George Washington Expense Account
By Gen. George Washington and Marvin
Kitman, Pfc.(ret)
285 pp. Simon & Schuster
By ROBIN W. WINKS
This "is what Washington scholars would call 'a little hatchet job.' " General Washington's co-author admits as much. Now the Cherry Tree has had its revenge. Not only has Pfc. (Ret.) Kitman cut the Father of His Country down to size, he has undercut him: Washington's quality of mind "compares favorably to the average big city banker of today." Just where this leaves you and the General depends upon how you feel about your banker. Kitman leaves little to chance however, for comparisons between the first General and the Eisenhower crowd are frequent, irreverent, and also irrelevant.
Kitman is a very funny writer and this- is a very funny book. Were the reviewer a famous reviewer, one could count on Simon & Schuster's reprinting that sentence between quotation marks in their next advertisement, for publishers live by expense accounts too. Kitman is also rather shrewd researcher, and quite bit of careful digging worthy of those professional historians mentioned in the Acknowledgments (who allegedly read the manuscript and provided comments "typical of the nit-picking and back-biting so commonplace amongst true scholars") appears unobtrusively throughout the text. Too unobtrusively, some of the nit-pickers may feel, since an anecdote here and there sounds less fresh than the salting of footnotes and peppering of parentheses would lead the unwary to believe.
The fact remains that the book is pretty good history, for it leads one to want to know quite a lot more about Washington, his wife, the cost of services and goods in 1776, and the place of the horse as the Cadillac of the Virginia gentry. The book is also compulsively readable, 'as hard to put down as a bag of potato chips, and just about as nourishing. (And no doubt someone has said that before too.)
Washington did, in fact, keep an expense account. It was a careful document, and neither more nor less honest than other works of this genre, as Kitman makes clear. Entries are frequently vague and need explanation; "To Willm. Vans acc.", behind which lurks an expenditure of $1,120.30 (New Style) for tea, tablespoons, Madeira, bottles and corks. The money paid to William Vans, partner in the military supply depot of Vans & Sparhawk. Many entries are longer and provide fuller information. The most interesting, and last of all, Is for L1972.9.4. (which Kitman calculates at $27,665.30) so that Martha Washington could visit her husband at Valley Forge.
All these items were fully revealed as long ago as 1833, when the Department of the Treasury published a facsimile edition of the original Account of Expenses. Washington scholars have long known that the General felt strongly about good spirits and good horses, and that he felt that his rank and position entitled him to fine carriages. But one can be pretty certain that the 1833 facsimile is not on every shelf, and that at least some of the entries were given different interpretations than Kitman, with his private's-eye skepticism of the good life of the brass, has provided.
While Sulgrave Manor may not be very happy with the conclusions here, anyone who has ever written an expense account will recognize some handy rules. "Let your employer know you are a good liver, so it won't come as a shock when your expense account is turned in" merely means, serve the boss champagne and steak not beer and turnip greens, and who can argue? Washington put his secretary on his expense account. Few historians have secretaries, but this will come as no surprise to them, since they have always suspected that anyone lucky enough to have one was not paying for her (him in Washington's case).
The General was also good at the "hidden-pair of pants trick" by which one orders tuna fish and a Coke for lunch at $1.50, rather than steak at $7, pocketing the difference, and at the end of a week having enough to buy a pair of pants or a new golf club. (Obviously this only works if the boss understands that one always has champagne and steak for lunch and never beer and turnip greens. One can see how everything fits together, but it's rather subtle. Why one would rather have an extra pair of pants rather than a good steak remains unanswered but apparently Pfc. Kitman is not a member of the International Wine and Food society.
Other maxims Include "For best results, you've got to know the territory"; "In lean years, only the fittest survive"; and "Get whatever the traffic will bear." The first two appear in italics, the third not, clearly intending a distinction too fine to grasp, but they do help explain why on Nov. 20, 1775, Washington signed for 34 (plus) dozens of eggs.
The book is all good fun, and Washington suffers no damage. Economics may, however, for computing costs into present-day equivalents is a tricky business, which even Jackson Turner Main-used by Kitman-does not attempt. An engrossing "Financial Note" by Kitman tells us quite a bit while leaving vague the crucial question of just what a dozen eggs really cost during the eight years (1775-83) spanned by this journal. Still, the book provide us with a number of insights into Washington's character and some curious examples of the new Relevant History: that Washington gained 28 pounds during the war, Valley Forge notwithstanding, and that there is no entry on the surrender of the British at Yorktown, the event being noted solely by "To Expended on a Second Visit to the French Fleet after the Siege of York," $565.60, as examples of the first; and of the question of relevancy, that Thimble Mountain, in the Central Mountains (ha!) of New Jersey, would be Washington's Sierra Maestra, and that the Continental Army's sneak attack at Trenton was "perhaps' just as immoral" as the Vietcong Tet offensive in Vietnam.
This book is the "Catch-22" of historiography, manic, amusing, sometimes disturbing. But surely no one today begrudges Washington the $565.60 he spent in that Second Visit to the French Fleet?
Mr. Winks, a member of the history department at Yale, edited "The Historian as Detective."