FATHER FIGURE. IN MOTION: 3/8 Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 6 August 2023
⏱️ 14 minutes
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FATHER FIGURE. IN MOTION: 3/8 Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick.
https://www.amazon.com/Travels-George-Search-Washington-Legacy/dp/0525562176/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
When George Washington became president in 1789, the United States of America was still a loose and quarrelsome confederation and a tentative political experiment. Washington undertook a tour of the ex-colonies to talk to ordinary citizens about his new government, and to imbue in them the idea of being one thing—Americans.
In the fall of 2018, Nathaniel Philbrick embarked on his own journey into what Washington called “the infant woody country” to see for himself what America had become in the 229 years since. Writing in a thoughtful first person about his own adventures with his wife, Melissa, and their dog, Dora, Philbrick follows Washington’s presidential excursions: from Mount Vernon to the new capital in New York; a monthlong tour of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island; a venture onto Long Island and eventually across Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The narrative moves smoothly between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries as we see the country through both Washington’s and Philbrick’s eyes
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Islanderworld. I'm John Batser with Nathaniel Filbrick. His new book has |
| 0:08.8 | travels with George in search of Washington and his legacy. As Washington and his |
| 0:14.0 | entourage, Prescott, his Tobias Lear is with him, his secretary, others are with |
| 0:21.0 | him, traveling to Boston. But what's important now is how Washington presents |
| 0:25.8 | himself to the people and the governors. And John Hancock is the governor of |
| 0:31.8 | Massachusetts, probably the richest man in North America. Hancock will test |
| 0:37.2 | who's more important, the governor of Massachusetts, or the president of the |
| 0:41.2 | United States. And at this point, Nat, I got the sense that Washington is is |
| 0:46.5 | playing a double game. He's also he's being commonplace with everybody he meets. |
| 0:52.2 | But at the same time, he he's aware of the fact that there are |
| 0:55.5 | personages who think they're more important than he is. Is that how to read it? |
| 1:00.0 | Absolutely. I mean, you know, I think what we take for granted today, that a |
| 1:03.9 | president outranks a governor, but that wasn't necessarily the case in 1789. |
| 1:09.8 | Before the Constitution, the governors were the ones with the primary political |
| 1:14.8 | power. They were the most influential and powerful political figures. |
| 1:21.2 | And but with the Constitution, there was the invention of the presidency. And |
| 1:27.1 | and I think there are some personal factors as well. John Hancock had invited |
| 1:32.0 | Washington to stay with him in Hancock's mansion on Beacon Hill. And because |
| 1:37.9 | Washington had committed himself to staying only in public taverns, he had to |
| 1:41.7 | decline the offer and somewhat missed Hancock had had invited Washington to |
| 1:46.7 | dinner and Washington said, well, good, I'll come to dinner. That'd be fine. |
| 1:50.4 | And yet when Washington arrives in Boston, you know, this it's it's a huge |
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