LogFAQs > #969169089

ellis123 posted...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/02/17/george-washington-unpopular-president/

Washington wasn't actually that popular as a president. It's mostly just propaganda trying to make it seem like our founders were deities.

This is pretty misleading because Washington was unanimously elected in both of his elections, and the Jeffersonian Republican hostility to his administration really didn't break out in huge numbers until the latter parts of his second term. Foreign policy issues, especially Washington's support for Britain against Revolutionary France, and his ascension to the Jay Treaty, made the Jeffersonians furious even though they were the right things to do given the context. Even Jefferson himself, who was a critic of Washington's administration, mostly blamed the things he didn't like about his Presidency on Alexander Hamilton and always spoke well of Washington as a man of republican conviction and as a leader.

Disparaging Washington for having political opponents is pretty silly when you consider that virtually every great statesman in history has had opponents to deal with as they have navigated complicated issues. Abraham Lincoln certainly had many bitter haters and enemies, and he really was not that popular either (he was a President elected with a plurality of the vote, not a majority), and yet that does not mean that those who think well of him are embracing "propaganda" or "deifying" the man. There is no question that Washington was the indispensable man of the Founding and one of the eminent statesmen in our history, whatever vitriol his Francophile enemies spouted about him.