Giving Thanks to George Washington on His Birthday

on February 16, 2015

Today legally and morally is not “Presidents’ Day” but George Washington’s Birthday. And the day should robustly honor the man without whom our nation, its wealth, its democracy, its free speech, its religious liberty and its singular vision of a world where all have legal equality may never have materialized. Hundreds of millions around the world live under democratic regimes of laws, of expanding life spans, good health and higher standards of living thanks in large part to the character, courage, shrewdness and perseverance of a Virginia farmer from modest means and limited formal education.

In the age of Washington, there were only three or four democracies in the world, and they with a franchise largely limited to propertied men. The average lifespan was even in the most advanced countries perhaps in the mid forties. Nearly everyone globally lived in desperate poverty or close to it. Most people, including the very wealthy, lived in chronic pain, with bad or no teeth (including Washington), in constant discomfort, with little protection from extreme weather, from horrible transportation accidents, from food poisoning, or, in a time before organized police, from violent crime. Losing life or limb or livelihood in workplace mishaps, whether on the farm or the mill, was common.

Children were commonly orphaned. Most married persons experienced the death of one or more spouses. Parents typically lost several children. (Martha Washington outlived all four of her children, only one of whom attained adulthood.) Throughout the world, on every continent, the majority who were poor had few if any meaningful legal protections from the rich and powerful, whether African chiefs, or Latin American viceroys, or Muslim sultans, or Indian Brahmins, or Chinese emperors. Women had few legal rights anywhere. Sexual and economic exploitation was de rigeur. Slavery and serfdom were almost universal, whether legal or de facto, with few questioning what had existed since the dawn of time.

Private conscience most places meant little, and religion was typically dictated by rulers. Political and religious dissidents were taxed, jailed, tortured, executed or tormented by mobs. For millennia, most persons’ occupations, locales and standards of living were merely a replication of their parents’, unless disrupted by cataclysmic natural disaster, plague, famine, epidemic or war, all of which were common and from which there was nearly no protection.

Throughout all history, kings and sometimes queens, with their immediate coterie and warrior knights, might attain glory and riches and education. But for nearly everybody else, nothing much else changed from generation to generation. Nearly everyone was illiterate, with the American colonies and Britain having unusually high rates of literacy. But even most of the literate typically did not have easy access to books, journals or newspapers.

So how did the obscure son by the second wife of a lower ranked Virginia Tidewater yeoman reshape and uplift a world of routine poverty and oppression? Notions of legal equality, of government by consent, of conscience rights, of industry and of economic uplift percolated throughout the Anglo Protestant tradition, encoded in Common Law, parliaments, patents, property rights, scientific discovery, and centuries of struggle, rooted in Providence, biblical revelation and natural law. But the application was uneven at best, even as the ideals were refined.

Great Britain in the age of Washington had the greatest constitutional government in the world, had some legal protections for political and religious dissent and was nurturing the start of industrial and scientific revolutions. But it was also still a land of aristocracy and generational serfdom, of empire, mercantilism and slave trade.

The American Revolution essentially harnessed the principles of English liberty against the mother country’s failure to uphold them. And that revolt could easily have failed without one steadfast general who was constant, self-disciplined, patient, strategic, magnanimous, bold, and visionary. A lesser man than Washington would have lost the army in a reckless battle against the much stronger British, would have quit in disgust or despair, would have revolted against Congress, would have established dictatorship, as nearly all leaders of revolutions do.

A lesser man than Washington would not have inspired and presided over the Constitutional Convention, creating the most durable republic in history. A lesser man would not have virtually created the presidency with constant restraint and good judgment, making momentous decisions that would prosper his nation and the world. A lesser man would not have have voluntarily left office for a quiet retirement. A lesser man would not in his public and private statements have so equitably left a constant record of prudence, free of personal rancor and prejudice.

Washington, the quiet lifelong Anglican, affirmed liberty for all religious sects of his day. He unusually avoided sectarian dissensions and modeled the framework for civil religion that ingeniously protected without establishing religion. He was a wealthy planter and slave holder whose national policies and personal convictions ensured the demise of landed gentry and slavery in favor of a literate, middle class, industrialized, technologically innovative, mostly urban great republic of mobility and constant ascendancy, successfully inducting into its Anglo Protestant constitutional and social system tens of millions of immigrants from every land across three centuries.

The engine of perpetual democratic, economic, egalitarian and technological innovation that Washington helped generate from a forested, primitive frontier of only a few uneducated million mostly farmers and shop owners has left no far stretch of the world untouched. Even the most desperate poor, whose numbers are constantly falling thanks to global economic growth, are now typically immunized, fed, armed with cell phones and inspired by aspirations of lawful democracy.

Excepting parts of Islam, Communist regimes, and Putin-style autocracies, the ideals of Washington animate the world. Even the regimes of counter narrative have congresses, presidents, constitutions and elections that, however fraudulent, still pay indirect homage to America’s Founding Father. And they parasitically exploit the wealth and technology generated by the dynamic economic and political machine that Washington fathered.

Anyone in the world today who values mass literacy, mass wealth and technological innovation, mass medical availability, lawful government, civil rights, religious liberty and conscience protections, who thinks the last and the least are no less valued in God’s sight than the rich and privileged, and who agrees with Washington’s hope, using language from the Book of Micah, as he told a Rhode Island Jewish congregation, that everyone “shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid,” should today, on George Washington’s Birthday, pause and give him thanks.

  1. Comment by David F. Miller on February 18, 2015 at 6:46 pm

    We were blessed to have men such as Washington in the beginning. I cannot but think that America for all its sins is Camelot, that shining city on a hill.

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