This Old House

Culture

This Old House

The Mount Vernon makeover is an occasion to reflect on our politicians and their many abodes.

Credit: image via Shutterstock

Looks like George Washington’s mansion outside Washington, D.C., is getting a makeover. Much of the manor house at Mount Vernon is now closed and will remain so for almost a year. Once the Property Brothers have tossed their tools into the back of their pickup and Ye Olde Jacuzzi is up and running, elected officials of our own day—Washington’s heirs—should be moved to the front of the line to see the results. The more they know about the Father of Our Country, the better for all of us, right? He set a worthy example for all of our political leaders, and the good ones try to live up to it.

This renovation will be “the most complicated preservation effort since the house was saved from decay in 1860 by the private, nonprofit Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, which still owns it,” the Washington Post reports. If action were not taken now, Douglas Bradburn, president of George Washington’s Mount Vernon says, termite damage is such that high winds “could knock it off its foundation.”

You can only imagine how a proud and sometimes crusty character like Washington would take that news. Back when he was commanding troops in the American Revolution and had left his home back in Virginia in the care of a trusted nephew, a 16-ton British frigate slipped up the Potomac River, torching plantations along the way, and paused at Mount Vernon. Interpreting this as a threat to bombard the place, the nephew boarded the ship, bearing “a small present of poultry,” followed by gifts of sheep, hogs and other goodies. This gesture of goodwill, said nephew told Washington, spared the farm from bombardment and might possibly secure the return of some 20 slaves who had fled to the frigate.

Rather than grateful, Washington was incensed. It would have been “less painful” to have heard that the nephew had thumbed his nose at that “parcel of plundering Scoundrels,” Washington said, and that “they had burnt my House and laid the Plantation in ruins.” 

Taking goodies to the British and “asking the surrender of my Negroes, was exceedingly ill-judged,” and the kind of behavior that other independence-minded Americans might copy, with dire consequences for the war effort.

This would not have imposed any great hardship on Washington, after all. Had the British leveled the mansion, he could easily have moved into the cozy townhouse he had purchased some years earlier just up the road in Alexandria. 

Here, as in so many areas, Washington set the standard. One lesson his successors in high political office have learned is the importance of having some place to rest your weary head after doing the public’s business all day when your primary place of residence is unavailable. This is true whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, to use today’s political labels. 

We are, first and foremost, Americans. Trump has Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago, and who knows what else. Bedminster? The Clintons have that place in Chappaqua, a mansion on Embassy Row in Washington, and an apartment in Little Rock. The Obamas own a place in Kalorama, which is not far from Embassy Row, and a vacation get-a-way on Martha’s Vineyard. Joe and Jill Biden own a four-acre lakeside property in Wilmington, Delaware, and a summer place at Rehoboth Beach where Joe was so often seen taking much-needed naps. 

Then there’s Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Bernie has a home in Burlington, Vermont, and a vacation place on Lake Champlain. Not so long ago, he also owned a townhouse on Capitol Hill. If, when he decided to vacate the townhouse, he converted it to “affordable housing,” we’re still waiting for his office to let us know.

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