*** Join the Army and Choose Whichever God You Like

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/opinion/sunday/join-the-army-and-choose-whichever-god-you-like.html?_r=1

By SARAH VOWELL  AUG. 12, 2016

George Washington’s triumphal entry into New York City, Nov. 25, 1783.CreditE.P. and L. Restein/Universal History Archive, via Getty Images

Every August, the oldest synagogue in the United States celebrates the fact that George Washington hated tolerance.

In 1790, a couple of months after Rhode Island became the last state to ratify the Constitution, Moses Seixas of Touro Synagogue in Newport wrote his president a nice note about what a relief it was to live in a republic “deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great governmental Machine.”

Washington replied to Seixas and his brethren, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” Tolerance, he meant, was small, petty and obsolete because they lived in a big new country where citizens stood side by side. For the United States government, he wrote, “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” He added, “Every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Pause here for a century or two until “every one” actually includes everyone. While we wait, it’s worth remembering that colonial Rhode Island had attracted so many Jews, Quakers, Baptists and other denominations because non-Puritans were persecuted in neighboring Massachusetts. And that in 1774, the First Continental Congress almost fell apart in its first five minutes because a couple of Episcopalians refused to pray with a bunch of shifty Quakers and Congregationalists.

So it was a civil rights landmark when the first American president publicly invited non-Christians to join him on equal footing on the First Amendment’s front porch. Now, after Khizr Khan appeared on national television offering to lend Donald J. Trump a paperback Constitution he had pulled out of his jacket, thereby turning the pocket Constitution into an Amazon best seller, next Sunday’s annual reading of Washington’s letter at Touro Synagogue is sure to crackle with newsy excitement.

A few months before Washington wrote to the Touro Jews, he confided to a British historian: “I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.” Because he was all too aware of inventing the presidency, the letter addressed to the Rhode Island synagogue is also addressed to us. As the first president, which is to say the first executive with the job of preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution, he was making a blunt statement on what he believed that Constitution was supposed to be about.

While Washington was enough of a republican to throw in with the Continental Congress from the get-go, eight years commanding the Continental Army transformed him. When he arrived in Boston to take charge of the gathered militias, he wrote a snooty letter to a Virginia crony complaining of “an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people, which, believe me, prevails but too generally among the officers of the Massachusetts part of the Army.”Continue reading the main story

Then Boston’s Henry Knox volunteered to go to Fort Ticonderoga in New York to fetch its stash of cannons, mortars and howitzers, which he dragged back over the Berkshires. In winter! The British occupying Boston took one look at that fearsome artillery pointing down at them and high-tailed it to Canada. And the Massachusetts part of the Army suddenly struck Washington as a lot less stupid.

Similarly, in February of 1777, Washington fired off a bitter missive to Congress complaining about the “evil” of unemployed French soldiers who had washed ashore expecting to steal American officers’ jobs. Nine months later, Washington wrote to Congress suggesting that they let the freakishly brave Frenchman Lafayette command his own division.

In Washington’s farewell orders to his troops in 1783, he marveled “that Men who came from the different parts of the Continent, strongly disposed, by the habits of education, to despise and quarrel with each other, would instantly become but one patriotic band of Brothers.”

Civilians envy this. I have qualms about the Spanish-American War — who doesn’t? But I wolfed down the part of Theodore Roosevelt’s book “The Rough Riders” portraying the men he commanded in Cuba: sheriffs and sharpshooters, Creeks and Chickasaws, a Louisiana bookworm, an Idaho hunter, a Jew nicknamed Pork-chop and a cowpuncher who went by “the Dude,” all living together in “complete equality.”

The last time Ghazala Khan spoke to her son Humayun, an Army captain, before he was killed in action in Iraq, he waved off her pleas to avoid heroics and stay safe, she said. “Mom,” he told her, “these are my soldiers, these are my people. I have to take care of them.”

Mr. Trump’s unpleasant reactions to being schooled on the Constitution (and on human decency) by Mr. and Mrs. Khan has led to nationwide alarm; as the filmmaker Albert Brooks put it, “So many Republicans are jumping ship Celine Dion’s going to sing the theme song.”

It was heartening to read the letter signed by 50 Republican national security officials who announced on Monday, “None of us will vote for Donald Trump.” Among their reasons: “He appears to lack basic knowledge about and belief in the U.S. Constitution.”

One of the signers, who has served in every Republican presidential administration since Nixon’s, stands out as having the most Republican name since Henry Cabot Lodge: William Howard Taft IV. He is the great-grandson of the Republican overachiever who was our 27th president and our 10th chief justice. So while every Republican stalwart on the list has my respect for abandoning their party’s nominee, I would imagine it took extra guts for Mr. Taft to add his family name to the list of mutineers.

Yet by breaking with Mr. Trump on constitutional grounds, Mr. Taft is not a Taftian turncoat, but is rather harking back to his forebears’ roots in the party of Lincoln.

Mr. Taft’s great-great-grandfather Alphonso Taft was a delegate to the first Republican National Convention, back in 1856. On the Cincinnati Superior Court in 1870, Judge Taft weighed in during the “Cincinnati Bible Wars,” a series of public quarrels and court cases about whether the Protestant King James Bible was the appropriate go-to spiritual reference in a school district also serving Catholics and Jews. In one case, Board of Education of Cincinnati v. Minor, Judge Taft asserted in an opinion that the Bill of Rights protected “every sect.” Expounding on freedom of religion in general, he declared, “the idea, that a man has less conscience because he is a Rationalist, or a Spiritualist, or even an Atheist, than the believer in any one of the accepted forms of faith, may be current, but it is not a constitutional idea, in the State of Ohio.”189COMMENTS

Which is a comforting thing to read after watching a recentNew York Times video showing less formal constitutional commentary outside a Trump campaign rally in Phoenix. Trump protester: “The Constitution says that religion is a right for all people.” Trump supporter: “Muslim is not a religion, partner. It’s an ideology. You don’t come and talk about America when you’re supporting Muslims.”

The Republican old guard will spend the coming years trying to figure out how to salvage the moral foundation built by original delegates like Great-great-grandfather Taft while warding off barmy xenophobes. Perhaps the party should start requiring potential presidential candidates to take a test about the meaning and mechanics of the Constitution. Such a test exists. Mr. and Mrs. Khan had to pass it to become naturalized citizens of the United States.

Correction: August 12, 2016 

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the location of Washington and his troops. It was New York City, not Suffolk County, Mass.

Sarah Vowell is the author of “Lafayette in the Somewhat United States” and “The Wordy Shipmates,” about colonial New England.