It’s one of the oldest warnings to Americans.
One that’s been ignored ever since it was first uttered.
After two terms in office, President George Washington left office in 1796 disgusted by partisan politics.
In his farewell letter to a young nation, he urged people to think of themselves as Americans not partisans.
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism,” Washington warned.
Partisanship, Washington added, “serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.
It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.”
Today on Presidents’ Day, every American should stop and use the official day off from work to read Washington’s warning.
To read a copy of Washington’s farewell, click here.
It’s such a powerful message that reading it aloud has become one of the longest-running traditions in American political life.
Every year, U.S. Senators take time around the Presidents’ Day holiday to publicly read his farewell letter aloud on the U.S. Senate floor.
This year, the honor goes to Mississippi’s Republican Senator Roger Wicker, who is scheduled to read the farewell letter tomorrow inside the Senate Chambers.
To watch the U.S Senate deliberations on CSPAN, click here.
The Senate tradition goes back to the civil war when Washington’s farewell letter was first read out loud — just as the nation was tearing itself apart.
The tradition was later codified in the U.S. Senate in 1901, which has since kept a leather-bound book full of handwritten messages from every senator that’s ever read Washington’s warning aloud.
The past is prologue,” wrote Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater in his 1957 notation. “Study the past.”
Up until WWII, senators would simply sign their name in the book, acknowledging that they read the warning aloud.
But right after the war, Senators started including small notes about their take on the warning.
“I was struck by how timeless the advice and observations from the 18th century, but also how timely for the challenges we face today, and the testing of the resolve of our institutions, coming off a contentious election, a second impeachment and a time when our country seems hopelessly divided,” wrote Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman when he delivered the speech February 2021.
“I love the Senate and as I read George Washington’s words on the floor of the Senate – a body that can and should be the consistence of the nation – and think of the attack on the same Senate on January 6, 2021,” wrote Vermont Democratic Senator Pat Leahy in February 2022.
When each senator retires, their inscription in the book is released to the public.
To read the messages left by U.S. Senators reading Washington’s farewell, click here.
