Category Archives: George Washington

Presidents Day 2019

18 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by in Alfred E. Smith, George Washington, George Washington's Mount Vernon, Museums

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I would love to have been able to visit Mount Vernon today but alas that was not feasible. I imagine they are having events today, and again this coming Friday on President Washington’s actual birthday. Inspired by yesterday’s post about Al Smith and his annual viewing of the retired firemen of Brooklyn, I’m leaving in a bit to visit the New York City Fire Museum in SOHO. Fire houses played a role in Washington and 4th of July observances from the time of the Early Republic until just a few recent decades ago. I’m up and out early because when I return I have to prepare for the week ahead, not least the laundry.

Enjoy your Presidents Day, everyone.

(image/Early twentieth century Edward Penfield poster via Library of Congress)

Washington’s Birthday 1928

17 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Alfred E. Smith, Brooklyn, Charles Loring Brace, Fiorello La Guardia, George Washington, Memory, Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father)

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New York governor Al Smith reviewed the Kings County Volunteer Firemen’s Association on Washington’s Birthday in 1928 in the leadup to the presidential race.

I was reading a good-natured online debate the other between a couple of people arguing the merits and demerits of American holidays. One of the running threads–indeed, the instigation of the discussion–was the idea of President’s Day itself. Some were averring that the holiday we are observing this weekend is now a second-tier observance, which is tough to argue against. It was not always the case however. President’s Day began as George Washington’s Birthday, and is still legally considered as such in many of the fifty states. Up until around the Second World War however Washington’s Birthday was still considered one of our most prestigious holidays, ranking below Christmas and Easter and on par with the 4th of July. It makes sense that Americans would have two secular holidays–one in winter and the other in summer–of such consequence. From the early days of the Republic through the mass immigration of the early twentieth century these holidays gave Americans a shared narrative. The 4th of July is still part of that narrative, but Washington’s Birthday–or even the more general “President’s Day–not so much.

Some of the men assembled to speak at Brooklyn Borough Hall were in their 90s. Later that day Governor Smith and Congressman Fiorello La Guardia spoke at the Brace Memorial Newsboys’ Lodging House in Manhattan.

Here above we see a moment during which Washington’s Birthday was still very much part of our cultural fabric. In 1928 Governor Alfred E. Smith visited Brooklyn to review the organization of retired Kings County firemen. From the steps of Borough Hall he watched the procession of men, some in their 90s, as they hailed the man everyone knew would run for the presidency that coming November. The Eagle, whose offices were adjacent to Borough Hall, noted that “Only the Roman candles and fireworks of the old political campaigning [were] missing.” It was not just Brooklynites; firemen had come from throughout Long Island, Manhattan, and as far away as Philadelphia and Delaware to see and hear Smith.

The governor had been coming to this event throughout the 1920s. He had come down from Albany for a few days to appear at several events; after speaking to and lunching with the retired firemen in Brooklyn, Smith returned to Manhattan and dined at the Brace Memorial Newsboys’ House on William Street. Lodging houses like the one Smith spoke at on Washington’s Birthday 1928 dated back to the days when Charles Loring Brace and Theodore Roosevelt Sr. created them prior to the Civil War. There with Smith at the lodging house was U.S. Congressman Fiorello La Guardia. Smith’s message to the 1,200 assembled hardscrabble lads was to accept that life is difficult even under the best of circumstances. The governor and presidential aspirant understood difficulty, having been born a slum kid on the Lower East Side and toiling in the Fulton Fish Market before becoming a Tammany man and starting his rise.

(images/Brooklyn Daily Eagle)

President Buchanan and the future King Edward VII visit Mount Vernon

21 Monday Jan 2019

Posted by in Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, George Washington's Mount Vernon, James Buchanan

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This painting of President Buchanan, the Prince of Wales, and several dozen dignitaries at George Washington’s tomb in October 1860 captures a dramatic moment in diplomatic history just prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War.

Two inspirations for visiting Mount Vernon last week was a trip to the Philadelphia Museum of the American Revolution last June and a chance viewing of the above painting at the National Portrait Gallery in August. Here we see President James Buchanan and the Prince of Wales, who forty-one years after the events depicted here would become King Edward VII, visiting Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon in October 1860. Buchanan knew the royals well, having served as Ambassador of the United States to the Court of St. James’s from 1849-53 when the prince was a very young lad. The events depicted in the painting took place in early October 1860, one month before the presidential election won by Abraham Lincoln.

The Prince of Wales was in the United States on a goodwill tour. Everyone put of a brave face but relations between the countries were strained. This all took place within living memory of the War of 1812 and even, for some very aged persons, the Revolutionary War itself, and tension in the Anglo-American relationship were evident. This was the tour during which Michael Corcoran of New York’s 69th Infantry Regiment refused to march his men before the Prince of Wales in review. The controversy in New York took place a week after this trip to Washington. The British entourage was unimpressed with the still-young nation’s capital. The unfinished crown atop the Capitol Building, stump of the unfinished Washington Monument, and shabby condition of even Mount Vernon itself–onetime home and final resting place of the colonial general and father of the country–reflected poorly on American ingenuity and even the viability of republican government itself. Given the hysteria and fever pitch surrounding the four-man presidential race then underway, once cannot really blame them for thinking such things.

