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BY TRACING George Washington's deliberate development
from colonial planter and soldier to republican icon, Paul
Longmore answers the riddle of Washington's simultaneous
fame and aloofness, arriving at a portrait of Washington as
a self-fashioning representative of his turbulent time. As a
young Virginia planter, Washington aspired to virtues
associated with the colonial gentry, but as the British
system of patronage threatened his own ambitions, he adopted
the radical Whig patriotism that would lead him to take up
arms. As a national hero of the Revolutionary War, and in
accepting the presidency, Washington defended civilian
control of the military and other ideals of republican
government because his own image was inextricably tied to
their success. The Invention of George Washington, first
published in hardcover in 1988, explores the character of
our first president in modern terms, but as Longmore shows,
Washington's assiduous cultivation of his own public image
does not ultimately diminish his extraordinary achievements
as general and statesman.
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"Paul Longmore has examined the origins of the national
image of George Washington, an image that still seems to
hide the man. (How could anyone have been that good?) It was
not, Longmore shows, the work of Washington's admirers, nor
yet of any 18th-century equivalent of the press agent.
Washington deliberately created his image himself."
--The New Republic
"Longmore's well-written and thoroughly researched work
explains George Washington's career in terms of his lifelong
ambition for public recognition, his conscious embodiment of
colonial Virginia's honor-based culture, and his adherence
to the Whig ideal of true patriotism. . . . Longmore also
convincingly demonstrates that, contrary to previous
scholarship, Washington was as politically sophisticated and
well-read in history and politics as other Founding
Fathers."
--Choice
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