John R. Miller writes in Sunday’s New York Times about how George Washington played a key role in forming the cherished American principle of civilian control of our miliary (thanks to Luke for finding this):
On March 10, an anonymous letter appeared, calling for a meeting of all officers the next day to discuss the grievances. Within hours came a second anonymous letter, in which the writer, later revealed as Maj. John Armstrong Jr., an aide to top Gen. Horatio Gates, urged the troops, while still in arms, to either disengage from British troops, move out West and “mock” the Congress, or march on Philadelphia and seize the government.
When Washington learned of the letters, he quickly called for the meeting to be held instead on March 15 — to give time, he said, for “mature deliberation” of the issues. He ordered General Gates to preside and asked for a report, giving the impression that a friend of the instigators would run the show and that Washington himself wouldn’t even attend. He spent the next few days planning his strategy and lining up allies.
But just as the meeting of approximately 500 officers came to order, Washington strode into the hall and asked permission to speak. He said he understood their grievances and would continue to press them. He said that many congressmen supported their claims, but that Congress moved slowly. And he warned that to follow the letter writer would only serve the British cause.
The officers had heard all this before — the letter writer had even warned against heeding Washington’s counsel of “more moderation and longer forbearance.” The crowd rustled and murmured with discontent. Washington then opened a letter from a sympathetic congressman, but soon appeared to grow distracted. As his men wondered what was wrong, Washington pulled out a pair of glasses, which even his officers had never seen before. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you must pardon me, for I have grown not only gray but blind in the service of my country.”
The officers were stunned. Many openly wept. Their mutinous mood gave way immediately to affection for their commander.
“One of the expedients of party to acquire influence, within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart-burnings, which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those, who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.”–George Washington’s farewell address
In her New York Times “And the Pursuit of Happiness” blog, Maira Kalman treated us on New Year’s Day to By George. The picture above is her take on Mt. Vernon. Since I’m highly partial to George Washington, his 110 Rules of Civility, and spirited colorful art, this was bound to wow me. If you don’t get all the way to the end, know that this will come out as a book in October. I’ll see you at the bookstore…
I just had a wonderful opportunity to talk with University of Virginia’s Ted Crackel about The Civility Project at U.Va., which will release a revised list of rules, in the spirit of Washington’s original. It is particularly wonderful that students are putting together the list. You can actually submit ideas for rules on their website: The Civility Project: George Washington Meets the 21st Century.
This isn’t any ole vanilla re-do of Washington’s rules, however. It’s got gravitas:
The Civility Project will be undertaken with organizational guidance from The Papers of George Washington, a Founding Fathers project based at the University’s Alderman Library, and with the inspiration of Judith Martin, who writes the nationally syndicated Miss Manners column in the Washington Post.
Martin and Theodore J. Crackel, editor-in-chief of the Papers of George Washington, met in 2005 when both were being honored at a White House ceremony. So when the Washington Papers staff recently discussed the idea of basing a project on our first president’s famed “Rules of Civility,” Crackel knew right away whom he wanted to enlist.
“I am absolutely delighted to have Judith Martin working with us on this effort,” Crackel said, noting that the columnist will play an active advisory role. “We in the project and the students involved couldn’t have a better adviser.”
We probably won’t sleep nights waiting to hear the results…
We had our first Politics, Partisans & A Pint happy hour last night, a great crowd very evenly divided along party lines. I had some of my best conversations of the year and it made me think of Adams and Jefferson, whose spirit was alive and well Thursday evening at Finnegan’s. Please help us make it spread…
Hop on over and read this same post at Purple State of Mind today, and just do some general visiting with our partners in civility while you’re there.
“…You and I ought not to die until we have explained ourselves to each other.”
So began the late-life correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the founding fathers described in the HBO mini-series “John Adams” as “the north and south poles of our revolution.”
Once friends, differences in opinion and political competition had taken a toll.
