George Washington and Revolutionary Asceticism: The Localist as Nationalist
Don Higginbotham, Ph.D. (1993)

Dr. Higginbotham, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina and an expert on comparative revolution, points out that Washington, unlike such leaders as Lenin, Khomeini and even Gandhi, was not a “revolutionary ascetic.” It was Washington’s attachment to his family and Mount Vernon and his eagerness to return to Virginia country life, Higginbotham argues, that made him a safe leader for a revolution that did not wish to replace one king with another. Washington was raised in a society that extolled the virtues of Cincinnatus, who gave up a position of unquestioned leadership to return to his beloved farm – a decision that Washington gladly made not once but twice.

To say that Washington’s pre-Revolutionary life in Virginia explains much about his character as a revolutionary figure is perhaps only to state the obvious. Even so, it seems that the subject is worth further exploration from the perspective of the study of comparative revolution. The Virginian was not an exile prior to the armed rebellion of 1775, as were the Kossuths, Lenins, Ho Chi Minhs, and Khomeinis of later revolutionary upheavals. Nor was his revolutionary persona in any way shaped by events in distant lands or by the reading of some seminal book. He hardly planned or initiated a revolution against British rule. He was never a professional revolutionary, the kind one encounters in the nineteenth century, such as Marx.

While several different comparative approaches might be equally valid, I find it especially useful to examine Washington's Virginia years within the context of several themes developed by Bruce Mazlish in The Revolutionary Ascetics. According to Mazlish, a substantial number of revolutionists in modem history have been ascetics. Drawing upon the studies of Max Weber and Sigmund Freud and their followers, Mazlish portrays many revolutionists as characterized by feelings of alienation from the dominant culture and by traits of self-denial, men principally unmindful of worldly, material pleasures, including “wine, women, and song.” Not only is this kind of revolutionary capable of cutting loose from family, class, and province or region, but his eschewing of them enables him to more readily oust from command and eliminate altogether his comrades in the cause and to risk the possibility of his own death.

Skeptics may assuredly argue that Mazlish casts his net too widely when he pulls in Robespierre, Lenin, Castro, and Mao together with Gandhi, and Arafat, even if they all share at least some forms of asceticism. Yet there have been revolutionaries who forsook the good life, and Mazlish demonstrates that total obsession with the revolution, sometimes including libidinal sublimation, has shown particular revolutionary leaders to be narcissists. They take themselves too seriously and, ultimately, see themselves as the revolution, without whom its values will erode and its cause will fail.

Does Washington fit the broad contours of Mazlish’s revolutionary ascetics? Though the answer is dearly “no,” be it cultural alienation, or self-denial of familial and material wants, or narcissism, he certainly possessed the iron will and personal bravery that Mazlish discerns in his own revolutionary characters, to say nothing of his resolve to see his Potomac mansion go up in flames rather than have his plantation manager bargain with the British to save it. In any event, a closer examination of Washington in relation to Mazlish’s three categories may be helpful in understanding both his incorruptibility and the nature of his loyalties during the American Revolution.

Though Washington has been properly hailed as the foremost nationalist of his age, both symbolically and as a relentless advocate of a strong American union, I maintain that he also remained throughout his life a committed localist, devoted to his roots—to people and place, which meant Virginia. For Washington, unlike some localists and nationalist-localists such as Patrick Henry of Virginia and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts and nationalists such as Alexander Hamilton of New York—it was possible to be both.

Rather than expressing alienation from British culture, Washington admired English ways. There were, of course, some differences between the country elites of England and Virginia: the English generally had greater wealth, which was not based on slavery or tobacco; but the similarities were more important to the Virginians, who felt they conformed closely to the Old World mold. According to Edmund Randolph, whose own family was split by the Revolution, “almost every political sentiment, every fashion in Virginia, appeared to be imperfect unless it have a resemblance to some precedent in England.” This “almost idolatrous deference” to things English, explained Randolph, was why Virginians before the Revolution had been more tolerant than other colonials when the mother country made mistakes.

