Then, in the 1830s Harvard's first professor of history, Jared Sparks, published an edition of Washington's Writings carefully purged of anything unbecoming such a saintly man. Next there was Chief Justice John Marshall's five-volume Life (1804-1807), more factual but ponderously reverent. Weems' imagination gave the nation the cherry tree story, the prayer in the snow at Valley Forge, and the hero's triumphal entry into heaven, where he was greeted by Benjamin Franklin and "all the virtuous patriots, who. Weems enlarged the myth in the successive editions of his The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington. The nearly 450 eulogies published on Washington's death in 1799 completed his apotheosis. Washington was a prophet, leading God's newly chosen people into the promised land of independence and nationhood. Until the Civil War, the old myth of Washington's superhuman qualities created by his contemporaries in verse, song and sermon, served well a people struggling to clarify their national identity. And Washington the television hero, the man of the 1980s, may startle those whose encounters with the founding father have been limited to making a hatchet in grade school or ascending the Washington monument. Now television, today's medium of popular myth and culture, takes up his story. Until now, the memory of Washington, the venerable American Moses, has been perpetuated mainly in the pages of books. and April 11 at 8 p.m.) based on Flexner's first two volumes. of the CBS mini-series George Washington (continuing April 10 at 9 p.m. Flexner's biography did not reach a wide audience, but all that is about to change with the debut tonight at 8 p.m.
From Flexner's pages emerged a strictly human hero much more understandable by modern Americans than the dour founding father of the Gilbert Stuart portrait.
His Washington was not a chosen instrument of heaven, not even a paragon of every desirable virtue.
WHATEVER remained of the 19th-century mythic Washington was laid to rest in the 1960s by the publication of James Thomas Flexner's biography.
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