WASHINGTON'S RULES OF CIVILITY
Richard Brookheiser (1998)

National Review Senior Editor Richard Brookhiser, author of “Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts That Guided Our First President in War and Peace,” puts the maxims that Washington copied into his notebook as a youngster into context in an era in which religious primers on etiquette and Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac” were the self-help vehicles of their time. Washington needed to internalize these precepts: He had a strong temper, and even in Cabinet meetings, was known to get into “one of those passions when he cannot command himself,” as Jefferson observed.

I would like to begin by sharing with you a New York moment. A few years ago, my wife and I were going to Carnegie Hall, and our cab turned onto 57th Street. There was a woman in the cross walk, heading away from us, who had the right of way, and who took her time exercising it. The cabbie crowded her, not dangerously, but noticeably. Without turning her head, she said, “You touch me, and your ass is grass.” The cabbie shouted back, “Bitch! Ugly!” Nothing more happened: she crossed, he made the turn, we got to our concert on time. Nothing, except for one more small tug on the frayed bonds of civility.

Rudeness is not just a problem in New York. U S. News & World Report, in a recent survey, found that 89 percent of all Americans think incivility is a serious problem; 78 percent thought it had gotten worse in the last 10 years. Respondents were also asked to rate the incivility of different professions. Eleven percent thought the police were uncivil; 19 percent thought that athletes were. Twenty-three percent had problems with the behavior of government workers; 35 percent picked on lawyers. Journalists,, my profession, were rated uncivil by 37 percent. One profession scored worse: 40 percent thought politicians were uncivil.

The bad news is, we have a problem. The good news is, that we think it is a problem. It is very American to think about civility, and one of the greatest Americans to think so was George Washington. When Washington had been president for seven years, a foreign diplomat's wife observed, that he had “perfect good breeding, & a correct knowledge of even the etiquette of a court,” though how he had acquired it, “heaven knows.” The way he acquired it was by taking good advice early in life. Eighteenth-century Americans were eager for good advice, especially advice concerning their conduct. Children who wanted to be more grown up, and adults who wanted to be smarter, shrewder, or more couth, consumed manuals of advice and instruction, written here or abroad.

The all-American dispenser of good advice was Washington's partner in revolution, Benjamin Franklin, in his Poor Richard's Almanac (“God helps them that help themselves,” “Have you somewhat to do tomorrow, do it today”) and his Autobiography (“Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation,” “Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve”). Franklin's maxims in time spread throughout the English-speaking world. D. H. Lawrence remembered them from a “scrubby little almanac” of his father's, and wished he didn't. “Probably I haven't gotten over those Poor Richard tags yet. I rankle still with them.”

People want advice on their behavior when they are rising in the world. Even as America's relatively open society gave people a chance to better themselves, it made them anxious about how much better they had actually become. Early Americans, who were almost all WASPs, also had a religious history of self-examination, what one historian called the “iron couch of introspection.” So they turned to books of advice.

Was all the busy advice giving and taking worth it? In one of his pieces of journalism, Franklin wryly suggests that the exertions of his fellow countrymen were wasted. He describes a crowd gathered for a sale, who ask an old man to tell them how they should live when times are hard. The old man gives them a fistful of maxims about frugality and temperance, drawn from Poor Richard. “Thus the old gentleman ended his harangue. The people heard it, and approved the doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary, just as if it had been a common sermon; for the (sale) opened, and they began to buy extravagantly, notwithstanding all his cautions....” But, years later, Franklin gave a more hopeful judgment. “... on the whole, though I never arrived at the perfection l had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been had I not attempted it.”

Young Washington came by his rules in a roundabout way. They were first compiled by French Jesuits in 1595, in a set of maxims called Bienseance de la Conversation entre les Hommes (Decency of Conversation among Men). The Jesuits, besides being missionaries, scholars, and all-purpose shock troops of the Pope, specialized in educating the children of the powerful. A guide to gentlemanly behavior would provide a popular service, and the Jesuits’ rules were translated into Latin and several modern European languages.

