Category: the American president

what about Madison and Monroe?

From the “News Notes” section of the October 1952 edition of The American Archivist:

Messages addressed to the Senate by Presidents Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Van Buren, and Polk are among documents sent to the National Archives recently by the Senate. Found recently in a supposedly empty file drawer in the attic of the capitol, the papers might have been lost forever had not the chief clerk of the Senate by chance opened the one drawer out of 780 that contained them, for the cabinets were destined for disposal. Relating chiefly to routine matters, the records fill gaps in the files of the Senate in the National Archives.

putting the president on the line

I just finished watching Cronkite Remembers, a sort of video memoir Walter Cronkite did back in the late 90s as an eight-part television series. It’s definitely worth checking out, particularly if you’re like me and were too young to remember Cronkite on the evening news. Along with coverage of big events, Cronkite talks about a lot of little things: the kind of stuff people might remember only when someone reminds them of it.

For instance, did you know that Cronkite hosted a phone-in radio show with President Jimmy Carter? Called “Ask President Carter,” it ran on March 5, 1977.
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I guess it was supposed to be the start of a series, but the phone company couldn’t handle all of the traffic. You can get the whole, long transcript here. It certainly looks more interactive than anything anyone has done with e-mail or the web, youtube included.

by others’ works

I visited the FDR memorial not too long ago and came away thinking it would have been much cooler had it been designed in the 1930s – except for the problem of monumentalizing a sitting president; I don’t think that would have gone over well.

I understand that it’s difficult to bring together all of the distinguishing features of FDR’s presidency into one theme – had he been in office just for the Depression or just for the war, maybe it would be different – but I found the memorial too spread out. Each of his four terms is given a separate section, each partially enclosed by granite walls. There are plantings on the walls; maybe they look good in the spring or summer, but to me the combination of vegetation and rock creates the impression of a modern ruin. Maybe I’m just conditioned to think of monuments as clean white marble, smooth, cold, classical, stately.

It’s still a nice setting for a walk, and I do appreciate being able to appreciate a monument on a (nearly) human scale, rather than being expected to stand in awe and reverence before some towering figure. (Not that the Lincoln Memorial isn’t awesome anyway.)  But it’s a bit unsettling, especially in these economic times, to watch visitor after visitor line up in the bread line to have their picture taken, smiling.

arduous days ahead

While reading FDR’s first inaugural recently, I was struck by just how forceful it is. Most of the time when I see quotes from FDR’s speeches they’re statements about specific events: “date that will live in infamy”; universal statements: “only thing to fear is fear itself,” or the four freedoms; or evocative descriptions of the conditions of the Depression: “one third of a nation.” But I rarely see people bring up statements like the following, from just after the “fear itself” quote:

In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

This isn’t FDR at his most left or populist or radical or progressive or whatever the term should be – especially not when compared with his 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden (familiar quote: “For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government”).* But of course Roosevelt, under pressure from groups on the left, from people like Huey Long, and from the effect of slowly improving but still difficult economic conditions shifted leftward from 1932 to 1936. (At least I think that’s still the current accepted interpretation.)

What’s surprising is how left (or whatever) he already was – at least that’s how it appears to me, reading him today – when he was sworn in. I suppose that’s a sign both of how dire the emergency then was, and also of how much the political spectrum has shifted the other way in more recent years.

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*However, near the end of the 1933 inaugural he does say:

But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

Which is pretty ominous-sounding, and though a dramatic increase in executive power isn’t clearly a right or left shift – it depends on what’s done with the power – it certainly is radical.

you win

Obama has youtube, FDR had the radio, but Calvin Coolidge, whose conversational skills were legendary, was the first president on sound film.
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analogy watch

How long until the Truman:Pendergast::Obama:Blagojevich analogy shows up in the major media? Never mind if the person making the analogy does a good job with differences and historical specifics. I’d just be amazed if it’s not made at all.

premonition

Cornelius Cole was not nearly the diarist his wife was – I was more interested in his correspondence – but that doesn’t mean my research did not turn up something incidentally interesting. Again from my old notes, again something not relevant to my research topic, here’s Cole, then a member of the House of Representatives, on Lincoln (from an entry dated 8 Jul 1864):

Mr. Lincoln takes no care of himself + I fear he may be assassinated by some rebel who could easily make his escape. I call upon the President often + once with Hon John H Rice of Me when I expressed my fears to the President that they might assassinate him in order to throw matters into confusion + make an assault. I before or afterward stated the same fears to Mr. Stanton. To the suggestion Mr. Lincoln replied that when he first came to Washington he determined that he would not be dying all the while.

