George Washington in and as Culture.

Edited by Kevin L. Cope with William W. Pederson and Frank Williams. AMS Studies in the Eighteenth Century, No. 38. (New York: AMS Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xx], 324. $74.50, ISBN 0-404-63538-5.)

I review this volume, which was published to commemorate the bicentennial of George Washington's death, not as a historian of the early American republic, but as a cultural historian. The introduction to the volume promises an exploration of Washington's cultural impact over two hundred years of American history using a variety of methodological approaches ranging from art-historical critiques to the New Historicism. Instead, most of the essays focus on challenging scholarly neglect of Washington by documenting purportedly overlooked but admirable facets of his life. With one exception, these essays examine "George Washington as culture" largely by pointing out how frequently his image has appeared in advertising and popular literature, a fact celebrated or deplored according to whether a given author finds such references apropos or inaccurate. Along the way, the essayists fail to provide convincing accounts of the cultural and political dynamics impelling the appropriation of Washington's image or his memory in specific historical contexts.

The neglect of the nineteenth century is particularly unfortunate. Popular culture took possession of George Washington's image and memory eagerly and early in the nation's history, as the success of Mason Locke Weems's biography of Washington suggests. Later in the century, Washington's image was emblazoned on articles of everyday use--spoons, handkerchiefs, serving dishes. As yet, no historian has studied these "apotheoses" (the term is a technical one used in the decorative arts), why they attained popularity at particular historical moments, and who bought them. Appropriating the Washington name and image asserted a connection with national ideals and identity. The gesture hints at cultural and political struggle, but of what nature? This volume, narrowly devoted to defending or revising Washington's legacy, does not examine such empirical and interpretive questions.

The essays that explore facets of Washington's life deal with a wide variety of topics, but their utility for historians is severely limited by the almost total absence of references to relevant historical literature, especially recent scholarship. Even more troubling, the essayists seem unaware of the wider literature bearing on the activities in which Washington was involved, which leads to some uninformed judgments about Washington's legacy. In an article on Washington and slavery, Arthur K. Steinberg argues that, in removing Washington's name from a Louisiana public school in 1997 because he was a slaveholder, expedient politicians failed to grasp that slavery was integral to colonial Virginia culture. Yet Steinberg makes no reference to the agonized debate among Jefferson scholars in the wake of the apparent confirmation of his relationship with Sally Hemings. Are these scholars, like the politicians, guilty of "moral bankruptcy" (p. 164) for questioning Jefferson's legacy? The authors in this volume too often launch their arguments into a scholarly vacuum.

The best article in the collection, by Ron Briley (I cannot tell you his institutional affiliation, as the volume lacks such information), explores Washington's legacy in the late twentieth century through a systematic study of representations of Washington in popular history periodicals, film and television, and high school and college textbooks. Those representations, he argues, reflected the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s. The "conservative heroic image" of Washington as model citizen (p. 220) competed with the "humanized" Washington preferred by those deploying visual media (p. 226), and also with the historical revisionists' Washington, the slave owner who shared the class and gender biases of his time. Briley demonstrates that Washington's image acts as a screen on which contending views of American identity are projected and debated. In doing so, he fulfills the promise of this volume.

KATHERINE A. CHAVIGNY
Sweet Briar College