[August 11th
marks the birthday of AmericanStudier pére, as well as one of the very best digital
humanists, scholarly writers,
and grandfathers I know, Steve Railton. In his honor, a series on some
noteworthy cultural and historical American fathers! Share your paternal
responses and reflections for the father of all crowd-sourced posts!]
On the
clear and relatively consistent but also complex images of two beloved leaders.
By a
variety of measures, from the educated opinions of historians and political
scientists to broader popular polls and rankings, George
Washington and Abraham Lincoln have long been our two most popular presidents. Given
the contemporary partisan attitudes and divisions that heavily influence not
only current politics but also assessments
of every 20th century president, these two much less controversial
(in our own era—they engendered
plenty of controversies in theirs) historical leaders are likely to remain
at the top of the list. Moreover, while of course scholars and historians try
to engage with the complex realities of each man and his leadership, our popular
narratives and images of both tend to connect to more personal and mythic
traits: specific characteristics, such as each man’s famous honesty; and
overall symbolic roles, such as Washington’s image as “The
Father of Our Country” and Lincoln’s as “Father
Abraham.”
It’s
important to note that those kinds of symbolic and often paternal images aren’t
just subsequent additions to the men’s legacies, nor simply the province of
children’s books. In a 1799
eulogy to Washington, Richard Henry Lee, one of Washington’s co-framers and one
of the era’s most prominent politicians, famously described him as "First
in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” and Parson
Weems’ 1800 biography likewise embraced, and indeed helped develop
and popularize, all of the mythic narratives and images. With Lincoln,
similarly, the phrase “Father Abraham” was apparently coined
by Union troops and used frequently in their letters and writings to describe
their attitudes toward the president, and Walt
Whitman’s 1865 poem “O Captain! My Captain!” illustrates just how fully the mythic
images of Lincoln had come to define the man for many Americans by the time of
his assassination. Which is to say, whatever communal and psychological reasons
we might have to turn these military and political leaders into familial and
paternal figures, those reasons (or at least some of them) were present in the
men’s own moments, and have only continued and grown in the centuries since.
So why
have we so consistently paternalized these two presidents? Obviously there are
specific circumstances and contexts for each, but I would point to one pretty
shared context: that of a nation torn apart internally. The images of the Civil
War as pitting brother
against brother are well known (and often accurate), and it
was Lincoln himself who characterized the moment with the familial phrase “a house divided against itself.” And the
Revolutionary era similarly split Americans and families—Ben Franklin, for
example, famously split from
his beloved son William when the young Franklin remained loyal to England. While of
course both Washington and Lincoln chose and led one side in those internal
battles (and it’s fair to say that neither the English nor the Confederates
bought into the paternal images as a result), it’s nonetheless true that both
men came to embody, during and even more so after their respective wars, the
possibility of a once-more united nation, of an American family that could move
forward rather than dwell on the past divisions and antagonisms. That’s perhaps
especially true for Lincoln, since his assassination meant that his images and
legacies could
exist outside of the continuing bitterness and hostility of Reconstruction.
But in both cases, these fatherly images greatly oversimplify and mythologize
both the men’s own perspectives and roles and the national community in and
after their eras.
Next father
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Fatherly texts or figures you’d highlight?
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