Category Archives: Washington

Legends in the News

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Today, I noticed two different opinion pieces mentioning “Legendary Americans” we have studied (or will soon discuss).

First, in tomorrow’s New York Times, the founders of the Women on 20s campaign argue that Harriet Tubman still deserves a spot on a bill, despite a statement released today that says Hamilton will stay. They write:

If, as Mr. Lew states, the images on our currency reflect what we value as a nation, then Jackson, a slave trader and Native American oppressor, should be removed from the ubiquitous $20 bill and replaced by the freed slave and freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, the choice in our online survey that polled more than half a million people. And we should continue to preserve and celebrate the legacy of Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant who did so much to shape our democracy, not to mention the monetary system that Andrew Jackson worked so hard to discredit.

Also today on The Atlantic blog, Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses recent controversy over the movie Nina Simone, in which the actress playing the lead character was asked by producers to darken her skin. Critics of the move have argued that the film ignores the fact that Simone herself often lamented the unique oppression suffered by dark-skinned, as opposed to lighter-skinned, black women. The biopic’s distributor replied by citing someone we will be reading about next week: “You think Rosa Parks’ pain was less than Nina’s when she had to endure not sitting on a bus?”

Finally, today I saw a spoken poem called “History Reconsidered” that touched on some of the topics that we’ve discussed the last two weeks. It begins: “Letter to Five of the President who Owned Slaves when They Held Office.”

Just more evidence of the ways that contemporary Americans continue to find “usable pasts” in the lives of legendary Americans.

Slavery in Children’s Literature

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In class last Thursday, one of questions we discussed had to do with how slavery itself is often depicted in children’s books about Harriet Tubman. One book described the young Tubman as “happy” even though she was a slave, which reminded me (I suggested) of the idea of “paternalism” discussed in Furstenberg’s book. On the other hand, as one of you pointed out, the books about Tubman do at least spotlight the brutality of slavery by focusing on the injuries she sustained and the separations from family she endured.

cake-for-washington

This discussion made me think of another recent controversy in the publishing world over a children’s book called A Birthday Cake for George Washington, which was published by Scholastic. The book, which tells the story of the President’s enslaved chef named Hercules, is summarized with screen shots here.

After several prominent school library journals criticized the book for giving a misleading, “even dishonest” picture of slavery, Scholastic ultimately decided to withdraw the book from circulation, though not before publishing a response from the author and editor. You can follow the whole debate by following the links at the end of this blog post, which also includes some interesting points about the ways that Native Americans are portrayed in children’s books on Thanksgiving.

Since I was familiar with Furstenberg’s book already when this controversy broke, the whole debate made me immediately think of his discussion of paternalism and the myth of Washington’s happy slaves. I wonder if the fact that Washington himself was portrayed in this book as a strong admirer—even a friend—of Hercules contributed to the controversy. (On the last page of the book, Washington throws his arm around Hercules and delivers this line: “‘Hercules,’ the president says in his soft voice that is like a whisper…’You are a magician, a master chef. You have outdone yourself again. Good man.'”)

On the other hand, this book—like the Tubman literature we discussed—also raises the broader question of how books aimed at children should treat slavery. Columnist and culinary historian Michael W. Twitty argued that what is desperately needed is complex children’s literature that makes space for the humanity—and even the smiles—of the enslaved, but without sugar-coating slavery and its brutal dangers. The real Hercules, Twitty notes, eventually ran away from George Washington—an act of explicit dissent that mystified and angered the president.

What do you think about the debate over A Birthday Cake for George Washington? If Sernett is right that our children’s literature reflects what an adult society wants to remember, then what do books like this reflect? I’d be interested in your thoughts, either here or in class.

Happy Presidents Day

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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:

ny-presidents-cover

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?

Washington Reading Questions

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For next Thursday, you’ll be reading most (but not all) of the Francois Furstenberg book. (See the schedule for full details.)

Below are the questions you should use to prepare for our discussion. You should also choose ONE prompt as the basis for your reading response, which you will write on a new page in your Google Doc.

  1. For Furstenberg, what was the fundamental “problem of U.S. nationalism” in the early decades of the United States? Did widespread veneration of George Washington solve that problem?
  2. One reason some Americans become “legendary” is because they represent or symbolize popular values or ideals. But Furstenberg also suggests that looking at the legends surrounding Washington can tell us a great deal about what Americans most feared during the nation’s early decades. What did Americans most fear in these years, and how did those fears influence portrayals of Washington? Do you think “fears” continue to play a role today in the way Americans remember the past?
  3. One of the concepts that Furstenberg frequently uses in his book is that of “civic texts.” Based on his definition of that concept in the book and in Appendix 1, are there any “canonical” texts (like speeches, books, or famous documents) that continue to function as nationalist “civic texts” today? Since Furstenberg also uses early American schoolbooks as one example of “popularizing” civic texts, do you think your own past textbooks or books you were asked to read in high school (for summer reading, for example, or in preparation for an AP test) can be described as “civic texts”?
  4. Is there good historical evidence for the story, told by Weems, Thayer, and others, that Washington chopped down a cherry tree and later confessed to it? If not, what accounts for the origins and continuing popularity of that story?
  5. After reading Furstenberg’s book, do you think that George Washington should be remembered as a “proto-abolitionist”?
  6. One of Furstenberg’s arguments is that “nationalism” has a lot in common with “religion.” In what ways was that true in the early national period, based on the evidence in the book? Where do the similarities end, in your mind?

After reading the assigned text for this week, you might enjoy this brief op-ed piece that Furstenberg wrote for the New York Times several years ago on the Fourth of July. In it, he makes the case that men like Mason Locke Weems were as much the “founding fathers” of the nation as men like Washington, since they popularized and glorified the legacies of the nation’s first leaders. After reading about Weems in detail in the book, would you agree with that assessment?

Image credit: This painting of Washington, depicting him as almost godlike, appears on the dome in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building. The photograph of the painting displayed here was posted on Flickr by “H4NUM4N.”