It ranks with the filibuster and the chaplain’s prayer among the hoariest traditions of the United States Senate: Every year since 1896, on or about Feb. 22, a member reads into the record George Washington’s Farewell Address. Washington’s prose, as honed by his ghostwriters James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, does not easily translate into the parlance of soundbite politics. But the dangers identified by the retiring president—excessive partisanship, sectional over national loyalties, misplaced allegiance to foreign powers—are as contemporary as the latest tweetstorm.
According to Stephen Howard Browne, a professor of communications at Penn State, the lawmakers may be listening to the wrong speech. To Mr. Browne it is Washington’s first inaugural address, delivered on April 30, 1789, that offers a classic defense of republican virtue as the linchpin of popular government. “I walk on untrodden ground,” the new president there acknowledged, his every action defining the scope of executive authority for all who would follow. In the years since, countless writers have retraced his footsteps, leading Mr. Browne himself to wonder: “Have we not had quite enough of George Washington?”
The question answers itself in this deceptively slender volume, in which Mr. Browne skillfully synthesizes biography, travelogue, social and political history, and rhetorical analysis to reach fresh conclusions about the relationship between individual and national character. Long before he took the oath of office on the balcony of New York’s Federal Hall, Washington had enshrined duty over self-advancement in his personal code. He demonstrated as much at the close of the Revolution, when mutinous officers in the Continental Army contemplated marching on Congress, until they were shamed out of it by their victorious general.
