George Washington offers a lesson in selflessness for 2016

Monday is commonly known as Presidents Day, a national holiday with professed historical significance. And yet as a nation, we cannot even agree on what the day commemorates.

The original holiday was labeled Washington’s birthday and celebrated on that day, Feb. 22. However, after the government stepped in and began to tie holidays to three-day weekends, states that had also been celebrating Lincoln’s birthday began to merge the two, and the holiday soon became known Presidents Day. That label allows people to celebrate the chief executive of their choice, although the active commemoration of any – be it Washington or Lincoln, Hoover or Taft, the Roosevelt of one’s choice or any other who occupied he Oval Office – has come to take a backseat to the important parts of the day: a holiday for most schoolchildren and storewide sales across the land.

In the end, our confusion about celebrating presidents may be no less confused than our current process for selecting them.

And yet, now in 2016, in the midst of one of the more bizarre presidential campaigns in our history, consideration of our first president and his distinctive legacy may well be appropriate. All around us men and women are scrambling to secure support in a political process that will culminate in a peaceful transfer of power when a new president is sworn into office next January. To most of us, that ceremony will simply be the latest in a long line of similarly peaceful transitions, events we have witnessed before and will expect to see again.

And yet in the sweep of world history, these quadrennial observances remain distinctive and unusual, with much of the credit for that going to George Washington. Indeed, for all Washington’s many accomplishments, arguably the greatest thing he ever did was walk away from power, surrendering it not just once but twice, and in doing so establishing a standard for selfless service and character that was never rivaled but continues to serve as a model in the republican government in which he invested so much.

In fact, Washington’s lesson is one applicable to all areas of life. Power, at whatever level and to whatever degree, can be intoxicating, and the susceptibility to what one might call the “aroma of authority” is not limited to those in high office. And yet Washington, at a time when death was almost the only thing that ended the reign of a powerful ruler, twice walked away from the highest office and the greatest amount of power his nation could offer.

It was not an abdication of responsibility. In fact, his return to the public arena after his original post-Revolutionary War retirement, as well as his no less grudging willingness to serve a second term as president, are clear evidence of his continuing sense of responsibility to the young nation he had helped birth. But in the end, Washington’s voluntary surrender of authority was a singular act of courage and leadership, as well as an enduring example of a different way to exercise power.

Author Garry Wills, fully cognizant of the power of Washington’s efforts, termed our first chief executive “a virtuoso of resignations,” but the power of his singular actions, not to mention their impact on observers, was expressed even more clearly by his Revolutionary adversary, King George III, who upon hearing that Washington planned to return home to Mount Vernon and work his farm at the end of the war declared, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

Indeed, that greatness based in high character, selfless service and a confidence in his fellow man to do right offers us more than a few lessons as we in 2016 try and carry on the distinctive governmental experiment for which Washington sacrificed so much.

This story was originally published February 12, 2016 at 6:02 PM with the headline "George Washington offers a lesson in selflessness for 2016."