Hero Worship : FOR KING AND COUNTRY: The Maturing of George Washington 1748-1760, By Thomas A. Lewis (HarperCollins: $27.50; 296 pp.) : PATRIARCH: George Washington and the New American Nation, By Richard Norton Smith (Houghton Mifflin: $24.95: 424 pp.)

George Washington may or may not have been indispensable, but he has certainly proven inescapable. His centrality to the colonial struggle for independence from England and to the establishment of the United States of America as the successor regime to the English imperial one guarantees his continuing interest to Americans. These two books form part of what appears to be the latest revival of interest in Washington, anchored by the monumental Washington Papers project, which will (by early in the 21st Century) have made available all letters to and from Washington. Each generation’s take on George Washington reflects its reconsideration of the history and prospects of the nation he is said to have fathered.

One of the problems with George Washington is the predictability of most writing about him. His accomplishments were remarkable and his character interesting, but there remains a certain remoteness to his image as it has descended to us and the temptation to furnish that remoteness with personal detail or to knock Washington off his pedestal has proved confining. In a nation founded without recourse to divine myth--indeed, constitutionally prohibited from enshrining the kinds of religious myths that most regimes use to legitimate their claims--Washington became the godhead of the secular American founding, the figure around whom the need to believe clustered. One either worshiped at the Washington shrine or found fault with the hero.

The two books under review here form no exception to this pattern. Thomas Lewis gives Washington back his human scale and Richard Norton Smith gives readers the kind of leader the nation craves but seems no longer to generate. Lewis tells a story of the young man and Smith of the mature man. The books face one another across the chasm of the colonial struggle for independence that culminated in the American Revolution and the establishment of the new American nation; their different views of Washington reflect alternative views on the meaning of the nation and notably different styles in the writing of history. Both books, it is worth saying, are the works of historians not affiliated with the university and both successfully reclaim history for the reader and the citizen and not just the scholar.

“For King and Country: The Maturing of George Washington, 1748-1760” gives a striking account of, in Lewis’s words, “how greatness eluded an ordinary young man of modest gifts and uncommon ambition.” Lewis has made a riveting story of the young Washington’s struggles to establish his place within Virginian society and its British imperial context. He sees Washington as a quintessential man of the West (by which Lewis means the frontier of European settlement in North America). His account is suffused with his unsentimental awareness of the troubling history of the devastation of indigenous populations, enslavement of African-Americans, and the degradations of the natural environment by the European-Americans who established the “empire for liberty.”

Lewis makes his position and his ambition clear. “As we shape our attitude toward the world we inhabit now, we need to understand that Washington, the father of our country and freedoms and society, is also an author and embodiment of two of the most grievous flaws in our American society: our collective contempt for other races, and our exploitation of land as a commodity of trade.” The result of this point of view is a daring book, an attempt to recreate the forging of Washington’s career primarily in relation to the political and military intrigues and events of the war between England and France for control of North America as it involved colonial English Americans and native Americans. It is a terrific story and Lewis tells it with rare narrative skill. What we get from this perspective on Washington is a refreshed sense of his importance to the nation most of us are living in, yet one told not in terms of ideological pronouncements but rather in a fast-paced, engaging narrative. Lewis writes the kind of history that reminds us that history has a muse, that it is an essential human art.

While this Washington was not heroic, Lewis makes it clear that he had the makings of a hero. “For King and Country” restores George Washington to historical life, the figure of complexity and interest he deserves to be. Lewis rekindles this interest in part because he is a superb writer, with a startling command of the historian’s art and a powerful interest in the moral aspects that history has always claimed. He also has in the young George Washington a subject of unfailing centrality and importance. His flaws, like those of any human figure worth his salt and worth our time, constitute the ground of his enduring human achievements.

It is no surprise that Richard Norton Smith’s “Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation” tends to confirm the views Lewis wishes to disturb. For Lewis, patriarchy is a symptom of the tragic flaw of Washington and America’s enterprise. For Smith, “Patriarch” is an appropriate title for a great leader of a free people. Smith knows what Lewis knows about Washington, but he takes a happier view of the country Washington fathered and has written a very good book about Washington’s contribution as President to its founding. It is a book full of incident and information, clearly written and well researched.

Smith’s Washington is a “necessary” hero, the figure who managed to pilot the newly united states through the most dangerous period of its history when civil war and foreign invasion and internal dissolution were constant threats, when conventional wisdom decried the possibility of a stable republican government being established in so great a territory and over so varied a population. Smith wants to show and does show how much more than Washington’s reputation and special status as an American hero he contributed to the nation’s founding. “Patriarch” presents a believable human being and gives an excellent account of Washington’s accomplishments and of his continuing interest and relevance.

These two books, taken together, indicate an important division among American historical scholars. For Smith, Washington’s essential contribution to the founding of the American republic was an unmixed blessing. He takes the United States of America as a historical given. He does not question the legacy of the founding as it has affected the peoples and the environment present at its creation. Lewis, on the contrary, sees Washington as the agent of a problematic legacy. His book raises in the reader’s mind all sorts of questions, hard and fascinating questions about the course of America’s history. Smith’s book has the virtue of his certainties; Lewis’s book is something else again. Under the compulsion of his awareness of the tragic legacy of the American founding, he has created a historical figure who compels us to reconsider the past.