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George Washington in the Movies

From The Columbia Companion to American History

on Film

Columbia University Press

By John D. Thomas

"Be courteous to all, intimate with few." George Washington gave those words of advice to his nephew, Bushrod, but they can also easily be applied to the relationship our first president has had with the American people. Almost every citizen knows Washington as the mythic father of our nation, but very few have a notion of what the man was really like. Americans commonly know Washington as the tenacious military leader whose defensive strategies helped the fledgling nation win independence. During his presidency (1789-1797), Washington kept the nation out of war, created our cabinet and currency, and, perhaps more than any other founding father, helped keep the country unified. The United States named its capital for him, built the towering Washington monument, and put his solemn face on the ubiquitous dollar bill.

But that is all most Americans know. A great number would certainly be shocked to learn that Washington was also sensitive, unschooled, emotional, pessimistic, and not an overwhelming intellect. The reason so many people have such a sketchy impression of Washington is that he was a victim of his own good (and frequently apocryphal) press. Many of the common myths about Washington -- that he could not tell a lie, that he threw a coin across the Rappahannock, that he kneeled in prayer at Valley Forge looking for divine guidance -- were perpetrated by nineteenth-century biographer Parson Weems. As a result, Washington is now seen by many as remote, aloof, and not particularly interesting.

After examining how historians currently view Washington, a considerably different, more complicated and contradictory picture emerges. Because so many portraits of Washington depict him as regal and reserved -- which he quite often was -- few people have any inkling of how volatile the man could be. In fact, Washington had quite a temper and was prone to fits of cursing. He was also a very proud man who was deeply concerned with how history would remember him. In contrast to this pride and self-assurance, Washington was quite insecure, not only because of the death of his father when he was eleven, but also because of his almost complete lack of formal education and his rural upbringing. He took great umbrage when anyone questioned his authority. In spite of his lack of schooling and lack of exposure to culture as a youth, he grew to love theater and music, he became an accomplished amateur architect, and he earned a reputation as an experimental farmer, one of whose projects was to introduce the mule to this country. Washington was also quite stoic personally, but he spent lavishly on entertaining. A slave owner, he was strict and demanding with his slaves, but he grew to find slavery repugnant. (He took the radical step of freeing his slaves in his will.) Another surprising fact is that Washington was anything but a commanding speaker.

The popular impression of Washington as a flawless military commander is something of a myth. While his army eventually wore down the superb British forces in what amounted to a war of attrition, during the Revolutionary War the general fought in merely nine major battles and won only a third of them.

Washington was not beyond criticism even in his own time. For example, in 1778, Pennsylvania attorney general Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant corresponded with Congressman James Lovell, telling him that "thousands of lives and millions of property are yearly sacrificed to the inefficiency of the commander-in-chief. Two battles he has lost for us by two such blunders as might have disgraced a soldier of three months' standing" (Randall 354).

But if Washington was such a flawed individual, how did he manage to have such a profound impact on the founding of our nation? Part of the answer rests in his disciplined character, as Robert F. Jones notes:

His talents in most fields were relatively commonplace; what he did was to raise those talents to the level of superlative accomplishment by self-discipline, a character trait in which he was certainly extraordinary. This enabled him, in turn, to pay unremitting attention to details, essential to coordinating all the disparate parts of an organization so they worked toward the accomplishment of a goal, whether it be the lands and slaves of Mount Vernon toward the attaining of personal wealth or the resources of the States and the soldiers of the Continental Army toward a victory over the English. (157)

With such a fascinating and complicated subject with which to work, one might assume that the Hollywood film industry would produce compelling cinema about the father of our new nation. Regrettably, this has not been the case.

Hollywood's Washington

While no Hollywood feature film has ever been made primarily about the life and times of Washington, America's first chief executive has appeared in supporting roles in about a dozen movies. Of those films, three are available on video featuring Washington as more than merely a spectral presence - America (1924); Unconquered (1947); and John Paul Jones (1959). Close examination reveals that films about Washington's life and character unconsciously reflect the eras in which they were made and that his image was manipulated to meet the rhetorical needs of the project. All of these films present Washington very much in the tradition of Parson Weems. And, keeping in mind the impact that Weems had on Washington's legacy, it is important to note how these sorts of portrayals have kept those myths alive. As film scholar George F. Custen writes, "While most biopics do not claim to be the definitive history of an individual or era, they are often the only source of information many people will ever have on a given historical subject" (7).

America (1924)

The New York Times described D.W. Griffith's America as a movie "that will stir the patriotic hearts of the nation as probably no other picture ever has done." Apparently American patriotism was not stirring enough for Griffith, because he contrived a love story to carry the plot. Two scenes are crucial to understanding how Washington was shaped as a symbolic figure and contrived to fit the purposes of this film.

