eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
George Washington made a noble gesture of refusing payment for his services as commander in chief of the Continental Army—but as this book reveals, he also took it as an opportunity to indulge his insatiable lust for fine food and drink, extravagant clothing, and lavish accommodations.
In a close analysis of the document that financed our Revolution, Marvin Kitman uncovers some surprising scandals and fascinating facts—and serves each up with verve and wit.
“An intriguing network of historical detection.” —San Francisco Chronicle
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802196613 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 396,358 |
| File size: | 23 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A MAN'S expense account needs no introduction; it usually speaks for itself. Still a few general words are in order about this revealing form of autobiography.
One of the great American institutions, the expense account, can make even a square-jawed, clean-cut American businessman or civil servant who rises early, works hard and always has his employer's interest at heart feel vaguely un-American. It doesn't matter that he hasn't done anything wrong. The concept of sleeping, eating and forgetting about the cares of a hard day away from the office at no expense to oneself seems immoral. General recognition of this negative attitude can be seen in the widespread usage within business and government communities of the phrase "swindle sheet."
The fact is, there is nothing nefarious about the expense account. It is not, as some may have supposed, the product of a Machiavellian or Eastern European mind. Indeed the classic in the field was handed in by that pillar of rectitude George Washington, for his work as father of his country.
Like most American schoolboys, I had heard the story of how George Washington offered to serve his country during the Revolutionary War without salary. In one of the most stirring speeches in the annals of patriotism, he explained, after his election as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army in June 1775, that all he asked of his new country was that it pick up his expenses.
In his own immortal words, which were written by his speechwriter, Edmund Pendleton:
As to pay, Sir, I beg leave to Assure the Congress that as no pecuniary consideration could have tempted me to have accepted this Arduous employment (at the expense of my domesttic [sic] ease and happiness) I do not wish to make any Proffit [sic] from it. I will keep an exact Account of my expences. Those I doubt not they will discharge, and that is all I desire.
Nothing much is heard in the classrooms about the equally stirring expense account General Washington submitted after the war.
I found this copy of his ledger book in the stacks of the New York Public Library, where for the past few years I have been researching a larger work, titled "The Making of the Prefident 1789" (to be published as part of the bicentennial celebration), about the way the Mount Vernon machine engineered the first national presidential election. It was what scholars call a very exciting discovery.
I am no historian. So I have to be very cautious about getting involved in the issues which Washington scholars have quibbled over for the past century. Was Washington soft on civil rights, as his 212 slaves might suggest? Or do his private letters, in which he said he detested the institution of slavery, qualify him as a prenatal member of the NAACP? Was he guilty of using profanity at the height of the Monmouth Court House battle, when he purportedly cursed Gen. Charles Lee, "Get your fat ass out to the battlefield"? Or was he simply issuing a command regarding the disposition of military vehicles? Did he marry the widow Martha Custis on January 6, 1759, for her money? Or for her land-holdings? Who really nominated him to be commander-in-chief with his earlier military record, John Adams of Massachusetts or Thomas Johnson of Maryland — and why?
But I am a free-lance writer. And if there is anything free-lance writers are authorities on it is expense accounts. Editors have said that some of my most creative writing goes into the composition of expense accounts accompanying my articles. Internal Revenue men have been known to whistle in admiration at some of my interpretations of what is just.
There has been a tendency on the part of modern historians to belittle Washington's accomplishments in war and peace. But expense account writing is the one area in which the man was second to none.
As I leafed through the yellowed, brittle pages of this priceless document, the refrain of a song I remember hearing while working for the government as a draftee† in the same army the Virginia planter founded drifted back:
You're in the army now.
You're not behind the plow.
You'll never get rich,
You son of a bitch.
You're in the army now.
That Washington was able to function as an artist in a place that traditionally offered so few growth opportunities told me that I was in the presence of true greatness.
While it made me sad to discover that much of what I considered original in my work in the field was derivative, I think it is only right that we give credit where it is due. Just about everybody who writes expense accounts today — the so-called "expense account crowd" — is following in George Washington's hallowed footsteps. I might even go so far as to say that General Washington's expense account is the obviously revered model for the nation's current defense budget.
Washington's expense account isn't perfect. There are 43 basic principles governing the art of writing this kind of introspective literature, and Washington has used only 42 of them. Still, he holds the record.
Some modern expense account writers believe the only principle they ever follow is that each one should be higher than the next. In today's military language, this is the escalation principle, which Washington followed scrupulously during the 96 months he was on the expense account.
Now nobody likes to give away one's trade secrets, but some of the less important rules, as demonstrated in the Washington model, are:
* Omit nothing. When in doubt, charge anyway. Put it on the train to Westport, and see if it gets off.
