Cross & Crescent

Editor’s Note: The following article is an excerpt of an article originally published from the September 1975 edition of the Cross & Crescent

Virtually every American schoolchild has become familiar with the story of the cherry tree and all the other tales which have made George Washington as much a folk legend as a hallowed figure.

Washington’s life has provided an abundance of material for thousands of historians, biographers, and novelists over the years, and one – a Lambda Chi Alpha named John Alexander Carroll – was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography for his work entitled George Washington: First in Peace in 1958.

Brother Carroll’s completion of a biography of George Washington was the result more of chance than of choice.

“Twenty-five years ago,” he explained, “while I was a student at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., I was employed on a part-time basis by the famous historian from Richmond, Virginia, Douglas Southall Freeman. Some years earlier, back during World War II, Dr. Freeman decided to write a definitive, multi-volume biography of George Washington. He had already spent twenty years writing a four-volume life of Robert E. Lee, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and he followed that with three great volumes on Lee’s comrades-in-arms. He used to say that he should have done the Washington ahead of the Lee books because Lee so obviously patterned his own behavior on the Washington example. As it was, Dr. Freeman cranked up the Washington project and after a while he hired me as a research assistant. When he died in 1953, he was nearing the end of his sixth volume on Washington. I was then his chief researcher in the Library of Congress and the National Archives, and his principal assistant in Richmond was Mrs. Mary Wells Ashworth. We got the sixth volume ready for the publisher, and after it came out in 1954 contracted us to do a final volume. This is the book which came to be called George Washington: First in Peace. It treated the last six and a half years of the General’s life, and it took the two of us three years to do. It was a happy collaboration, and I personally got a lot of miles out of it.

Becoming “Doctor” Carroll

“In fact, I wouldn’t be ‘Doctor’ Carroll at all without the book. I got my Ph.D. dissertation out of it. Of the 22 chapters in the book, the first 15 deal with Washington’s second presidential term – the years 1793-97. That was my part of the work, and my dissertation at Georgetown was entitled President Washington and the Challenge of Neutrality, 1793-97. Mrs. Ashworth concentrated on Washington’s retirement period at his Mount Vernon farm – the years 1797-99. She was a very bright lady, a real Alpha person with tremendous curiosity and insight, and she understood Dr. Freeman’s methodology down to the last jot. She was a widow, about twenty years older than I, and she had been associated with the Freeman family for years on historical projects. I learned a lot from Dr. Freeman directly before he died, but I also learned from Mrs. Ashworth.

“Mrs. Ashworth and I retained a few graduate students, mostly my friends from Georgetown, to do a little copying for us from manuscript collections. We didn’t have much money to spend on paid research, but my Georgetown pals wanted in on the project and they gave us some good mileage. My personal debt, however, is to my main professor at Georgetown, Charles Callan Tansill, who read my chapter drafts very closely and provided invaluable supervision overall. Dr. Tansill used to tell his friends that my dissertation was the best he had directed in forty years as a university professor. If that was so, it was as much his masterpiece as mine. He was my beau ideal of a professor. He’s been dead for many years now, and I don’t expect to see his like again. If he hadn’t been such a fire-eating Southerner and a controversialist, he probably would have been appointed either Librarian of Congress or National Archivist. He knew more American historiography and more about the manuscript resources of U.S. history than any scholar then alive. Everybody said so, even his enemies.”

On the subject of Washington himself, Dr. Carroll is in basic agreement with the President’s very first biographer – Parson Weems. “A hundred years ago,” he said, “every American schoolboy knew who he [Weems] was. He was the man who wrote The Life of General George Washington, which was next to the Bible in sacred authority. The first edition was printed about six months after Washington went to his grave in December 1799, and a revised edition was still being passed out in the schools when Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as president in 1901. Weems, who was actually an itinerant book-peddler rather than a preacher, made himself and his descendants rich with his little tract on Washington. He told the stories of the cherry tree, the well-pitched silver dollar, the bountiful life at Mt. Vernon, the severe life at Valley Forge, the Yorktown triumph, the Federal Convention, and Washington’s toils in the chair of state as the first chief of the American republic. On the last page Weems has Washington ascending into heaven and being greeted by St. Peter at the Pearly gates.

