Abstract

"“Making George Washington a Businessman: Origins, Context, and Consequences”"

Dael Norwood, University of Delaware (dael.norwood@gmail.com)

In 1932, the Hon. Sol Bloom staked a bold claim about the public reputation of George Washington. In a short essay, the New York Congressman – and Director of the George Washington Bicentennial Commission – declared Washington a “business man.” The father of the nation was not just a brave soldier or a steady statesman, but rather a “remarkable man of affairs,” whose mastery of system was critical to his battlefield victories and political triumphs. A genius for business, Bloom claimed, was what made Washington “the most successful American of his century.”

Refiguring the nation’s favorite hero as a businessman during the nadir of the Great Depression was no small effort. Bloom’s article was the tip of an iceberg of public addresses, research monographs, curricular plans, radio programs, plays, and singalongs that collectively redefined Washington for a new era. In shaping this new image, Bloom and his collaborators went over Washington’s early life to make the case that the provincial Virginian’s experiences with credit and debt instilled a worldly financial acumen – and then ransacked his rough and rarely balanced ledgers to demonstrate Washington’s bookkeeping capacity. In Washington, Bloom and his friends at the Bicentennial Commission found – or rather, made – a businessman who exhibited exactly the kind of genius that the early 20th-century entrepreneurial elite claimed for itself. Franklin Delano Roosevelt lauded Bloom for his success in using Washington to revive popular pride in the country, “and faith in its system of government.”

This paper will explore what it meant to redefine George Washington as a career capitalist at a moment of crisis in American business. Tracking how and why Bloom and others came to this project, what means they used to accomplish it, and why they felt that refashioning the most famous founding father into a businessman was in the public interest, this paper will assess how “the businessman” was written into American national culture, with lasting consequences – historiographically, and politically.