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| The Apotheosis of Lincoln, illustration ca. 1865. |
Presidents’ Day is jacked up. To begin with, it’s not on the
right day. Or days.
As a celebration, it’s a conflation of the birthdays of two
iconic American presidents: Abraham Lincoln (#16) and George Washington (#1). Lincoln’s
birthday is on February 12, 1809; Washington’s is on February 22, 1731, except
Washington’s was really on February 11, 1731 as the British Empire didn’t
switch over to the Gregorian calendar until Washington was 21, in 1752. Then
Congress changed it and since 1971, it’s taken place on the third Monday of
each February, so now their birthdays can be commemorated anywhere between
February 15 and February 22 of any given year. Got me?
And how IS it celebrated? We don’t really party; we don’t
dress up like Abe or G Dubs. We go shopping, which was perhaps the whole point
of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act to begin with. Before then, each day was
observed on its own.
Perhaps I remember this more vividly because it was a
constant in school for me through age 10. The twin icons of American
self-definition loomed over the second month of the year in the classroom. We
were living at the pinnace of the American Century, and Washington and Lincoln,
neither yet interrogated by more probing historians. They were our two secular
saints, our patriarchs and role models. Colorful posters of them unfurled above
us; we drew them, played them, we memorized their words. For a brief, illusory
time we had one version of history, relaxed and assured, unrevised and
incorrect.
As cinematic material, the two men couldn’t been more
different. Lincoln is most congenial subject of biography, and fable, that
American history has yet spawned. A lifetime is not enough to absorb all the
material examining him. Washington lies at a further remote, before photography
and other voracious technologies were there to document him as obsessively as
Lincoln was.
We can’t construe versions of Washington in the public
imagination very well. He is instantly recognizable — Zeus-like, imperturbable,
stiff . . . stodgy. Colorful does not enter into it. He had wooden teeth and
slaves (and in fact, Washington’s slaves weren’t even a part of our era’s history
lessons. Mount Vernon evidently came from IKEA.) Not a lot to work with there.
In numerous historical films, Washington just kind of parachutes awkwardly into
the scenario to lend a sense of authenticity (“Hey, look! It’s Washington!”),
usually to endorse a hero, inspire somebody, or seal the deal on a happy
ending.
In keeping with Washington’s proverbial seriousness, the
actor who have played him have uniformly possessed a sense of gravitas. That
is, they have to play a stiff. The first guy to make a thing of playing
Washington was Joseph Kilgour, who did so in four films between 1909 and 1915,
the first of which was Washington Under
the American Flag.
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| Joseph Kilgour as Washington |
Arthur Dewey played Washington in D.W. Griffith’s America (1924), his Revolutionary War
epic.
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| Arthur Dewey as Washington in America (1924) |
After this, there is scant evidence of the first Chief
Executive on the screen. When he did return, it was almost exclusively to
television — Washington could not generate enough charisma to sustain a feature
film. John Crawford makes a brief appearance as Washington in John Paul Jones (1959), the only visual
evidence of which scorns the historical accuracy of the scenario.
Long-time
bad-guy Myron Healy played him in an episode of the bizarre hippie-rebels-fight-undercover-for-the-American-Revolution
1970 TV series, The Young Rebels (“Suicide
Squad” 10/25/70); Will Geer played him for laughs in a two-part episode of the
TV sitcom Bewitched (“George
Washington Zapped Here” 2/19, 26/1972).
It took about 200 years for us to begin to grapple with the
idea of Founding Fathers as non-mythical characters — pushed no doubt by both
the Bicentennial and Gore Vidal’s provocative counter-story in his novel Burr (1973) and subsequent Narratives of Empire historical fiction
series. Richard Basehart was craggy but troubled in the 1975 TV movie Valley Forge; Peter Graves required minimum
adjustments to appear as the Father of Our Country in 1979’s The Rebels, part of an immense and awful
TV miniseries that attempted to film all of John Jakes’ long Kent Family Chronicles
pop-history book cycle.
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| Richard Basehart |
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| Peter Graves |
Finally, a healthy effort to sex up Washington took place in
the 1984 TV miniseries George Washington,
featuring Barry Bostwick as G.W. “No one knew of the secret desire that burned
within him!” the promo exclaims, promising to tell us his “little-known,
intimate story.” Evidently the writers inserted a life-long, steamy, illicit,
bodice-ripping romance between Washington and childhood friend Sally Fairfax,
played by Jacklyn Smith, to try to keep us awake. A soporific sequel, George Washington II: The Forging of a
Nation, followed. Alexander Hamilton is portrayed here as an unsympathetic,
snobbish, disruptive character, a role he was routinely relegated to in films
about the period until Lin-Manuel Miranda’s huge Broadway historical hip hop
musical hit, Hamilton, hit the stage
in 2015.
More recently, Jeff Daniels lent a doughy earnestness
concealing a solid will to the character in the TV movie The Crossing (2000), concerning the famous crossing of the Delaware
River to attack the Hessians on December 26, 1776.
Kelsey Grammer plays a
rather oblivious Washington in Benedict
Arnold: A Question of Honor (2003). David Morse put on the most convincing
impersonation to date in the HBO miniseries John
Adams (2008). His Washington is grumpy and taciturn, a reluctant icon.
Plus, it always looks like his teeth are killing him.
Washington suddenly becomes more malleable as a concept.
Voiced by Michael Santo, he is more of an action hero in Liberty’s Kids, a 40-episode animated PBS half-hour from 2002 about
the American Revolution, with teenagers in the foreground, suspiciously like 1970’s
live-action Young Rebels. In AMC’s TURN: Washington’s Spies (2014-2017),
Ian Kahn plays Washington as a cunning schemer.
The thrust of this series,
the story of an American double agent who must violate the laws of heaven and
earth and risk scorn in the name of a just cause, is a direct throwback to the
original notable exploitation of Washington as a literary character — none
other than James Fenimore Cooper’s second novel, and his first international
success, 1821’s The Spy. In it, peddler
Harvey Birch is a double agent for Washington, who whisks in and out of the
novel in the guise of the mysterious “Mr. Harper.” The prototype of the
espionage and spy genre starts with the fictional assent of the Father of Our
Country.
TURN: Washington’s
Spies is also a kind of Age of Enlightenment/John le Carre mélange
crossbred with the Smudged-Faced School of Historical Reenactment, to which is
added a soupcon of Tarentino. It is, then, the embodiment of the formula for
the successful broadcast pseudo-historical saga of today. The same kind of approach
is taken in the History 2015 miniseries Sons
of Liberty, in which Jason O’Mara plays Washington as a kind of a badass.
Washington figures in obliquely with the other Founding
Fathers in the hit pseudo-historical thriller National Treasure (2003); a key scene in the film takes place at
Mount Vernon. On the Fox TV series Sleepy
Hollow (2013-2017), Washington is a necromancer; in “The Washingtonians”
episode of the anthology Masters of
Horror (1/26/2007), he was the founder of a cannibal cult. In the “Capture
of Benedict Arnold” episode (12/12/2016) of the time-travel series Timeless (2016-2018), he’s a dick.
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| "The Washingtonians" |
In the end, it took Christopher Jackson onstage in Hamilton to make Washington a magnetic
and dynamic presence. When, decades hence, the show stops running, some future
stars will fight to embody Washington yet again on screen.
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| Christopher Jackson as Washington in Hamilton |
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