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GEORGE WASHINGTON (Vols. I & II, Young Washington, 1,013 pp.)—Douglas Southall Freeman—Scribner ($15).
". . . and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, 'I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.'
" 'Run to my arms, you dearest boy,' cried his father in transports, 'run to my arms. Glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son is worth more than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver, and their fruits of purest gold.'"
No man could completely live down a yarn like that, which was told to Parson Weems in 1800 by an "excellent lady." It is just such saccharine legends, overlaid with priggish nonsense, that have helped to make George Washington a forbidding figure in U.S. history. The too-well-known portraits, by Gilbert Stuart and others, haven't helped either. The frozen face of Washington that stares down on thousands of U.S. schoolkids is that of a jut-jawed old party whose cumbersome false teeth are giving him trouble.
No less forbidding is the awesome father-of-his-country whose chilly shade rises from the five massive volumes of Chief Justice John Marshall. There have been at least 54 other Washington biographies, most of them rewrites, but their net effect has been to make a great man something of a national bore. Paragons rarely make sympathetic heroes, and to most U.S. youngsters Feb. 22 is a wintry day that celebrates a wintry figure.
Durable Heroes. This week, in an attic study 69 miles from George Washington's Virginia birthplace, a self-confessed "amateur" scholar was digging away at the formidable task of making the nation's first President a credible man. It was a rescue job—as biography must be—of a historical character buried alive. At 62, Douglas Southall Freeman, the nation's No. 1 military historian, is a past master at converting the legendary dead into durable heroes. He devoted 19 years to a four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee, the untouchable Galahad of the Confederacy; historians of the Civil War were agreed that the job need never be done again. Another six years were spent on his three-volume Lee's Lieutenants, a study in command and military personality so lastingly pertinent that General Omar N. Bradley made it his major reading in the days before the European invasion.
If anyone could find Washington-the-man behind the cold marble mask of the historical figure, it was Douglas Freeman. Next week, with the first two volumes off the press (there are four more to come, the last in 1952), readers can get started on what is certain to be the best researched life of Washington yet written.
Washington Monument. Said Biographer Freeman, in Richmond, where he is at work on Volume III: "Washington did not himself climb up on a marble pedestal, strike a pose and stay there. What we're goin' to do, please God, is to make him a human bein'. The great big thing stamped across that man is character.''