullough's book, I also put in a request at the local public library for the HBO miniseries based on it.

I was #91 in the line. It's a month and a half later, and I'm #66. At this rate, we might get to watch it during November (John Quincy Adams month).

I think that's a pretty good way of thinking about Adams; I've felt stuck with him. I'm partway through the Jefferson biography, and I keep comparing it to McCullough's book ("how can you just skip over his years in France with the Adamses like that?" I'll say). The man really seems to have dominated my conception of the early days of America in a way I wouldn't have expected. Washington, sure; Jefferson, of course. Those guys were important. But I'm reacting to Adams in the way I do with new information, turning it over and over in my head to try to find where it fits in the brain.

New Book!

After our mammoth experience with John Adams, we're taking August easy (well, easier) with R. B. Bernstein's Thomas Jefferson, which, to judge a book by its jacket, seems to be exhaustive without being exhausting.

(Also: does titling biographies seem like the easiest job ever? I've reached the point already where something like Ellis's His Excellency, George Washington reads like a Dave Eggers or Sherman Alexie title.)

A little beach reading

Even at the beach (Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, to be exact), I was reading David McCullough's John Adams. I alternated between that and Life and Style magazine, just to keep in the spirit of summer.

The election of 1800 is notable for being the first presidential campaign in which there was, well, a campaign (also for being the first time a sitting vice-president ran against a sitting president). Although neither candidate would actually campaign--that sort of thing was thought to be beneath them--the tabloids of the day certainly did enough tarring and smearing to make Bill O'Reilly proud.

Adams was a secret monarchist who wanted to be America's first king, they argued (much in the way Obama is a secret Kenyan-born socialist), and therefore couldn't be trusted with a second term. Jefferson, while not actively making these points, certainly didn't do anything to stop them, and in fact supported the anti-Adams, pro-Jefferson tabloids.

I suppose it's a nice sense of American continuity that we've always had a partisan press; that there's not much of a line connecting Philip Freneau and Glenn Beck (although Freneau could actually write well, including poetry; I shudder to think of Beck's verse). But at the same time, it's a little disappointing; one of those perils that comes with having a free press.

Presidential Rehab

Do you recognize this man?



Why, it's Pope Linus, of course, the second pontiff, who ruled what must have been a pretty small group of Christians for about nine years (67-76). You'd be forgiven for not recognizing him; I mean, I went to Catholic school and took Mr. Mulvaney's Church History course, and I couldn't pick St. Linus out of a lineup.

John Adams, the Linus of America, suffered the same fate for a long time. I remember visiting the Denver Mint as a kid and buying souvenir coins in the gift shop. They sold coins with each president's portrait, and I decided to buy three. I bought Washington, because he was number one, and Jefferson, because he was my favorite president. Then, because he filled the gap in between, I bought Adams, the guy between numbers one and three.

So it went with Adams in popular culture. George Washington was the first president; Adams was the first vice-president (and the first to complain about how powerless the VP is). GW got elected twice, unanimously; JA is the first guy to lose a presidential election. Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase; JA signs the Alien and Sedition Acts into law. For a long time, he's a name on a list, a brief stop on the way between the important founding fathers.

This changes in 2001, when David McCullough publishes John Adams, his 751-page bio of America's first forgotten president. What's interesting about this isn't the fact that it's a success--as a New York Times points out, the book is "rebelling against the rebellion against the history of Great White Men"--but rather that it's taken so long for someone to do a really comprehensive reworking of Adams's reputation. Maybe the problem is too much information--after all, part of the mystery of Washington is Martha's destruction of their correspondence (Jefferson does the same when his wife dies, too), whereas John and Abagail Adams write each other (and everyone else) constantly. McCullough's got a lot of reading ahead of him (as he notes, the microfilm runs over five miles in length).

The result, though, of all this primary material and McCullough's willingness to wade through it all, is lively, engaging reading; I felt like I knew Washington a little bit better as a person at the end of June, but finishing John Adams felt like saying goodbye to a good friend. Ellis fleshed out Washington, but McCullough animates the Adamses--a remarkable family who we'll obviously return to later this year--with a vivacity that makes for a wonderful read.

But there's a dark side to this presidential rehab. We know that George W. Bush likes McCullough a lot--he gives him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006--and that Bush frequently invoked Harry S. Truman (another McCullough subject) in discussing how history would vindicate his presidency. Is is possible that, in reading about Adams, Bush thought some future biographer would explain away his failings and restore him to his believed rightful place in American history?

Weekend of Washington, Part Two

I'd read in Ellis's book that Washington was 6'2", which is also my height (this hasn't worked out for me quite as well as it did for Washington, but being tall does have its advantages). And it's easy enough to read that someone's the same height as you and think "that's how tall I am." Not that exciting, really.

It's another thing entirely to go to Mount Vernon's musuem and come face-to-face (literally) with the Houdon bust of Washington--generally considered to be the best likeness of GW, carved from life. Looking at the bust, seeing the case's reflection of my eyes lined up with GW's eyes, I understood the physicality of the man in a way I hadn't before, and from now on, whenever something is my height, it's going to get described as "Washington-sized."



