So Who Do You Hate for President’s Day?

posted at 2:40 pm on February 15, 2010 by Howard Portnoy
[ Politicians ]   

Last weekend as the Big Game was approaching, I heard the question asked repeatedly: So who do you like for the Super Bowl? That question — or at least the variant that appears as this post’s title — came to mind after I read an editorial in The New Hampshire Union Leader paying tribute to the Father of our Country, George Washington.

Speaking more precisely, it wasn’t the editorial which brought the question to mind but a comment by one of the readers. The comment in question, posed by one “Jake, Manchester,” follows here in its entirety:

Let us also remember that he [Washington] owned many slaves (over 300 by the time he died at Mont [sic] Vernon). If not for those slaves its [sic] very possible he might not have become the man that he was.

Jake, Manchester’s comment makes it crystal clear who he hates for Presidents’ Day, though it doesn’t quite explain why. Let’s assume for the moment that Jake isn’t just engaging in some cheap, rhetorical self-righteousness — that he really believes that it was Washington’s slaves and not the man’s own military prowess that enabled him to defeat the British against great odds in the Revolutionary War. Shouldn’t Jake then — shouldn’t we all — feel gratitude to Washington and his slaves for the role they played in causing the events of history to turn out as they did? Can’t Jake join the rest of us in giving thanks for the ends General Washington achieved if not the means by which he achieved them?

But, as the editorial notes, Washington’s gifts to the nation he helped found didn’t end on the battlefield. They continued once he was elected as its first leader:

On his ride to New York City, then the capital, he was serenaded by citizens singing, ‘Welcome, mighty chief!’ Had he sought them, dictatorial powers were his for the taking. But on his inauguration, he wore a plain brown suit fitting of an average American, the first step in his plan to establish that Presidents were citizen executives, nothing more.

It is not clear from Jake, Manchester’s comment whether he read this portion of the editorial, but to accept the viewpoint that Washington’s democratic ideals somehow derived from the slaves he owned is to make a preposterously large leap.

The fact that Washington personally owned slaves is lamentable. The fact that anyone ever owned slaves is lamentable. Most lamentable of all is that that slavery continues to be practiced as a way of life in some places to this day.

The need to mention any of this in the context of paying homage to our founding fathers for the great gift they bestowed on us on a day set aside for doing precisely that is beneath contempt.

Blowback