The Feb. 22, 1907 NYT has the following story concerning the legacy of George Washington:

It is not a wholly easy task that the Italian Government has set for the School Directors of the kingdom in directing them to explain to their pupils to-day "the meaning and importance" of the anniversary of Washington's birth in the United States. It is, indeed, a task for which a good many of our own teachers might find themselves only indifferently equipped.

Nothing different today.

[I]t is hard to picture definitely what it was that he did for his country and what was the full significance of his remarkable career. This is all the harder because the approximately true Washington is known and can be known only to a limited number of rather careful students, while the portrait that serves and must serve for the great mass of us is at best vague and in many respects quite misleading.

At least the Washington mythology seems to have been foisted on him and not created and nurtured by him. This is in stark contrast to today's leaders who seem to write a book a year with yet another explanation of their life and why we should think it important.

Two seemingly contradictory facts stand out in the life of Washington. One is that we cannot conceive of the independence of the country won and its National Government established without him, and the other is that in peaceful times it is quite possible that Washington would have passed thorough an uneventful existence known only to his immediate associates.

Following up on Ed's post earlier today:

Had he lived in the latter half of the nineteenth century he might, indeed, have been one of the great property holders of the day as he actually was of his own day. He was by native propensity a bold speculator in land values, and at seventeen, when surveying for Lord Fairfax, he located lands he afterward secured and made very profitable. His fortune, estimated at above half a million at his death - among the very largest, if not the largest, of that time - was gathered in part by skillful and sagacious farming, but also by shrewd speculation and by investment in corporate ventures.

The NYT offers a final salutation:

But all this conjecture is really beside the mark. What we know and what we cannot afford to forget are his indispensable services to our country and the splendid unselfishness with which they were rendered.