They say journalism is the first draft of history. I’m among the many journalists who love studying the later drafts.
I read a lot of history, often in the form of biography. I took many history courses as an undergraduate. One class at Northwestern University that made a particularly lasting impression was a semester-long consideration of George Washington’s 6,000-word “Farewell Address.” The professor asked us to contemplate not just Washington’s address to “friends and fellow citizens” in 1796, but the historical and social context of Washington’s decision to decline to run for a third presidential term.
Washington’s farewell is most of all a love letter to democracy.
“This government, the offspring of our own choice, uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers, uniting security with energy, and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just claim to your confidence and your support,” Washington wrote. “Respect for its authority, compliance with its laws, acquiescence in its measures, are duties enjoined by the fundamental maxims of true liberty. The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.”
Washington’s farewell also is an appeal for unity, a criticism of partisanship, a primer on foreign relations, a call to recognize that patriotism comes with responsibilities. Because it contains so much, it has had something to say to a wide range of readers.
Washington even included a shout-out to journalism: “Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”
Years after I took the class, Morgan Tsvangirai, a Zimbabwean opposition leader then in exile in South Africa, told me the most important piece of writing he’d ever read from an American politician was Washington’s “Farewell Address.”
When I met Tsvangirai in 2008, Robert Mugabe had been in power in Zimbabwe 28 years. Mugabe’s early successes – winning a democratic election after the end of British colonial rule, bringing healthcare and education to more citizens, overseeing a stable economy – had been overshadowed by the brutality to which he had resorted to hang onto power. What if, Tsvangirai wondered, Zimbabwe’s founding father had had the humility of America’s?
A central theme of Washington’s farewell was that the future of a democracy lay with the people, not any one man. Washington’s retirement set two terms as the unwritten limit in the United States – and set a precedent for presidential farewell addresses. After Franklin D. Roosevelt served 12 years, dying during his fourth term in 1945, the two-term, eight-year limit became law with a Constitutional amendment.
Washington wrote in his farewell: “With me a predominant motive has been to endeavor to gain time to our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption to that degree of strength and consistency which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.”
My university class was called “Toward a Farewell Address.” Lin-Manuel Miranda brilliantly condensed much of that class into “One Last Time,” one of the songs in “Hamilton.” A line in that song would have made a better name for my class: “Teach them how to say goodbye.”
The first time I heard the “Hamilton” soundtrack I recognized that Miranda was quoting the Washington address that Alexander Hamilton ghost wrote. The farewell had inspired Miranda in his artistic and personal exploration of America’s early drafts of itself
“In reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors,” Washington said in the final lines of his farewell, lines Miranda transformed into song.
“Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.”
There was Washington’s humility, the quality Tsvangirai so admired. I sometimes fear we citizens don’t value it enough. Washington placed his faith in ordinary people, and that is a responsibility we must live up to.
“Relying on its kindness in this as in other things, and actuated by that fervent love towards it, which is so natural to a man who views in it the native soil of himself and his progenitors for several generations, I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.”
Washington, a slave owner, would not have recognized me, a black woman, as a “fellow-citizen.” But I can claim equality today because others took up the task of perfecting our union.
I had admired Washington’s farewell for the ideals they express – many of them still unrealized. It took “Hamilton” for me to hear that his words also had music.