The cherry tree myth is the most well-known and longest enduring legend about George Washington. In the original story, when Washington was six years old he received a hatchet as a gift and damaged his father’s cherry tree. When his father discovered what he had done, he became angry and confronted him. Young George bravely said, “I cannot tell a lie…I did cut it with my hatchet.” Washington’s father embraced him and rejoiced that his son’s honesty was worth more than a thousand trees.1
Ironically, this iconic story about the value of honesty was invented by one of Washington’s first biographers, an itinerant minister and bookseller named Mason Locke Weems. After Washington’s death in 1799 people were anxious to learn about him, and Weems was ready to supply the demand. As he explained to a publisher in January 1800, “Washington you know is gone! Millions are gaping to read something about him…My plan! I give his history, sufficiently minute…I then go on to show that his unparalleled rise and elevation were due to his Great Virtues.”2 Weems’ biography, The Life of Washington, was first published in 1800 and was an instant bestseller. However the cherry tree myth did not appear until the book’s fifth edition was published in 1806.
Although there were other myths about Washington in Weems’s book, the cherry tree myth became the most popular. Weems had several motives when he wrote The Life of Washington and the cherry tree myth. Profit was certainly one of them; he rightly assumed that if he wrote a popular history book about Washington it would sell. Weems was also able to counter the early tradition of deifying Washington by focusing on his private virtues, rather than his public accomplishments. A Federalist admirer of order and self-discipline, Weems wanted to present Washington as the perfect role model, especially for young Americans.
Cover page of the 1840 edition of Weem's Life of Washington. The book's subtitle shows how important Weems thought the anecdotes were to his book's central purpose to make Washington a role model for his "Young Countrymen."
The cherry tree myth and other stories showed readers that Washington’s public greatness was due to his private virtues. Washington’s achievements as a general and president were familiar to people in the early nineteenth century, but little was known about his relationship with his father, who died when Washington was only eleven years old. As one Pennsylvanian observed, “The facts and anecdotes collected by the author are well calculated to exhibit the character of that illustrious man, and Christian hero.”3 Weems knew what the public wanted to read, and as a result of his success he is considered one of the fathers of popular history.
Weems wrote his version of the cherry tree myth to appeal to a broad audience, but decades later William Holmes McGuffey composed a series of grammar school textbooks that recast the anecdote as a children's story. McGuffey was a
Mason Locke Weems, by an unidentified artist, c.1810. Number NPG.95.190, National Portrait Gallery.
Presbyterian minister and a college professor who was passionate about teaching morality and religion to children. His books, known as McGuffey’s Readers, gave him the perfect opportunity. First published in 1836, the readers remained in print for nearly a hundred years and sold over 120 million copies.
McGuffey's version of the cherry tree myth appeared in his Eclectic Second Reader for almost twenty years, including the German-language edition from 1854. In McGuffey's version of the story, Washington's language was formalized, and he showed more deference to his father’s authority. For example, when Washington’s father explains the sin of lying, McGuffey has young George respond tearfully, "Father, do I ever tell lies?”4
As ministers concerned with moral and religious reform, McGuffey and Weems had similar motives for writing. Both men also believed that the best way to improve the moral fiber of society was to educate children. Washington provided the perfect role model, and McGuffey turned the cherry tree myth into a story specifically aimed at children. Follow-up questions at the end of McGuffey’s cherry tree story reinforce its message: “How did his father feel toward him when he made his confession? What may we expect by confessing our faults?”5
By the 1830s, the cherry tree myth was firmly entrenched in American culture, as the case of Joice Heth clearly shows. Heth was an elderly enslaved woman purchased by P.T. Barnum in 1835. He made her into a sideshow attraction, billing her as the slave who had raised George Washington. (If true, this would have made her 161 years old.) Heth had many physical characteristics of extreme old age, most likely due to her lifetime in slavery. The stories she told about Washington--including the cherry tree myth--were right out of Weems. Heth was credible because she was telling stories that people already knew.
The cherry tree myth has endured for more than two hundred years probably because we like the story, which has become an important part of Americans' cultural heritage. It has been featured in comic strips and cartoons, especially political cartoons. Americans like to use the myth as a standard for politicians; presidents from William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have been featured in cherry-tree themed cartoons. The longevity of the cherry tree myth is demonstrative of both American ideals and Washington’s legacy.
Jay Richardson
George Mason University
https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/cherry-tree-myth/
- Stories define us - how do stories tell us who we are and what's important to us?
- Which stories are more important to you? Stories can be personal memories, family stories.
- Are all these stories factual?
- How can a story be truthful without being factual?
