By an Associate.
Continuing the narrative that began here.
There were many men who thought they might be exactly the man required for this new position of President. Fortunately Washington had a weapon in his arsenal that could not be matched by any of his opponents. Mr. Hamilton had already concluded that his own prospects of advancement depended upon Washington’s being elected President, and he threw himself into the project with his customary enthusiasm.
“We need to make sure you’re appealing to all demographics,” Hamilton explained over Madeira on the back porch at Mount Vernon.
“What are demographics?” Washington naturally asked.
“That’s a term I’ve come up with on my own. It literally means ‘people-writing.’ ”
“You want me to write on people?”
“No, you misunderstand—”
“I usually just sign their autograph albums, and that makes them happy enough.”
“It’s not about writing on—”
“I’d think the quill would tickle them terribly.”
“Please try to—”
“There was one young woman in Annapolis who made a request I considered somewhat immodest, but even that was on fabric.”
“Look, there are—”
“And the ink feathered, so that to my mind the signature was spoiled, but on the other hand I should hope that not many people will see that much of her anyway.”
“It doesn’t mean writing on people,” Hamilton said. “It means writing about people.”
“Oh, I see,” said Washington. “Well, really, when I think about it, I do seem to write mostly about people, except for Irving of course. That is, when I do write. Well, I shall be very glad to have a new word for it.”
“Let me begin again,” said Hamilton. “There are many different kinds of people, and we want to make sure you appeal to all of them. The best way to do that is with targeted advertising, as I call it.”
“Do you—”
“And I’m not shooting anything!” Hamilton explained quickly. “Let me show you what I mean. What sort of people do you think go to cheap inns and taverns?”
“Well,” said Washington, “I should think they would be people with little money who like to drink.”
“There you are, then,” said Hamilton. ‘We put up a poster in every cheap tavern: “Share a Drink with Washington—A Man of the People, for the People, Protecting Your Interests from the Rich.’ And then what sort of people go to the races?”
“Mostly wealthy planters,” Washington replied.
“So we put up posters wherever the races meet: ‘Washington—The Prince of Planters, Protecting Your Interests from the Mob.’ You see how it works. You aim, so to speak, your advertisements at the people who are likely to see them in the place where we hang them. Thus your advertisements are targeted, as I call it.”
“But it seems to me that you have General Washington acting in two entirely contradictory ways,” said Susanna. “You have him protecting the poor against the rich, and the rich against the poor.”
“I prefer to say ‘complementary’ rather than ‘contrary,’ ” said Hamilton. “Like St. Paul, you become all things to all men.”
“Oh, well, if it’s in Scripture,” said Washington.
“We’re simply broadening your appeal by the Pauline method, as it were. Similarly, in the New England states, we shall have posters to tell the people that Washington is the protector of shipping and manufacturing interests against the rich plantation-owners, and in the South, of course, we shall be careful to say that Washington, the man of the South, will protect Southern interests against Northern plutocrats.”
“Plutocrats?” Weems asked.
“It’s another word I’ve come up with on my own,” Hamilton said proudly. “It means rich people with too much influence.”
“My word, Hamilton, you certainly are enriching our American language,” said Washington. “Why, if we keep adding words at this rate, no one will be able to understand us at all.”
“We explain what they mean as we introduce them,” Hamilton responded. “I have a list, you see, and I add to it every day.” He shuffled downward in his stack of papers until he found the one he was looking for. “Here it is.”
Washington took the paper, which looked tiny in his hand, and examined it closely. “Well, you certainly have been busy, Hamilton. You have some fine words here, if I’m any judge of words. Like ‘ee-lights,’ for example. What are ‘ee-lights’?”
“That’s ‘ay-leets,’ ” said Hamilton. “It’s a word I borrowed from the French.”
“Oh, well, I suppose if we pillage foreign languages, there’s no end to the number of words we can come up with. I thought you were just making them up out of your own head, like ‘sizzwappler.’ ”
“ ‘Sizzwappler’? What’s that?”
“It’s a word I just made up out of my own head,” Washington explained.
“But, you see, these words are formed on regular principles out of the materials already afforded us by the Saxon, French, Latin, or Greek.”
“It seems like a great deal of work to have to know four languages just to make up words in English. I think my method is much simpler. What does ‘ay-leets’ mean, anyway?”
“It means people who are better educated, with more wisdom and understanding, than the average man.”
“Oh, I see. So you want to tell the people that I am one of these ay-leets.”
“No! People hate the elites. They don’t want anyone to be wiser or to know more than they do. They want a leader who’s as stupid and ignorant as they are.”
“But then why would they want someone like me?” asked Washington.