In addition to chopping down the cherry tree and crossing the Delaware, one of the most persistent images of Washington is of his time spent at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777-1778. On the one hand, Washington expert Willard Sterne Randall writes, "The pain and suffering that Washington's troops suffered that winter ... have become a cliche in American history.... It was not an unusually cold winter: in fact, it was one of the warmest in memory" (351). But warm memories are exactly what many people have of Valley Forge, thanks to the apocryphal image of Washington kneeling in the snow, praying for guidance. The myth lives on into our time in a manner clearly designed to inspire national admiration: that image of Washington on bended knee with hands clenched in prayer has graced two postage stamps (1928 and 1977) as well as J. C. Leyendecker's famous cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1935. Like the U.S. Postal Service, Griffith was not timorous about using fiction to reinforce the American belief that Washington was a divinely inspired hero. Through an intertitle, America informs the audience that, at Valley Forge, "Washington's army suffered through the winter of 1777-78, the worst in fifteen years." Then, the film cuts to the classic shot of Washington (Arthur Dewey) kneeling in the snow, hands folded in prayer, eyes to the sky seeking guidance from the Lord.

The final scene in America depicts the inauguration of Washington in New York City. The image itself is not incorrect -- Washington standing on a balcony with ecstatically cheering crowds below him. The intent of the final tableau is to show America's first president as an icon of strength and power, showered with adulation. But, at the time, Washington was feeling anything but strong and powerful. Describing the new president's mood as "pessimistic and gloomy," Harrison Clark writes that, "for Washington, the thought that his countrymen expected him to be a living god served only to deepen his human worries" (132). That apprehension, however, was certainly not a color on the palette from which Griffith painted his epic portrait. Still, at the time America was released, the country was dealing with corruption in Warren G. Harding's administration, including the infamous Teapot Dome scandal, and the resplendent, unimpeachable image of Washington on movie screens would certainly have been received as assuring and restorative. In addition, America was released the same year the xenophobic Immigration Act of 1924 was passed. The law was designed to maintain America's putatively Nordic bloodlines through immigration restrictions, and the image of the heroic, ever-so-white Washington in America could easily have been seen as underscoring the sentiment behind the law. It should also not be forgotten that America was made by the same filmmaker who created The Birth of a Nation (1915), a racist picture that proudly displayed its Nativist sentiments.

Unconquered (1947)

Almost a quarter century later, a similarly iconic Washington appears in Cecil B. DeMille's Unconquered. The movie focuses on Captain Christopher Holden (Gary Cooper), a frontiersman who saves both a fort and his love from the evil clutches of a rogue (Howard DaSilva) who is attempting to undermine America's march toward independence.

One scene is key in showing how DeMille worked to manipulate Washington's life in order for it to match the hagiographic myth. Washington (Richard Gaines) finds Holden staring uneasily at an auction of white indentured servants brought over from Britain (Holden's love object [Paulette Goddard] is one of them), and Washington ventures this bit of personal information: "One of my teachers was an indentured convict, Chris, a fine man, but he never could teach me to spell."

While it is true that Washington did receive much of his education from an indentured servant, the film does not explain that the man was owned by Washington's father, that Washington's father also owned dozens of slaves, and that Washington, himself, would own some 350 after his marriage. In 1947, when Unconquered premiered, it is safe to assume that an offhand remark about Washington being schooled by a white indentured servant was one thing, but opening the Pandora's box of slavery at a time before the nation had begun to deal adequately with its racial divisions was something entirely different. DeMille, for his part, kept the box hermetically sealed. It is also important to note that the Cold War-inspired anti-communist investigations began in Hollywood around the time of this film's release, and that the film's moral, dignified portrait of Washington could easily be seen as an artistic salvo from the film industry to underscore its faith in classic American (i.e., anti-communist) values.

John Paul Jones (1959)

In 1959, Washington once again appeared on the screen, this time playing muse to heroic sea captain John Paul Jones (Robert Stack) [in a portrait not very different from that of Unconquered]. As a clue to understanding how America felt about Washington during the 1950s, historian Karal Ann Marling writes that "in his appearance as a kind of historical mirage praying in the cold of Valley Forge on Norman Rockwell's 1950 Boy Scout calendar, George Washington was a holy picture" (378).

And in director John Farrow's John Paul Jones, Washington (John Crawford) is held in divine reverence. The movie also underscores how filmmakers never allow facts to get in the way of national myths. The key scene in John Paul Jones occurs as the captain, fed up with the bureaucratic balderdash that is keeping him from fighting the good fight on the high seas, travels to Valley Forge during that historic winter of 1777-78 to personally deliver his letter of resignation. The future first president lectures Jones like a naughty schoolboy, asking him, "What are you fighting for, the principle of liberty or promotion?"

