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His (Modest) Excellency

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If You Can Keep It

In 1932 — the year in which our first president, George Washington, would have celebrated his two-hundredth birthday — Harvard historians were busy trying to figure out exactly how to sum up the man, his life and his career.

They determined, according to authors Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, that a comparison or two might be in order.

As it were, however, no less than seven would prove satisfactory.

Washington, our Crimson friends wrote, “was bolder than Alexander, more crafty than Hannibal, wiser than Caesar, more prudent than Gustavus Adolphus, more resourceful than Frederick, more sagacious than Napoleon and more successful than Scipio.”

’Twas, put simply, quite the “World’s Best Dad” acclamation for the Father of the United States.

Whether Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Frederick, Napoleon and Scipio — or the peoples they led — would have seen things the same way is, of course, another matter entirely. But at least one thing’s for sure: their American counterpart, any additional merits notwithstanding, had some killer gravitas.

This was precisely the topic some of Washington’s own contemporaries found themselves discussing in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia when Gouverneur Morris, one of the States’ more rambunctious Founding Fathers, dared say that he and the General were as chummy with one another as any old pair of drinking buddies. Alexander Hamilton was skeptical — and wagered Morris a fine dinner and an even finer vintage to prove it.

Morris took the bet.

Soon enough, the author of the Preamble made his way to one of Washington’s receptions and, true to form, approached the host to do what he had promised. After exchanging the usual greetings, Morris threw his hand on Washington’s shoulder, peered amicably into his eyes and said, per an explicit request from Hamilton, “My dear General, how happy I am to see you look so well.”

The grimace Washington shot back at him in return — after first removing the offending hand from his person — prompted Morris to later remark, “I have won the bet, but paid dearly for it, and nothing could induce me to repeat it.”

So, yeah — no one can accuse the first man in America to wear the title “Commander-in-Chief” of having been too laid back for the job. But stories of George Washington’s fabled heroism and often hard demeanor belie another quality of his that I find all too lacking in even the most cloyingly saccharine politicians of today: his modesty.

Granted, “modest” is probably not the first word that comes to many a mind when thinking about one of the few Americans in history whose countrymen would have been — and, indeed, were — comfortable referring to as “His Excellency.” Yet, in looking back on his life and the manner in which he presided over the nation that would claim him as its symbol, it is precisely that description which does our beloved Mr. Washington the most justice.

Ironically, nowhere is the Washington brand of modesty more apparent than in the words he used in 1796 to say goodbye to both public life and the people he had so benefited by pursuing it.

After serving only two terms as President of the United States, the country’s original George W. — whom Alexander Hamilton, for one, had wanted to enshrine as president for life — was stepping down, setting a precedent which would virtually guarantee that America could look forward to seeing new leadership in its executive branch every eight years. Washington wanted his fellow patriots to feel secure in the knowledge that tyranny would never take root in the nation they had built as an escape from it. By voluntarily leaving office even while he could have stayed (likely for much, much longer), he played a major role in combating any notions of autocracy. But, in his Farewell Address, he made it clear that there was another brand of tyranny lurking which only the American people themselves could prevent.

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities,” Washington warned, “is itself a frightful despotism.”

He was speaking, of course, about something that Americans today are all-too-familiar with.

“It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is,” Washington said, “truly their worst enemy.”

We see that something which he describes manifest itself anytime a Republican or a Democrat writes off an opponent’s ideas solely because of the letter in the box that follows his or her name: a government overrun with partisanship, one that, in Washington’s words, “put[s], in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party.”

The Father of America wanted the politicians who would come to lead his United States to keep their focus on what was right not for a group within the nation, but right for the entire nation. Sure, he had his allegiances. He, like everyone else in both his time and ours, had his own beliefs and his own opinions. But he was decent enough, modest enough, to know that those things he wanted would not always be the things that his country needed.

It would be unrealistic for me and, were he alive, even Washington himself to hope for an end to a party system that has become so entrenched in modern American government that it is now an integral part of it. But it is wholly realistic — and wholly consistent with the spirit of Washington’s words — for all of us to seek to temper it.

Despite his majesty, George Washington was the epitome of humility. He was secure enough in his judgments to listen with an open mind to those of others, even if those others were people with whom he often disagreed, and he was never unwilling to alter his own conclusions if reason or circumstance so demanded — especially because of something as immaterial as the self-applied political label of a fellow citizen and patriot.

May we all be so modest.

Mark Coombs is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at mpc39@cornell.edu. If You Can Keep It appears every Thursday.

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