Who is George Washington?
George Washington was the United States of America’s first president. Washington’s passion for a free country led him to fully support the American Revolutionary War and secured him the title of “father of the nation.” George Washington was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia on 22 February 1732 to a family of planters, a profession he embraced himself early on. After graduating from university, George Washington worked as a land surveyor until the French and Indian War started and he decided to join the war. His leadership during the war later won him an appointment as the American Army’s commander in chief, which he held until the end of war in 1783. George Washington’s intentions were to go back to his early work as a planter, but his love for the emerging nation kept bringing him back to the center of political upheavals. He was one of the driving forces behind the drafting of the Constitution, and the key creator of a new tax system and the first national bank.
Two score and 15 years ago, I first learned the names of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. At that time, each was honored on the day of his birth with a holiday. Our classrooms were plastered from floor to ceiling with their images, along with quotations that revealed their vision for what America should be as a nation. Their lives and accomplishments were used to instil a respect for our common values, heritage, language and culture. Once lost, a tradition is very hard to rebuild. Have we forgotten the values and characteristics that make us Americans? Are we losing our identity? In 1968, the Congress replaced the celebration of Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays with a generic President’s Day. During the Congressional debates, Representative Dan Heflin Kuykendall, Republican of Tennessee, warned, “Ten years from now our schoolchildren will not know or care when George Washington was born. They will know that in the middle of February they will have a three day weekend for some
