Cincinnatus: George Washington & The Enlightenment – Garry Wills, 1984 ★★

Unlocking the Washington Code

Do you know the many Classical allusions buried within artistic representations of George Washington? Are you interested in why Washington stands with his right (not left) arm outstretched in Gilbert Stuart’s famous portrait, and what it says regarding how he was viewed by those he led?

Garry Wills lays out the meaning behind the iconography of our foremost Founding Father, in this hopping, learned, rambling analysis.

“Before there was a nation – before there was any symbol of that nation (a flag, a Constitution, a national seal) – there was Washington,” Wills writes in his introduction. “He was the embodiment of stability within a revolution, speaking for fixed things in a period of flux.”

For many of us, the stability of Washington is all-too-easy to appreciate. He’s the bland face staring out at us from the dollar bill, the name of the city politicians and pundits so frequently denounce, the guy with the silver dollar and the wooden teeth and the stuff of many other old jokes. But what about his own flux? What made him so uniquely well-positioned to trigger the dawn of a new age, not just for his country but the world?

Wills works at this idea by presenting us with a legendary ancient Roman, one Cincinnatus, to whom Washington was often compared in his own lifetime (and immediately after). Cincinnatus, who lived from 519-430 B. C., was a prosperous farmer and decorated military veteran who came to power in wartime for the express purpose of saving Rome from conquest; once he did so he relinquished rule and returned to his plow.

“People did not admire a conquering Caesar in him, but a Cincinnatus resigning,” Wills writes of Washington.

Wills outlines three key moments in Washington’s career where the Cincinnatus comparison holds up: his resignation from the Continental Army after the British left in 1783; his deferential role in the framing of the Constitution in 1787; and his leaving the Presidency after two terms in 1797. Wills simultaneously analyzes artistic depictions of Washington for hidden meanings and resonances that connect Washington to the era in which he lived, the Age of Enlightenment.

For me, this was where the trouble with Cincinnatus began. The book follows two separate tracks all the way, Washington as national avatar and Washington as artistic subject. Sometimes the points come together; often they just taper off into disparate analyses. Wills doesn’t quite connect them, even within the same chapter. The result is often like reading a succession of learned but disparate footnotes.

In short, this should not be your first book on Washington. If you don’t know about the Conway Cabal or the Sons of Cincinnati or who Charles Lee and Horatio Gates were, you need to before you pick this up. Other authors have a gift for simultaneously explaining and interpreting what they write of; Wills sticks with the latter. It can be frustrating.

Wills’ overall appreciation for Washington’s selfless legacy is muddied by a desire to traipse off into the hinterlands of classical allegory or contemplate the meaning of right and left in paintings. Wills’ lively intellect chances upon many surprising burrows. He returns repeatedly to French painter Jacques-Louis David, who never depicted Washington in his work but influenced others who did. Many consecutive pages in Cincinnatus pass without mention of Washington at all.

Wills has worthwhile things to say about Washington; sometimes he even gets around to saying them. His two chapters on how Parson Weems reinvented Washington for Americans in the decades just after Washington's death are especially illuminating and entertaining.

Weems was the fabled originator of the cherry-tree story in which young George takes an axe to the aforementioned tree, then confesses the deed to his father with the memorable line: “I cannot tell a lie.” It’s a cloyingly saccharine story and the subject of mockery since at least 1939, when painter Grant Wood of “American Gothic” fame used it as the subject for one of his most sarcastic canvases.

Grant Wood's 1939 painting "Parson Weems' Fable" features a boy George with powdered wig and middle-aged countenance; Wills notes the many parodic elements include the cherry-shaped ornaments on the curtain Weems lifts and the circular way everyone depicted points at one another - including the ax, which points at the true doer of the deed, Weems himself. Image from http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma98/haven/wood/weems.html. 

Wills separates the myth from Weems’ original (albeit fictional) account, which was not about George being an honest vandal but rather his father’s ability to see past the act and offer his child unconditional love. This is one occasion I enjoyed this book. Wills zooms in on Weems, finding in the Bible-hawking salesman an American original whose invention served the public good and was truer to whom Washington really was than scoffers like Wood cared to admit.

“If his prose was always more lively than dignified, Weems’ causes were good ones, ardently promoted, courageously disseminated,” Wills writes. These causes included abolition, literacy, and, in the case of the cherry-tree story, sparing the rod.

Even here, though, you can see the problem: This is a book about a man and his legacy that takes too much time talking around both.

Another example is the introduction. Wills starts off his book noting of the three most famous monuments in Washington, D. C., two of them depict the men representationally: The Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial. Not so the third.

“Washington’s faceless Monument tapers off from us however we come at it – visible everywhere, and perfect; but impersonal, uncompelling,” Wills writes. “Yet we should remember that this Monument, unlike the other two, was launched by private efforts.”

This seems a fine starting point for examining Washington’s most recognized touchstone, yet Wills never returns to the structure after the opening two paragraphs. Mount Vernon, Washington’s Virginia home and another tourist destination (unlike the Monument, actually open as of this writing), is only ever mentioned in passing. Wills would rather explore Washington’s legacy via painters and sculptors who didn’t know him, who indeed were often dead before Washington’s birth.

A lack of focus comes into play when Wills lays out those three episodes in Washington’s life where the Cincinnatus parallel was validated. For example, his account of Washington’s announcement he would not run again for the Presidency dwells little on the decision itself, or how people of his day reacted to it. Instead Wills embarks on a long, multi-part discourse about the meaning of the word “opinion” as it was understood by Scottish, French, and Roman philosophers.

He often quotes French philosophes sans translation, or delves into the hidden meanings behind some of the better-known 19^th century paintings made of Washington. Not all of them: Emanuel Leutze’s depiction of the crossing of the Delaware is never mentioned. This is odd given how the universality of Washington is one of Wills’ key themes; Leutze was German and created his painting for fellow Germans.

Even Englishmen admired Washington, Wills notes. Lord Byron’s poem “Ode To Napoleon” declared Washington “the Cincinnatus of the West” and rhymed his name with: “To make men blush there was but one.”

To the extent Wills brings the Cincinnatus story into the spotlight, the book has a satisfying resonance about it, a sense of that specialness that Byron and others observed. But it feels thin, as if what he really wanted to write was an analysis of Washington portraiture but was persuaded by the publisher to write something more accessible and marketable. By focusing on symbols instead, he allows Washington, so famously ungraspable in life as well as after, another chance to slip away.