Where The Founder Fits in the Picture

By Richard Brookhiser

Four of John Trumbull's paintings of the American Revolution hang in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, but to see the complete series you have to visit the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Conn. What they say about the war and the country is still worth pondering.

Yale's Trumbulls hang on a wall the color of tomato soup in front of a green plush banquette meant to duplicate an overripe art gallery of the past century. It is best to study the paintings in the order of the events they depict. The first two are pictures of battles: the failed defense of Bunker's Hill (actually Breed's Hill), which Trumbull had seen with his own eyes, and a failed attack on Quebec. The central event in each is a military pieta, the death on the field of an American general, though the compositions are swirls of confusion and activity. Hands wave, lifeless limbs sprawl, flags stream or tangle crazily against smoky, lowering skies.

The third picture in historical order, The Declaration of Independence, is probably the most familiar (it is reproduced, badly, on the reverse of the $2 bill). But it is not a terribly good painting. Trumbull shows the drafting committee presenting its handiwork to John Hancock, but he was also obliged to include 40-odd additional Founding Fathers. As a result, the eye wanders from John Adams' stockings to Thomas Jefferson's red waistcoat to the drum hanging oddly on the room's rear wall.

With The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, there is a change. Once again, we see dead and dying on the field, but this is an after-the-battle scene, and there is no doubt about the center of attention: the American general who accepts the wounded Hessian commander's surrender, George Washington. The cloud behind Washington's head, lest we miss the point, is white. Washington dominates all but one of the remaining scenes in the set, which ends with his resignation as Commander in Chief. He wins the battles, the war, the peace and the paintings.

Yale has quite sensibly grouped the pictures around another, larger canvas, not strictly in the series, but proclaiming the same message: a standing portrait of Washington at the Battle of Trenton, in a bright yellow uniform and navy blue frock coat. Behind him, a horse rears and a cannon lies shattered. But he radiates a majestic calm. An empire, one feels, might well break on that forehead, or a republic arise.

Trumbull's notion of Washington's character was not unique; virtually all his contemporaries acknowledged his poise, his integrity, his resolve, his reserve. Nor was Trumbull alone in his estimate of the importance of Washington's character to the success of the Revolution and the new nation. Washington had a quasi-divine status in his lifetime, and the Washington Monument was the first of the great presidential memorials to rise in the city named after him.

Yet in the past 40 years or so, his reputation has sunk. He may be on our quarters, but he is no longer first in our hearts, if the testimony of our intelligentsia is to be believed. Arthur Schlesinger Sr.'s poll of prominent American historians in 1948 put Washington second, after Abraham Lincoln. In 1981 a poll of all Ph.D.-holding American historians at the assistant- professor level or higher found that Washington had sunk to third, behind Franklin D. Roosevelt. What happened?

Part of the fall in Washington's fortunes is simple shortsightedness, to which even historians are not immune. The relative prominence of Franklin Roosevelt is owing to the fact that Roosevelt created the modern state, in both its domestic and military aspects, and died before its ills were diagnosed. He takes the credit and escapes the blame.

Washington suffers, more seriously, from the intellectualizing and verbalizing of American life. Perhaps because Americans are better educated -- or, at least, spend more time in schools -- we believe only what we read in the papers, or in the great books.

Lincoln, who has twice won the historians' presidential sweepstakes, was the greatest stylist to occupy the White House. Of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton all helped write political classics. Washington can make no such claim. His most famous pronouncement, the farewell address, was written with Hamilton's assistance. His magnum opus was his life, and how can you put a life on a reading list?

Ideas are important. But they are not enough. Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton were erratic leaders, for all their brilliance, and they were far from the worst that the young country produced. Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr were also patriots. Washington possessed, to an unparalleled degree, three qualities America needed to succeed, in addition to sound political theory: the desire to serve its ideals, the ability to inspire others to serve them and an absolute unwillingness to be led astray by personal gain or ideological distractions.

Every subsequent revolution, from the French Revolution, the year of his first Inaugural, to the last coup in Fiji, has fallen short of his standards. The few liberators who were honest, even saintly -- San Martin, Garibaldi, Gandhi -- left chaos in their wake. Most have been rascals or monsters and forerunners of worse tyrants yet.

The character issue of the late 18th century was not a matter of politicians' sex lives. It was the question of whether a large-scale republic in the modern world could summon enough civic virtue to exist. George Washington, more than any other American, guaranteed that the answer would be yes.