ed the British.
The myth-maker's choice is which truth to place at the center of the story.
Weems was wiser than generally is recognized. In his version of the cherry tree story, according to Garry Wills ("Cincinnatus," p.53), the focus is on the father's wisdom in recognizing the courage of truth-telling. "It was in this way," Weems writes, "by interesting at once both his heart and head, that Mr. Washington conducted George with great ease and pleasure along the happy paths of virtue." It was a parable of parenting. Later retellings, especially in school readers, turned it into the advertisement for truth-telling that Wood satirized.
Washington was no idealist. He merged practical policy with the moral high ground whenever possible. In treating his Hessian prisoners well after Princeton, he had a strategic purpose. He wrote to the Pennsylvania authorities to whom he had sent the German POWs and directed them to "canton them in the German Counties."
If proper pains are taken to convince them, how preferable the situation of their Countrymen, the Inhabitants of those Counties is to theirs, I think they may be sent back in the Spring, so fraught with a love of Liberty[,] and property too, that they may create a disgust to the Service among the remainder of the foreign Troops and widen that Breach which is already opened between them and the British.
Canny! And as late as World War II, America still used such a policy on captured enemy POWs. What made Washington important is that he deliberately chose the virtuous path in the times when it didn't suit the immediate interest. His lesson by example was doing the right thing even when it went against expedience -- that cherry tree again.
We can smile now at the deliberate attempt by Weems and others to build an American mythology in parallel motion to republican Rome and ancient Greece. It seems a quaint excess, at best, to us. We find it superfulous to modern minds, modern democracies. We can excuse the Founders, and dispense with their fairy tales.
Or can we? Myths like those woven in 1800 by Parson Weems tell us who we are and what we stand for, and that tempers a great power by giving it a virtuous purpose. "Morality" has become a dirty word to a lot of people, because they concede morals to the prudes. So I'll go back to the word the Founders used: virtues. When Europeans carp about our patriotic religion and fixation with morality, I say, "you really don't want to have to deal with what we'd be without it." A great power without virtues is more deadly to itself and its neighbors than a great power that believes it has to live up to some high standard ordained by God, the gods, human experience, or history.
For generations, Washington's artificial example discouraged open displays of political ambition in America. Candidates were expected to be called to office, not to chase it. And if ultimately they developed a skill at furiously politicking while appearing to sit at ease on their porches and watch their crops grow, the model of Washington at least kept it from being too blatant. Only in Andrew Jackson's time did Americans realize what a powerful position they had created in their presidency, and the revelation shocked many men. The restraining model of Washington had, in large part, kept a check on baldfaced expression of power.
More important was the strong influence Washington's virtuous image held in the early republic among the officers of the Revolution, among the Southern aristocracy and Northern men of wealth -- the elite class that clustered in the Federalist and Whig parties. Histories of other lands show the fragility of young republics, and the temptation of just such classes to try to correct the excesses of democracy, and the wisdom of making it a point of pride among those classes to not intrude.
All this Washington accomplished, with the help of Parson Weems and the others who fed his mythology. Can a people live without myths? Can a nation survive without virtues? Aren't they the same question?
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