Tremendous response on George Washington’s thingummy. Readers are all over the place, though. Is the mystery feature

  • A watch fob? (A reader points me to this: “Men of distinction also carried pocket-watches, and the fashion for dangling watch fobs began in America around 1740. When the watch was slipped into the pocket, a ribbon fob was left to hang outside the pocket with a carved seal or cluster of seals dangling.”)
  • “the tassels and tail end of the ‘sword sash’ that attaches Gen. Washington’s scabbard to his belt”?
  • The tassel of a masonic apron? (A reader: “Despite the tendency to see something nefarious in every strange bump or blip, let’s not hassle over the tassel.”) Georege Washington was indeed a Mason.
  • Some part of Washington’s suspenders?

… or what?

Whatever it is, it has been subjected to censorship by the school-textbook Thought Police:

On the much-reduced scale of a textbook, the watch fob is difficult to distinguish — and viewed with a feverish, bureaucratic, or juvenile eye, the red fob might be misapprehended as the rosy tip of Washington’s genitalia. In 1999, that scandalous possibility so alarmed Guy Sims, the superintendent of schools of Muscogee County, Georgia, that he had teachers’ aides spend two weeks re-painting by hand more than 2,300 fifth-grade textbooks to eliminate the offending detail. ‘I know what it is and I know what it is supposed to be,’ said Sims. ‘But I also know fifth-grade students and how they might react to it.’ The school officials of neighboring Cobb County were not so delicate — they simply ripped the offending page out of all their textbooks.
By the time the books reached Texas this year, the publishers had apparently gotten the message from Georgia. Of the three books, only Prentice Hall’s faithfully reproduces Leutze’s original, watch fob and all. The Glencoe/McGraw-Hill text (not pictured here) darkens and distorts the colors of the original to the point that all small details are rendered invisible — avoiding all danger of ‘wondrous revelation.’ Holt’s Call to Freedom is the most deceptive: It prints and represents as Leutze’s painting what is in fact an inferior, highlighted copy painted by his student Eastman Johnson for the purpose of making engravings — and thus eliminating all ornamental details like watch fobs.
Glencoe/McGraw-Hill officials did not return calls requesting comment …

Well, they wouldn’t, would they? Another reader points out that whatever the dangly thing is, it’s visible in other paintings: last one on the left here, for example. Another one here.

I’m going to have to close this thread, or give up the day job, but many thanks to all who helped illuminate the issue. I think I’m going to dismiss the wilder specualtions (one reader thought it might be GW’s cellphone case) and settle for a watch fob.