TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022089/02208900.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.8 KB | 116 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.