"In the nineteenth century, millions of Americans read his biographies of Washington and Marion--even if critics and historians ridiculed them as didactic fiction."

Part I | II | III | IV | Bibliographic essay

IV

Parson Weems has had an afterlife that's likely to outlast Dutch. In the nineteenth century, millions of Americans read his biographies of Washington and Marion (although his lives of Benjamin Franklin and William Penn probably sold less well)--even if critics and historians ridiculed them as didactic fiction. The story of Washington and the cherry tree became an American legend, not just repeated in images of Washington, but also invoked in political cartoons to poke fun at current political leaders. The twentieth century was less kind. The 1920s penchant for debunking historical icons produced W. E. Woodward's George Washington, The Image and the Man (1926), whose title spoke volumes: the Weemsian image wasn't the real man, whose faults ranged from vanity to horse racing and card playing. Weems himself became associated with sanitized, didactic pseudo-history--to put it more bluntly, mythmaking. Historians tended to dismiss him.

The Iowa artist Grant Wood offered a more humorous commentary. In his 1939 painting Parson Weems' Fable (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth), Weems stands in the foreground, lifting a curtain to reveal little George.

Wood, Grant. Parson Weems' Fable. Oil on Canvas, 1939.
Image courtesy the Carter Amon Museum, used with permission.

Complete with head from Gilbert Stuart's portrait, George stands before his father and points to the hatchet in his left hand. The cherries dangling from the tree mimic the tassels on Weems's red curtain. On the eve of World War II, Wood hoped to counter fascist propaganda with "the preservation of our folklore." He also aimed to show how American myths differed from Nazi ones: Americans could recognize that their fables were simply stories, and story telling and humor themselves were American traditions. In other words, to borrow a phrase from that other 1939 American classic, The Wizard of Oz, Wood knew that there was a man behind the curtain.

In the background of Parson Weems' Fable, two slaves labor at another tree--a fact not lost on seventh-grader Taylor Davis of Hidden Valley Middle School near San Diego. Davis's 1998 poem, "Overlooking Mount Vernon: After Wood's 'Parson Weems' Fable,'" appeared in the Oak Grove Review, an local annual anthology of student poetry:

The boy
with the gray hair
holding the axe
that cut down the cherry tree,
his father is happy,
for he didn't tell a lie.
I am the man pulling back the curtain.
I know the situation.
Little George's dad
shouldn't worry about George.
He holds the lives of the slaves
in the back of the picture,
their fingers tired
from picking cherries all day.

Grant Wood isn't the only American artist to take Weems as a subject. In 1975, the American composer Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) wrote the score for Parson Weems and the Cherry Tree, a ballet suite commissioned by Erick Hawkins. Thomson drew on "songs, marches, and parlor pieces from the Federal period." The ballet was a comic one, inspired perhaps by the bicentennial; its twelve sections included "The Parson Writes His Book," "The Parson Instructs George," and "Chopping the Tree."

Today, the phrase "Parson Weems" evokes multiple responses. The most common, of course, is Parson Weems the unreliable storyteller, whose myths aimed to inculcate values but whose history was half-baked at best. Several commentators have noted how the false history undercut the moral message. Commenting on the biblical doctrine of bearing false witness on the eve of the Clinton impeachment hearings, a North Carolina minister noted that Weems's story hadn't done its job: it "has succeeded in making George Washington the sworn enemy of all young children," but it "certainly has not made them more truthful. The funny part of it is that this story about the virtue of telling the truth is itself not true--Parson Weems or somebody made it up." Maybe the message is utterly different, at least for a generation of capitalists. In the New York Times, Michael Lewis, author of the best-selling Liar's Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street, suggested that the "true significance" of the cherry-tree story is that "it pays to lie, if you have the knack for it. And if you lie as well as Weems you can make a lot of people happy, simply by telling them what they think they want to hear."

At the same time, historians and literary critics have rediscovered Mason Locke Weems as a major American cultural figure. Historians of American publishing always knew Weems: his letters to Carey and other publishers, a treasure trove about early American bookselling, were published in 1929, and numerous historians of print culture have examined his bookselling career. What's new is the sense that Weems possessed larger cultural significance. R. Laurence Moore writes that "Weems's marriage of aggressive marketing with a moral mission was one important starting point of America's nineteenth-century culture industry," especially the selling of religion. Steven Watts identifies Weems as "a captain in the swelling moral militia of bourgeois culture in early-nineteenth-century America." Jay Fliegelman sees the cherry-tree story ("Run to my arms, you dearest boy") as part of America's revolution against stern patriarchal authority, a parable for the nineteenth-century culture of family sentiment. Conversely, T. Hugh Crawford argues that Weems made Washington into a new patriarch to stem the tide of revolution. Weems's Life of Washington shows up in college courses on early American literature and the history of the early republic, thanks to this new interest and especially to a 1996 scholarly paperback edition.

Weems isn't without his political uses, either. The cherry-tree story appears in the "Buchanan Brigade Library--Our American Heritage," a web site created in tandem with Pat Buchanan's 1996 presidential campaign. According to Buchanan, today's schools poison children "against their Judeo-Christian heritage, against America's heroes and against American history, against the values of faith and family and country." His library--whose contents range from the Declaration of Independence to Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride" to the West Point Cadet's Prayer--aimed to level the playing field. The day after President Clinton admitted his liaison with Monica Lewinsky, conservative columnist Linda Chavez wrote a piece called "How America Lost Its Moral Compass." Once upon a time, Chavez wrote, children learned the value of truth from the story of Washington and the cherry tree. "But then a few decades ago, Americans became too sophisticated for the likes of Parson Weems' popular tale. After all, it wasn't strictly speaking a true story about the nation's first president, whose reputation was busily being deconstructed by a new breed of historians committed to exposing the atrocities of dead, white, European males." Shades of the controversy over Morris's Dutch--where, too, conservative critics worried about the aftershocks of academic history.

Of all the current manifestations, I think Weems would most appreciate the Weems-Botts Museum in Dumfries, Virginia. Weems bought the building in 1798, probably to use as his bookshop, depot, and overnight lodging. He sold it four years later. Today the museum houses exhibits and hosts events, including a 1999 cherry-pie eating contest judged by an actor dressed as Weems. It also charges $3.00 admission and maintains the "Peddling Parson Book and Gift Shoppe." Weems's marketing methods were his own itinerant peddling, his sermons, and the advertisements he placed in local papers. But were he alive today, Weems would surely do exactly what the Weems-Botts Museum did last year. Dressed in eighteenth-century garb, then-curator Jeanne Hochmuth showed the house and talked about Weems in local classrooms. She insisted we'll never know whether his stories were true or not. And the museum doesn't need a traveling salesman. It has a web site.

Whether Edmund Morris's Dutch has the staying power of Mason Locke Weems's cherry tree has yet to be determined. Either way, the complaint that biographers blur the line between fact and fiction is nothing new. Perhaps some of the motivations for that blurring are also the same. Weems sold books by telling the people "what they think they want to hear," to borrow Michael Lewis's phrase. Morris's line sounds eerily similar: the acid test of nonfiction isn't its literal truth, but "its success in saying something--or quoting something--that a majority of readers 'can't help but believe.'" Morris may not mean "marketability" when he says "success," or perhaps his literary aspirations don't allow him to admit the mercenary motives that Parson Weems never denied. What changes is the context and language of the debate. Two centuries ago, it was Federalists vs. Republicans, domestic privacies vs. public deeds, and history vs. romance. Today, it's Reagan and the intelligentsia, postmodernism and docudrama, Oliver Stone and Forrest Gump.

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