The 1932 commemoration of Washington’s 200th birthday, the “George Washington Bicentennial,” offers a particularly revealing precedent. Planning for the Washington Bicentennial began in 1926 with a nationwide address from President Calvin Coolidge, broadcast to what was then the largest radio audience in American history. Coolidge argued that earlier generations had placed Washington on a pedestal, transforming him into a “rather imaginary character” shaped by a “universal desire to worship his memory.” The result, he warned, was that “the real man among men” had been obscured.
Coolidge’s call resonated. Over the next six years, Americans set out to rediscover the “real” George Washington and to share that version with a mass audience. The scale of the effort was staggering. Newspapers published millions of articles about Washington. Radio broadcasts reached audiences across the country. At its peak, an estimated 16,000 commemorative programs took place every day during the nine-month celebration, totaling nearly five million events.
Washington’s presence saturated American life in a way unmatched before or since. Yet the mainstream Washington Bicentennial programming erased Washington’s involvement with slavery.
This omission was hardly incidental. The mostly all-white planning bodies saw a nation in flux: many women had gained the right to vote, a new wave of immigrants streamed into American ports, and a growing number of Americans, especially Black Americans, began moving into cities. In this whirlwind of change, Washington’s involvement with slavery was simply beside the point.
Federal planners weren’t the only ones using the anniversary to uncover the “real” Washington. African American activists, intellectuals, and scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson shared their own visions of Washington’s legacy, one that focused squarely on his involvement in slavery.
Du Bois, for example, published a pageant—a common form for sharing lessons from Washington’s life during his bicentennial—that placed Washington’s enslaving front and center. One scene depicts Washington taking roll call of the people he enslaved at Mount Vernon, while in another, Washington is upstaged by Black patriots of the American Revolution. Du Bois lamented the fact that “many Americans would write the history of this land with no memory” of the central role of African Americans. “Never was this narrowness of mind better shown,” he argued, “than in the celebration of the bi-Centenary of the man whom this country called father.”
Other scholars went further in foregrounding Washington’s history with slavery. Scholar Walter H. Mazyck’s 1932 book George Washington and the Negro was likely the first book devoted entirely to Washington’s history with race and slavery. With its publication timed to coincide with the Washington bicentennial, Mazyck noted that “as the master of slaves,” Washington had received “little consideration” in the minds of the public—a situation he sought to rectify with his book.