Somehow, even when he lost a battle, Washington still won. After the bloody Battle of Germantown (October 4, 1777), Washington lost his position and twice as many men as the British, but the French decided he was pretty brave and threw their weight behind his flailing army. (It helped that his generals were winning important battles at places like Saratoga.)
Mercifully, too, since the French were better at the whole “strategy” thing than the Americans. They had been using it against the British for a lot longer. It was thanks to French advice that the colonist won at Yorktown (1781), which was the beginning of the end for the British dream of one big Canada. It was also the beginning of Washington’s celebrity status and the end of Washington’s human status.
Casanova?
Washington had a habit of capitalizing on his good looks, like winning command of the army and charming French generals into helping the American cause. That’s because he knew the importance of looking the part. And while his marriage was a good one, he didn’t mind flirting and dancing with pretty, young girls after a few sips of champagne.
In fact, Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, was so infatuated with him that in her letters to her husband she gushed about Washington’s goodness—and his good looks. Furthermore, Lady Kitty, the daughter of one of Washington’s generals, requested a lock of George’s hair, and Caty Greene, wife of General Nathaniel Greene, danced for three straight hours at a ball with Washington. Afterwards, she named her son after him. That must have been some two-step!
Getting Better with Age
Okay, so George wasn’t great at the whole “tactics” thing while leading the army, but he was really good at being strict with his troops. He was forever trying to make his soldiers look like soldiers—his own personal mini-me’s. He wanted them to stop gambling, drinking, and cursing. A man could get twenty-five lashes for uttering a curse word, fifty lashes for drinking, and fifteen hundred lashes for desertion. That is, until Washington had a gallows built and hanged a couple of repeat deserters as a warning to the rest of the soldiers.
Washington was constantly annoyed with his men unless they pulled off a miraculous feat, like trudging miles through snow with bleeding feet or winning against terrible odds. Then he liked them. After their shared suffering during the winter at Valley Forge—where up to ten men died a day from the cold, disease, and starvation—Washington became his soldiers’ biggest supporter. He stopped complaining about how worthless his volunteers and officers were and started defending them. He may have stayed in plusher quarters and ate dinner each night, but he knew they were miserable, and he felt bad enough about it to beg, borrow, and steal things they needed.
In time, Washington grew into his position. He gave better treatment to prisoners of war, inoculated his army against smallpox, operated a spy ring, mixed freed slaves into his army, developed a navy for the colonies, and finagled much-needed funds and arms from Congress. But it seems that the reality of the job finally hit home, and he once mentioned how he would have never taken the gig if he’d known how hard it would be.
freed slaves:
Even though Washington allowed freed slaves to fight with the army, it’s not as magnanimous a gesture as it first appears. If it had been up to him, he would never have allowed them to serve. But he desperately needed men, and the British were only too happy to arm black men for their cause. So Washington reversed his decision a year into the war, and the Continental Army was the most integrated army in America until the 1960s.
Washington may have lost more battles than he won and he was usually outmaneuvered by the superior British forces, but he held the army together, inspired loyalty in his men by his bravery, and persuaded men to reenlist. That’s no small accomplishment, no matter what kind of general you are.
First President—Kind Of
After the British surrendered and the Treaty of Paris was signed, Washington didn’t get unanimously voted in as first president, nor did he prance into the Oval Office as a thank-you for winning the war. For one, the first president to stay in the White House was John Adams (president number two), and the Oval Office wasn’t built until 1909.
Besides that, the states had to make a few mistakes at governing before Washington took the role as president. Enter the Articles of Confederation, which gave each state a ton of power and created a bunch of presidents in what was called the Congress Assembled.
It was a terrible idea. Nobody agreed and nothing got done. So that was scrapped and the United States Constitution was born in 1787. The Constitution balanced the power between the states and the federal government. It also made one person president, and that person was none other than George Washington, who was unanimously voted into office.
Now—finally!—you can start picturing the white-haired, dignified-looking Washington.
Don’t go crazy and start thinking he was the brains behind the operations. Washington knew enough to know he didn’t know enough. So he surrounded himself with geniuses, and he didn’t mind leaning on them for advice—a great tactic for once. Instead of dictating policy, like a dictator, he guided it with the wise advice of others, which became a precedent.
You don’t want to know what’s behind those pursed lips . . .
Even some of Washington’s speeches were written by others. George never attended a university, even though he really wanted to, so spelling and grammar weren’t exactly his forte. It was something that always bothered him. It also bothered one of his first historians, Jared Sparks, who went back through Washington’s old letters and cleaned up the truly horrendous grammatical errors and fancified his dull sentences.
Others helped create the myth of George Washington by gussying up details about his life. The famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware shows George heroically standing in front of the first American flag. In reality, Washington was still flying the Grand Union during the crossing—which had the British flag in the corner with stripes across its body representing the thirteen colonies—but that didn’t seem as patriotic for the painter and the flag was changed to the new American flag.