- Do we always embellish stories? Can any story be transmitted 'cleanly'?
| Stories by Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (Breslov)
The Turkey Prince |
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| Once there was a prince who went mad and imagined that he was a turkey. He undressed, sat naked under the table, and abjured all food, allowing nothing to pass his lips but a few oats and scraps of bones. His father, the king, brought all the physicians to cure him, but they were of no use.
Finally, a wise man came to the king and said: I pledge to cure him. The wise man promptly proceeded to undress and sat under the table next to the prince, pecking oats and heaving at scraps of bones, which he gobbled up. The prince asked him: Said the wise man: The prince replied: To which the wise man responded: So the two turkeys sat together until they became accustomed to one another. Seeing this, the wise man signaled to the king to fetch him a shirt. Putting on the shirt, he said to the prince: The prince was much taken by these words and also agreed to wear a shirt. At length, the wise man signaled to be brought a pair of trousers. Putting them on, he said to the prince: The prince acknowledged this as well, and he too put on a pair of trousers, and it was not long before he had put on the rest of his clothes at the wise man's directions. Following this, the wise man asked to be served human food from the table. He took and ate, and said to the prince: Seeing this, the wise man addressed the prince: And the prince thought this through and accepted the wise man's opinion. Once he got up and walked about like a human being, he also began behaving like a complete human being. |
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| Translations and commentaries copyright © 2002, Lewis Glinert |
Joseph Dan The Teachings of Hasidism Behrman House, 1983.
"...the famous ''Hasidic stories" that typify Hasidic literature for many present-day readers did not come into being util long after the period under discussion...Only two narrative works were published during the whole first century of Hasidism...and both...appeared in 1815, more than a half century after the death of the Besht and thirty-five ears after Hasidism began producing extensive homiletical literature....they were invariably written by individuals who were not Hasidim, but either former members of the movement or adherents of the Haskalah (Enlightenment), and the motives of the authors were primarily pecuniary. Thus, the "Hasidic story" is to a great extent a 20th century fantasy created by writers who overemphasized a literary form that the found more satisfying than the movement's authentic literature. (pp. 4-5)
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chasidic/hebrew/rabbi_tp.html
Elie Wiesel Souls on Fire Random House, 1972.
"Miracles of the Baal Shem Tov...naive and childish, these tales are bound to make us smile. Written and transmitted without any literary purpose, could it be that they were meant to test our eason or our faith or perhaps our imagination? ...To his servant Reb Yaakov he entrusted the mission to travel and make his fortune by telling stories-about the Best, of course. But did he wish Reb Yaakov or any of the other to add and embellish as they chose?..." (pp. 34-35)
New York Times review of Elie Wiesel's book Souls on Fire (Published 1972)
But why Hasidism? Does it offer Wiesel anything more than a comforting nostalgia?‘More to the point, can these 18th‐century and 19thcentury eastern European Jewish mystics really speak to late 20thcentury Americans? Can they offer anything relevant to our concerns in the year 1972? A decade ago, when the young were just beginning to explore mysticism and mind and consciousness expansion, the question might have seemed almost ludicrous. No longer; in the year 1972, one hardly need argue the limitations of pure rationality.
What, then, does Hasidism have to offer? Not answers, Wiesel suggests, but a way to live — a way to live joyously — when there are no answers. Part of Hasidism's appeal to Wiesel is that it does not pretend to answer the unanswerable; nor is it a stranger to melancholy and despair, or even loss of faith. As Wiesel emphasizes over and over again, the greatest Hasidic masters — among them Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, Yaakov‐Yitzhak of Pshiskhe, Menahem‐Mendl of Kotzk, even the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, himself — questioned, argued with and even threatened God, and fell prey to frequent and sometimes lengthy periods of melancholia. “To induce others to believe is easier than to believe,” Wiesel recalls his Hasidic grandfather telling him. To challenge God “is permissible, even required,” Wiesel insists. “He who says no to God is not necessarily a rene glide. Everything depends on the way he says it and why. One can say anything as long as it is for man, not against him... It all depends on where the rebel chooses to stand. From inside his community, he may say everything.”
If belief is difficult or impossible, if there are no answers to the existential question, it is nonetheless possible to draw strength from the despair that is man's lot. As with almost everything else in Hasidism, the point is made by means of a story:
“A disciple came to see Rebbe Pinhas of Koretz. ‘Help me, Master,’ he said. ‘My distress is great; make it disappear. The world is filled with anguish and sadness. Men are not men. have no faith in them, or in myself. I have faith in nothing. What shall I do, Rebbe, what shall I do?’
“‘Go and study. It's the only remedy I know.’
“‘Woe unto me, I cannot even study,’ said the disciple. ‘So strong are my doubts, so all‐pervasive, that they prevent me from studying.... What can I do, Rebbe, what can do?’
