Commentary

What is it about presidential lives that keep us Americans so rapt? Barack Obama shows up on all the morning shows, on Larry King Live, Sixty Minutes, Nightline, Keith Olberman, Leno. Ratings go sky-high. Obama, Clinton, and George W. Bush are all on Twitter (Obama's following is the eighth highest twitterwide— higher than Taylor Swift and Ashton Kutchner, though—bizarrely— just behind Britney Spears). PBS—American Experience, Frontline, Nightline—regularly features retrospectives on presidencies, and presidential biopics—most recently on Clinton. HBO runs feature mini-series on presidents early (Adams) and recent (Nixon). And when we get tired of the presidents we have, we can enjoy a steady stream of dramas featuring fictional ones—from West Wing, Commander in Chief and 24 television fare to Hollywood presidents played by stars like Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Morgan Freeman, or John Travolta. If we're lucky (or not), the fiction becomes reality: the April 2012 Vanity Fair features a chart detailing how Aaron Sorkin's West Wing influenced and/or "predicted" key features of the Obama administration and a companion article charting the show's influence on today's Beltway culture and practice.

Our fascination with the presidency fuels print media too: it's a rare week indeed when books about the presidents—by former presidents, those associated with presidential administrations, wives of former presidents, historians, pundits, or presidential aspirants—are not topping nonfiction best-seller charts (it's not unusual for there to be three-to-six presidential memoirs/histories/ exposés on the New York Times top-sellers in a given week). And there's hardly a better way to boost your book's sales than to run for president. The public gobbles candidate books (unless you're Mitt Romney), even if they're a decade or more old, reading character as tea leaves for future politics and policy. As for the sitting president, pundits, shouting heads, and journalists offer varying levels of exposés and "insider" stories (à la Woodward), to keep us close to the action, and close, too, to the predictably developing disgust for and/or disappointment in the sitting President. Once the First Family leaves the White House, then comes a stream of memoirs from the former President, family members, and fellow administration members, alongside retrospective analyses by historians, political scientists, and the commentariat. Most of these hit the best-seller charts. In and among all of these are regular popular biographies of iconic presidents, chart topping too: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, FDR, Reagan, Clinton.

Books about at least one president have been best-sellers since the founding era. Mason Locke Weems, the minister, itinerant peddler, book agent, and author, understood early that inexpensive books about the first president—and especially anecdotes about his private life—would make money.¹ His Life of Washington tripled in length as Weems continued revising and republishing it after its original publication in 1800, within a year of Washington's death. As Christopher Harris notes, in revising it Weems paid no attention to his critics, who gave it a mixed reception.² He didn't have to: the sentimental story that offered teary glimpses into Washington's childhood and heroic accounts of his early military career consistently outsold everything on his list.

Weems's biography did well in part because he tapped into anxieties about political virtue in the early nation, offering lessons about where and how that virtue was best exercised. Explaining his narrative approach to the biography just a generation after democratic revolution turned people out onto the streets, Weems urged citizens back inside. "Private life is always the real life," he advocated: it is the life "behind the curtain" where citizen readers can discover the true worth of a patriot and a man (2). Here he underscored President Washington's own lesson in the Farewell Address, suggesting that men best exercise their citizenship not face-to-face, in the public square, but at home, in their worshipful and private remembrance of the president.

In this original presidential best-seller, Weems harnessed Washington's presidential stature not to today's familiar celebrity but to self-culture. Weems taught...