“America was the first 'fascist' country of the modern world..." -- Gary Wills

In Canova's famous statue, Washington renounced his sword by placing it on the ground. Here he hands it on the fasces, pitting it at the disposal of the republic as he returns ot the plow. The fasces is the axial norm between sword and plow, war and peace, as those exist in the life of a citizen, each to be taken up only as the common good requires. The sword's return is therefore provisional..... As the mainstream conservative Catholic historian Gary Wills writes: “America was the first 'fascist' country of the modern world – the first, that is, to make wide use of [the fasces] symbol of a revived Roman republic. The French revolutionaries enthusiastically followed suit – the relationship of Washington to the fasces in Houdon's statue party resembles that of David's design for Hercules standing by a fasces in the fourth stop of the Procession for the Festival of Brotherhood in 1793. The fasces were everywhere in early American art; and they are still encountered all over Washington – on bridges, on Lincoln's chair in his Monument, on the frames that hold Trumball's paintings in the Rotunda. Columbia holds the fasces in Fragonard's depiction of Franklin. The table legs in Sturt's Lansdowne portrait are tapering fasces. William Rush's stern carving for the ship Revolution showed 'the Genius of America binding the fasces with her right hand'. Perhaps the largest pre-Mussolini fasces were raised to the heroes of Fort McHenry by Maximilian Godefroy.” Cincinnatus: George Washington & the Enlightenment, NY: Doubleday, 1984, pp. 227-8.