I hope you are all enjoying Presidents Day. I’ve spent a part of it thinking about how presidents often become “legendary Americans” of the sort we have been studying. As we saw when we discussed Francois Furstenberg’s book, Americans often turned to George Washington, above all, as a symbol of the nation’s highest ideals. And I think we’ve seen that this continues even today, especially at moments of high partisan conflict of the sort that Parson Weems and Federalists like Washington himself often deplored.

Consider, for example, the recent cover of the New Yorker magazine, which depicted a number of presidents (Washington most prominently) expressing chagrin about Donald Trump:

That cover reminded me of a discovery I made a few years ago, which is that searches for Washington’s Farewell Address on Google still peak in October and November: in other words, around elections. You can see the trend for yourself. The popularity of that search seems to have been highest in October and November of 2004, a moment of extreme political division.

Perhaps, then, the patterns that Furstenberg noticed in the ways that Washington and presidents were used in the early republic to address fears of political division have not gone away. Indeed, there may be a whole host of ways in which Weems’s work in deifying Washington continue to influence us, as historian Joseph Adelman argues in an article for The Atlantic today.

What about you? Have you noticed past Presidents or Washington being cited today to speak to the concerns of this election cycle?