XI. GREAT MINDS IN THE GREAT STORM Suppressing Americans. The Business of Getting Ready. Many Men of Many Minds. XII. THE HOUSE LONG DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF Unpatriotic Confusion of Opinions and Interests. Sometimes Too Late to Mend. Selecting the Leader of Liberty for America. XIII. LARGE BODIES MOVE SLOWLY The First Commander-in-Chief. Big Business, Money-Makers and Patriotism. The Strong Mind for Great Needs. XIV. TURNING REVOLUTION INTO GOVERNMENT Seeking Retirement for Life. Freedom and the Wrangle for Personal Gain. Laying the Foundations of Liberty and Law. XV. THE PEACE OF HOME AT LAST Sorrow for the Departed Scenes. Crowned in the Fullness of Time. A Life-Like Scene from Washington’s Home Life. XVI. STANDARDS OF AMERICAN PATRIOTISM Foundations. Freedom of the Western Hemisphere. The Loyalty of Youth. XVII. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS The Washington Ideal as the American Ideal. Not Birth But Character Makes Americans. The American Lesson Learned from the Greatest Leaders in the Making of America. WASHINGTON AND AMERICAN LIBERTY CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS I. AMERICAN PATRIOTISM AND THE MEANING OF AMERICA “America for Americans” is a patriotic appeal that has arisen in many a political crisis, and then gone to pieces in the confusions of what we mean by “Americans” and “America.” American Liberty has been a goddess of worship from the beginning, and yet we find ourselves in an endless turmoil concerning what we mean by “American liberty.” Washington and his associate patriots wrote a great definition in history and established that definition in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, but human meaning, like the skies, seems hard to get clear and to keep clear. To know clearly what the definition of freedom means and to promote it in the right-minded way, is the patriotism that identifies anyone anywhere as being American. The makers of America loved the right-minded way, and their primary test of justice unfailingly required, as a basis, the personal liberty that has been described to us by all as freedom to do the right that wrongs no one. To these “rights of man,” they gave “the last full measure of devotion,” as Lincoln defined patriotism, for “the birth of a new freedom under God.”