* Be specific on the smaller expenditures and vague on the larger ones. Describe in some depth the purchase of a ball of twine, but casually throw in the line, "Dinner for one army."
* Whenever possible, intermingle personal and business expenses.
* Pick up the check for one's associates. Washington was perhaps generous to a fault this way with taxpayers' money.
* Above all, be reasonable. Know what the market will bear. As Washington undoubtedly heard Torn Paine — a leading PR man of the day (his client was the Declaration of Independence) — say often, "You have to use common sense."
Sometimes General Washington manages to illustrate his grasp of the 42 basic principles in the narrow space of three-fourths of a single page (see my accompanying translation). By no means do the items in the ledger book suggest that Washington invented the expense account — I want to make that clear — only that he may have been the founding father of the American way of life known as "expense account living."
My purpose in seeing now to the reprinting of this watershed document in the history of commercial writing is not in the spirit of boasting of one's Revolutionary War antecedents, although I am proud to establish yet another link to the first President. (The first one is that he passed, in great haste, within a block of my house in Leonia, New Jersey, in 1776 on the retreat from Fort Lee to Hackensack, Paramus and eventually, Valley Forge. My purpose, rather, is to aid in rehabilitating Washington's name.
The average fellow in our expense account crowd today thinks of Washington about as much as Millard Fillmore. After reading this book, I hope every drummer and influence-peddler in Washington will make a pilgrimage to Mount Vernon to pay his respects at the shrine of this great writer — and on somebody's expense account.
With this new appreciation of Washington, the monument and the man, I also hope to revive interest in him amongst the young. My coauthor was the Ché of Fairfax County, Virginia, a dangerous revolutionary who was willing to risk everything — foxhounds, slaves, beloved shrubs and rose gardens — to overthrow the establishment. He was a radical of no political party, without program or ideology, except perhaps a belief in the magical ability of the weed tobacco to solve his problems. His relations with his mother were strained. The way Washington fought the war on an expense account also should have great appeal to radical students of today who ask for amnesty in their insurrectional activities.
CHAPTER 2This is one of the most inspiring books to come out of the War for Independence, or any other war. Yet for some reason it never caught on with the public.
It was first published by the Chief Clerk in the Register's Office of the Treasury Department in June, 1833, under the title, "Accounts, G. Washington with the United States, Commencing June 1775, and ending June 1783, Comprehending a Space of 8 Years." Despite the sensationalism of the title, it must have struck readers of that era as just another government handout. The account book was not quickly established as a classic American document nor its author as one of the literary heroes of the war.
Eight years later, the book was reissued in a new package. It had all the juicy parts, the dry-as-martini statistics, but a new title: "A Monument to Washington's Patriotism." Published by the Trustees of the Washington Manual Labor School and Male Orphan Asylum, as a fund-raising project, this facsimile edition was enhanced by a number of advance reviews from authorities on spending federal funds, from President John Tyler and secretaries of the departments, down to members of the House of Representatives. They were all raves.
"This simple memoir is full of instruction," wrote Representative John Sergeant of North Carolina. "It teaches all, and especially the young, that economy, order, and unusual conscientiousness even in the smallest matters ... not only may be consistent with the greatest capacity and most splendid achievement, but are indispensable to their perfection. ..."
Levi Woodbury, Secretary of the Treasury under Tyler and later a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, said of his reasons for enjoying the ledger: "The first one is the example so very laudable which it sets to the rising generation of accuracy, care and punctuality in monied matters, however small. The other [reason] is the model it furnishes of disinterestedness in the public service. ..."
No wonder it turned off the kids. On closer examination than the reviewers gave it, this book would have explained why economizers in government — from President Tyler, whose administration promised to cut federal spending, to President Nixon — face such a hopeless task.
Actually the publishing history of this book may be one of the earliest cases of news management. If the government had tried to suppress this long forgotten chapter of the war, it might have had a decent chance to become a best-seller. By making it available to the public — only 43 years after the statute of limitations ran out — the government's strategy may have been that nobody would read it. The book's impact since 1833 more than fulfilled the government's high expectations.
Although I haven't finished reading all the 39 volumes of Washington's collected papers† yet, I did my homework by reading this ledger through. It differs from his other work the way a company's annual report differs from its president's expense account. The difference in this case was so striking, I read the expense account again and again.
The prose Washington is most remembered for always seems to have been written by somebody else. A busy man during the war, Washington employed at least 32 private secretaries in batches of four and five. These were divided into riding and writing aides. This latter group was composed of corresponding secretaries and secretary-treasurers who also kept his books. Alexander Hamilton, the bright, young Columbia (King's College) lawyer, later the Ted Sorenson of the first Washington administration, was one of those who served with distinction as a ghostwriter at Headquarters. Although Colonel Hamilton is credited with being the hand behind much of Washington's writing on economics after the war, there is little doubt about who penned this masterpiece.
