George Washington, Entrepreneur: How Our Founding Father's Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World

Written by John Berlau

Narrated by Corey Gagne

A business biography of George Washington, focusing on his many innovations and inventions.

George Washington: general, statesman...businessman? Most people don't know that Washington was the country's first true entrepreneur, responsible for innovations in several industries. In George Washington, Entrepreneur, John Berlau presents a fresh, surprising take on our forefather's business pursuits.

History has depicted Washington as a gifted general and political pragmatist, not an intellectual heavyweight. But he was a serious inventor and inveterate tinkerer, and just as intelligent as Jefferson or Franklin. His library was filled with books on agriculture, chemistry, and engineering. He was the first to breed horses with donkeys to produce the American mule. On his estate, he grew countless varieties of trees and built a greenhouse full of exotic fruits and flowers. Unlike his Virginia neighbors who remained wedded to tobacco, Washington planted seven types of wheat. His state-of-the-art mill produced flour which he exported to Europe in sacks stamped GW Flour—one of the very first branded food products. Mount Vernon was also home to a distillery and became one of the largest American whiskey distributors of the era.

Berlau's portrait of Washington, drawn in large part from his journals and extensive correspondence, presents a side of him we haven't seen before. It is sure to delight readers of presidential biography and business history.

A Macmillan Audio production from All Points Books

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781427296696

John Berlau

John Berlau is an award-winning journalist, recipient of the National Press Club’s Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism, and Senior Fellow for Finance and Access to Capital at CEI. He is a columnist for Forbes and Newsmax, and has contributed to Financial Times, Washington Post, Politico, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Times. He is a frequent guest on CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and Fox Business. Berlau lives in Alexandria, VA, 7 miles from the Mount Vernon estate.

Reviews for George Washington, Entrepreneur

[Maria Jette · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Some good info re G Washington, but as one wag in my bookclub said, it read like an undergrad term paper, assembled at the library. To me, it was reminiscent of film strips we used to be forced to watch in junior high, with the monotonous narration of someone who seemed not to have read the material in advance. Every other line seemed to credit another writer. While I appreciate the correctness of that, it really pointed up the collage aspect of the book. As for the “entrepreneur” bit, s ever so of us found giving that title to a farmer who saw tobacco not working well as his cash crop, and switched to something with excellent prospects (wheat), was a bit of a stretch. GW was clearly an excellent farmer, well read and imaginative enough as a business person to experiment with plants and animals to make profits and expand his empire. There’s another book about GW as entrepreneur, from just a few years ago— I’d start with that if the 8th grade reading level of this one doesn’t appeal!