Skip to main content

Washington And Flexner

March 2023
3min read

We are happy to announce that James Thomas Flexner has just received the National Book Award for George Washington: Anguish and Farewell, the fourth and final volume of his biography of the great man, as well as a special PuIitzer Prize citation for the whole series. Over the years we have published no fewer than nine excerpts from this monumental work, and we are deeply pleased to see the author honored. Flexner’s acceptance speech, an eloquent personal statement of his feelings about Washington after more than a decade of tracing his career, appears below.

In the twelve years that I have worked on a biography of Washington, I have made various unexpected discoveries. Surely the most surprising was that George Washington is alive. Or, to put it more accurately, millions of George Washingtons are alive. Washingtons have been born and have died for some two centuries.

Almost every historical figure is regarded as a dead exemplar of a vanished epoch. But Washington exists within the minds of most Americans as an active force. He is a multitude of living ghosts, each shaped less by eighteenth-century reality than by the structure of the individual brain in which he dwells. An inhabitant of intimate spaces, Washington is for private reasons sought out or avoided, loved or admired, hated or despised. In my wanderings of a dozen years, I have come across almost no Americans who proved, when the subject was really broached, emotionally indifferent to George Washington.

The roles played by the mythological George Washingtons fall into two major categories: one Freudian, the other a procession of mirrors reflecting people’s attitudes toward the situation of the United States at their time.

In an essay that had no specific reference to Washington, Freud described how “infantile fantasies” concerning people’s own fathers can shape their conceptions of historical figures. “They obliterate,” Freud wrote, “the individual features of their subject’s physiognomy, they smooth over the traces of his life’s struggles with internal and external resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestiges of human weakness or imperfection. Thus, they present us with what is in fact a cold, strange, ideal figure instead of a human being to whom we might feel ourselves distantly related.”

Here is, of course, an exact description of the marble image of Washington which so many Americans harbor—and resent. I have been amazed by the infantile glee with which people I have met made fun of my writing a biography of Washington. Was I recording the clacking of wooden false teeth? Had I ever tried to envision how Washington would have looked in long winter underwear? These mockers often dance up and down with self-satisfaction, like a small child who has dared express an impious thought about his father.

Down the years, Washington’s second mythological role has been as a national symbol, an alternate to the American flag. In periods when Americans were happy with their society, they have thought of Washington with adulation. At times of resentment and self-distrust, the mythological Washingtons have been resented and distrusted. I have discovered, sometimes to my considerable embarrassment, that the current attitude toward Washington—and toward me as his biographer—is often hostile. Their denial of this prejudice makes me particularly grateful to the judges who are honoring my book today.

My twelve years’ effort has been to disentangle the Washington who actually lived from all the mythological Washingtons, and in so doing I have inevitably—for that was the fact —revealed a great and good man. There have been in all history few men who possessed unassailable power who used that power so gently and selfeffacingly for what their best instincts told them was the welfare of their neighbors and all mankind.

In being ourselves untrue to the highest teaching of the American tradition, we of this generation have tended to denigrate that tradition, to seek out all that was unworthy, to emphasize whatever justifies national distrust. In so doing, we have discarded an invaluable heritage. We are blinding our eyes to stars that lead to the very ideals many of us most admire: the sanctity of the individual, the equality of all men before the law, government responsive to the people, freedom for all means of communication, avoidance of what Washington denounced as international “ambition,” the self-determination of peoples everywhere.

To find again the American ideals we have lost, we may not return to our national beginnings with the blinded eyes of idolatry or chauvinism. Let us examine deeply every flaw, every area, such as slavery, where the founding fathers were untrue to what they professed. Let us examine Washington not as the spotless figure delineated by infantile fantasies or by selfseeking wavers of the flag. Let us determine without prejudice exactly what happened, exactly how men behaved. If we do this, we shall, so I am profoundly convinced, find, in the dark valley where we often stand, inspiration.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "October 1973"

Authored by: William C. Davis

Branded a traitor by the government he once served, John C. Breckinridge ran a perilous race for freedom rather than risk capture by the North

Authored by: Ralph K. Andrist

Anthony Comstock spent a lifetime on a crusade to clean the nation’ Augean stables of smut, vice, and nudity. Sometimes it seems as if he pried in vain

Authored by: Stephen B. Oates

Sure that he was divinely appointed, Nat Turner led fellow slaves in a bloody attempt to overthrow their masters

Authored by: The Editors

An album of pictures from the days when the Kennedys were parvenus and workingmen demonstrated in derbies

Authored by: Adm Kemp Tolley

“My God! What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead!” the Admiral told Lanikai's skipper when she finally sailed into port

Authored by: Caroline Jones

Riding to hounds has been as much of a sport among well-to-do Americans as among the British gentry

Authored by: Don Troiani

Fifth in a series of painting for
AMERICAN HERITAGE

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.