In fact, that dramatic encounter never happened, because that winter Jones had already sailed to France to see Benjamin Franklin. The New York Times, for one, felt that Farrow's historic tinkering was over the top. "The old Hollywood disposition to reconstruct American history in the spirit and style of steel engravings or large patriotic lithographs is exercised again in [producer] Samuel Bronston's pseudo-biographical 'John Paul Jones,' " wrote Bosley Crowther. However, that type of portrait may have been psychologically reassuring for many Americans at the time. President Eisenhower, a Washington-esque war hero whose administrations were characterized by peace and prosperity, was about to finish his second (and final) term, (potentially) leaving the nation without a strong, experienced leader to deal with critical issues including an international Cold War and increasing domestic racial tensions.

Washington in Screen Comedies

Washington has also appeared as a flat character in a number of comic farces. A good example is Monsieur Beaucaire, a 1946 Paramount release starring Bob Hope as the eponymous barber who flees France to set up shop in the colonies. At the end of the picture, Washington (Douglass Dumbrille) trots into Beaucaire's barber shop for a shave and a haircut, and, when Beaucaire asks him what his plans for the day are, Washington replies, "Oh, Jefferson and the boys are cooking up some sort of a declaration or something. I thought I might go over and watch them sign it." Comic irony has never been so rich.

Washington once again plays the fool in the 1942 Jack Benny film, George Washington Slept Here. The story hinges on the fact that Bill Fuller's (Benny) wife (Ann Sheridan) buys a dilapidated house in the countryside, mostly because she is in awe of the fact that Washington once spent the night there. When they begin renovating, the couple goes wildly into debt, and things never stop going awry. At one point, once again perpetuating the Weems-ian myth of Washington and his axe, the frustrated family maid declares, "George Washington should have chopped this house down instead of the cherry tree."

Watching and reading the critical responses to these films featuring Washington as a character, one is left with the feeling that a great injustice has been done to our first president. Washington has been portrayed as a ridiculously virtuous one-trick political pony. In the same way that Jefferson Smith stands in naive awe before the Washington Monument in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, filmmakers have also treated Washington with a reverence that has done little more than perpetuate the Washington of Weems' didactic tales.

Two Documentaries Look Beyond the Washington Myth

Whatever Happened to George Washington? (1996) has attempted to right some of these cinematic/historical wrongs. In it, Ben Wattenberg moderates a roundtable discussion with a quartet of Washington experts (Daniel Boorstin, Stanley Elkin, Edwin Yoder, James Rees) to "look beyond the mythology of the father of our country."

The participants discuss matters including Washington's lackluster military record and his intellectual limitations; however the issue they continually return to, i.e., the facet of Washington's persona that was most crucial to his success in helping to establish this nation, was his character. For example, as Yoder explains, "People forget that at this time the infant U.S. was surrounded by hostile and alien powers -- the British in Canada, the French in the Mississippi Valley, the Spanish in Florida ... and Washington had the vision and character to keep this struggling young nation out of this vortex of European rivalries and ambitions."

While these experts do a good job of humanizing Washington, their reliance on such an amorphous term as "character" makes their arguments somewhat imprecise. Even Washington de-mythologizer, the late Marcus Cunliffe, is very wary about attaching the term to our first president, writing pejoratively that, in the work of Weems, "character is the key word" (8).

A more solid, substantive and precise examination of Washington was presented by the C-SPAN series, American Presidents: George Washington. It ran for more than six hours, and segment topics included Washington's boyhood home, Washington and slavery, Washington's relationship with the first Congress, Washington's relationship with women, and Washington's connection to modern day America. Perhaps the most compelling portion of the programming was a two-hour segment during which historian Richard Norton Smith answered questions of callers from all over America. Smith fielded questions that touched on everything from Washington's sense of humor (he had a quite developed one) to whether or not he had sexual relations with his slaves (he did not). A twelve-year-old boy even called to ask if the first president had indeed chopped down the fabled cherry tree. Many of the callers expressed a desire to know more about the real Washington, as opposed to the saccharine myths that have been disseminated so widely.

Judging from the hunger for knowledge about Washington expressed by those callers, it seems as if America is now ready and eager to get to know and truly understand its first president. Hollywood films have shortchanged Washington over the years, inflating his image beyond recognition. Certainly, such studies as Willard Sterne Randall's George Washington: A Life and George Washington: The Man Behind the Myths by William M.S. Rasmussen and Robert S. Tilton provide a basis of fact for future films about our first president. When such films are produced, Americans will rediscover Washington as a man much less precious than they were led to believe, but just as important in the founding of our country as they knew.