By B.L. Wilson
President George Washington’s Farewell Address, a 6,000-word missive published in a newspaper as he rode away from Philadelphia in 1796 after his second and final term, can be seen as a memo to the American public sent down through the ages, according to political columnist, author and CNN commentator John Avlon.
“[It is] about the forces that he feared could derail and destroy our republic,” said Mr. Avlon. “He saw things that would be highly resonant to you and me—hyper-partisanship, excessive debt, foreign wars and foreign influence in our elections … all forces we have actively and unwisely invited into our culture and into our government.”
Mr. Avlon was the fourth speaker in the George Washington University’s Presidential Distinguished Event Series, held at the Jack Morton Auditorium Thursday, the evening coincided closely with the birthday of the university’s namesake.
GW Associate Professor of History Denver Brunsman, associate chair in the Department of History, introduced Mr. Avlon as someone who, in our “polarized time of hyper-partisanship, gives us hope through President Washington’s words and his example that there is another way.”
Washington worked on the first draft of the Farewell Address with James Madison, the legislator, adviser and future president. Washington revised it later in collaboration with Alexander Hamilton, his secretary of the treasury.
Mr. Avlon noted that the address was not just a “warning” but a plan—a set of principles bequeathed by the founding fathers to protect the country against “degenerating” forces and to guide the country forward.
Mr. Avlon called the principles laid out by President Washington “the pillars of liberty”—national unity, political moderation, fiscal discipline, the importance of virtue and religion, importance of education and foreign policy independence.
He offered a rationale and made a case for each of these principles in the Farewell Address, for example, promoting “the diffusion of knowledge” as essential to enlightened public opinion after Congress defeated President Washington’s attempts to create a national university and after he refused to kneel or take communion in a church rather than send an “insincere” and “troubling message” about the freedom of religion.
In discussing national unity, Mr. Avlon pointed out that the country, though stabilized by 1796, was from the beginning very diverse with Dutch in New York and Germans in Pennsylvania, beset by North-South and regional and state divides, and rural versus urban tensions.
“It’s been taken for granted largely throughout our history that the president of the United States would always emphasize what unites us, not what divides,” he said, “but nothing can be taken for granted entirely.”
The founding fathers studied the role of extreme factions in undermining democratic republics, particularly Edward Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Mr. Avlon said, and were aware of foreign interference that “created fractures” and brought down governments.
President Washington was contemplating his own departure, he said, and urged neutrality as members of his government and Americans in the street hotly debated lining up on either side of the French Revolution with “guillotines and heads rolling literally through the streets of Paris.
“Just look at the lesson [in the Farewell Address],” Mr. Avlon said, that are applicable now, quoting from the document: “As avenues support foreign influence, they are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions to practice arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils?
“That’s why history is worth studying,” he said. “The tools of disseminating some of these disinformation campaigns and foreign influence campaigns are more [prevalent] than ever before. “So we need to be vigilant. We need to be wide-eyed.”
In the Q & A that followed, Mr. Avlon was asked how he came to write the book. He explained that for many years the Farewell Address had fallen out of favor, although at one time it was more widely printed than the Gettysburg Address and taught in schools after the Civil War to reunite the country. He said he began thinking about it when he was writing about the rise of the Tea Party.
“We need to dedicate ourselves to first principles and rededicate ourselves to [the proposition of the Farewell Address] across party lines,” said Mr. Avlon, “and extend these first principles forward to future generations.”
