PART 2
/Does it Matter Whether it’s True?
‘History is something quite different from the past.’
Wayne Johnson
Historians have sometimes simply made-up bits of the past they felt were needed to sell their books. One of these was a Minister and itinerant book seller, Mason Locke Weems. His historic invention was a whopper and it stuck.
The good Reverend claimed that young George Washington, having received an axe as a sixth birthday present, adjourned to the backyard and tried it out. He was handy enough with it to quickly dispatch the family’s cherry tree. When his father confronted him, he courageously admitted all. ‘I cannot tell a lie…I did it with my hatchet’. The story goes that this example of an honest little boy was matched by the example of a generous father. George’s father is said to have been delighted by his son’s honesty, which he declared to be ‘worth a thousand cherry trees’.
Does it matter that George Washington never cut down a cherry tree? Weems felt that even if he hadn’t, he perhaps should have, and if he should have, a person of his character would not tell a lie by denying it.
This vignette is so charming that one can only wonder that Weems left it out of the first four editions of his biography. By the time the fifth edition was to come out we may not be surprised to know that the public was perhaps wearying of the same old thing.
Weems correctly judged that they were not just looking for the straight truth. They were looking for a hero. The story of a great boy becoming a great man, was a good moral lesson. Even, apparently, if untrue. Why shouldn’t the readers get what they want? The Minister obliged. The new edition flew off the shelves and the story became engraved permanently in the popular imagination.
To celebrate his success Weems plunged on abusing history. Successive volumes rampaged over American history and bore increasingly lengthy and titillating titles. One of them we present in full for your consideration.
They are all good stories but rarely good history, but they do tend to stick in the mind.
Once again history has been ‘made’.