(image/Visit of the Prince of Wales, President Buchanan, and Dignitaries to the Tomb of Washington at Mount Vernon, October 1860, painter Thomas P. Rossiter; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery)

Mount Vernon in January

19 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by in George Washington, Heritage tourism

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I hope everyone’s 2019 is off to a good start. My gosh, I have not posted since New Year’s Day almost three full weeks ago, the longest stretch with no posts since I began the blog eight years ago. I went on holiday January 3 and have spent the time since my return preparing for the upcoming semester. My co-teacher and I have been discussing the syllabus, narrowing down the reading list, and such. It is always exciting and a little nerve-inducing getting ready for a new term. I’m fortunate to have such a good colleague.

I am here in the DC area for the weekend. Yesterday the Hayfoot and I visited George Washington’s Mount Vernon. The last time I was there was more than forty-five years ago. I wanted to visit before starting the James Thomas Flexner four-volume biography, which I intend to begin when I get back to New York City. I am supposed to give a talk related to Washington at a particular historic site in Manhattan on Presidents Day, but with the government shutdown still ongoing we will see what happens.

George Washington’s Mount Vernon, January 2019

A cold January day is an opportune time to visit. They estimated at the information desk that they would receive 500 visitors for the day, as opposed to the 6000-8000 daily tourists they receive on a typical spring or summer day. When we arrived at the mansion itself, we walked right up as the tour was commencing. No lines. Alas photography was not permitted in the house, but my favorite item was the Bastille Key given to George Washington by the Marquise de Lafayette. I made a point to the tour guide that Lafayette gave the key to Washington with the idea that future generations might see and appreciate its significance–and that that was precisely what our little group was doing at that moment. She had clearly never thought of it like that before and lit up when I said it.

A little later in the tour we were in the outdoor kitchen when a visitor asked the guide to explain again why officials at the site refer to Mount Vernon’s enslaved community not as “slaves” but as “enslaved persons.” The reason, the guide explained quite well, is to affirm the humanity of this community and tell their stories with fuller nuance. A few in the group still weren’t getting it. As it happened this came at the end of the tour, after which we all exited into the courtyard area. We joined an informal discussion at this point in which our group was still discussing the terminology about the enslaved community. As she so often does, the Hayfoot stepped up and with clarity and compassion added a few salient points that built on what the guide had said. A few eventually “got it,” with or without necessarily agreeing with the premises being expressed. A smaller number never did get it. If they went home to ponder it, or put it out of their minds entirely right then and there, I will never know.

All in all it was a great day. There was so much to see and so little time to take it all in that we became Mount Vernon members. So come spring we’ll be there again, only this time with the great masses taking in the gardens and all else there is to see and learn at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

 

 

J.T. Flexner’s George Washington

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Eliza Hamilton Schuyler (mother of Louisa Lee Schuyler), Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Washington, Historiography, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project)

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James Thomas Flexner’s four-volume biography of George Washington

Late last week I received in the mail a package containing the books your see above. This is James Thomas Flexner’s four-volume biography of George Washington, which the author published from the mid-1960s into the early-1970s. I won’t go too much into the details here and now but reading Flexner’s history of the first president will be part of some projects I have planned for 2019. I am already making a list of various interpretive possibilities. It may seem like a marked digression from my previous endeavors but that would be less accurate than it might seem; one of the major themes of my book manuscript, Incorporating New York, is that the Civil War generation was a bridge from the years of the Early Republic to the modern city and nation. That is one of the reasons I was so keyed up to see the Schuyler family plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery last week. Just as one example of such threads: Eliza Hamilton Schuyler was the granddaughter of both Philip Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, John Jay and Isaac Roosevelt were three of the delegates who voted in favor of the adoption of the United States Constitution in Poughkeepsie in 1788.

I intend to start volume one of Flexner’s series after the holidays. I am a tabula rasa with the Founding Fathers. I started building a foundation by reading James McGregor Burns’s and Susan Dunn’s slim George Washington, part pf the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The American Presidents series, and am continuing now with Harlow Giles Unger’s “Mr. President” George Washington and the Making of the Nation’s Highest Office.” These historians have extensive experience already on the presidents; Burns wrote two authoritative volumes on Franklin D. Roosevelt and Unger penned the authoritative modern biography of John Quincy Adams.

George H.W. Bush, 1924-2018

05 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Federal Hall National Memorial, George Washington, Those we remember

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President George H.W. Bush (standing illegibly on center platform) at Federal Hall, April 30, 1989. The white specks are not snow but confetti to celebrate the bicentennial of George Washington’s First Inaugural.

Let me be the first to acknowledge that the image here is not the clearest. I wanted to share it however not for its clarity but for its historical significance: in the middle of the image, admittedly impossible to make out, is President George H.W. Bush. This New York Times photo was taken at Federal Hall on Wall Street on April 30, 1989. The occasion was the bicentennial of George Washington’s First Inaugural, which had taken place on the same spot two hundred years earlier. I wanted to share t because today is the day of mourning for the 41st president.

Coupled with the death of John McCain earlier in the year it seems that 2018 really is the end of something, the end of what I am exactly not certain, but the end of something nonetheless. Watching Bob Dole struggle to attention to pay his respects in the Capitol rotunda was profoundly moving. I don’t idealize the past or political figures–I spend half my time telling students not to look away or respond cynically to the sausage making that is baked in to the process. I agreed and disagreed with various aspects of each of these three men’s choices. That said, at their best they represented something better and larger than themselves. Notions of service, grace, kindness, civility, and respect for others. Wherever we are on the spectrum, it is something to think about on this national day of mourning.