In 1640, they appeared in English as Youths Behavior, or Decency in Conversation amoungst Men. The translator was listed as Francis Hawkins, a twelve-year-old boy, who had supposedly done the work when he was eight. (The rules of civility of book publishing, then as now, tolerated a considerable degree of exaggeration.) Whoever translated them, the rules proved to be popular, going through eleven printings by 1672, with various extensions and supplements, including a Decency in Conversation amongst Women. This last, added by a Puritan printer, shows that good breeding was interesting to both sexes, and all religions.

How they got to Virginia and George Washington is a mystery. A nineteenth-century historian, Moncure D. Conway, who first discovered the Jesuit origin of the rules, believes they came to George directly from the French, skipping over Hawkins entirely. Washington never learned French, but Conway learned of a French Protestant minister who had lived near Fredericksburg, Virginia, just across the Rappahannock from Ferry Farm, the home of George's mother, and who could have translated them for his young neighbor. Later scholars have concluded that Washington's rules, though they are shortened and modernized versions of Hawkins, follow him closely. So they dismiss the Frenchman as an intermediary, and assume that someone, perhaps a tutor or a schoolteacher, perhaps George's father or one of his older half-brothers, put a later version of the set in his hands and told him to write them out.
Youths Behavior was divided into seven sections, and "The Rules of Civility" follows the categories: General and mixt Precepts (rules 1-24); First Duties & Ceremonies in Conversation (rules 25-36); Of the fashions of qualifying or titleing of persons (rules 37-50); Of Clothes & Arraying the Body (rules 51 and 52); Of walking, be it alone, or in Company (rules 53-57); Of Discourse (rules 58-59); Of Carriage at the table (rules 90-107). The last three rules come from an appendix.

What is evident from reading these categories, or from even a casual dip into the Rules, is how few of them seem to deal with morals. Rule #108 rewords the Fourth Commandment (“Honor & obey your natural parents although they be poor”) and offers a pale reflection of the First (“When you speak of God or His attributes, let it be seriously & with reverence”). Rule #109 is the only rule to mention sin (“Let your recreations be manful not sinful,” a veiled warning against whoring?) Rule #I10 is a serious thought, “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience,” but it is so brief, and so long in coming, that Washington's biographers can't decide whether it is the crown of the whole, or a throwaway. The overwhelming majority of the rules deal with etiquette.

Etiquette was an important matter in the eighteenth century. One of the first orders of business of Congress under the Constitution was to decide what George Washington should be called. The House of Representatives wanted what eventually became his title, and the title of all his successors, “The President of the United States,” but the Senate vainly held out for something more elaborate, such as “His Highness the President of the United States and Protector of the Rights of the Same” (even “fire companies” and “cricket club(s),” John Adams complained, had plain presidents). Nowadays, when presidents are seen in jogging shorts, and even tell us about their underwear, and many Americans are much more informal than that, such concerns seem quaint. What use is etiquette in an age of daytime television and drive-time radio?

Many of the rules are time-bound. Some prescribe ways of coping with life in an era that was more coarse. When even a trip as short as New York City to Albany was a three-day expedition, and inns (where they existed) might put several guests in the same bed, people had to know not to spit into the fire (rule #9) or not to crush ticks in the presence of strangers (rule #13). Even as our hygiene and our housing have advanced, our social hierarchies have grown simpler. Rule #26 begins by discussing how to bow and doff your hat “to persons of distinction,” such “as noblemen.” In modern America there are no noblemen; hardly any hats (apart from baseball caps, which nobody doffs); and no one bows. Life in Washington's days could also be crueler than it is now. “When you see a crime punished . . .” begins rule #23, not a rare event when people were put in the stocks, or hung on public gallows. Our material conveniences, our social structure, and our sensitive temperaments spare us from thinking about a number of the issues raised in "The Rules of Civility."

