Alexis Coe wants you to read George Washington’s Farewell Address. She calls it a “shockingly modern document” for something that was written in a late-18th century agricultural society. But its warnings, written by the nation’s aging first president after two exhausting terms, still resonate.
As he prepared to cede power rather than become a quasi-monarch, President Washington admonished Americans about the dangers of factionalism and the spirit of party which had “its root in the strongest passions of the human mind… The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”
What Washington referred to as factionalism we would call partisanship today. And no one can deny Americans are bitterly divided by politics that have seeped into every corner of the culture. A Pew Research Poll unsurprisingly found that increasing percentages of Republicans and Democrats view not just the opposing party but the people in that party as immoral.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Ms. Coe, the best-selling author of “You Never Forget Your First,” a best-selling biography of America’s foremost founding father, discusses the enduring relevance of Washington’s Farewell Address (which was, by the way, never delivered as a speech. But it was printed in newspapers).
“He was concerned with what he would have called factionalism. He was concerned that people would lose the ability to compromise and that in pursuit of their end goals they would do whatever it takes. Once you decide that the end goal justifies the means, you’ve lost all your principles,” Ms. Coe said.
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