A brief silence followed, and then Hamilton explained, “It’s simply a matter of image.” He pointed to the word “image” in his list. “We want to create an image of you as a man of the people.”
“You mean like a statue?”
“No!” Hamilton put some effort into getting his annoyance under control; it could perhaps be unwise to be too short with a man who was three times his height. “You have doubtless imagined, say, George the Third in your mind.”
“Oh, yes,” said Washington. “I picture him with long ears that stand up and out from his head, a long muzzle, four hooves, a long and brushy tail…”
“You mean like a mule?”
“Precisely. I believe he shares many characteristics with my archnemesis Irving.”
Hamilton looked blank for a moment, and then assimilated this new addition to the conversation and went on. “Well, that image in your mind stands in for King George. When you think of King George, that is what you think of. What we want to do is control the image the voters have of you in their minds. We want them to see the right image when they hear your name.”
“Oh!” cried Washington, “so they can see me when I’m not there! That’s extraordinary, Hamilton. It’s a remarkable idea. A real sizzwappler. Do you have a word for that, too—people seeing me when I’m far away?”
“It’s not really— Well, actually, I suppose it is seeing you when you’re far away, isn’t it? We could call it “teleoptics,’ or ‘proculovision.’ ”
“How about ‘television’?” asked Washington. “I like the sound of that.”
“No, you can’t combine Greek and Latin parts that way. But you see the principle, don’t you? When the ordinary tavern-goer thinks of you, we want him to think of someone like him—someone who hates the rich industrialists and planters and merchants and suchlike people and looks out for the interests of the ordinary man. When the planters think of you, we want them to see a rich planter who thinks the way they do and hates the common mob. That’s what I mean by ‘image.’ ”
“But the way you paint these images of me, I’m not sure I’d like me very much if I met me.”
“We don’t care what you think of you. We care what they think of you. We need to reach the people who will vote for the electors who will vote for Washington.”
“And you will do this by putting up images of me?”
Hamilton looked blank again for a moment, and then said, “If necessary.”
The only other candidate we really had to fear was John Adams, who was not nearly so well known as the General. But Hamilton was bent on leaving nothing to chance. Soon we began to see Washington-for-President broadsides and posters wherever we went. When Susanna and I took little Crispus and Jane for a walk down toward the docks, there were Washington’s posters:
WASHINGTON
for
LOWER
TARIFFS
and
MARITIME
IMPROVEMENTS
Later Susanna asked Hamilton what he meant by “maritime improvements,” and he replied, “It means whatever the shipping interests want it to mean.”
Not long afterward, a poster appeared across from St. Paul’s, very near our house:
DON’T LET THEM TAKE YOUR SLAVES
Vote for
WASHINGTON
Because when slavery is outlawed,
only outlaws will have slaves.
Susanna was especially enraged by this one because she already knew that Hamilton had sent to Boston to have posters put up with a very different message:
KEEP MASSACHUSETTS FREE
Vote for
WASHINGTON
Don’t let slaveholders
control the confederation.
“How is that even logical?” she had demanded of Hamilton when he told us of the Boston posters. “Washington is a slaveholder himself, and you are asking them to put him at the head of the Union.”
“The people will vote for the image,” Hamilton had replied. “The man is immaterial.”
Meanwhile Mr. Adams’ campaign was not idle. A few days after Washington’s first posters were put up, a small poster appeared on the wall of the Lyceum:
You Might Consider Voting
for
JOHN ADAMS
If It Is Not
Too Much Trouble.
We saw no other Adams posters, but the mere existence of this one raised Mr. Hamilton’s ire to a frightening degree. “We must crush this Adams,” he said when we were again gathered on the porch at Mount Vernon. “We must pound him into the earth until there is no life left in him.”
“Mr. Hamilton,” Washington said with obvious shock, “John Adams is a friend of mine, and no consideration could induce me to do him the least injury.”
“I meant it metaphorically, of course,” Hamilton said hastily. “Privately you and Mr. Adams may remain the best of friends. It is only in the political sense that we must beat him down and crush his bones to powder under our boots. That is what ‘politics’ means.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” said Washington. “What would we do to beat him down politically but not personally?”
“Well, for a start, we might place anonymous articles in the Gazette, which would soon be picked up by the papers from Boston to Savannah.”
“I see. And what would these articles say?”
“Anything unflattering about Adams that would damage his reputation. We could question his masculinity, for example.”
“Don’t be absurd, Hamilton. Adams is as much a man as any of us here. I know a man when I see one; I can tell the difference.”
Hamilton glanced helplessly at Susanna, but she gave him a look that would wither an oak tree.
