Editor's Letter: Claiming George Washington

last updated 8 January 2015

In advance of her upcoming address to the Tea Party convention in Nashville, Sarah Palin recently named George Washington her favorite Founding Father. It’s an unassailable choice. Who better than the Revolution’s “indispensable man,” the American Cincinnatus, to inspire the Tea Party’s small-government, anti-tax rebels? In homage, one Pennsylvania group even held its Tea Party rally last April at the site where Gen. Washington crossed the Delaware.

And yet. For chronic quibblers, there are nits to pick. Washington, for instance, didn’t wholly embrace the original tea party. He backed the Bostonians’ opposition to the “despotick” tax that had instigated the protest, but the tea-tippling Virginian stopped short of approving their “conduct in destroying the tea.” It wasn’t until 1794, however, when President Washington was struggling to fund a government, that his views on anti-tax rebels took a decidedly hostile turn. After Washington imposed an excise tax on whiskey, farmers in Pennsylvania, for whom whiskey was a virtual cash crop, rebelled, attacking federal revenue agents. With a “solemn conviction” that federal prerogatives were at stake, Washington sent a militia to suppress the rebellion. In effect, he used federal power to crush a local, populist challenge—not exactly the kind of government action Tea Partyers seem to fancy. It may just be that the ranks of presidents provide poor models of executive restraint. Washington was the first—but hardly the last—to leave government larger and more powerful than he found it.