“... Rebbe Pinhas. of Koretz replied: ‘Know that what is happening to you also happened to me. When I was your age I stumbled over the same difficulties. I too was filled with questions and doubts.... tried study, prayer, meditation. In vain. Fasting, penitence, silence. In vain. My doubts remained doubts, my questions remained open. Impossible to proceed. Then, one day, learned that Rebbe Israel Baal Shem Toy [the founder of Hasidism] would be coming to our town. Curiosity led me to the house where he was praying. He turned around and the intensity in his eyes overwhelmed me. I knew he was not looking at me alone, yet I knew that I was less alone. Suddenly, without a word, I was able to go home, open the Talmud and plunge into my studies
“‘You see,’ said Rebbe Pinhas of Koretz to his disciple, ‘the questions remained questions, my doubts were still as heavy with anguish, but I was able to continue.’ “
Contradictory, yes; but as Wiesel writes, “Hasidism does not fear contradictions,” teaching instead that “contradictions are an intrinsic part of man,” and of life. Like most Jewish mystical movements (and unlike most Oriental), Hasidism is a mysticism that emphasizes the here and now, a search for the invisible and the eternal by way of the mundane and the visible. Above all, it is a mysticism that emphasizes the relationship between man and man. The es sence of Hasidism, as Wiesel puts it, is the combination of presence and transformation. “In Hasidism, everything becomes possible by the mere presence of someone who knows how to listen, to love and give of himself.” Another story, this one describing a contemporary Hasidic rabbi:
“Reb Leibele Cywiak calls for silence: ‘One day the Guerer Rebbe, may his sainted memory protect us, decided to question one of his disciples: How is Moshe Yaakov doing? — The disciple didn't know. — What! shouted the Rebbe, you don't know? You pray under the same roof with him, you study the same texts, you serve the same God, you sing the same songs, and you dare tell me you don't know whether Moshe Yaakov is in good health, whether he needs help, advice or comforting?
“‘Therein lies the very essence of Hasidism,’ concludes our host, ‘it requires that everyman share in every other man's life and not leave him to himself in either sorrow or joy. ‘“
Particularly not in sorrow. “Hasidism triumphed,” Wiesel writes, “because it made itself the advocate of a new Judaism, a smiling Judaism as it were, reconciling man with the idea of happiness. It was, in fact, a resounding call to joy.” Not the joy of innocence or of denial, but rather a “laughter that springs from lucid and desperate awareness,” “a laughter of revolt against a universe where man, whatever he may do, is condemned in advance.” Hasidism's call to joy came, moreover, at a point in time much like the years of the Holocaust, when widespread persecution and pogroms made it almost impossible ‘to believe or to persevere. As one of the great Hasidic masters and storytellers, Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav, put it, “Hell exists
It is this similarity between the state of the world then and now, not mere nostalgia, that has drawn Wiesel to cele brate Hasidism and retell its tales. For thanks to Hasidism “the Jew suddenly discovered within himself the desire and the strength to sing and celebrate life at a time when the sky was darkening with crimson clouds and the threat was becoming closer and more defined.” Thanks to Hasidism, the Jew “could persevere and gradually regain self‐confidence; he could claim his place in time and in hope,” having “freed himself from the inside.”
Scholars, to be sure, may quarrel with Wiesel's version of Hasidism, as they quarreled with Buber's, arguing (perhaps correctly) that it is hopelessly romanticized and historically incorrect. No matter; “Souls on Fire” is not intended to be a work of historical scholarship; like the Hasidic legends themselves, it is a work of genius and of art — an extraordinary man's extraordinary effort “to humanize fate.”
“One of the Just Men came to Sodom, determined to save its inhabitants from sin and punishment. Night and day he walked the streets and markets preaching against greed and theft, falsehood and indifference. In the beginning, people listened and smiled ironically. Then they stopped listening: he no longer even amused. them. The killers went on killing, the wise kept silent, as if there were no Just Man in their midst.
“One day a child, moved by compassion for the unfortunate preacher, approached him with these words. ‘Poor stranger. You shout, you expend yourself body and soul; don't you see that it is hopeless?’
“ ‘Yes, I see,’ answered the Just.Man.
“‘Then why do you go on?’
“ ‘I'll tell you why. In the beginning I thought I could change man. Today, I know cannot. If I still shout today, if I still scream, it is to prevent man from ultimately changing me.”
Elie Wiesel has prevented man from changing him. Perhaps this Just Man may still succeed in changing man.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/03/09/the-science-of-storytelling/#77ffbf4f2d8a
by Steve Denning, Forbes.com, 3/9/2012
"Why storytelling?"
