Home > Newsletter > February 2002

GEORGE WHO?

The other day I received a fund raising letter from Mrs. Robert E. Lee IV. Yes, there is such a person and she is Vice Regent of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association. George Washington's home, Mount Vernon, is not a public park or federal land as many believe. Mount Vernon has been maintained by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association since 1858. George Washington's Mount Vernon would be a heap of rubble had it not been for this organization.

I was honestly shocked by Mrs. Lee's letter and some of the statements in it. So shocked that I checked to make sure the letter and the statements were authentic.

Mrs. Lee stated that one in four Americans don't know whose image is on the front of a quarter! I checked out the facts and she is right. Fully one fourth of Americans don't know that President George Washington, the father of this nation, is on the face of a quarter.

Moreover Mrs. Lee stated that George Washington and his deeds are written about in the school textbooks of today only ten percent as much as they were in the 1960's! I checked this as well, and unfortunately she is very correct.

The very day I received Mrs. Lee's letter, a front page story in the Washington Times had this headline "No Founding Fathers? That's our new history." The story by Ellen Sorokin announced that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin are not included in the revised version of the New Jersey Department of Education history standards. Not only was the father of our country omitted, but so were the Pilgrims, the Mayflower and the word "war".

In other states, names and titles have actually been changed. The Pilgrims are now called, "early settlers," "early Europeans," European colonizers" or simply "newcomers".

The assault against the memory of George Washington and the other "dead white men" who founded the United States started in the 1960's, and Congress helped in the war against our founding fathers. When I went to school, George Washington's birthday was a national holiday. Not any more! By an act of Congress the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were "consolidated" into one national holiday now known as "Presidents' Day".

We now have only one national holiday named after an individual, and that person is Martin Luther King. Abraham Lincoln, the man who ended slavery in America, making it possible for Martin Luther King to be educated and to preach for change, has no holiday named for him. Am I the only one who finds this odd?

The high school textbooks of today give very little information about George Washington. Many times the references to him and the other Founders are in passing. School libraries have very few books on the Founders and virtually none written by conservatives