They, like others in the founders’ generation, had deep philosophical disagreements. But as they went about the business of building a country, an endeavor that if unsuccessful would surely lead to their hanging, they hardly had the luxury to stop talking to each other.
So they agreed where they could, disagreed where they had to and kicked a lot down the road a bit (toward us, in fact).
Despite the differences between them and the odds against them, the founders managed to cobble together their opus – and ours – the Constitution, which despite all probability still guides this diverse group of people forward together.
But, alas, “politics ain’t beanbag” and two election cycles later, Jefferson and Adams had no tolerance for one another.
Fast-forward a couple of centuries and most of us are likely to relate to the fix Adams and Jefferson found themselves in. We, like they, have deep disagreement with – and sometimes little tolerance for – one another. Even our understanding of the founding document we all revere is riddled with fundamentally different viewpoints.
The two founders ultimately died friends, having given history the gift of their final correspondence. They died on the same day, July 4th, 50 years to the day after the nation they built was born. Not knowing that Jefferson had passed on just hours before, Adams last words were “Thomas Jefferson survives,” providing one of history’s most poignant lessons to us across the centuries.
If we continue to choose the path of this legacy – the uneasy yet unbreakable partnership of opposites that is our unique birthright – it will never be easy. Maybe a big part of our problem is that we’ve grown far too accustomed to easy.
“Whether you or I were right,” Adams had written to Jefferson, “posterity must judge. Yet I ask of you, who shall write the history of our revolution?”
The philosophical descendants of Jefferson and Adams are alive and well today in us, in this amazing American experiment “in the course of human events.”
And we are still writing the history of their revolution.
Like the founders before us, we hardly have the luxury to stop talking to each other.
If you have not seen Republican Orrin Hatch’s eulogy of Ted Kennedy, please watch before we forget what a Republic looks like (3 parts). This conservative Mormon and liberal Catholic did it just as our Founders intended. This is a rivalry befitting this great country. This is the real conversation of democracy. If this isn’t the standard your Senator or Congressman strives for, I hope you’ll expect better beginning tomorrow morning. If you don’t, who will?
For this occasion, I will pass it off to the Founders. Please feel free to add your favorite quotes to the mix.
“I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.” — George Washington
“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” –Patrick Henry
“A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.” — Benjamin Franklin
“Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.” –John Adams
“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.” –Thomas Jefferson
“It’s hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present state of human improvement, of placing human beings In contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.”
First, I have to confess that I give the piece good marks on a couple of points:
1. It is civil. Forgiving the “King Obama” reference, on the whole, it is serious and thoughtful writing. By being (mostly) civil, it is light years ahead of the standard rant-fest.
2. It gives due deference to the concept of governance closest to the people being the best governance. So fundamental is this belief to what we have built as Americans, I can’t help but like part of what he says.
But – borrowing from Mr. Shakespeare – “therein lies the rub.” I suspect that this too is what many movement conservatives – a la the tea parties – might find appealing about the secession movement… the surety that they are recapturing the real America, the Founders, the roots.
I too, as a middle-ish Democrat, love the roots. I revere the Founders in ways that defy mere words. But I think that in the political right’s stampede to give the Founders their due, they’re running right over them.
Chief among my concerns is that we have entirely stopped trying to communicate with each other. We’ve replaced this old fashioned concept with a self-stimulatory feedback loop of just how gosh darn right we are.
Last I knew, communication was the art of trying to make your perspective heard. (How quaint.)
Our Founders – if they believed nothing else – believed in the world of ideas, the world of knowledge. They stretched. They had to.
Our long tradition of a capacity to maintain connection despite straining disagreement, I believe, is what America has to offer this broken world of ours. That these 250 years later we’re still a nation speaks to the power of their legacy, the very legacy secessionists are ready to blow up in their determination to honor it?
Hat tip to Luke for a great John Stuart Mill quote I somehow missed:
“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind…The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it…If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: If wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error…We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.”
