POLITICIANS NO LONGER SPEAK OF WASHINGTON: 4/8 Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
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.
1921 MT VERNON
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The DFS Winter Sale is on, so if savings on sofers and beds float your boat, now's the right time. |
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| 0:12.0 | And for a short time only, get four years. thing at the right price. |
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| 0:17.0 | DFS, what's your thing? |
| 0:20.0 | This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Bachelor with Nathaniel Philbrick, who tells a |
| 0:27.5 | whale of a tale that travels with George in search of Washington in his legacy. |
| 0:31.8 | This is the first term of two terms for |
| 0:34.5 | George Washington and he travels to meet people. He travels to meet common people and |
| 0:39.8 | to demonstrate the power of the presidency and also to learn the nation that he now |
| 0:45.5 | rules in some fashion in some fashion it wasn't clear how to be how it's to be done |
| 0:50.0 | but there's a trip that he takes to Long Island and he goes to Long Island places we all know, |
| 0:57.0 | Cold Spring Harbor, Roslyn, these are stops along the Long Island Railway, but this is an important serendipitous |
| 1:06.0 | trip for George Washington because in a place called Cetauckett on Long Island Sound were men who participated as spies in the |
| 1:17.0 | revolution and they were not revealed at the time. Why not Nat? |
| 1:22.0 | Well they weren't revealed as spies, you know not even their family members knew because if this experiment in a republic should fail and great Britain should come back in charge of her former colonies, it would not be a good thing to be known as a spy against the British crown. |
| 1:41.0 | And so their role as spies was kept an absolute secret. Only |
| 1:47.6 | Washington and Benjamin Talmadge, his spy chief, were probably the only |
| 1:52.0 | people who knew their identities and it wouldn't be until |
| 1:56.7 | the 20th century that a historian would reveal those identities for the first time. |
| 2:01.6 | Their family members would have no idea of the role they took |
| 2:05.2 | in trying to win America its independence. |
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