To discern the values of a nation and its leaders, watch their parades. Tomorrow, on the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, President Donald Trump plans not only to display the country’s military might but also to present himself as its supreme leader. Some 6,600 soldiers and 200 tanks, warplanes, helicopters, and the like are expected to descend on Washington, D.C., to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. According to reports, parachuters will land on the Ellipse, where Trump instructed rioters on January 6 to “fight like hell,” and submit to him a folded American flag. All of this will occur on the president’s birthday, which spurs the question of whether we’re celebrating the country or the man who seeks to dominate it.
President George Washington offered a very different model of an American parade—one better suited for a moment that tested the nation’s founding principles. In October 1789, Washington was scheduled to visit Boston, which had planned a celebration in his honor. Unlike Trump, Washington resisted attempts to turn the event into a military display. The very notion of a ceremony organized around him made the first president uneasy.
As Washington explained to John Hancock, the governor of Massachusetts, “I am highly sensible of the honor intended me. But could my wish prevail, I should desire to visit your metropolis without any parade, or extraordinary ceremony.” Various newspapers echoed his concern. The Herald of Freedom reminded readers that Washington was traveling to Boston “not for the purposes of empty parade, or to acquire the applause of gaping multitudes.” He needed no “splendid mercenary guard.”
Hancock failed to get the message. He insisted that the president deserved a grand military spectacle. Without consulting Washington, he put forward his own plan. As Hancock explained, “a military parade has been determined, & a body of about 800 men, will be under arms at Cambridge on the day of your entering Boston.” To the governor’s shock, Washington objected. After some delicate negotiations, Hancock eventually accepted a much smaller number of soldiers.
Other elected officials in Boston apparently understood America’s ideals more clearly than Hancock did. They organized a parade that honored not just Washington and the military but also the city’s artisans and tradespeople. Workers marched past the president in alphabetical order: First came the bakers and blacksmiths; much later, the wharfingers and wheelwrights. They carried banners expressing pride in their various crafts and in the values that united the nascent republic. The carvers displayed their belief that the Arts flourish under Liberty. The coppersmiths extolled Union. The lemon dealers proclaimed Success through Trade.
Although the day was very cold and the parade lasted many hours, the event pleased Washington because it represented what was, for him, the most important achievement of the American Revolution. That achievement wasn’t military in nature but political: a constitutional republic based on the will of the people, dedicated to advancing prosperity and protecting liberty. In Boston, he witnessed newly empowered citizens giving voice to an egalitarian order. “Your love of liberty—your respect for the laws—your habits of industry, and your practice of the moral and religious obligations,” he observed, “are the strongest claims to national and individual happiness.”
Washington served in the Continental Army, so he understood the sacrifices that soldiers make for their country, and the public reverence those sacrifices are due. But he also knew the dangers of using the military for personal purposes. He saw clearly the need for the citizens of a republic to stand vigilant against the pretensions of a leader who would use the Army to flex his own might. He had no wish to become America’s elected monarch.
The current president may eagerly anticipate the sound of marching troops, warplanes, and tanks, a display to rival those of Vladimir Putin in Moscow. But for the many Americans now anxious about their basic rights, these spectacles ought to be a warning. As The Massachusetts Magazine explained in 1789, the freer “the constitution of any country, the less we see of pageant, titles, and ceremonies.” What looks like an excess of strength may really be a deficit of liberty.
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