If Washington himself sought to become as English as his station and circumstances permitted, he sometimes encountered frustrations in his quest. First, there was the matter of his inadequate formal education. Over the generations his male clansmen had resumed to England for schooling, and so had many other Virginians, such as the Blairs, Carters, Randolphs, Lees, George Wythe, and Thomas Nelson, their names on the rolls of a score or more institutions for the eighteenth century alone. To do so was exceedingly expensive, and particularly for the first three generations of Washingtons, none of whom ever amassed the financial means to enter the upper ranks of the provincial notables. But their successful determination to send their sons abroad provides evidence for Louis B. Wright's contention that the rising gentry in Virginia was almost as concerned with passing on to their progeny their English cultural legacy as they were with the accumulation of wealth.

Here Washington was an exception, explained by a shortage of family resources after the death of his father when the boy was only eleven. Washington particularly lamented his lost educational opportunity in the mother country and in his twenties spoke of “the longing desire, which for many years I have had of visiting ... that kingdom.”

When Washington spoke of that “longing desire” of “many years” duration, he told us a good deal. Imagine, then, what a heady feeling it must have been for the young man to be in the company of English gentlemen in Virginia. His educational deficiencies in general and his inability to immerse himself personally in metropolitan life were partly overcome by those opportunities, which came as a result of spending much of his teenage life in the home of his brother, Lawrence Washington. Lawrence, in addition to his British schooling, had held a commission in the King’s army and had afterward named his estate Mount Vernon, after his commander in the Cartagena campaign of 1740-1741. It is reasonable to assume that Washington absorbed much from his cultivated brother, who supervised his entry into provincial high society. Lawrence had married into the powerful Fairfax family, which had come over to the colony as major players in the land game. It is common knowledge that George visited frequently at nearby Belvoir, where Colonel William Fairfax lived with his son, George William, and the latter’s delightful wife, the former Sally Cary.

Just as those years helped George wear off his rough edges and attain a measure of sophistication by his mixing and mingling with his Belvoir neighbors and their influential friends and visitors, so he also expanded his intellectual world by dipping into the books in their library at Belvoir. Washington would eventually have his own library, with well over nine hundred volumes on a broad variety of subjects. While there has been disagreement about the extent of his reading and the range of his intellectual interest, Paul Longmore has recently argued convincingly that Washington's self-education was more extensive than has been acknowledged. Assuredly Washington believed that any man possessed of a sizable estate needed to read works on mathematics and agricultural practices. He likewise considered “Philosophy ... very desirable knowledge for a Gentleman,” as was “classical knowledge.”

Another dimension to Washington's Britishness, and a source of some further frustration as well, concerns his relationship with the British army. Both Lawrence Washington and Colonel William Fairfax were British veterans with battlefield experience, and it takes little imagination to see Washington at Belvoir listening intently to their talk of campaigning in what was an age that still viewed war glamorously. He, too, wanted a British commission, and to that end, between 1755 and 1757, he appealed to Generals Braddock, Shirley, and Loudoun, all to no avail, even though he was definitely worthy, given his combat record with Braddock and his impressive performance as Colonel of the Virginia Regiment and Commander of Virginia’s frontier defenses during the most arduous period of the Seven Years’ War.

It was European style warfare that fascinated him, not backcountry tactics, which were already known as guerrilla or partisan methods. Washington’s service beyond the Blue Ridge (Mountains) only reinforced his learning at the feet of Lawrence Washington and Colonel Fairfax. As a young Virginia officer, he read British army manuals, observed the practices of his crimson-clad superiors, and trained and disciplined his own provincial troops in such a manner that he could find some professional officers agreeing with his claim that his regiment was the equal of any British unit in America. His ideas remained fundamentally the same in 1775 when, as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental army, he drew upon British precedents to organize and train his own troops. Unlike many late revolutionaries, he was militarily conservative.

Washington was, in the decade and a half between his military commands, much like an English country gentleman, possessed as he was of the manners and deportment of his British counterparts, with their customary military title to boot; he was henceforth known to one and all as Colonel Washington.

If he had no ancient plantation house that served as a wellspring of family lineage, few Virginians did before the 1720s, from which time forward, with the tobacco wealth now available to them, they built such stately Georgian back edifices as Stratford Hail, Westover, and Berkeley. Although Mount Vernon, which Washington acquired in the 1750s, was a modest frame structure at the time, he added to it several times over the years, and he rusticated its siding so as to give the appearance of being constructed of stone.

