To My Mother
The greatest glory of our system is its dazzling variety. Like snowflakes and fingerprints, no two Presidents are exactly alike and most are totally, amazingly different. Given our national attention span, this is just as well. Every four or eight years, we get somebody new to watch.
If we voted for him, we watch to see if hes going to prove us wrong. If we voted against him, we watch to see if hes going to prove us right. We watch his goings out and his comings in, his children, his dogs, his wife. If the sun shines and the armies win, we cheer him; if the stock market hits the fan and hurricanes rage, we hiss and boo; if the times are boring, he bores us. Hes our national sponge, chosen by the people to absorb the national moods and happenings. Hes only a few moves away from the ancient scapegoat that soaked up our sins and troubles and then carried them away into the desert. Eight years later, at most, he disappears into the wilderness, leaving us cleansed and righteous and ready to watch the next.
Imagine having to listen to Castros speeches for forty years. Imagine living in a monarchy. If the times are peaceful and you get yourself a young and healthy king, you could be watching the same First Family for fifty years. You would see his children born, go to school, grow up, and have children of their own, and by then youd know more about them than your own. His majestys portrait would be hanging on the classroom walls for generations. With luck, hed get in scrapes occasionally, perhaps have a mistress to keep you awake for the evening news, but most modern kings lead exemplary lives.
When he finally dies, nobody gets to guess whos next; his eldest son succeeds, and youve been hearing about this prince for as long as you can remember and nothing he does will surprise you.
Americans would never stand for this. Even sixteen years of George III was too much to bear. However exciting a President may be, eight years of the same show is plenty. We are not naturally monogamous. Americans pine for fresh fields and pastures new, different clothes in the White House closets, somebody else to think about.
Sometimes the process coughs up a hairball, sometimes events overpower a perfectly decent fellow, but the system gives us chance after chance after chance, and always we keep our eye on the horizon, waiting to see whos next.
The Founding Fathers invented a glorious game.
George Washington
17891797
Youre wrong about George Washington. Nathaniel Hawthorne was wrong too. He said, He had no nakedness, but was born with clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world. People rarely feel all warm and cozy about Washington. They look at pictures of his wife and think he must have been a stranger to the tender passion, and maybe the birds and the bees do it but George didnt.
To all this I say, then what about Sally Fairfax?
As a young country colonel, George fell in love with several pretty girls who wouldnt marry him. and playing cards and staring at Sally until the Fairfaxes got quite cross. Even when he was off soldiering he couldnt stop thinking about her and wrote her such unsuitable letters that her relatives felt obliged to complain. Just before he married Martha, he wrote to Sally promising lifelong devotion, and the year before he died, when she was sixty-eight, he wrote saying that nothing in his career had been able to eradicate from my mind those happy moments, the happiest of my life, which I have enjoyed in your company.
So there.
Martha was short and dumpy and had more than the usual number of chins, but she was pleasant enough. Her grandson said she had nice eyes, always the essential compliment for those with little else. By an odd coincidence, she was also the richest widow in Virginia. She liked to putter around the kitchen lifting the lids off the kettles and tasting things and helping the slaves fix Georges favorite dinnercream of peanut soup, Smithfield ham with oyster sauce, mashed sweet potatoes with coconut, string beans with mushrooms, spoonbread, and whiskey cake.
As First Lady, she gave rather stiff parties that ended sharp at nine oclock, when she blew out the candles and she and George went to bed, guests or no guests. By all reports they grew quite fond of each other. I cant imagine why they werent blessed with issue.
In the beginning, George was born in a house with a chimney at each end, halfway between Popes and Bridges creeks, and he was scared of his mother. Everyone was. She was a vindictive lady with a savage temper and all her children left home just as fast as possible. She refused to go to Georges inauguration and said terrible things about him every chance she got.
When George was eleven his father died. I hope youve forgotten the cherry-tree story. It was invented by Parson Weems after George was safely dead and the moralthat you can commit any outrage you like as long as you confess to it afterwardhas misled generations of Americans. Most people believed his whole book. Most people will believe anything.
We dont know any true stories about his boyhood because he didnt tell us any. He was trying to forget it. He did write a letter to Richard Henry Lee when they were both nine, thanking him for a book with pictures of elephants. He claimed he could read 3 or 4 pages sometimes without missing a word, and added that if it didnt rain his mother might let him ride his pony, Hero, over for a visit. (I realize this isnt very exciting stuff but its all I could find. I suppose you think you could come up with something better.)
He never went to college or learned any Latin or Greek, or got too much further than the book about elephants. In later life he had a nice library with lots of books like Diseases of Horses, A Treatise on Peat Moss, and Mease on the Bite of a Mad Dog, but basically he was more a man of action.
At fourteen he tried to run away to sea, but his mother stopped him, and then when he was sixteen his half-brother got him a job surveying for the Fairfaxes,7 and so for several years he trudged around measuring the boondocks and rejoicing at getting away from Mother.
When he was twenty-one, Virginia was having some problems with France, and George got commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the militia. He rushed right out and attacked a French scouting party, which was silly, and accidentally started the French and Indian Wars. People forgave him, though, after Braddocks Defeat, which I dont have time to discuss right now. He was never much of a military genius, but he was brave enough and always looked good on a horse, and that was the main thing. A strapping lad (one source calls him a noble youth), he was six foot three, with size thirteen boots and big heavy fists with which he sometimes forgot himself and knocked unruly soldiers out cold. Hed inherited his mothers temper. From a distance he may have looked like a frozen halibut, but he spent his life grinding down his dentures and counting to ten to keep from breaking heads. When he was annoyed his language made his secretary shake in his shoes.
By age twenty-three he was a full colonel and defended the Virginia borders against the usual French and Indians. and he and his neighbors chased foxes until it was time for dinner. He always enjoyed dinner in spite of his problem.
