COLUMNISTS

Distant but still present

Even before he was their first president, even before there was a Republic to preside over, Americans looked to George Washington as men look to shelter in a storm. Maybe because in the midst of so much change, he did not. Yet he changed all about him-whether he was leading troops or setting up still another new government or setting precedents that would hold for almost three centuries now with his every decision, signature, word and gesture.

Out of all the turmoil in which he found himself from youth to age, Washington fashioned order. And yet he also defended liberty. How did he manage to do both? Because he did not fight change but guided, even inspired it. Because he did not just make policy but gave direction. Because he understood the role of virtue in a republic, he would lend whole institutions, indeed a whole republic, his own character.

If George Washington has become the very symbol of American stability, that may be because he presided so long and so successfully over so much change. His generation not only founded but destroyed two governments before creating this third one. The first to be swept away was the accumulation of centuries of British rule and misrule. The second system to be abandoned was the revolutionary government itself-that brief, not very satisfactory experiment under the Articles of Confederation.

The conventional wisdom at the time, which was the late 18th Century, held that the new constitution would not last much longer than the old Articles had. James Madison confided to his friend Thomas Jefferson just before the constitutional convention adjourned in the summer of 1787 that its work was really too weak to endure. Washington himself gave the new system two decades at best, and would surely have been astonished to learn that it now has lasted two centuries. Going on three.

But even if he had foreseen those American centuries, General Washington would surely have contained his astonishment. So much change over so many years had taught him the wisdom of self-control, not an easy attainment for a man of his temper. He made use of his ideas and enthusiasms; he did not let them use him.

George Washington was not what passes for a Man of Ideas in modern times, meaning a captive of theory. He learned early on, in the wilderness with Braddock, the dangers of relying on theory rather than experience. It would be a lesson that served him and his country well when he found himself in many another wilderness-the wildernesses of statecraft, of politics, of diplomacy, of commerce . . . the wilderness of freedom itself.

Washington could be forceful when he had to be, as when he crushed the Whiskey Rebellion, making it clear that the new government would collect the taxes it was due. But he was gentle when he could afford to be, which was as soon as the rebellion was over. That’s when he pardoned all those who had taken part in it.

General Washington had learned the power of persistence at Valley Forge and in a dozen campaigns. President Washington had learned not to misuse power by the example of the empire he had fought, a great empire run by small minds. And in what might have been his greatest service to the republic, after all he had accomplished and come to symbolize, he walked away from power itself, recognizing that it was time. The way a father lets go when his child begins to walk on his own. But not without leaving us a storehouse of good counsel in his Farewell Address. Like this particularly relevant piece of wisdom for our own debt-ridden, spendthrift times:

“As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it, avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.”

In another century, Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Massachusetts man with his own provincial prejudices, may have got it right when he sniffed: “How characteristic of the Virginian (generally provincial) to think more of Jefferson than of Washington. Washington had the nation in his belly.” Jefferson with all his ideas might only envision the nation. Washington, lumbering in thought and word but determined in deed, could feel it. And step by step, relying on patience and virtue, he would build it.

On this anniversary of his birth, it seems a far distance back to the first president’s understanding of what republican government requires, beginning with prudence. It requires the old, ordinary virtues-but practiced with extraordinary diligence. The way its first president and commander-in-chief did. No wonder he remains our pole star, showing the way. In spirit, far above the passing hubbub, he is still our presiding officer, keeping order, and furnishing both vision and perspective. Neither is adequate alone.

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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial, Pages 16 on 02/22/2014

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