The key to the authenticity of the authorship is in the orthography, which has Washington's special touch. At the age of thirteen† Washington wrote a famed guidebook for self-made men, "Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation," in which he advised, "Never tell a lye." He had a fantastic system of spelling, but the code can be broken by keeping in mind that he was never able to get the i's and e's right, in the words like ceiling. He wrote blew when he meant the color blue, and oil was oyl. It shouldn't be supposed that this was typical of eighteenth century scholarship. Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin could spell and use grammar perfectly. George Washington was an elementary school drop-out, and paid the price.
Historians are not clear on how long George Washington went to school; we can safely assume he got some schooling between the ages of seven and eleven, and that he did not go on, like many of the other founding fathers of Virginia, to the College of William and Mary (except for a kind of adult extension course in Surveying I). In that light, his compositions are quite good, although none of the 300 or so written for this book can match the raw talent displayed in his diary of March 15, 1748. On a field trip, the sixteen-year-old surveyor's assistant wrote:
We got our suppers & was Lighted into a Room & I not being so good a woodsman as ye rest of my company, striped myself very orderly and went into ye Bed, as they calld it, when to my surprize, I found it to be nothing but a little straw matted together without sheets or anything else, but only one thread bear blanket with double its weight of vermin, such as Lice, Fleas &. I was glad to get up... I put on my cloths & lay as my companions.
He seems to have made a deliberate effort to clean up the spelling when submitting the expense account to a learned body like Congress. Still a basic military word like reconnoiter continually evaded him in the expense account compositions. He also misspells the names of friends and other proper nouns regularly. Young Washington once referred sardonically to Williamsburg as "the great Matrapolis." He is always in the same ballpark with a proper noun, unlike some of the New England privates whose diaries, we will see later, immortalized Markis Delefiat (Lafayette), Dullerway (Delaware), and Hushing (Hessians).
General Washington received a degree from Harvard in 1776: an L.L.D. It was probably the most comprehensive degree ever awarded by an American institution of higher learning, making him "Doctor of Laws, the Law of Nature and Nations, and of Civil Law." Since I expect Harvard Business School, as well as Wharton School of Finance, graduate students to use this book as a required text, I have taken the liberty, as part of my contribution to this joint effort, to improve Dr. Washington's compositions. The periods dropped into run-on sentences are mine.
Dr. Washington's strength was in the science of numbers. He loved arithmetic as other boys of his period loved Marlowe (or Shakespeare). His mind as a boy was crammed with important facts and figures — avoirdupois, pints and gallons, cords of wood, pecks of peas, multiplication tables, and the conversion rates of pound sterling to Spanish dollars. He never learned French, but even as a boy he knew how to draft a bill of sale, a power of attorney, a promissory note. He wasn't what we call today an idea-man, but few scholars would deny his preeminence as a thing-man. George Washington was first among American statesmen in counting things.
One of the more moving passages in his diaries begins: "Took a list today all my Negroes, which are as follow, at Mt. Vernon.
HOME HOUSE
Will... ValdeChambre.. 1 Frank
* Austin ... Waiters in the House ... 2 Hercules Nathan. ... Cooks ... 2 Giles
* Joe Paris-boy ... Drivers & Stablers ... 3
* Doll Jenny ... Almost Past service. ... 2
* Betty
* Lame Alice Charlotte ... Sempstresses ... 3
And so forth, down to "the carpenter, Sambo." (The asterisks denoted "Dower Negroes," i.e., Martha Washington's contribution to the household.) Slaves were sold then like used cars today, and it was very important for the Virginia planter-industrialist to keep a careful record of the condition of his property.
Every penny he owned and every foot of land was set down over and over again, in the most orderly, meticulous way, in memorandum books he carried inside his tunic. Washington's spirit of inquiry knew no limits. He counted and listed "the no. of Paynes" in each window at Mount Vernon. At one time when he was managing five plantations and seven hundred slaves he calculated laboriously the number of seed in a pound Troy weight of red clover (71,000). He was the Robert McNamara of the Continental military establishment.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "George Washington's Expense Account"
by .
Copyright © 1970 Marvin Kitman.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
I. INTRODUCTION,
II. ORIGINAL VERSION: Accounts, G. Washington with the United States, Commencing June 1775, and Ending June 1783, Comprehending a Space of 8 Years,
III. FINANCIAL NOTE,
IV. A TRANSLATION FROM THE OLD ENGLISH TO THE NEW ENGLISH: Accounts, G. Washington with the United States, Commencing June 1775, and Ending June 1783, Comprehending a Space of 8 Years,
V. CONCLUSION,