But to dismiss “The Rules of Civility” as “mere” etiquette, and outdated etiquette at that, is to miss the point. The rules address moral issues, but they address them indirectly. This is what separates them from Franklin's maxims (as well as the self-help and how-to manuals of today). Franklin's little sermonettes are sometimes symbolic (“An empty bag cannot stand upright”), sometimes sarcastic (“When there's marriage without love, there will be love without marriage”). But they all make clear and fairly blunt moral points. Don't waste time; don't get drunk; don't tolerate poverty, if you value your independence; don't accept coldness in marriage, if you value fidelity. Some people profit from exhortation, as Franklin felt he himself had, up to a point; some people, like his shoppers, or D. H. Lawrence, don't.

“ The Rules of Civility” take a different tack. They seek to form the inner man (or boy) by shaping the outer. They start with hats and posture and table manners, and work inward. The key is set in rule #1: “Every action done in company ought to be done with some sign of respect to those that are present.” The effect of all the rules taken together is to remind you that you should not just do whatever feels right, or the first thing that comes into your head; rather, you should always be mindful of other people, and remember that they have sensibilities, and feelings of self-respect, that deserve your respect.

“ ... (I)f you see any filth or thick spittle ... upon the clothes of your companions,” says rule #13, “put it off privately....” In other words, don't make a fuss about helping someone. It only calls attention to his problem (and, incidentally, calls too much attention to your helpfulness). “Undertake not to teach your equal in the art himself professes; it savours of arrogancy” (rule #41). It savours of arrogance, because it is arrogance. Besides, your equal might be able to teach you something. “It’s unbecoming to stoop much to one’s meat” (rule #96). People don't like to sit next to someone hunched over his plate, paying more attention to his appetite than his companions. Thinking about sitting up straight also provides an automatic brake on gluttony. Sometimes the rules frankly counsel insincerity. Rule #23, about punished criminals, goes on to say that though “you may be inwardly pleased” by the spectacle of justice done, “shew pity to the offending sufferer.” In extremis, even the sensibilities of a criminal are worth a little dissimulation. If this is hypocrisy, then, as Patrick Henry said of treason, make the most of it.

This awareness of the human environment, the sense that we navigate life through crowds of people who are, for all their differences of class or character, like ourselves, is what gives the rules their moral dimension, and their moral effect. “Attention must be paid!” declares Willy Loman's wife in Death of a Salesman. The way you get people to pay attention, say “The Rules of Civility,” is by starting them off paying attention to their hats.

“ The Rules of Civility” were an important help to Washington in his public life. He was genial by nature, enjoying company and a good joke; he got along well with men, and women. Washington's rules included no advice specifically addressed to conversation with women, but he somehow acquired the knack. “Fiction is to be sure the very life and soul of poetry,” he wrote a lady poet who had sent him verses in praise of him. “To oblige you to make such an excellent poem on such a subject, without any materials but those of simple reality, would be as cruel as the edict of Pharaoh which compelled the children of Israel to manufacture bricks without the necessary ingredients.” “[He] has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point,” wrote Abigail Adams, evidently impressed with him. “That if he was really not one of the best-intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one.”

But Washington also had a tremendous temper. This was a lifelong problem. When he was sixteen, a rich neighbor who was employing him as a surveyor wrote George's mother: “I wish I could say that he governs his temper.” When Washington was sixty-one, Thomas Jefferson recorded a cabinet meeting at which President Washington “got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself.” “Had he been born in the forests,” wrote the painter Gilbert Stuart, who had the opportunity to study Washington carefully while he sat for his portrait, “he would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes.”

