According to historian James Thomas Flexner, Washington’s biographer, maybe so.
“Although (George Washington) drank and gambled and (we gather) wenched as did his officers, he was known as a stern disciplinarian in military matters,” Flexner wrote in 1965 in the first of his six volume biography.
Flexner’s open-mindedness about his hero is compelling. Thomas Jefferson’s biographer, Dumas Malone, denied to his dying day that the Sage of Monticello was capable of interfering with one of his enslaved women.
But Flexner’s use of “wenched” as an intransitive verb is an effort to shift the onus from the great wencher to the irrelevant woman with whom he wenched.
If we accept the second dictionary definition of “wench” as “prostitute,” it’s a case of boys being boys.
If, however, we accept the dictionary’s first definition of “wench” as “servant girl,” to use her as a means of wenching sounds more like boys raping.
No one knows whether young George’s women were willing partners but it doesn’t really matter. Even as a young officer, Washington was a white aristocrat who probably considered farm and pub girls as his inferiors. He knew he had power over them whether they liked it or not.
George Washington, as Flexner points out, created many precedents as the nation’s first president. Is it possible that some of those precedents paved the way for powerful men to seek sex from powerless women anytime they got an itch? Jefferson impregnated at least one of his slave women. Cleveland conceived a child out of wedlock. Harding explored hidden spaces in the White House to have sex with a young woman. FDR and Ike were unfaithful to their wives and LBJ had several mistresses. John Kennedy’s sexual appetite was breathtaking; he once told British Prime Minister Harold McMillan that if he didn’t have a different woman every three days he got terrible headaches.
Because bedrooms of yore were private places, we will never really know how many other presidents took advantage of powerless women. No doubt most of the men who occupied the White House were upright men who were faithful to their wives and treated women with respect. I’m sure that list includes Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden..
But conspicuously missing from this chaste list is the 45th president, whose attitudes and actions towards women are migraine inducing. As Donald Trump sits mum amid accusations of rape it’s clear he is not going to sit down and reassess his life and the harm he has done to his fellow human beings.
That’s too bad. Because as thousands of women are letting it be known that they will no longer tolerate crude and abusive behavior by men, we could use a little male moral leadership to speak on behalf of us guys: sisters, you are right, and we have been deplorable. We vow hereinafter to show you the respect you deserve.
But Mr. Trump will remain smugly quiet. And to be sure, there is little he can say at this point to erase the words that will be carved in granite on the walls of his presidential library:
Cakes and Ale 