merica to them has been a perpetual disappointment. They pitched the whole project and set up a rival pantheon of "heroes" from some truly awful raw material -- from John Brown to Stalin to the Black Panthers. Would Che Guevara's life hold up as well as Washington's, if raked with the same historical scrutiny?
The "American scene" paintings of Grant Wood (1891—1942) are gentle satires. "Parson Weems' Fable" (1939, above) is based on Charles Willson Peale's portrait of himself lifting the curtain on his own museum in Philadelphia in which he sought to display and classify all the rich natural life of America. In Wood's painting, the parson lifts the curtain on a scene in which the cherries are as artificial as the curtain tassles. There are the slaves, too -- the embarrassing fact, in the background, and there is little George, with the head of old President George right off the 3-cent stamp. The picture is squared off and lit like a theater stage. Parson Weems's fable is a lie told to teach that lies are wrong. Wood enjoys this paradox and gently mocks it.
But much of the intellectual class in America has turned so hard and vicious in its contempt that it does not even recognize Wood's satire for what it is. Wood's paintings, such as "American Gothic," have been used as the basis of more brutal satire.
Such as here, on the cover of the book in which Ward Churchill's infamous essay is printed, comparing the Sept. 11 victims in the World Trade Center to Nazi Jew-killers. If Parson Weems missed the irony in telling a lie to teach the virtue of truth, Churchill, or his book designer, reveal their folly in tearing up a straw man of satire and thinking they are shooting arrows into the heart of Evil Amerikkka.
Washington's soldiers protected the captive Hessians from the Philadelphia mob in 1777. It also is true that the colonials in arms sometimes swapped barbarity for barbarity with their enemies, plundered and raped, and occasionally tortured and butchered POWs -- especially loyalists and runaway slaves who had joined 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 