ave, William Lee, whom he bought in 1767. Washington called him not his "manservant," as was the custom, but "my fellow." Lee shared abilities in Washington's great first love: horses and riding. Lee was a brilliant rider and often the only man capable of keeping up with Washington in his fearless, breakneck pace on a northern Virginia hunt. Paintings showed them together in battle, and Washington emancipated him after the war.
Washington had slaves. Very well; every founder but Hamilton was touched by the taint of slavery. Yet Washington also managed the remarkable act of emancipating all his slaves and providing for them. There is a letter from him to Phillis Wheatley, considered the first important American black writer, thanking her for some verses, full of praise and courtesy and closing with an invitation to visit him.
He did not much care for immigrants, as a class, but he wrote of them, "If they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa or Europe. They may be Mohammedans, Jews or Christians of any sect, or they may be atheists."
In all things, Washington was ahead of his time in that great modern value, tolerance.
But modern American intelligensia doesn't have Washington the complex man-hero, Washington the flawed and tolerant. Instead, we merely tore down the old myths, the old virtue-stories, and replaced them with -- nothing.
The 1920s was the decade America became modern. The New York musical, the historic preservation movement, Hollywood and the automobile all came of age. By 1929, five-sixths of the world's automobile production was in the U.S.; one car for every five people. Real per-capita income rose, millions of working people acquired savings accounts, life insurance, and their own homes for the first time.
Yet it also was the decade of Prohibition's nasty chaos, xenophobic Americanism and the second incarnation of the Klan. The Ten Commandments displays in courthouses and town halls, now subject of acrimonious lawsuits, often had been added deliberately in the post-World War I years to edifices that had stood for generations without anyone thinking they needed such stern brazen reminders.
Intellectuals veered left in the 1920s, but that was a consequence, not a cause. At heart they were not moving leftward so much as moving away from the traditional American narrative of values, which they felt had been discredited by the repressive hyper-patriotism of World War I and the vulgar middle-class prosperity of the '20s.
Edmund Wilson in the depths of the Great Depression celebrated the young intellectuals "who had grown up in the Big Business era and had always resented its barbarism, its crowding out of everything they cared about." For them, the Depression years "were not depressing but stimulating. One couldn't help being exhilarated at the sudden, unexpected collapse of the stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom; and it gave us a new sense of power."
Scott Fitzgerald put it bluntly in 1932: "The New Generation had matured to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken; all they knew was that America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history." Another author, in a polemical book published the same year, summed it up like this: "Having surrendered idealism for the sake of prosperity, the 'practical men' bankrupted us on both of them."
Other intellectuals before had stepped outside the American mainstream and criticized it as narrowly violent, materialistic, crass, obsessed with false gods and rotten ideals -- Thoreau, Henry James. In the 1930s, this became a prevailing theme. Since then, it has only increased in fury. So much of the literary and academic class is fixated on American evil, to the degree of seeing nothing but it. Theirs is not the mature, whole vision foreseen by McMaster, but an infantile and poisonous replacement for Parson Weems.
They seem never to have advanced past the moment they learned Washington did not, in fact, skip a silver dollar across the Potomac. Somebody lied to them. Because the myths were not real, the virtues are not. A