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Washington has always been one of the most enigmatic of Revolutionary heroes and Presidents, which has rendered his image amenable to packaging and repackaging according to the needs of the times. His reputation for honesty, probity, and dignity (among other virtues) has appealed to Americans across the generations. We, as a culture, have placed him in an imaginary colonial past--simpler, less complicated--a past that we can look to, and find comfort in, as a palliative for our own hurried and complicated lives.
Marling takes us through the development of Washington the "icon", beginning in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. She shows us how our fascintation with the hero of Valley Forge helped to spur a general, wide-spread interest in things colonial--the Colonial Revival movement--that continues to this day (her book ends in the 1980s); witness the vast quantities of colonial revival furnishings, house designs, and other "artifacts" produced over the decades.
Apart from Washington's "influence" on the colonial revival, his image has been used to sell everything from soup to nuts to politicians, a phenomenon that Marling examines in amusing detail. Her analysis of Warren G. Harding's use of Washington iconography is wonderful, as is her examination of the symbolic use of Washington and the "colonial" by the artist Grant Wood.
In sum, for anyone interested in American popular culture and the way that we make use of the past, "George Washington Slept Here" should find space on your bookshelf.
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The book seemed to be a meditation on a single theme - George Washington was a human being with human frailties, misfortunes, and maladies. However, it is these weaknesses, according to the vibrant virtous verbiage(this is style in which Scwartz seems to sporadically specialize)of the author, that resulted in the "cult" of Washington.
Schwartz alludes to Washington's Revolutionary War loss at Philadelphia, his military indecisiveness and his self-induced lameducketry during his second term as proof of his humanity. I was pleasently suprised to read about these qualities or in Washington's case, the lack thereof.
Unfortunaely, Professor Schwartz assumes that the reader has rabies, because he injects us with 17 examples on the same theme. What of his problems with L'Enfant, his relationship with Martha, his relationship with his father, his children(did he have any?), his relationship with politicians other than John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin?
In sum, Schartz provides the reader with a brilliant synopses of as to how Washington's military failures made him more human and thus, a better man. The scinece-fictionesque conclusion is atypical of a biography, but this is an atypical biography, so it fits quite will.
However, Schwartz is a sociologist, not a historian, and he attempts to overcompensate for this fact. Instead of producing a sociological study of a man whose life is often portrayed as if he were a Super Bowl halftime show, Schartz has fallen into the quagmire of over-analyzing his military misadventures, a boring road that this reader has travelled down many times before as an amateur historian.
Still, this is an entertaining read, one I will recommend to others with just caution.
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The book is lavishly illustrated with color and grayscale pictures that are strategically placed throughout the text in a way that is particularly helpful to the reader. Most students will find this book to be a fairly easy read that captivates them while they learn about the character of our first president.