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Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy

2022; Penn State University Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/steinbeckreview.19.1.0110

1754-6087

Cecilia Donohue,

American Literature and Culture

It has been nearly sixty years since the publication of Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), John Steinbeck’s memoir of his canine-accompanied, cross-country search for an America with which he had lost touch. Since then, a plethora of travel accounts have been published whose titles lift the first two words of Steinbeck’s book. The multiplicity of Travels with (fill in the blank) tomes runs the gamut of trips with or without dogs, treks that span the continental U.S. or limit their stops to specific states, and voyages whose quests focus on either the personal or the political. And while many pay direct tribute to Steinbeck as inspiration for this sort of national travel across country and the chronicling of sights and impressions, some fail to mention his name even once within the pages of their texts.A recent addition to these subgenres, Nathaniel Philbrick’s Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy (2021), is a lively written, highly informative volume that pays respect to and parallels the Steinbeck trek in all but geographic span. Philbrick, a best-selling historian whose 2015 work In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story That Inspired Moby Dick won the National Book Award, sets out in pre-COVID America with his wife Melissa and Nova Scotia duck-tolling retriever Dora in their Honda Pilot to revisit the first U.S. president’s post-inaugural tour of the young nation. Steinbeck set out on an extensive drive across the United States because, as he put it, “I discovered that I did not know my own country. I . . . was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir” (1963 Bantam ed., 5). Philbrick presents a similar but more focused historical goal—exploration of Washington’s life as general-turned-president: When he surrendered his general’s commission to Congress in 1783, . . . he knew that an even greater challenge—creating a lasting government that fulfilled the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence—lay ahead. . . . I needed to find out what happened to Washington next, never suspecting that he would lead me into a world as fraught and contentious as our own. (xii) Philbrick replicates Washington’s East Coast interstate itinerary, offering a rationale similar to Steinbeck’s: “After two decades of writing about the country’s past, I needed to see for myself what the country had become” (xvii). And like his predecessor, Philbrick embarks on his tour with optimism despite the political climate in the United States in 2018: “This journey wasn’t about identifying the forces polarizing the country. I was hoping to discover just the opposite—what still binds us together” (31). After offering “due deference to John Steinbeck” (xviii), Philbrick articulates additional differences between his trip and that of Steinbeck. While Steinbeck believed that he “had to go alone” (6), Philbrick planned from the start to travel with his newly retired spouse. Both trips included canines, and Philbrick details the demographic differences between Steinbeck’s French poodle Charley and his own duck-tolling retriever Dora: “Unlike Steinbeck’s Charley, who’d been a sedate ten years old, Dora was so rambunctious and freewheeling that we’d attached a GPS tracker to her collar. Whether or not Dora was going to be helpful in striking up a conversation with a stranger, she was guaranteed to make the trip a lot livelier” (4). Coincidentally, while in Connecticut Dora meets a dog named Charley: “a brown standard poodle, . . . identical, as far as I could tell, to Steinbeck’s poodle of the same name, . . . [the two] got along like fast friends” (70–71). The objectives of both Philbrick’s and Steinbeck’s travels are expressed clearly. And Philbrick concurs with his predecessor’s observation on travel as a universal experience: “We do not take a trip; a trip takes us. . . . The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it” (Steinbeck, qtd. in Philbrick 7).Perhaps the most pronounced difference between Steinbeck’s and Philbrick’s respective searches for America lies in their execution of the task. While Steinbeck essentially assumes a semi-passive, spontaneous stance in gathering his impressions, taking in and commenting on whoever or whatever crossed his path that offered a contribution to his defining and depicting his homeland, Philbrick’s schedule is more structured. Informed by the history and folklore that have become part and parcel of America’s knowledge of George Washington, his pre-planned stops along the way include the streets where Washington marched to heroic reception, historic taverns where he may have stopped for food and beverage, the most likely site of the chopped-down cherry tree, and the buildings where it can be declared with sufficient veracity that “George Washington slept here.” And while Travels with Charley (written in a less attribution-conscious era) is devoid of acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, or pictorials, Travels with George generously includes