(2 of 2)
If Historian Knollenberg's voice is not always dispassionate, this is due to the fact that his book is less an onslaught on Washington than a book-bat heaved in a historians' squabble. Conspicuous on the receiving end is Historian John C. Fitzpatrick, editor of the Bicentennial edition of Washington's works.
Since the beginning of the present century, historians like Sydney George Fisher, Claude H. Van Tyne, Francis V. Greene, by a process known as making Washington less of a statue and more of a human being, have busily reduced the prodigious figure to something nearer their own size and understanding. They were doing quite nicely when along came Historian John C. Fitzpatrick, by whom, says Knollenberg testily, "their work has been largely undone." So exasperated does Historian Knollenberg become in undoing this undoing that he accuses Historian Fitzpatrick of taking literally a remark of Washington Irving's: "There is a certain meddlesome spirit which, in the garb of learned research, goes prying about the traces of history, casting down its monuments, and marring and mutilating its fairest trophies. Care should be taken to vindicate great names from such pernicious erudition."