Washington had a lot to be angry about over the course of his career: untrained soldiers, incompetent officers, difficult allies, quarrelsome associates (including Jefferson), to say nothing of his own mistakes, from losing battles to misjudging people: Washington trusted Benedict Arnold, a man of great apparent civility, though little real decency, up to the moment he ran off to the enemy. But if he had gone into uncontrollable rages at every disappointment or disaster, he would have ruined his health, besides ruining his effectiveness as a leader.

Washington got some help reining in his temper from the Stoic example of the ancient Romans (the philosopher Seneca, whom he read as a teenager, wrote a whole essay on anger, and what a bad thing it was). But the earliest lessons came from the Rules. “… in reproving shew no sign of choler” (rule #45). “Speak not injurious words neither in jest nor earnest” (rule #65). “When you deliver a matter do it without passion.” (rule #83). “Be not angry at table whatever happens & if you have reason to be so, show it not but (put) on a cheerful countenance” (rule #105, that saving insincerity again).

The measure of Washington's success, despite his lapses, is that we have forgotten that he had a problem. We look at Stuart's glacial image, and a dozen other composed and almost emotionless portraits, from the face on Mount Rushmore to the bust on the quarter, and we assume that that's just the way Washington was. His contemporaries knew better; they saw the composure as an end product, the result of early training and continuous effort. The training, and the disposition to make the effort, came from the Rules.

The trajectory of Washington's life demanded that he be well mannered. He was the third son of a Virginia planter who was prosperous and ambitious, but not yet at the top of the social pyramid in his colony. Then Washington's father died when he was eleven. Obscurity beckoned, but rich in-laws gave the teenager an entree into a more sophisticated world, and into military life. He needed some measure of polish in order to retain this first foothold. Despite several slips, he kept it, and climbed higher in Virginia society (marriage to Martha Custis, a rich young widow, helped). In his forties destiny beckoned, and from the time he became commander of the Continental army, in 1775, until his death twenty-four years later, his contacts were national and international. Washington dealt with Indians, both allies and potential enemies; with blacks, both slaves and freemen; with Roman Catholics and Jews; with pacifist Quakers and hell-raising Scotch-Irish frontiersmen; with Yankee traders and Southern aristocrats; with generals (American, French, and British) and privates; with adoring crowds of strangers and with congressmen who, however much they professed to admire him, might not be disposed to give him what he wanted. Sometimes, the only way to deal with some of these characters was to be stern, to be cold, or (in the rarest of cases) to let slip the leash on his rage. But up to the point of no return, Washington was best served by civility. Politeness is the first form of politics, and Washington had the most taxing political task of anyone in his generation. He was fortunate that, by the time he had assumed his greatest responsibilities, civility had become second nature to him. Rule #l begins: “Every action done in company ...” Beginning in his forties, the company Washington kept expanded from a plantation aristocracy to a continental republic. Decent behavior helped him lead it.

Not everybody in the founding generation agreed with Washington’s notions of civility of civil society. The American Revolution produced no dictators, but there were several figures who might have auditioned for the role, had circumstances been different. Aaron Burr (who served under Washington in the war) once told Alexander Hamilton (who served on Washington's staff, and later in his administration) that “great spirits care little for petty morals.” Burr, who later killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and was prosecuted for treason, did not care about large morals either. The large ones depend on practicing, and understanding, the petty ones.

Washington went on to fame. Not so his Rules. They slumbered in their notebook until the early nineteenth century, when the historian Jared Sparks published fifty of them. The editions that have followed at intervals have been either biographical, satisfying our curiosity about the details of a famous man's life, even as we read books and articles about Washington's foxhounds, or his chinaware, or antiquarian: a quaint look at Ye Ode Times, a Williamsburg restoration of table manners. Biography makes the Rules interesting, but too particular to Washington, no more useful to us than his dentures. Antiquarianism makes the Rules charming, but remote.

