TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/022089/02208900.000

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 108 lines

ESSAY, Page 110

Where the Founder Fits in the Picture

By Richard Brookhiser


    Four of John Trumbull's paintings of the American Revolution
hang in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, but to see the
complete series you have to visit the Yale University Art Gallery
in New Haven, Conn. What they say about the war and the country is
still worth pondering.

    Yale's Trumbulls hang on a wall the color of tomato soup in
front of a green plush banquette meant to duplicate an overripe art
gallery of the past century. It is best to study the paintings in
the order of the events they depict. The first two are pictures of
battles: the failed defense of Bunker's Hill (actually Breed's
Hill), which Trumbull had seen with his own eyes, and a failed
attack on Quebec. The central event in each is a military pieta,
the death on the field of an American general, though the
compositions are swirls of confusion and activity. Hands wave,
lifeless limbs sprawl, flags stream or tangle crazily against
smoky, lowering skies.

    The third picture in historical order, The Declaration of
Independence, is probably the most familiar (it is reproduced,
badly, on the reverse of the $2 bill). But it is not a terribly
good painting. Trumbull shows the drafting committee presenting its
handiwork to John Hancock, but he was also obliged to include
40-odd additional Founding Fathers. As a result, the eye wanders
from John Adams' stockings to Thomas Jefferson's red waistcoat to
the drum hanging oddly on the room's rear wall.

    With The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, there is a change.
Once again, we see dead and dying on the field, but this is an
after-the-battle scene, and there is no doubt about the center of
attention: the American general who accepts the wounded Hessian
commander's surrender, George Washington. The cloud behind
Washington's head, lest we miss the point, is white. Washington
dominates all but one of the remaining scenes in the set, which
ends with his resignation as Commander in Chief. He wins the
battles, the war, the peace and the paintings.

    Yale has quite sensibly grouped the pictures around another,
larger canvas, not strictly in the series, but proclaiming the same
message: a standing portrait of Washington at the Battle of
Trenton, in a bright yellow uniform and navy blue frock coat.
Behind him, a horse rears and a cannon lies shattered. But he
radiates a majestic calm. An empire, one feels, might well break
on that forehead, or a republic arise.

    Trumbull's notion of Washington's character was not unique;
virtually all his contemporaries acknowledged his poise, his
integrity, his resolve, his reserve. Nor was Trumbull alone in his
estimate of the importance of Washington's character to the success
of the Revolution and the new nation. Washington had a quasi-divine
status in his lifetime, and the Washington Monument was the first
of the great presidential memorials to rise in the city named after
him.

    Yet in the past 40 years or so, his reputation has sunk. He may
be on our quarters, but he is no longer first in our hearts, if
the testimony of our intelligentsia is to be believed. Arthur
Schlesinger Sr.'s poll of prominent American historians in 1948 put
Washington second, after Abraham Lincoln. In 1981 a poll of all
Ph.D.-holding American historians at the assistant-professor level
or higher found that Washington had sunk to third, behind Franklin
D. Roosevelt. What happened?

    Part of the fall in Washington's fortunes is simple
shortsightedness, to which even historians are not immune. The
relative prominence of Franklin Roosevelt is owing to the fact that
Roosevelt created the modern state, in both its domestic and
military aspects, and died before its ills were diagnosed. He takes
the credit and escapes the blame.

    Washington suffers, more seriously, from the intellectualizing
and verbalizing of American life. Perhaps because Americans are
better educated -- or, at least, spend more time in schools -- we
believe only what we read in the papers, or in the great books.

    Lincoln, who has twice won the historians' presidential
sweepstakes, was the greatest stylist to occupy the White House.
Of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander
Hamilton all helped write political classics. Washington can make
no such claim. His most famous pronouncement, the farewell address,
was written with Hamilton's assistance. His magnum opus was his
life, and how can you put a life on a reading list?

    Ideas are important. But they are not enough. Jefferson,
Madison and Hamilton were erratic leaders, for all their
brilliance, and they were far from the worst that the young country
produced. Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr were also patriots.
Washington possessed, to an unparalleled degree, three qualities
America needed to succeed, in addition to sound political theory:
the desire to serve its ideals, the ability to inspire others to
serve them and an absolute unwillingness to be led astray by
personal gain or ideological distractions.

    Every subsequent revolution, from the French Revolution, the
year of his first Inaugural, to the last coup in Fiji, has fallen
short of his standards. The few liberators who were honest, even
saintly -- San Martin, Garibaldi, Gandhi -- left chaos in their
wake. Most have been rascals or monsters and forerunners of worse
tyrants yet.

    The character issue of the late 18th century was not a matter
of politicians' sex lives. It was the question of whether a
large-scale republic in the modern world could summon enough civic
virtue to exist. George Washington, more than any other American,
guaranteed that the answer would be yes.