We had tried to go to Mount Vernon before, but ran into the following things when we arrived:

1. Rain heavy enough to make it a problem, even under the trees in the long line to enter the house itself.
2. A thousand tour buses (18, but still).
3. People ahead of us in line complaining about how they should get to go to the front of the line to enter the mansion since they're senior citizens.
4. Six thousand schoolkids (this may not be an exaggeration).

So, in one of those joint decisions that might be the reason we're still married, we bailed out of the line, went back to the visitor's center, and plunked down the extra cash to get year-long passes to Mount Vernon. It's the first time I've ever had a year-long pass to anywhere, and I'm inordinately pleased that it's Mount Vernon.

The next weekend, the day after our visit to the GW birthplace in Northern Neck (see previous post), we woke up bright and early and got out to Mount Vernon right when it opened. We skipped past the entrance line, flashing our passes (our photos are on the cards!), and made a beeline for the entrance to the mansion. As you can see, it was a much nicer day:



A quick wait to let a school group (they always win, don't they?) ahead of us, and we were in George and Martha's home. A few thoughts while touring the grounds:

1. Bright paint signified money, which was something Washington could display. So there are some rooms in Mount Vernon that are really green. Shockingly so.

2. For a place that was a private residence for a long time, Mount Vernon has an impressive collection of Washington's stuff. Part of this is due to the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, one of the forerunners of historical preservation societies (and, as Seth Bruggeman points out, a way for women to write themselves into history in a time when they couldn't participate in it), and part of this is due to George Washington Parke Custis, GW's step-grandson, who kept his step-grandfather's stuff in a kind of museum at his other mansion--Arlington.

3. Among that stuff is Washington's campaign chest, which, given the length of the Revolutionary War, must have seen plenty of action, Washington's uncommon chair, and the bed Washington died in. After he died, Martha ordered that wing of the house sealed. She never entered it again, and retired to the third floor of the house, which is off limits to visitors, except during the winter months (annual pass!).

After touring the house, we strolled a short distance past stables and gardens and slave quarters (Mount Vernon is pretty up front about Washington and his slaves; they've got an advantage in the fact that GW freed his slaves in his will, the only president to do so; it'll be interesting to see how Monticello or Montpelier handle the same subject). After a while, we came up to the tomb of Washington--a crypt with George and Martha's marble coffins.

Whoever the other people around us were, they must have been high muckety-mucks, because the guards unlocked the gate to the crypt and opened it up for them. They then posed in the crypt, next to the coffins. I didn't have the chutzpah to sneak in there myself, but I did snap a picture of the open crypt. Imagine a zombie GW stepping out of it (six foot two, remember).



There's really not that long of a line between pilgrims on their way to Lourdes and Elizabeth and I on our way to Mount Vernon: struggles, admiration, a mix of the physical and spiritual. A peek at the relic-like devotion paid to a set of Washington's dentures in the Mount Vernon museum reveals as much, right down to the greatest sign I've ever seen in a museum: Please Refrain from Photographing the General's Dentures. It will be interesting to see how this devotion proceeds as we move on through history.

The Weekend of Washington, Part One

Because I'm a glutton for history but not for punishment, we headed out on our Washington journey the weekend before July 4th; rumor has it that only fools and tourists make the journey on the holiday. So, on Saturday, with a bag of store-brand Cheddar Cheese Sun Chips (totally different texture; oddly unappealing), we pointed the car towards Northern Neck, the Land of Leaders.

(Note: Northern Neck (or Westmoreland County) doesn't actually call itself "The Land of Leaders," but it's not a bad idea. Washington was born there; Robert E. Lee next door (although in the plantation system, that's a few miles down the road. We passed a sign for the James Monroe birthplace, too. Maybe "The Land of Leaders of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries" doesn't look good on a souvenir Frisbee.)

After a short drive, we arrived at the George Washington Birthplace National Monument. As far as National Park Service sites go, it's fairly unassuming (although there's a great obelisk marking the entrance to the site, part of the convoluted history of memorialization there; more on that in a second). Small visitors center, separate gift shop. Living history exhibitions (although none when we visited, which was technically not long before closing).

But the location! Well chosen, Washingtons. Well chosen indeed. Here's a photo of me attempting to look noble on the deck of the visitors center, next to the very wide Popes Creek:



The fact that the weather was just about perfect helped, obviously, but it wouldn't have been a bad place to grow up. Except, of course, Washington didn't grow up here; he grew up at Ferry Farm. He left this site at the age of three, which raises the question: why all the fuss? When did we decide as a country that where you were born was for some reason a place of pilgrimage?

Historian Seth Bruggeman argues in his book Here, George Washington Was Born that the Popes Creek plantation is where this happened. The book is, as we like to say, academically dense--Bruggeman's discussed medieval object fetishism, the Colonial Revival, and how dollhouses create a domestic paradigm, and I'm only on the second chapter--but his essential argument is this: that when Washington's step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis sails up the Potomac with some friends in 1815 and puts a stone engraved with the words "Here, George Washington Was Born" on what he thinks is the site of Washington's birth, he establishes the historical/biographical site in America.