“Simple: nothing else works.”
That was the rudimentary answer that I gave to cynical left-brained managers back in the 1990s and early 2000s when I was introducing them to the power of leadership storytelling. Slides leave listeners dazed. Prose remains unread. Reasons don’t change behavior. When it comes to inspiring people to embrace some strange new change in behavior, storytelling isn’t just better than the other tools. It’s the only thing that works.
A more scientific answer can be found in Brian Boyd’s wonderful book, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, (Harvard UniversityPress, 2009)
This elegantly written book assembles a mass of scientific evidence, drawing on evolutionary theory, ethology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, game theory, anthropology, economics, neurophysiology, analytic and experimental philosophy, epistemology and psychology, and shows--scientifically--why storytelling is so important.
The eclipse of storytelling in the 20th Century
Anthropologists always knew that storytelling is a universal feature of every country and every culture, even if, for most of the 20th Century, storytelling got very little respect. As so-called scientific approaches to life became dominant, mechanistic, machine-like thinking was everywhere triumphant. Analysis was king. Narrative was seen as either infantile or trivial.
The phenomenon didn’t just affect storytelling. In retrospect, the 20thCentury can be seen as a giant experiment by the human race to find out what could be accomplished if organizations treated people as things and communicated to them in abstractions, numbers and analysis, rather than through people-friendly communications such as stories.
Employees became “human resources” to be mined, rather than people to be minded. Customers became “demand”, or “consumers” or “eyeballs”, to be manipulated, rather than living, feeling human beings to be delighted. Storytelling was only one of many elements that suffered “collateral damage.”
The whole experiment can be seen as a success to the extent that the material standard of living of a proportion of the world’s population for a time improved. But the experiment was an abysmal failure in most other respects. It made human beings people miserable. And organizations steadily became less and less productive, as the need for innovation grew.
In any event, the effort to suppress storytelling was unsuccessful: storytelling, though despised, lived on in the cracks and crevices of society—in the cafeterias, the corridors, around water-coolers, in bars and restaurants, living rooms and bedrooms. Throughout the 20th Century, storytelling got little respect, but it could not be suppressed. It turned out to be central characteristic of being human.
It also turned out that storytelling was a central component of leadership. Want to understand why Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama became national leaders? A big part of it lay in their ability to tell effective leadership stories.
Now, the ongoing reinvention of management to transform workplaces from the boring, sterile, dispiriting cubicles of the 20th Century into the lively centers of inspiration and creativity that are needed for the Creative Economy of the 21st Century has storytelling at its core.
Why stories are so powerful
Boyd explains what is it about the apparently frivolous activity of storytelling that makes it so powerful. He helps us see why storytelling is central to innovation, the critical performance dimension of 21st Century organizations: stories are a kind of cognitive play, a stimulus and training for a lively mind.
Although it is not always obvious from what goes on in Washington DC, Boyd argues that “humans are hyper-intelligent and hyper-social animals.” By lining up key elements of intelligence, cooperation, pattern-seeking, alliance-making, and the understanding that other beings have beliefs and knowledge of their own, stories make us stronger and more effective as a species.
For Boyd, story is “a thing that does” rather than “a thing that is”. It is a tool with measurable utility rather than an object for aesthetic admiration. Attention is the reward that listeners bestow on the storyteller.
Boyd analyzes successful stories to prove his point. The second part of the books zeros in on two famous stories: two works of fiction: Homer's Odysseyand Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who!
Boyd mines The Odyssey not so much for its beauty or its meaning but for its sophisticated treatments of survival and reproductive success, particularly issues of cooperation within social groups. The instinct for justice compels listeners to attend to the horrible punishment of Penelope’s freeloading suitors. For Boyd, The Odyssey is about the acceleration of intelligence in the interests of preserving the social order. Odysseus is deceitful yet honorable because his cause is just.
Boyd’s book is engrossing and deftly reasoned. It assembles the scientific evidence which explains why some stories speak to audiences across cultures and generations. The most successful storytellers apply themselves to the listeners’ dilemmas—not just to amuse, but to make them fitter to triumph in the contests of life.
As Laura Dietz points out in her review, Boyd welcomes contradictions, expecting and even celebrating conflicting agendas within a given work. Just as reshaping the human pelvis for walking on two legs made it less able to cope with childbirth, so new forms of story generate their own new sets of problems, which require yet more solutions. Boyd looks at stories as a naturalist looks at a leaf or shell, not criticizing improvisations but marveling at their inventive beauty, as a refreshing experience.
By assembling the science that underlies effective storytelling, Boyd helps restore storytelling to the intellectually respectable and organizationally useful role that it merits.