In establishing his country seat, Washington accepted the responsibilities that Virginia planters, imitative of the English gentry, had long assumed. He became a justice of the peace, vestryman, and member of the House of Burgesses, the equivalent—in Virginians’ eyes—of the British House of Commons.

Local elites in the rural realms of Virginia and England also had a responsibility to be patrons to lesser neighbors and to help the needy. In a quiet, unassuming way, Washington lent sizable sums to those in financial distress, even at the risk of his own solvency, as he explained to Captain Thomas Posey, a small planter and old military companion, who repeatedly prevailed on Washington’s liberality, notwithstanding his notoriously poor management of his own affairs. And he accepted the burden of serving as executor or advisor for so many friends that he pictured himself in January, 1775, as having had in the last year or two “scarce a Moment that I can properly call my own.” Whatever these demands on his physical and material resources, he reserved something for philanthropy. “Let the hospitality of the House, with respect to the Poor, be kept up,” Washington instructed his cousin and overseer, Lund Washington. “Let no one go hungry away,”and let some “money in Charity to the amount of Forty or fifty Pounds a Year” also be given to assist the indigent and afflicted.

Washington shared with his British gentry counterparts a desire to be a hands-on planter. Serious-minded agrarians in England and Virginia often preferred to call themselves farmers and boasted of their attention to the details of cultivating crops, raising livestock, and erecting storehouses and other dependencies. By birth and by habit, Washington was a true countryman, early to bed and early to rise, but not without spare hours for the centuries old English pastimes, particularly horse racing, riding, and fox hunts.

Withal, Washington was not blinded by his Britishness. There is hardly a sense of deep regret on his part, when the empire disintegrated in the War of Independence. This is not to say, however, that he was already deeply alienated from Britain by the mid-1760s, that his slights from the British army and his difficulties at getting an adequate return on his tobacco in London had made him bitter, suspicious of all that England did. (He) was sometimes critical of the corruption of Hanoverian court life and the rapaciousness of London mercantile houses. (But) his sympathies for the landed elite of the mother country were still much in evidence at the time of the French Revolution, for he saw in that segment of society the finest representations of British life.

Indeed, Washington’s quarrel with Britain in the American Revolutionary crisis was principally with its political leadership and decidedly less with its cultural and institutional configurations. His criticisms of British imperial practices and policies evolved over a decade or so. The same pattern of disenchantment was probably also true of most of the Revolution’s leaders.

As for self-denial, Washington certainly struck some contemporaries as distant and aloof. There was a reserve to the man, especially when in groups and in the presence of strangers and those he did not know well. Were he devoid of natural human feelings, one could assume that he was indifferent to women. He did not take a wife as early as some men, and his marriage is often portrayed as one of convenience—he needed a mistress for Mount Vernon, while Martha Custis sought a father and manager for her son and daughter and their properties.

If the above notions were wholly correct, one might go back to a preoccupation of some Washington biographers—that of parental influences—in search of the causes for the impersonal Washington. One might theorize that the Washington who lost his father as a boy, who—in the opinion of some writers—was denied warmth and affection by his strong-willed mother, had turned cold, fearing that hurt might come to him in any intimate relationship.

Douglas Freeman and other Washington scholars have turned to the same familial sources to account for what were admittedly aggressive qualities in the young man’s make-up. But before we convict his mother in particular for all his failings, a note of caution is in order. There is no learned consensus as to the roots of aggressive behavior. If domineering mothers—if that is what Mary Ball Washington was— may generate visible aggressions in their sons (or daughters,) they are just as likely to leave their offspring timid and strait-laced. Conceivably, too, Washington, were he severely damaged by his mother’s influence, might have become effeminate when in truth we know that he was strongly attached to the opposite sex and manly in all other respects as well. There are, one should add, multiple varieties of character, and to explain the grown man simply in terms of putative childhood determinants appears to leave small room for personal development.

In short, one may not weave together so easily the strands of Washington’s personal life. Distant though he was at times, he had a healthy enjoyment of worldly pleasures. Whatever his reserve around some men, he was ever a gallant with women once he passed his awkward teens. Did Washington speak from personal experience when in 1783 he observed to a lady friend that “once the Woman has tempted us and we have tasted the forbidden fruit, there is no such things as checking our appetites, whatever the consequences may be.”

