POLITICIANS NO LONGER SPEAK OF WASHINGTON: 7/8 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
⏱️ 11 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 MUSIC ROM MT. VERNON
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is |
| 0:05.0 | this is CBSi in the world. I'm John Batcher with Nathaniel Philbrick. |
| 0:10.0 | His new book Travels with George in search of Washington and his legacy. |
| 0:14.4 | George Washington is in South Carolina, this is the state that is understood as the centerpiece of what we've come to be called the slaveocracy. |
| 0:26.5 | That's what it was called in the 19th century prior to the Civil War and after the Civil War. |
| 0:32.2 | And George Washington traveled from Charleston to Savannah, |
| 0:35.2 | a beautiful city as well as Charleston. But the ironies are everywhere and when we come to the 21st century with Nat and his wife, Melissa, and their Tolar Dora, |
| 0:48.4 | they find strikingly, without looking for them, all these signs and memories of Sherman's March. |
| 0:55.4 | It's amazing to me Nat. |
| 0:57.2 | I felt sometime that we were in a time machine to the 18th century, but every once in a while there be a |
| 1:03.3 | a warp in time and we said it is suddenly be 1865 |
| 1:06.9 | 1865 absolutely well you know one of when Washington couldn't find a public tavern, he would stay in sumptuous houses that were there, and every one of them had been burned by Sherman. |
| 1:21.0 | And so at one point I wanted to visit this the site of this place. I couldn't be but the |
| 1:28.1 | someone working at a as a grocery store nearby showed had a pictures of it on her on her iPad and showed me you know the |
| 1:36.3 | rubble of this this once splendid plantation with a row of live oaks leading to it and you know the rubble of |
| 1:46.8 | what will be the future of Washington's journey and yet is the past to us was everywhere on our way to |
| 1:56.1 | Savannah we passed a billboard this huge billboard beside a very small road saying, you know, Sherman's army, looters, you know, I'm paraphrasing here, |
| 2:10.3 | you know, it's as if it had happened two days ago that the anger is still there and and so it made this and here we are following Washington as in as he's trying to unite this country, knowing that Sherman will be headed this way in the midst of the civil war that will tear everything apart. |
| 2:33.2 | And so it made it an extraordinary segment of our journey, |
| 2:40.9 | you know, a kind of culminating point. |
| 2:43.0 | Another irony paradox discovered in the travels with George is the Native Americans |
| 2:49.2 | and how Washington's government itself had two minds about what is to be done, but we meet the Katabas at the Katabah River and a particularly general new river. |
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