2016 has been an acrimonious year election-wise in the United States and I've noticed a trend in this particular election to generate memes like the one above. In it we see George Washington scolding the United States population for some sort of vague "make your government more what you want it to be" without actual specifics. For me, this meme implies that George Washington would find the current United States federal government, and its actions, unacceptable and challenges the citizens of the United States to "step up" and take back their government. Which to me is taking the actual presidency of George Washington, and its legacy, and corrupting it. Because George Washington as President faced off against the very sort of action this meme espouses, and he did not take kindly to it at all.
This glorious painting is from 1791 during the Whiskey Rebellion, and the figure on the horse is George Washington leading a combined force of United States federal troops and local state militia units on an expedition to disband an armed rebellion against a tax law passed by the United States Congress. The Whiskey Rebellion formed in reaction to the high debt held by the federal government after the Revolutionary War, in which the federal government absorbed individual state debt along with its own. Import duties, it was felt by Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, could not be raised higher and a tax on a domestic product was needed. Distilled spirits became the target of the new law, it was seen as a "sin tax" and Hamilton, along with Washington, felt that the tax would spark the least anger of any taxed domestic industry. They did not figure with the anger of farmers living in the western portions of the United States at the time, in particular western Pennsylvania, who felt this tax violated their traditional rights and position.
Distilling spirits was seen by western farmers as a legitimate means of storing surplus grain and generating a valuable product for sale in eastern markets. Whiskey was also used as a means of currency in the region, so this effort to tax farmers for making whiskey was widely seen as a new form of "taxation without representation." Rebels in the region rose up, attacked tax collectors, and refused to pay the tax. Many claimed they were defending the spirit and principles of the American Revolution. Hell many of them were veterans of the American Revolution. Washington strongly disagreed and although he sent out peace delegates to deal with the rebels, he also marched out with an army to disperse them. The Whiskey Rebellion collapsed and the right of the federal government to tax internally was defended, by Washington, against individuals rising up to defend the
spirit of the revolution - a.k.a. traditional limited federal government.
But hang on, because evidence is even more present in Washington's economic policies. Although he attempted in his first term as President to stand neutral between two rival factions, Hamilton and Jefferson, who respectively wanted a larger federal role in the economy and a lesser federal role (Jefferson and his yeoman farmers concept) - Washington leaned in Hamilton's direction. By his second term Washington fully agreed with Hamilton's ideas about a broader federal government and used his executive powers, along with raising support in Congress, for new laws that expanded the role of the federal government in the domestic economy of the United States. This included controversial actions like creating a Bank of the United States, strong investments in infrastructure, and tariffs to protect rising domestic industry. It even involved direct federal investment in the creation of local factories, a level of federal involvement today that makes many scream.
Overall Washington was not the man depicted in the first meme at the top of this post, he was actually as President a strong believer in a firm, well organized, fiscally involved federal government that firmly held in its hand a whip to coerce those who would rise in rebellion.
Sources: Wikipedia articles on
George Washington's Presidency and the
Whiskey Rebellion