What's especially interesting is that in 1932, the park builds the Memorial House--a replica of a wealthy planter's house, furnished accordingly, on the site of GW's birth. The great thing about this is twofold: one, the Washingtons weren't in that class, and two, it's not on the actual site where Washington was born. That would be what was called "Building X," not too far from the Memorial House. Here's a photo of half of it, or, more accurately, half of the oyster shell outline of the house's foundations:



In the background is Memorial House; close, but not quite.

I was reminded of the Lincoln Birthplace in Kentucky, which takes object fetishism to its grandest heights: a neoclassical temple dropped over a log cabin. The Park Service will tell you that the cabin isn't actually the cabin that Lincoln was born in, although it toured the country at the turn of the twentieth century just as such. The Washington birthplace seems like a more honest version of that, and, as Bruggeman seems to be arguing, a microcosm of historical preservation in the United States, mistakes and all.

The next day: Mount Vernon.

July 2009

Only a week until our next book starts, and while there's plenty more to say about George, it's time to tee up the next book, which, it will come as no surprise to discover, is David McCullough's John Adams.



It's a bio to kill big bugs with, so get ready.

Myth-Making

George Washington is successful, in part, because he's tall.

At least, according to Joseph Ellis, he is. Apparently, since Washington towered over a lot of the Continental Congress and tended to keep quiet, they gave him command of the Continental Army. Oh, sure, there are other reasons--the need to bring Virginia's land-owning class into the fray, for example, and the fact that Washington is already pretty well known for his military exploits in the French-Indian War. But Washington's six feet and two inches of apparently impressive stature helps him get the job.

This actually makes sense, given the amount of self-creation that Washington indulges in; he talks his way into a officership in the French-Indian War. He inherits and marries his way into the land-owning class. He knows that silence can speak louder than words. He seems rigidly fixed on self-improvement--one of the only early writings we have of his is a (perhaps copied) list of rules for better living.

And the weird thing about Washington is that all this works--he does become a pretty solid military leader (even if he does lose more battles than he wins), he's the go-to landowner in Virginia (and manages his estates so well that he's one of the few founding fathers not to die broke). In an odd way, he's not just the perfect guy to be president; he's the perfect guy to create the office of president.

We indulge in this myth-making about GW, too. He has wooden teeth, he threw a dollar across the Potomac, he stood in the front of the boat as it crossed the icy Delaware (um, no; it would tip). Maybe that's because there are so many gaps in the Washington story that we have to fill it in with speculation, or maybe it's because so much time has passed since he walked this earth that he's now a face on the dollar bill, a day off in February. It certainly makes this possible (oddly NSFW):



Imagine that with, say, Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan.

Soon: we answer the burning question: What kind of cookies did the Washingtons eat?

Primary Decisions

According the Library of Congress catalog (which got its start with a president's library, although we'll discuss that in a few months), there are 1,134 biographies of George Washington. Washington's own papers run to a few dozen collected volumes. With so many choices, how do we choose a single biography to read? Can we possibly encompass the width and breadth of 43 presidents' lives in single books when we could easily spend our lives reading about just one?

Well, no. So we've got to pick one. In some cases, the choice is easy, thanks to a recent major biography (David McCullough's John Adams, for example. Or there just isn't much written about the president (William Henry Harrison, I'm looking in your direction). Sometimes we'll let what we can get at the library make the decision for us.

But Washington--well, that's tricky. Lots about him. After some reflection (and digging around Amazon), we've settled on Joseph J. Ellis's His Excellency, George Washington. On the surface, it's got lots going for it--Ellis is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his writings on the Founding Fathers, the almost-four-years-old book is still in Amazon's top 3,000 (not to mention the best-selling bio of GW on the Kindle), and there's even a bit of scandal about Ellis's claims of Washington's relationship with his neighbor Sally Fairfax. But scratch the surface a little, and there's something interesting going on with the author, too; something that might reveal a little about why and how biography gets written.

"I do solemnly swear..."

The idea is a relatively simple one; in 42 months, we'll perform a ritual. Fast food restuarants will offer a free chicken sandwich or donut when you come in with your "I Voted" sticker. A phalanx of senior citizens will look up your name in their books. You'll stand in a booth and mark a bubble, or punch a hole, or (god forbid) use a touchscreen, and you'll cast your vote for somebody--Barack Obama or his opponent--to be president.

Forty-three men have been president in the 233 years of the United States; some good, some bad, some forgettable. One was president for 13 years. One was president for 32 days. They've ranged between 5'4" and 6'4". One weighed 332 pounds. They've all been men, and until this year, they had all been white men.

So let's do some Old School History here. Let's dig into the Lives of Great Men and see what we can learn about them, and about the office, and about the country they ran. Let's see who made it better, who made it worse, and who just watered the plants for four years.

Here's the plan: one biography a month, with the occasional doubling up to keep on schedule. We start with the guy on the dollar bill and we end on the guy in the Oval Office. Along the way, we learn a little about how history's written and how biographies change. Read along!