Despite the unceasing, titillating speculations about his feelings for George William Fairfax’s wife, Sally, with whom he carried on a flirtatious correspondence almost up to the time of his own nuptials, Washington's marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis seems to have been highly gratifying in every respect. To be sure, he and Martha had hardly the time to fall madly in love before their wedding owing to his military duties—they seem to have become engaged during his second visit to White House, the Custis estate on the Pamunkey River in New Kent County. Doubtless he had not in his “contemplation of the married state,” as he cautioned a relative in after years, “look(ed) for perfect felicity before consent(ing) to wed.”

In any event, Martha was not without her personal allures. Her painting by John Wollaston, completed a year or so before her engagement to Washington, shows a remarkably pretty face and an overall appearance consistent with what Lois Banner has described as the eighteenth-century ideal of femininity: “buxom, yet small and delicate, with sensuality coy and indirect.”

Time and again Washington declared that he prized domestic felicity above all other pleasures and rewards. Just before the wedding of his nephew, George Augustine, to Martha’s niece, Fanny Bassett, Washington wrote that he had “always considered marriage as the most Interesting event of one's life, the foundation of happiness or misery.” Unfortunately, only three of George and Martha’s letters to each other are known to have survived; but they bespeak a tenderness and sensitivity for his “dear Patsy” often lacking in an age when communications between husband and wile were not uncommonly formal. (All three, two from him and one from her, begin with “My Dearest,” which must have been their customary salutation.)

As Commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary army, Washington urged Martha to join him in camp and stay as long as possible, and this she loyally and willingly did, although she confessed to a dislike for distant travel, unfamiliar places, and warlike activity. Though torn by a yearning to minister to a grieving Burwell Bassett over the loss of his wife and her own sister, Anna Maria (Nancy) Bassett, Martha in December, 1777, explained to her brother-in-law that her greater obligation was to her husband, who was likely to call her north at any moment: “if he does, I must goe. " Each year she usually set out from Mount Vernon in the autumn and returned—much to her husband’s visible distress—in the spring with the opening of the next military campaign. (“I was,” she recalled, “a kind of perambulator during eight or nine years of War.” The prospect of ever undergoing such fatigue would be “too much for me to bear.”)

Given his healthy attitudes about romantic love and marriage, we will have problems with one psychological contention if applied to Washington. It is, as Erik Erikson puts it, that “special powers of sublimation may be assumed to exist in persons with passionate devotion and minute service to public causes.” But, to repeat, Washington was not a revolutionary ascetic.

If more evidence be needed, we have only to recall the good life that he pursued to the fullest at Mount Vernon, which included Washington’s enjoyment of friends and family, so much so that he not infrequently acknowledged wistfully in his diary the absence of guests — “At home alone all day.” There were swarms of Washington relatives who came to Mount Vernon, further indication that family was indeed important to George Washington. He would have derived little meaning from the ongoing academic debate as to whether the American family, at various times and places, was nuclear or extended in its structure. Relatives paraded in and out of his home throughout his entire married life or in other ways engaged his attention: Custises, Lewises, Dandridges, Bassetts, Washingtons,
and more—perhaps as many as eighty-six of these kinfolk had some interaction with him. They often stayed for weeks, months, and longer —and sometimes lived there in his employment as an overseer or secretary. One could say of his family (and many other planter clans then and later) that “its borders were permeable and its structure was elastic.”

Washington displayed a particular fondness for young people. He could scarcely have been more giving to his Custis stepchildren, John Parke (Jack) and Martha Parke (Patsy.) Washington sought for Jack all the educational opportunities that had eluded him, composing detailed missives to tutors and teachers on his aspirations for Jack and traveling with him to enroll at King’s College in New York City. But the young man, no scholar and in love with a Maryland belle, soon dropped out of school in favor of marriage, much to Washington’s distress. That pain could hardly be compared to his feelings when sixteen-year-old Patsy died of epilepsy. For three weeks thereafter Washington eschewed all business activity and for three months— except for one occasion—he did not spend a night away from Martha. Several years later a more mature Jack Custis could better appreciate what Washington had meant to his mother and to him as well. “I am extremely desirous,” he assured Washington, “to return you Thanks for your parental Care, which on all Occasions you have strewn for me .... Few have experience'd such Care and Attention from real Parents as I have done.”

