Washington's Birthday

The popular idea of Washington has recently begun to veer away from the vision of an eighteenth century demigod in a wig,—an old-fashioned statue in dusky bronze, stern and forbidding. We are swinging around toward the idea of a loveable, fallible, very human personality with humor, a hot temper, and a genuine love of pleasure.
Accordingly, in gathering material for this book the editor has passed by those earlier writers who are mainly responsible for this distorted view; and he has aimed to gather here the essays, orations poems, stories, and exercises which best exhibit the modern conception of Washington; together with a selection from his own writings and the finest of the elder tributes to the memory of our greatest National Hero.


A good deal of American history was once violently distorted by the partisanship of the eighteenth century, frozen solid by its icy formalism, and left thus for the edification of succeeding generations. For example, it was not until 1868 that Franklin's Autobiography was by accident given to the world in the simple natural style in which he wrote it. The book had been edited by Franklin's loyalist grandson, and had been cut and tortured into the pompous, stilted periods that were supposed to befit the dignity of so important a personage. When John Bigelow published the original with all its naïveté and homely turns of phrases and suppressed passages, he shed a flood of light upon Benjamin Franklin.
But not such a flood as has still more recently been shed upon our struggle for independence, and the hero who led it.
In view of this state of affairs, it is not strange that Washington should have shared in the general misrepresentation. Like Franklin's, his writings, too, were altered by villainous editors. In his letters, for example, such a natural phrase as one hundred thousand dollars will be but a flea-bite was changed to one hundred thousand dollars will be totally inadequate.
The editors were aided in their refrigerating enterprise by a throng of partisan biographers, first among whom was the Rev. Mr. Weems, that arch-manipulator of facts for moral purposes. They were helped also by many of our old sculptors and painters, who were evidently more concerned to portray a grand American hero in a wig than to give us a real man of flesh and blood.