In response to the hullabaloo around yesterday’s article on George Washington, Jeffrey Tucker offered the following defense of Rothbard’s treatment of The Founder:

This article hurls a dead cat into the temple of the civic religion — and does so in way that only Rothbard can.

Given the general tenor of the pro-Washington comments, I’m not sure how many of the commentators even understand what “civic religion” Tucker is talking about, let alone the importance of violating its shrines.

Listening to the History of Rome podcast that I recently discovered, I was surprised and delighted to hear the intelligent commentary of host and author Mike Duncan on the legendary founder of an earlier empire:

It seems comically naive of the Romans to believe that so much could be owed to a single man, but when we look at our own almost religious veneration of George Washington, it begins to make sense. In 500 years, will historians be reporting that George Washington was born of a cherry tree — and had wooden teeth to prove it? That he flew over the Delaware River, defeated the British army, and designed the Constitution all by himself? It seems crazy, but as time goes by, the subtleties of actual events are compressed into small, digestible units. Horatio Gates has already been pushed from the collective consciousness and is known only to historians, but it was his victory at Saratoga, not Washington’s, that led the French to support the Revolution, and thus ensure its success. That story, however, is too complicated. Most Americans don’t know how critical French involvement was, let alone that Washington had little to do with securing it. Washington beat the British. That is the story of the American Revolution. As the years pass, will the name of Madison be lost? Hamilton? Even the great Thomas Jefferson, whose fame is second to none, may yet fall under the juggernaut that is this mythical Washington, as he, like Romulus, becomes the answer to all questions about the founding of America.

By the way, that’s the same Horatio Gates about whom Rothbard writes, “During the campaigns of 1777 a suspicion began to well up among many Americans that Gates was an excellent general and Washington a miserable one, and that maybe something should be done about it.” The same General Gates who wrote a less than flattering letter about General Washington to General Thomas Conway, after which “Washington and his influential friends immediately conjured up a nonexistent widespread ‘plot,’ the mythical ‘Conway Cabal’ … soon forced out of the army by the vindictive Washington.”