Washington Today
Washington was lucky that there were no such things as televised debates and campaign speeches back in 1776. He never would’ve become president if there had been. He had a soft voice—John Adams sometimes had to repeat what Washington said in Congress so people could hear—and off-the-cuff questions made him nervous. Also, his dentures had the distinct possibility of falling out of his mouth whenever he spoke.
Some played up Washington’s Hulk-like physique, claiming that he threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River. Sadly, there were no silver dollars in circulation at the time of Washington’s life, and no one could do that except for the actual Hulk.
Even the infamous cherry tree story was phony thanks to Washington’s earliest biographer, Parson Weems, who apparently thought George wasn’t cool enough on his own to sell books.
The Grand Union flag: not the patriotic look they were hoping for.
Washington did accomplish a lot of real things, though. He set precedents that presidents still go by today, like only serving two terms, wearing civilian clothing, giving an inaugural address, picking his inner circle, reserving evenings for dinner parties, and retreating back home when the job got to be too much. (When in doubt, retreat!) He had to make tons of decisions not made explicit in the Constitution.
Washington set another precedent that seems to have been passed down through the years: leaving the next president with his really messy foreign problems.
Since the British were sore losers, they liked to take American sailors on the high seas and impress them—not by flexing their muscles or showing them the best Caribbean beaches, but by kidnapping them and forcing them into the British Navy. This was called impressment, and it was pretty obnoxious, but Washington didn’t plan on solving the problem while in office. In fact, Washington said sayonara, sucker to the second president, John Adams, and retired to Mount Vernon, leaving America
open to another war with Britain—the War of 1812.
Paging Greatness
So for what should George Washington be considered great? Being a good leader and politician? Being the first president of a new democracy? It’s complicated since the revolution switched one set of old white guys for another set of old white guys with slightly less snobbish accents. Slaves didn’t get any more rights and neither did women.
Yet, despite Washington’s faults, who else in history has been asked to raise an army, stop a juggernaut (the British Empire), and start a new nation? And then after he succeeded, he did something kind of crazy. He gave up power not once, but twice.
Instead of riding into Congress and crowning himself emperor—kind of like Napoleon did a few years later in France—he handed in his title of military dictator. Then, Washington stepped down from office after two terms as president. This kind of thing sent a pretty strong message to the rest of the world.
True, he was sick of getting raked over burning hot coals by his one-time friends and prying media. He also wasn’t feeling well and the last tooth in his rotten mouth was gone, but he set the term limit as president at two, which has not been changed since. There would never be a king or emperor ruling for life in the United States of America.
term limit:
Except for Franklin D. Roosevelt who was elected four times, but only got to serve three before he died. After him, Congress quickly passed the Twenty-Second Amendment limiting term limits to two—just like George Washington.
In the end, maybe what made Washington appear so great (and what we still remember to this day) was looking exactly how a budding new country needed its founding father to look: majestic on a horse during war, and wise and measured on a dollar bill.
Chapter
3
Pythagoras
The Father of Everything
Lived: Sixth century BCE, Greece
Occupation: Mathematician (ish)
Immortality Suits Pythagoras
Are you confused by a + b = c? A little fuzzy on the meaning of the word hypotenuse? Unsure why the triangle has to be “right”? Don’t worry. It’s quite possible that Pythagoras was just as perplexed as you are, and he supposedly invented the formula.
Pythagoras lived around 570 BCE in Samos, an island off the coast of modern-day Turkey, and also in Croton, a city in Southern Italy. That’s about all you can take to the bank. Everything else is debatable.
See, Pythagoras attracted legends like bugs to a bright light. Except, he was more like the fat spider in the corner, gobbling down legend after legend. It’s hard to blame him, though, since he was dead for most of the meal. It was his followers who threw incredible deed after miraculous feat at the memory of the dead man, turning him into history’s biggest math fraud. It wasn’t just the triangle thing, either.
Suddenly, he invented mathematics, discovered the secrets of the harmony of the spheres, and began Greek philosophy itself. That’s a pretty impressive résumé for a corpse. But first, he taught students something a little different than your average geometry teacher.
Are you sure this is “right”?
A Vegetarian before It Was Cool
The Greeks didn’t have the rosiest ideas about the afterlife. It was more doom and gloom than harps and happiness. They believed that inconsolable shades roamed a dark field in Hades for eternity. Shades were hungry and cold and miserable, and they stayed that way forever.
shades:
Ghosts.
Enter Pythagoras. Like a hoplite in shining armor, he came to the rescue of any Greek unhappy with such a bleak picture of life after death, and really, who wouldn’t be?
hoplite:
Greek warrior.
According to Pythagoras, you didn’t have to die. Not for long, at least. You could be reborn. He swore he’d been reincarnated four times already. He even remembered the battle at Troy where he had been killed by Menelaus centuries ago.
chiton:
Greek version of the toga.