“The content of the accusation is not important,” Hamilton bravely continued. “In fact it will be more effective if we do not phrase the thing as an accusation, but rather as a question. “Is John Adams a Horse Thief?” You see we say nothing dishonest; we merely ask a question. Or, better yet, a denial: “Adams Denies Arson Charges, Say Campaign Insiders.” We tell no untruth: in fact we specifically deny that Adams is an arsonist. Nothing could be more honest than that.”
“But what do you accomplish by telling the voters that Mr. Adams has done nothing wrong?” I asked.
“Ah, but we do not precisely tell them that he has done nothing wrong. We tell them that he has denied doing something wrong, and they will conclude from that that someone has accused him of doing it, and then they will wonder, Did he do it? And there will be a good number of them who think, in the words of the old adage, ‘Where there’s smoke—’ ”
“ ‘—permission ought to be asked of the ladies.’ Yes, I am familiar with the proverb,” Washington said. “But something about this makes me uneasy, Hamilton. Is it not possible to win the office of President simply by giving the public a candid assessment of my intelligence and abilities, and thus allowing the people to make an informed decision?”
Hamilton thought for a moment.
“No,” he replied at last.
Soon Hamilton’s anonymous articles began appearing in the Alexandria Gazette. As Hamilton had foretold, the articles were not long in being reprinted in Philadelphia, Charleston, Baltimore, New-York, Savannah, Hartford, and even as far west as Pittsburgh; or so I was told much later by a certain Mr. Brackenridge, who will appear later in these pages.
Not long after that, we began to hear the rumors in the usual gossip at the taverns and coffee-houses of Alexandria, and even in church: they say that Adams stole twenty horses from a defenseless old widow in Quincy; they say that Adams has one-quarter African blood in his veins; they say that Adams wears a long coat to hide his pointed tail; they say all those things that Hamilton’s articles specifically denied about Adams, which, as Hamilton had intended, introduced thoughts that had not previously been in the minds of the people. Adams and his friends wrote letters denying the rumors, but all their denials were merely favorable breezes under the wings of Rumor, and had the effect of spreading the stories farther and farther. In effect, Adams was doing Washington’s campaigning for him.
Meanwhile, Hamilton arranged for Washington to travel up and down the country to meet the people face to face—“shaking hands and kissing babies,” as Hamilton explained, although the latter part of the program was quickly abandoned when we discovered that the effect on babies of a fifteen-foot man bending down to kiss them was not uniformly positive. We traveled in a train of coaches and wagons, which Hamilton called a “cavalcade,” that included a large number of correspondents for the various papers up and down the country. After Washington began to complain of back pain, we added a large crew of diggers, who would go ahead of us and prepare a nine-foot-deep trench for Washington to walk up and down in, so that he could greet the people who came to see him without bending over. Everywhere we stayed, of course, Washington put up one of his brass plaques, which were greatly prized by the communities; most of them appeared now on churches and meeting halls, and not a few barns; which, but for the very most opulent planters’ houses in the South, were generally the only available buildings sufficiently large to accommodate Washington’s current dimensions. We had to send men ahead—“advance scouts,” Hamilton called them—to find such accommodations, and, after two regrettable incidents that were much talked about where they occurred, to make sure that the location chosen for Washington’s appearance before the crowd was not dangerously near a cherry orchard.
As more and more writers for the weeklies joined our cavalcade, their demands upon Washington’s time grew more and more inconvenient, until at last Hamilton set aside certain times when all of them could gather at once and ask the General whatever questions occurred to them. Because of the press of correspondents trying to push their way to the front, these occasions quickly became known among the literary gentlemen as “press conferences.” The usual procedure was that one correspondent at a time would be chosen to ask a question, to which Washington would give a reply, and then Hamilton, standing on a raised platform beside him, would explain what Washington meant by what he had said. It was not obvious to Washington that these explanations were truly representative of his own thoughts; but Hamilton gave him another lecture on the subject of “image,” and Washington agreed because agreeing made the lecture stop.
Hamilton’s master stroke was to arrange a face-to-face debate between Washington and Adams in Philadelphia. In this debate, certain correspondents from the Philadelphia papers were permitted to ask questions, which both candidates answered extemporaneously. Mr. Adams answered every question intelligently, and had all the information about tariffs, diplomacy, commerce, finance, Indian affairs, and turnpikes ready to hand. Washington had none of that, with the result that his brief answers and irrelevant aphorisms held the attention of the audience, and he was universally judged to be the winner of the debate.
At last the great day came; the people went to the polls in great numbers; they chose electors for Washington; and the General was ready to take his place as the first President of the United States.
But if the electoral process was obscure, it was clarity itself in comparison with the presidency. The Constitution specified a few duties of the President, which, taken together, might occupy a day of his time out of the month. What was the President supposed to be doing the rest of the time?
To be continued in Chapter XIII.