OPINION: Washington’s Farewell Address holds lessons for today

George Washington’s Farewell Address is one of the key documents of America’s founding era. It’s not as familiar as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and some other writings, but it was a clarion call for national unity when the United States was forming its identity. It’s also remarkably pertinent to our own time. As political scientist Robert Strong writes in a recent essay, the dangers that Washington foresaw for the young republic “seem startlingly contemporary and relevant 229 years later.” Chief among Washington’s concerns was excessive partisanship, which, he wrote, “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, (and) foments occasionally riot and insurrection.” The Farewell Address, written with help from James Madison and, especially, Alexander Hamilton, and published in a Philadelphia newspaper on Sept. 19, 1796, explained Washington’s reasons for not seeking a third term as president. Washington was uniquely popular. The hero of the American Revolution, he was already celebrated as the father of his country. Presidential electors had voted unanimously for him in 1788 and 1792. He could have been president for life, but he put the government in the capable hands of his contemporaries. The Farewell Address, when it’s mentioned, is often cited for its warning that America should “steer clear of permanent alliances” with other nations. That language has been used — wrongly, I believe — to justify isolationism. But Strong, who spent time working in my congressional office as an American Political Science Association fellow, writes that the overall focus is on domestic affairs. George Washington warned that the government shouldn’t accumulate debt, for example. When it had to borrow money, he wrote, it should promptly repay it, “not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.” Today, our national debt approaches $40 trillion, a burden for future generations. He also worried about regional disputes, especially between North and South, a conflict that would tear the nation apart 65 years later. Today, we are divided between blue states on the coasts and red states in the interior. We aren’t at war, but our relations can be tense. Washington’s strongest warnings were against partisanship, or what he called “the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.” At a time when the first American political parties, Hamilton’s Federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, were taking shape, Washington conceded that creating parties was “inseparable from our nature.” But he feared the consequences: “disorders and miseries” that “incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction … turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.” The language may seem dated, but the concern about extreme partisanship, the concentrated power of an individual leader and even the “runs of public liberty” should speak to Americans today. Washington pointed to the Constitution’s checks and balances between the branches of government as a critical safeguard against absolute power. “To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them,” he wrote. It seems likely that he would be concerned about the way Congress, in recent years, has stood by while presidents accumulate more power. America’s founders weren’t perfect. They were men of their time (and they were all men). Many of them, including Washington, were slaveowners. They couldn’t foresee the ways the nation would change and grow. But they thought deeply about the meaning of freedom and about how to institute a government that would preserve it. We would do well today to take their words to heart.        

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Lee Hamilton, 94, is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years (1965-1999), representing a district in south-central Indiana.