Happy President’s Day! — Washington on Civility

Posted in books by Editor on February 20, 2012

The text isn’t a new release, but I only recently learned of it, thanks to Courtney Barnes of Style Court, who pointed me to this version. Washington’s rules themselves, from a manuscript in the Library of Congress, are widely available for free at a variety of websites, including NPR (which featured a story on Brookhiser’s book in 2003) and Colonial Williamsburg.

On a more personal note, I recall that my mother, a school teacher for much of her life, would observe the holiday by taking chocolate-covered cherries in for her third-graders. Given that a large number (if not most) of the students were none too fond of these treats, it seemed like the perfect way to underscore the bittersweet component of national myth-making. -CH

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From the University of Virginia Press:

Richard Brookhiser, ed., Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts that Guided Our First President in War and Peace (Charlotttesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 96 pages, ISBN: 9780813922188, $18.

As a young man, George Washington admired and copied into a little notebook 110 rules for civil behavior that originated from a Jesuit textbook. Washington took these rules very much to heart, and that handwritten list remained with him throughout his life, serving as inspiring guidance from his military days at Valley Forge and Yorktown to his two terms as president. Guidance that at first sounds archaic, it is in fact just as relevant as — indeed, possibly more necessary than — it was nearly three hundred years ago. Richard Brookhiser makes clear the pertinence of these rules for modern readers and proposes that now more than ever we will be wise to follow the modest example of such a great man. Witty and insightful, Brookhiser’s commentary offers real-world instruction in the lost art of self-discipline, and his new preface provides a compelling and timely context in which to employ these guidelines today.

Richard Brookhiser, senior editor of the National Review and a columnist for the New York Observer, is the author of Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington; Alexander Hamilton, American; and America’s First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918.