Don’t Cross the Boss
Pythagoras liked numbers. They were pretty, they were rational, and they were magical, which just about covers all the criteria Pythagoras needed. According to legend, everything was numbers—whole numbers, to be exact. People who believed in imaginary, irrational, and negative numbers (all things mathematicians study today), well, they weren’t allowed into Pythagoras’s group. In fact, irrational numbers and their type were even worse than toot-inducing beans.
Unfortunately, Hippasus, one of Pythagoras’s most famous followers, picked a bad time to discover the irrationality of the square root of two—on a boat in the middle of the sea. Hippasus, perhaps forgetting the bigwig didn’t like irrational numbers, was understandably excited to show his findings, so he challenged his fellow Pythagoreans to find a whole number answer to the square root of two. Their bushy eyebrows scrunched together and their eyes started to cross. Nothing worked. Steam probably poured out of the Pythagoreans’ ears soon after.
At this point, Hippasus should’ve been nervous. Word couldn’t get out that there were irrational numbers, so the group (or perhaps Pythagoras himself) threw Hippasus overboard. Hippasus would have to tell his discovery to the fishes. (Just to be clear, this story was first told hundreds of years after it supposedly happened. And there are a lot of versions.)
Like most good things in life, it wasn’t easy to be reborn. It took a lot of hard work, but Pythagoras had a few tricks up his chiton to help his followers achieve this immortality.
If you thought life in Ancient Greece without running water and television was hard enough, becoming a Pythagorean meant life was about to get a lot harder.
Some of the easy rules included: don’t eat beans, don’t eat animals (that delicious goat might be your grandfather, after all), don’t let yourself be buried with wool, don’t stir a fire with iron, don’t look in a mirror that’s beside a light, don’t use public roads, don’t step over a yoke, and definitely don’t speak in the dark. That was just the beginning, though. The list was exhaustive, and exhausting. (Hard ones involved sitting at a table full of food, letting the smell of hot, tasty roast goat waft up your nose, and then leaving without touching a thing after a “considerable time.”)
Membership to Pythagoras’s club was exclusive. This was a secret society of sorts. Not everyone could join, and for the first five years of membership, no one was allowed to talk, even in daylight. That’s one easy way to keep people from complaining about how much they miss their mom, or not getting to take the easy way home—on a road.
So was Pythagoras the first vegetarian? Maybe, or maybe not. Some say he ate no meat and wouldn’t even talk to butchers. Others say he ate meat except for oxen. Unless someone tracks down a recently reincarnated Pythagoras, his eating habits will stay a mystery. Except for the beans. His followers were very clear on that count.
No beans allowed, because not only did beans look like fetuses (and you wouldn’t want to be a cannibal, would you?) but everyone knows the more beans you eat, the more you toot, and that can obviously distract you from thinking about lofty things like death and math.
The Original Renaissance Man
With such an interesting man, it didn’t take long for more rumors about his life to start flying. And the golden rule of rumors is the crazier, the better. Crazy tends to grab people’s attention.
How crazy, you ask? How about this: He was a son of Apollo, the god of reason; he could be in two places at once; he could predict earthquakes; he never laughed; he bit a snake to death; and he had a golden thigh—things of that nature. Things teachers really should mention in math class more often.
Snake and beans: it’s what’s for dinner.
In his lifetime, Pythagoras only claimed to know mystical secrets about the hereafter. A few hundred years later, and people claimed Pythagoras knew everything. (Saying he was the son of a god probably helped sway disbelievers.) It was thanks to these rumors and to his loyal followers, that Pythagoras was
soon the Father of Everything.
Harmonizing Hammers: the opposite of MythBusters.
By the fourth century BCE, things had spiraled out of control. Somebody insisted Pythagoras discovered musical harmony simply by walking past a blacksmith’s forge. The ringing of the hammers sounded pleasant—except for one. Pythagoras ran inside, only to realize the one unharmonious hammer didn’t have any ratios in common with the others. Thus, the principle of harmony was found, even though the MythBusters could debunk this in a second.
Next, Pythagoras was declared the Master of Philosophy, right about the time some famous guy named Plato was writing down his own philosophical conversations (427–347 BCE). Pythagoras’s followers cried foul and accused Plato of plagiarism.
As for the famous Pythagorean Theorem, it wasn’t until some Romans living in the first century BCE mentioned the two together that Pythagoras became connected. Cicero said that Pythagoras found something new and sacrificed an ox. Then Cicero had to go and say he didn’t believe the stories. Every writer after Cicero conveniently left out the “I do not believe it” bit and embellished the story, including Vitruvius thirty years later, who added the all-important triangle bit.
According to an earlier source—now lost—a guy named Apollodorus the Calculator (Not to be confused with Apollodorus the Tape Measure. Just kidding.) mentioned how Pythagoras celebrated the secret of triangles not by going out for ice cream, but by sacrificing oxen—which later got turned into a hecatomb. Which seems like it would get in the way of that vegetarian thing. Maybe that’s why Cicero said he didn’t believe it.
Famous Phonies Page 3