enlightening illustrations (including a photograph of Washington’s dentures), informative maps, and copious clarifying notes and references.The most striking parallel between the two travel memoirs concerns the issue that Philbrick revisits throughout his narrative and that Steinbeck brings to readers’ attention near the conclusion of his journey: the troubled condition of race relations in the United States, whether as a fledgling nation or as a twenty-first-century world power. Steinbeck went to New Orleans to watch the “Cheerleaders”—middle-aged White women hurling obscenities at a tiny young Black girl, dressed all in pristine white and flanked on either side by protective U.S. marshals, as she went up the sidewalk to enter a previously all-White elementary school. “Sick with weary nausea” from what he had witnessed (256), Steinbeck decides to conclude his cross-country journey after this stop in the American South. He describes the region as “a troubled place. . . . And the solution when it arrives will not be easy or simple” (271). According to Philbrick, the first president of the United States of America saw comparable difficulty in addressing the issue of slavery. He writes, “Washington fought a war to create a new country, and now he wanted to do everything he could to preserve this uncertain union of states. To broach the issue of slavery . . . at the outset of his administration would have potentially jeopardized his future attempts to create a lasting government. But how could he justify a government that sanctioned slavery?” (51). As Travels with George progresses, readers are granted a balanced portrayal of Washington on this issue of race that shows just how personal it became for the president. Relating the relentless pursuit of the runaway slave who was the personal servant to First Lady Martha Washington, Philbrick states, “Even though Washington had long been contemplating the emancipation of his enslaved workers at Mount Vernon, he resolved to do everything possible to get Ona [Judge] back” (113). Thus an uxorious president favored domestic tranquility and pleasing his wife over following his conscience and setting Ona free.In concert with his assessment of President Washington, Philbrick calls attention to the impact and influence of slave labor on life in the Northern states: “Walking the streets of Newport [Rhode Island] today, you can’t help but marvel at the wonderful collection of historic homes. The truth is many if not most of these homes were built with profits associated with slavery” (154). The whole matter becomes personal for the writer in his revelations regarding the connections between slavery and his undergraduate alma mater, Brown University. Amid the monuments to the Confederacy he finds when he visits the Southern states—including the Robert E. Lee on Traveller statue in Richmond, Virginia, that was removed on September 9, 2021—he is charmed by a young student touring the South Carolina State House in Columbia who “was looking for an alternative historical figure to venerate.” Philbrick states, “An African-American student brought me up short. ‘Nice dog,’ he said, pointing to Dora. Before I could thank him, he said, ‘I think you should name him Frederick Douglass’” (249).On the concluding pages of his book, Philbrick refers to Steinbeck and his mid-twentieth-century travels one last time: Steinbeck had traveled the country in search of the meaning of America. What he had discovered—that “Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners”—was exactly what Washington had hoped to accomplish. . . . Despite all that had happened in the sixty years since Steinbeck’s journey, what he called “the American identity was still ‘an exact and provable thing.” (307) One could argue that this is a debatable observation, and Philbrick says as much in one of the final paragraphs of his travel memoir as he recalls standing on top of Mount Mansfield in Vermont toward the beginning of his journey: “To say a lot has happened in the year since we stood on that mountain is an understatement” (312). Yet he sees the answers to the nation’s problems in looking not at the flaws in the life of the Father of Our Country, but rather to his management style: “Washington didn’t need to be right all the time. He just wanted to make things work. He understood that feasible change is not attained by righteous indignation; it’s understanding that the road ahead is full of compromises if life is actually going to get better” (311). Fancifully, Philbrick also opines that “if George Washington had been a dog, I decided, he wouldn’t have been a toller or even one of his beloved foxhounds. He would have been a standard poodle like Charley: a noble dog ever mindful of his boundaries” (71).Without question, early American history buffs will delight in the information and observations Philbrick brings forth in this text. Dog lovers will enjoy how Dora becomes a character in the book much as Charley was portrayed in Steinbeck’s memoir—never anthropomorphized, but a key source of gentle humor and comic relief. And fans and scholars of John Steinbeck will applaud Travels with George in its deep appreciation and admiration for the letter and spirit of Steinbeck’s journey through a post-Washington and pre-Philbrick America.