Physically, Dr. Carroll describes Washington as “giant-sized – 6’-3 ½” in a day when American men were three or four inches shorter, on the average, than today. He was very large-boned, thick with saddle muscles, and weighed between 210 and 225 pounds at different stages of his life. Moreover, he was militarily erect all his life, and this made him appear even larger. Lincoln was a mite taller, but he was much thinner and stood in a slouch. If the two were side by side, Washington would appear to be considerably the bigger man. His physical remarkability was the first thing anyone ever noticed about him. It made him rather God-like, and people tended to look upon him with awe. Someone of the size of Rock Hudson, or Wilt Chamberlain as a better example, would have the same effect today.

Washington: Patriotic Visionary

As a person and statesman, “Washington was a patriotic visionary. All the Founding Fathers were visionaries, of course, or else they wouldn’t have founded a nation. He was instinctively conservative in that he was property-minded, tradition-loving, and God-fearing. But he was in no sense reactionary. He was as visionary as Jefferson, and in some ways more so.

“And he had more directly to do with the founding of the United States than any other person – more than Franklin, who did a great deal diplomatically; more than Jefferson or Madison, who did so much intellectually; and more than Hamilton, who did a great deal in a practical way. And I haven’t forgotten the bell-ringers of the Revolution, Sam Adams and Patrick Henry, or the mainstay contributions of John Adams. Each one of the Founding Fathers was in his own peculiar way, just a wee bit jealous of the central, integral, and most important role Washington played in the great developments of the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

As the first president of the United States, Washington was faced with enormous tasks of building a strong new government. And the old speculation of whether the man makes the office or the office makes the man has been applied as much to Washington as to other U.S. Presidents. Brother Carroll feels that in Washington’s case, as in the case of other men who have held that high office, “you can reasonably say both things. As the first president, Washington brought his reputation, character, and personality to the office. Certainly these ingredients ‘made’ the office what it became in his time, and what it tended to be thereafter. But simultaneously the burdens and responsibilities of office added dimensions and contours to the man himself, and Washington went home to Mount Vernon in 1797 a wiser – and sadder – human being.”

Historians have also uncovered some of Washington’s weaknesses, although they could hardly be called monumental. “Parson Weems discovered none,” noted Dr. Carroll, “but later biographers have unearthed a few. Dr. Freeman used to say that Washington was a bit too zealous in guarding his image and therefore a bit thin-skinned; perhaps a bit too interested in ostentatious display of his possessions – land, livestock, equipage, and clothing; and a bit too exacting in all business transactions and somewhat tight-fisted with money. From my personal researches, I would agree with the latter in particular. Washington may have thrown a dollar across the river, but no one got rich from the nickels he dropped. I would add, from my researches, that he had a dynamite temper which did explode from time to time – and he was not inclined to apologize very readily for such eruptions.”

As a scholar who has devoted so much energy to recording the lives and thoughts of our founding fathers, and as “Bicentennial Professor” at Troy State University, John Carroll feels strongly about the practical implications of the Bicentennial for the United States. The nation can benefit from the Bicentennial, he said, “by getting it clearly in mind that there is an important difference between intentions and achievement. Jefferson’s immortal Declaration stated the intention of his countrymen to be free; Washington’s work at Valley Forge and Yorktown made possible the achievement of freedom for Americans. That freedom was not perfect in Washington’s time, nor in Lincoln’s, nor is it nearly perfect today. But in two hundred years the American people have made freedom more nearly perfect than anyone else ever made it anywhere on earth. We are still declaring freedom, as the Founders did in 1776; but we must also continue to achieve it, and that is the harder part.”

Becoming a Lambda Chi

A relative newcomer to Lambda Chi Alpha, Dr. Carroll speaks positively of its value, and speculates that George Washington would readily agree with him. “I became a member in 1970 while on the faculty of Texas Christian University. When I was a student at Georgetown years ago, there were no fraternities on campus – just clubs of one sort or another. Still I was in military service at that time and didn’t live on or even near the campus. I had no significant involvements of the sort that come with fraternity life. This left a certain gap in my education that I began to notice after I had gone to teach at the University of Arizona in the latter 1950s. I’m very glad that I finally had the opportunity to become associated with a fraternity. Even at my age it has broadened and deepened my thinking on a number of topics. The mindless attacks on the Greeks that accompanied the campus radicalism of a few years ago were, to my way of reckoning, quintessential examples of the craziness of that period. The survival and flourishing of Greek life, on the other hand, is pretty telling testimony to the value of fraternities in American higher education. If you were to ask me, I would say with certainty that George Washington would have been a fraternity man had the opportunity been available to him. He would have readily grasped the point of the whole thing.”