I finally finished this doorstop of a biography by Ron Chernow! My mom bought a copy for me at least five or six years ago and it spent some time sitting on my shelf before I decided I needed to find a way to work through it, bit by bit, or I was never going to read it. Tackling the whole thing at once was just not going to happen.
I ended up keeping it near my bathroom so I could grab it as I was going in and use it as reading material. Even if I just read a paragraph or two, it was a paragraph or two I probably would not have read otherwise.
I did take a few breaks to read some other books in the same manner, which is why it took me four years to read this book. I’m not kidding. When I looked back at my history with the book on Goodreads, it said I started reading it four years ago.
I wasn’t too far into this biography of Washington when Alexis Coe came out with her biography of Washington, “You Never Forget Your First.” I haven’t read it, but I got to listen to the author on a podcast talk about how Washington’s mother often gets denigrated by male biographers as a terrible mother, whereas Washington was the ideal son. Coe had a different take, and pointed out that Mrs. Washington did the best she could with what she had and George wasn’t always a very good son.
Listening to that early on in my reading of this book meant that I got to read it through that lens, and Coe has a point. Chernow assumes that any mother would be proud to have a son who would go off and become a general and lead his army through an incredibly difficult war. The thought that maybe she actually wanted to spend time with her son never seems to occur to Chernow. And Chernow insists George was ever the dutiful son, even though he almost never visited his mother. Chernow thinks George’s occasional payments to help his mother pay the bills should have been enough for her, which just goes to show how differently men and women view what counts as “dutiful.”
Chernow also greatly resents Mrs. Washington for constantly asking her son for money. He lists all her assets at the time of her death as proof she could not have been as destitute as she claimed. By the same token, George had thousands of acres of land, hundreds of slaves, imported marble to decorate his mansion, and a coach to ride around in. He was also constantly complaining about being strapped for cash, but for some reason Chernow is much more sympathetic to George’s financial straights than those of his mother. Maybe George just learned bad money management from his mom. Ever think of that, Chernow?
Chernow also makes excuses for Washington owning slaves, claiming he was a “good slave owner” because he refused to separate families. Sorry, Ron, but there’s no such thing as a good slave owner.
The other example of Washington’s hypocrisy that struck me was all the fenagling he did to gain power, only to spend all his time griping about the weight of his responsibilities and how hard his job was. He managed to position himself as head of the revolutionary army without appearing to do so, then proceeded to do the same thing when it was time to choose a president after the Articles of Confederation failed.
Again, Chernow seems to buy into Washington’s own narrative of how he grudgingly accepted power, even though Chernow himself wrote about everything Washington did to try to gain that powerful position without appearing to do so. It was truly masterful and it’s that, not Washington’s false humility, that deserves real credit.
That false humility also seems to have been a bit of a theme with the early presidents. I couldn’t help but laugh at Jefferson’s assertions that he wanted nothing more than to retire from public life forever when he quit his position as Secretary of State. Despite their differences, Jefferson apparently emulated Washington in his ability to gain power while insisting he really didn’t want it.
And all of Washington’s whining about how he didn’t want parades or public attention made me wonder why he was so intent on gaining that position of power in the first place. Dude, you literally signed up for this. Maybe it’s just another example of why you should be careful what you wish for. Or maybe it was part of Washington’s continued ploy to make people think he didn’t want the power he had worked so hard to get.