The Founding Fathers' Convenient Fictions
The story of George Washington’s supposedly wooden teeth, a quaint detail often repeated, is often presented as a minor historical curiosity, easily debunked by modern dentistry revealing his dentures were made of gold, lead, ivory, and human teeth. The Independent article highlights this, focusing on the material composition of his dental work and reinforcing the idea that it’s just a historical
inaccuracy, easily corrected. What this surface-level correction deliberately omits is the source of many of those human teeth: they were purchased from enslaved people, often extracted without consent or proper care, or taken from deceased individuals. This grim reality, well-documented by American historians like Edward G. Lengel, shatters the benign image of a leader suffering a common ailment
and shifts the narrative toward the brutal economic realities of early America. Washington, himself a prominent slave owner, purchased teeth, a practice that underscored the disposable nature of Black bodies in the nascent republic, not unlike how colonial powers justified the extraction of resources from the Global South. This selective amnesia extends far beyond Washington's mouth. From the 1954
CIA-backed coup in Guatemala, overturning a democratically elected government for the United Fruit Company, to the 2003 invasion of Iraq based on fabricated WMD claims, mainstream narratives consistently downplay or erase the human cost and imperial motives behind state actions. They craft palatable fables, much like the wooden teeth myth, to maintain a sanitized national identity, one that