birthday pedestal.
Washington is American history's grand exemplar of the virtue of civic duty. Say "actor-president" and people think Reagan, but Washington played a role so thoroughly, and so perfectly, that people still think he was that regal, noble Roman hero. When you read the accounts of him written by his intimate circle during the Revolution, you see the American man -- vain, hard-driving, hard-cussing, clever in a farmer's ways. And you appreciate what he did to get America launched on an even keel: passing up a life he could have spent happily among his horses, transforming himself into a living virtue as a gift to the new nation.
As the Revolution drew to a close, Washington deliberately reached back to yet another historical myth to ease the delicate transition from military revolution to civilian administration: Cincinnatus, the Roman hero who, during a crisis, reluctantly accepted the dictatorship for six months, defeated Rome's enemies in six weeks, then resigned and went back to his plow.
Now regarded as almost surely mythical, Cincinnatus was a real hero to the Founders. And when Washington resigned from public life in 1783 after the great victory and returned to Mount Vernon rather than mounting the throne of the new nation, he was the marvel of the world, and he was behaving quite deliberately on the classical model. His peers recognized it. Instead of becoming King of America, Washington became head of an association of Revolutionary War veterans -- the equivalent of today's American Legion or VFW -- called the Society of the Cincinnati. This was the classical idea of "virtue" as defined by Himmelfarb: "the will and capacity to put the public interest over the private."
As America's first president, Washington literally had to invent the job of being an elected leader of a nation, because there was no model for it in modern times. He had to parse out decisions about what title people should use when addressing the president, how a president should interact with Congress, how he should receive dinner invitations.
In some small details of protocol, Washington erred on the side of royalty. No harm done; Adams and Jefferson tilted the balance carefully the other way. The danger of having no dignity at the top, no noblesse oblige, was the greater danger, and Washington made sure we had enough noblesse to realize the oblige.
Washington stood for generations as a living example of American virtues, a monument in flesh before he became one in granite or marble. The nation chose him to bear the mantle of the American way, and he accepted the role.
Washington modeled himself on Cato the Younger. His favorite play was Joseph Addison's "Cato," which was based closely on the Cato section in Plutarch's "Lives." Washington ordered "Cato" performed at Valley Forge for the soldiers; he often quoted Cato (or his speeches from the play) at key moments. Historians who have studied his handling of the Newburgh mutiny of 1783, a key crisis in early American freedom, discovered it was directly lifted from Addison's play. [Act III, Scene 5, if you have a script; see Carl J. Richard, "The Founders and the Classics," pp.50-59].
The process that began in Washington's life snowballed upon his death in 1799. "America produced a flood of mourning pictures in many different genres: paintings, prints, sculptures, textiles, rings, ceramics. ... These images of George Washington became icons in every sense. They were reproduced in lithographs and chromos, hung on the walls of American homes, and regarded with a reverence that other people reserved for religious images." [David Hackett Fischer, "Liberty and Freedom," p.181]
Chief among the icons was a pamphlet, later expanded into a book: Mason Locke Weems's "Life and Memorable Actions of General George Washington," published a year after Washington's death. The Chesapeake clergyman and itinerant bible salesman wrote a lively, if overblown, prose, and told a series of stories meant to display Washington's "Great Virtues." It was one of many pamphlet biographies written mainly for the 