More Sunday Perspective

• Perspective: Drawing the Line
• Phil Lewis: Press-ing issues, Naples forum
• Jeff Lytle: Survey shows one thing for sure: Readers have passion for letters

Tell us about it

• What would you add to this story? Tell us what we missed.
• Do you have photos from this event? Documents we need to see? Share with us.
• Upload photos & videos
• More ways to get your stuff online and in the paper.

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

Share and Enjoy [?]

NAPLES — Both the major political parties have nominated their candidates for president, and this seemingly endless campaign is moving at last into its final phase.

News commentators and pundits have already talked themselves hoarse. Fishing around for something new and interesting, they’ve even begun to hark back to our first president, George Washington, for historical comparisons with today’s raucous, rancorous turmoil.

Maybe they’re thinking how pleasant it would be if everyone could agree on a single candidate and just elect him to the office without all the sound and fury. Washington was elected unanimously, they point out, somewhat wistfully. Twice.

When I think of our first president, though, I think of the minor miracle that we have a president at all. Washington could have made himself king, and most Americans would have gone along with it.

After all, all the nations of Europe were ruled by kings or emperors. The idea of a democracy, with the people voting for their head of state, was a very new, very radical and totally untried concept.

In fact, at the end of the Revolutionary War, the officers who had led Washington’s army tried to make him king of the newborn United States of America.

It happened in Newburgh, N.Y., which was then a bucolic city on the banks of the Hudson River, a few miles north of West Point. In 1783 Newburgh was the site of the headquarters of the Continental Army.

Washington’s officers were disgruntled because they hadn’t been paid for many months by the Continental Congress. They felt that the politicians were incompetent to run the fledgling nation. The army should take over the government, with Gen. Washington as king.

Washington got wind of their plot and called a meeting of his officers. He wanted to read them a letter from the Congress, which whined about how difficult it was to collect taxes and begged the officers to be patient.

Standing before his officers, Washington took out the letter from Congress, then reached into his coat and pulled out a pair of eyeglasses. His men had never seen their leader wear spectacles.

Washington said to his officers, “You must pardon me, gentlemen. I have not only grown gray in the service of our country, but nearly blind.”

Legend has it that there wasn’t a dry eye in the whole assemblage. Washington read them the letter and asked them to have faith in their new nation. They would have followed him over Niagara Falls.

That’s why we don’t have a king.

■ ■ ■

An equally important event in American history happened in 1800.

We had a presidential election.

This was the fourth time Americans had voted for a president, but this election was special. It was make-or-break time for the idea of democracy.

Washington had run for the office twice and both times won by unanimous vote among the Electoral College. Then he retired — a significant step in itself. How many other national leaders have had the strength of character to step down voluntarily from the apex of power?

It took bloody war to get rid of Napoleon, for example. Executions and revolutions have toppled other national leaders. Before Richard Nixon was driven from the White House by Watergate, his supporters had quietly formed a committee to repeal the 22nd Amendment, the one that limits presidents to two terms.

When Washington retired, the vice president, John Adams, was comfortably elected to the presidency. Adams was a bone fide patriot, instrumental in getting the nation to declare its independence from Britain. He had great talents. He also had some faults, among them a powerful ego.

Adams bitterly resented attacks on him in the press, especially when he was trying desperately to keep us out of war with both France and Britain. Partisan politics had reared its head. Adams, like Washington before him, was a Federalist. The opposition against him was led by none other than Thomas Jefferson, once a friend of Adams, but now head of the Democratic Republican Party (which evolved over the decades into today’s Democratic Party).

The opposition press lampooned the round-bellied Adams as “his rotundancy,” and attacked his policies savagely. Adams got Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Laws which, among other things, made it a punishable offense to hold the president up to ridicule.

Despite such laws (or maybe because of them), Adams lost his bid for re-election. When the voters went to the polls in 1800 they elected Jefferson.

But it wasn’t as simple as that. Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, received the same number of votes in the Electoral College. According to the Constitution, either one of them could be named president. The final decision had to go to the House of Representatives. (The Constitution has since been amended, so that the candidate for vice president cannot be considered as a candidate for president.)

The House of Representatives opted for Jefferson. He became president. Without a shot being fired. Without anyone taking to the streets, or to the hills. Political power was transferred from one party to another — and even from one branch of a party to another — without violence.

Nothing like that had ever happened before. We take it for granted today, but the election of 1800 was truly epochal. Americans showed that they had the strength to make democracy work.

Jefferson’s inaugural address sums it all up eloquently: “Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind,” he said. Let us realize that “every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”

Something worth remembering as the increasingly shrill partisan wrangles fill our national discourse between now and November: Democrat or Republican, Socialist or Libertarian, we are all Americans.

Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of nearly 120 books, including “Mars Life,” his latest futuristic novel. Bova’s Web site address is www.benbova.com.