Americans still peruse vast quantities of advice and self-help literature. But until very recently, rules of civility were not among them. The abeyance of civility was due in part to the cult of authenticity, which has old American roots of its own, going back to Emerson and Thoreau. The sixties, and their wholesale successor the seventies, made authenticity a national orthodoxy. Even as fashions in authenticity changed, civility remained at a discount. Whether you grew your hair out like Jim Morrison, or buzzed it and dyed it like Dennis Rodman, you were not doing it as a sign of respect for others. “Play not the peacock, looking every where about you, to see if you be well deck’t...” (Rule #54).

In part, the seeming irrelevance of civility nowadays is due to (or is rationalized by) our disgust with the century we live in. After the Holocaust and the gulag, when civilization itself can seem beside the point, what is the value of “Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation”?

The best answer to the second objection is a little history. Three months after the Senate and the House finished wrangling about George Washington’s title, the French Revolution began. In its early stages, thousands of priests, women, children, and simple peasants were herded onto barges and drowned, and the former Queen was publicly humiliated and decapitated. Americans then did not know as much as we know about the drownings, but they certainly knew about the Queen: the revolutionaries killed her in public, because they were proud of killing her. This wasn't Auschwitz, but it partook of the same spirit. Our Age of Innocence overlapped with the dawn of the Age of Experience. Yet no one, certainly not Washington, felt released by the turmoil in France from the obligations of civility in Philadelphia, or Mount Vernon.

Just as Washington repelled the assault from the left, he surmounted the fears of the right. In Reflections on the Revolution in France first published in 1790, Edmund Burke wrote that “the age of chivalry is gone -- that of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded.” The aristocracy, Burke knew, was the traditional source of manners in the western world. The word chivalry comes from chevalier, or knight; courtesy means the behavior of a court. Burke argued that when the aristocracy went, manners would follow, and society could only be ruled by force. “In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.” It was a powerful argument, and events in France proved him right. The task of the American revolution, and of George Washington, was to show that the French way was not the only way, and that civility and civilization could survive in republican forms.

As for the cult of authenticity, the best answer to it is to consider our little interaction on 57th Street. When everybody does his thing a lot of nasty things get done, even in a society as decent and a regime as mild as ours. From the White House to the trailer parks, Americans act like boors and dress like louts because they are, in fact, boorish and loutish.
Another problem with authenticity is that it is so easily faked. The sincerity of self-helpers, empathetic politicians, anguished rock artists, or preachers at mega-churches may be real. But it may not. An actor can do wonders with a catch in his voice. Psychopaths, who spontaneously simulate the emotions others want of them, don’t even have to consciously. A man who tips his hat may harbor all manner of unpleasant thoughts, including indifference. But he has tipped his hat. Maybe the gesture, repeated often enough, will work inward, and stimulate a more magnanimous disposition.

There is a special reason why Washington's “Rules of Civility” are not taken seriously today, and that is the withering of the ambition to be great, and of the belief that greatness is possible. Twentieth-century Americans believe they can be rich, or powerful, or famous: we can found software empires in the garage, or become president, or cut demos that go platinum. If those achievements are beyond reach, we can be happy. Certainly we pursue happiness, as the therapies and workouts and self-help books attest. But greatness has vanished from the map of our minds.

It was there two hundred and fifty years ago, though, in a cluster of colonies that consisted of a handful of towns, a Third World economy, and millions of acres of trees. Even so, the backwoods lawyers and the seaport philosophers and the farmers with libraries thought they knew something about virtue and liberty, and they believed they could establish them in the world, if they made themselves fit for the task. In the same exercise book that contains “The Rules of Civility,” there is a geography lesson which describes California as an island. George Washington did not know what California was, but he knew there were great things to be done in his country, and for it. The first step he took toward playing an important role in public life was to copy out rules that would tell him how to dress, walk, and eat.
Many of the rules are outlandish in their details, and it would be wrong to drain the fun out of them. But they were meant seriously. Maybe they can work on us in the 1990s as the Jesuits intended them to work in the 1590s, indirectly, by putting us in a more ambitious frame of mind.