Washington was endlessly doing favors for his brothers, cousins, nephews, and nieces. He wrote long, avuncular letters to his younger relations on making their mark in the world, doubtless filled with the same maxims and principles which his own deceased older brother, Lawrence, had imparted to him years earlier and thoroughly typical of the concerns of Lord Chesterfield in his famous epistles to his son, which were published in the 1760s and constituted yet another popular form of courtesy literature. In his family letters, Washington frequently expressed “love” and “affection” for both male and female relatives, words hardly consistent with the marble image of the man; and, for that matter, not even comfortable terms for many twentieth century men to employ toward those of their own sex.

It should hardly surprise us to learn that Washington was one of the few revolutionary helmsmen in modern history to be praised for his family life. The link between statecraft and domesticity was of the highest importance to Americans of the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Nothing could be more revealing in this respect than New York’s advice in 1775 to its delegates in the Continental Congress on the appointment of a Commander-in-chief. “On a General for America,” they declared, such a man should have “In his property, his kindred, and connections....such pledges that he will faithfully perform the duties of his high office, and readily lay down his power when the general weal shall require it.” It was widely perceived in the Continental Congress that Washington, a family man and large-scale cultivator, would make burdensome sacrifices in drawing his sword and would be cager to return to his former station in life at the earliest moment. John Adams, making the point graphically, spoke of this “gentleman of one of the first fortunes upon the continent, leaving his delicious retirement, his family and friends, sacrificing his ease, and hazarding all in the cause of his country!”

Kenneth Silverman rightly says that Americans praised the nonmilitary dimensions of Washington more than his martial side, and they did not neglect his immediate family, during the war or afterward. Poets rhapsodized over his loving relationship with his wife.

Artists picked up the same themes, Congress early in the war expressed an interest in portraits of both George and Martha Washington. Charles Willson Peale, who had limned miniatures of the Washingtons, converted them into mezzotints entitled: “His Excellency George Washington Esq. and Lady Washington.” At a later time, Edward Savage's “Washington's Family” was quite popular in engraved form; it portrays George, Martha, and Martha’s two grandchildren whom the Washingtons adopted. Undoubtedly, Washington’s countrymen saw him as a father figure not only because he was a nation-maker (and another George to replace George 111?) but also because of his well-known domestic sensibilities. Certainly that was the opinion of Brissot de Warville, a French traveler in 1788, who, like other observers, declared that “Americans speak of him as they would of a father,” but not one who was austere or authoritarian, completely dehumanized, as would be the fate of Washington after his doom at the hands of nineteenth-century biographers.

In our discussion of Washington with regard to alienation and self denial, we really have already implicitly cast light on Marlish’s third category: narcissism. There is simply no evidence that during Washington’s generalship or later his mind turned to narcissistic thoughts, the kind that have been the undoing not only of certain revolutionary ascetics but also that of a whole panoply of revolutionary types ranging from Latin American caudillos to Third World nation makers such as the Nkrumahs and Sukarnos.

When there were moments for dreaming and for private concerns, Washington’s attention turned to his Virginia world. He not only corresponded frequently with Martha but he dispatched letters to clansmen, friends, and business associates. He was saddened by the death of two brothers and a brother-in-law, and he worried about the orphans of his brother Samuel (several of whom became his responsibility). He carried on a voluminous epistolary exchange with Lund Washington, his manager. Washington at the time he assumed his military role in the Revolution was already embarked on a course of economic diversification and enlarging his house and gardens. They were activities that he watched as closely as possible from afar as they went forward under Lund’s capable supervision. Indeed, throughout his adult lifetime Mount Vernon was growing and changing. Eventually, his estate, part of which had belonged to his great-grandfather, the immigrant John, numbered 7,600 acres: his “Mansion House Farm” and four outlying farms. Displaying great creativity as a farmer, landscape designer, and architect, Washington in his minutely detailed directives (both during the Revolution and during his presidency) to Lund and his subsequent managers offers abundant evidence that he could hardly wait to return to take over the personal direction of what seemed to be a hundred and one enterprises.