That he did not believe that he was to die in that way. That no one could do such a deed without expecting to lose his own life, and the life of each man was equally dear to himself. That if any body wanted to kill him it was easy to do it from a window any day while he was riding out 7th street. He did not think such was to be his fate.”

not for granted

I don’t have anything to say about Grant’s status as an intellectual, never having read his memoirs, but this discussion reminds me that I have in some old research notes an impression of Grant set down shortly after his first inaugural in the diary of Olive Cole, whose husband was then a Senator from California, and whose papers can be found in this collection. The entry is dated 5 March 1869 (words in brackets followed by a question mark indicate I had trouble making out what was written):

Genl Grant converses easily and, barring a peculiar Western pronunciation, quite elegantly. His language is simple – clear and forcible. He always asks many questions, and is quite as willing to answer general ones, tho’ is sometimes “reticent” – when leading questions are addressed to him, or special favors are asked. He wants time to decide important questions and to consider the propriety of granting favors to others. He [hears?] urging very patiently, I hear. Time will reveal to us the extent of his great patience. He told me a few evenings ago at the house of the Ex – [Mayor? Major?] Hallack that he was too lazy to perform the duties of President and he looked forward to them with dread. Then I [sallied? sullied?] him upon his duty to the people at this great crisis of all the good he might do etc – he coldly remarked he was not ambitious to do what another could do better and he presumed the people would be as happy to have him leave the White House at the end of four years as they are now to see him go there.

[Here my notes indicate that the following section is crossed out in the diary]

My only fear is he is not in sympathy with the great “people” and does not realize the necessity of establishing our government upon the principles of freedom. He is a good judge of a General, of a cigar, of a horse, but is he of men in general? He has not made human nature a study – and his ignorance of somethings national and political astonished even me.

[end crossed out section]

He is fond of his wife and children – and well he may be, for they are gentle + lovely.

I believe he will do as nearly right as any man we could have chosen for President, tho’ he may not do as much. My greatest fear is that he will forgive the Rebels too freely – and trust them too far.

His gentleness of heart will lead him to great charity + forbearance that is better in excess – than excess of tyranny.

I would caution against taking this as a sort of definitive judgment on Grant, especially given that he had barely been President when it was written, and that some of it had been crossed out sometime after it was written. But neither do I have reason to believe that Cole misrepresented their conversation.

Cole’s diaries, incidentally, were among the most engrossing documents I read during my history grad student days. Too bad it was information about her husband’s work in Congress and his relations with business that I was really looking for in their papers. Also too bad is that I’ve never worked up that research into publishable form (blogging doesn’t really count, I don’t think).

civilian leadership

Timothy Noah wonders why, since 1964, presidential candidates who were war heroes have been so unsuccessful:

With the sole exception of George H.W. Bush in 1988—who won by waging the dirtiest presidential campaign of the modern era and then served only one term—no war hero has won the presidency since John F. Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960. Before Kennedy, there was Dwight Eisenhower, former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Before Eisenhower came a century and a half of American history during which war heroes and battlefield commanders routinely won the presidency, starting with George Washington and continuing through Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman. Between TR and Truman came a dry spell of 36 years during which no sitting president had served in the military. But that anomaly can be explained partly by the fact that for nearly half that time the president was a single person—Franklin D. Roosevelt. Moreover, both Roosevelt and his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had performed enormously significant civilian duties in World War I, Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the Navy and Hoover as a highly enterprising organizer of famine relief, first as a private citizen and later as an appointee of President Woodrow Wilson. The Oval Office’s current drought of military leaders, then, would seem historically unique.

Noah then runs through a few possible explanations, which I don’t find particularly satisfying, even when I agree with them. Part of the problem is that I’m not sure if this is the right question.

Noah suggests that it was historically the norm for presidents to have been war heroes, but he’s only able to name 14 who fit his description (which he never really defines); add Hoover and FDR – and I think he has a better case for Hoover than for FDR – and you still have just 16.* That’s a substantial number, to be sure, enough to say that presidents who were war heroes have been a recurring feature in American politics, but hardly enough to say it’s also unusual for presidents not to be war heroes.

Now take a look at the wars involved:

  • Revolutionary War: 1 (Washington)
  • War of 1812 and related Indian wars: 2 (Jackson, Harrison grand-pere)
  • Mexican-American War: 1 (Taylor)
  • Civil War: 5 (Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison (petit-fils), McKinley)
  • Spanish-American War: 1 (TR)
  • World War I: 2 or 3 (Truman, Hoover, maybe FDR)
  • World War II: 3 (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Bush pere)

Notice any pattern here? The Civil War accounts for at least one third of all war heroes; it plus the two world wars account for two thirds. So the supposed norm largely comes down to the effects of three wars, each of which involved unusually large mobilizations – and you still have to stretch to get more than one president out of the first World War.** Moreover, each of the remaining wars were not just significant victories for the United States but seen as turning points in the country’s history and development. Given that the United States hasn’t been involved in a war on the scale of the Civil or the two World Wars since 1945, and that the main candidate for a smaller, turning point war is Vietnam, it’s hardly surprising that there haven’t been more war hero presidents in recent times.

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*If you expand the category to include all Presidents with any prior military service you get to about 30 – depending on how you treat those who served in the militia/national guard but did not serve in active combat. But Noah specifically rules out that kind of expansion when he writes

Presidents Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan were all World War II veterans, but their service records were unexceptional.

Most of the increase comes from the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and World War II. All of the Civil War vets are already on the hero list. And no, Fillmore’s Civil War service doesn’t count towards his presidential electability.

**And it’s only by stretching that you break up the 36 years between TR and Truman without a war hero president. By the way, does Noah really expect us to go along with his math when he claims that FDR’s 12 years took up “nearly half” of that period?