Mount Vernon and all it meant to Washington ever remained the centerpiece of his life. Lionized by men of affairs, sought out by visiting dignitaries, all but deified by hosts of his countrymen, he kept his pre-war values and priorities in place. Still, he recognized that he had symbolic importance for the Revolution, both during the war itself and in the post-1783 years as well. As W.W. Abbot says, “we have only to look at the record of willingness to sit for any artist who wished to paint his portrait, to correspond with any French, German, English, Dutch, Irish, Italian, Swedish, or American man or woman who wrote to him a letter, and to open the doors of his house to any stranger, foreign or domestic, who came to pay homage or only to have a look.. What he did and said mattered to people and to himself, for he was a proud man, conscious of his honor and reputation for his own lifetime and for posterity.” Although some historians have a different view, I believe that Washington was deeply reluctant to attend the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and to accept the presidency two years later. He did so, of course, but only out of a sense of obligation and responsibility when confronted with the insistence of leaders throughout the country. Rather than seeking new opportunities to return to the limelight and reinforce his fame, he recognized that he could lose his hard-earned reputation along with the peace and tranquility of Mount Vernon if he resumed to the national arena.

Moreover, Washington’s intention was always to maintain some measure of his privacy. That explains why, for example, he singularly ignored the request of his former aide and secretary and would-be biographer, David Humphreys, for information about his family and early years. Surely his attitude did not stem from a fear that he had more to hide that would reflect negatively upon his character than do most human beings. For other luminaries, that has not always been the case. Even for leaders who maintain their public ideals in the face of acclaim, there has always been the temptation to compromise their family life. It has been true of some famous twentieth-century Americans, and it was also a temptation that men succumbed to in the generation of the Founding Fathers.

How different in this respect was Washington from Benjamin Franklin, whose wife was probably no more educated and cultivated than Martha, and who seems to have considered his loyal, devoted Deborah Franklin to be an embarrassment, remaining apart from her for five and ten year stretches, even though, in the last case, he knew she was troubled by his broken promises to return and was gravely ill and longed to see him a final time. It may tell us a good deal about Washington to say that Martha Washington hardly came across as a repressed or neglected spouse but rather as a happy, healthy, well-adjusted woman. Contemporary portrayals of her personality and character are notably consistent over a period of twenty years, beginning with the first known assessment by Mercy Otis Warren in April of 1776. Mrs. Warren recorded Martha’s openness and amiable disposition at that time, so did Abigail Adams— “her great ease and politeness” and “modest and unassuming” ways—in 1789, and so did the young English architect Benjamin Latrobe—her “good humored free manner ... was extremely pleasant and flattering”— in 1796.

Had it been written them, Washington might well have called to mind the name of a song, although it would have involved changing the state. He would have called it “Virginia on My Mind.” The Old Dominion does contain the key to why Washington was a safe man to lead a Revolution. We find it not only in his experiences as a Virginia officer in the Seven Years’ War and in his seventeen-year career as a legislator in the House of Burgesses, subjects which have been addressed elsewhere; but, even more important, we locate it in his domestic values and family life. This safe leader, a general and president who willingly, even eagerly, relinquished power, knew that in Virginia he found far more gratification than in any post or laurel ever bestowed upon him.

Washington said as much publicly and in his correspondence with quotable men of affairs. It was also what his countrymen wanted to hear—however much they pressed him to overcome his reluctance to serve. Theirs was a neoclassical age in which men took as warm and moving gospel the stories of Cato, who extolled the joys of rural retirement in the Sabine Hills away from the pomp and corruption of Rome (Washington’s friend, Landon Carter, named his home Sabine Hall) and of Cincinnatus, who relinquished his sword in favor of the plough. Washington was equally eloquent innumerable times to friends and family. And never more so than in his letter to Martha informing her that he had accepted the command of the Continental army in 1775: “I should enjoy more real happiness and felicity in one month with you, at home, than have the most distant prospect of reaping abroad, if my stay was to be Seven times Seven years.”

Sixteen years later, after accepting the highest civil office in the land, the pull of home had not diminished. To Dr. David Stuart, a family member, he wrote: “I can truly say I had rather be at Mount Vernon ... than to be attended at the Seat of Government by the Officers of State and the Representatives of every Power in Europe.” Therefore, is it any wonder that he resumed to his great house on the Potomac fifteen times during his presidency?

Paradoxically as it may seem, Washington was both a localist and a nationalist. His love of Virginia and its people had led him to revolt, and that same love kept his nationalism—powerful that it became— within appropriate bounds.