My students and I had fun discussing political geography today.  For instance, take a look at these two maps side by side.  First, we have the presidential electoral map from 1860, from the National Atlas of the United States:

Then we have this recent study, from Open Left, depicting how white men (the only ones eligible to vote in 1860) voted in 2008:

Now, obviously it would be very easy to overdraw an analysis from these two maps.  And indeed, I think Open Left is a bit too Whiggish (despite trying not to be Whiggish) about the links between the expansion of voting rights and the election of Progressive presidential candidates–after all, the expanded electorate has certainly elected its share of conservative Presidents.

But it’s still pretty interesting.

I have long thought that now-President Obama’s reputation as an orator was little inflated, more by a media and public starved for a leader who could speak in complete sentences and cogent thoughts than by the man himself. That is an observation, not a criticism. My short speech-writing period left me with a very lively sense of how hard and ill-advised it is for a real modern human being to write or speak like a JFK film clip. Lots of Democratic politicians have hurt themselves rhetorically by trying to channel JFK. When they try MLK, it is generally even worse.

Today’s inaugural address was much like Obama’s convention acceptance speech in wisely avoiding Sorensenian flights of inspirational rhetoric and preacherly flourishes, but instead presenting liberal values and a post-imperial world view in forms that Americans raised on decades of Reaganism might be able to accept. Here is a passage that struck me:

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

Nothing special there rhetorically — even the nice “better history” line turns out to be recycled from Obama’s late campaign stump speech. Yet what he was saying what rather noteworthy, coming from a U.S. president. Here and in other parts of the speech, the infantile exceptionalism that has become nearly our national creed was quietly but firmly rejected. Our freedom, wealth, and power relative to other nations do not exempt us from the exigencies of history or the rules of morality, Obama declared. Quite the contrary.  We are not authorized to “do as we please” just because we are America; our activities have an impact on other peoples that must be taken into account, and that accounting must modify our behavior. Poverty, injustice, fear, evil, and incompetence all exist in modern America and as part of our tradition. We can and must choose our “better history,” and also choose not to dwell on the worst, but the worst is still there, some it of sitting on the inaugural dais, in a wheelchair.

As in the convention speech, there was also a distinctly liberal economic message in Obama’s inaugural address, but delivered in so mild and sensible a fashion as to be almost impossible for all but the most hardened ideologues to disagree with. The free market is a powerful tool for generating wealth, but it cannot work properly without the “watchful eye” of government. Otherwise the market will “spin out of control.” The last line quoted above, about “the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things” was one that many listeners (including Fox’s Brit Hume) probably heard as a shout-out to capitalist entrepreneurs. What it really was, or perhaps simultaneously acted as, was a little restatement of the labor theory of value that can be linked back to the producerism that has been the heart of so many past radical movements in American history. True wealth was not created by amassing “riches,” Obama argued, but instead by making things through our labors.

I make no claim that there is anything radical about Obama, or even Populist, and I worry about the Wall Street/Ivy League establishmentarians he has guiding his economic policy here at the outset. Yet he does represent and express the better part of our historical political tradition. I am happy that we chose it and look forward to the day when it does not take a national crisis to bring some of those better angels out.

We’re all aware that this is a huge moment in the social history of the presidency — first African-American president, first president born after 1960, etc. — but it’s also an interesting moment in the cultural history of the presidency. Doubtless most readers have seen the publicity about Barack Obama’s appearance in the current issue of Amazing Spider-Man, which Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada described as a “shout-out back” to a president-elect who was outed as a former comic collector some time ago. [Read some of the key panels here.] What we didn’t know was that the idiom of the comics our generation (“X ” or Jones or whatever) grew up with had become part of his political language. Actually, I suspected as much, but today we have proof.

My wife noticed the following in what was billed as Obama’s inauguration letter to his daughters, published in this morning’s Sunday newspaper supplement, Parade Magazine.

“I want every child to understand that the blessings these brave Americans fight for are not free-that with the great privilege of being a citizen of this nation comes great responsibility.”

This is a paraphrase of Spider-Man’s motto — “With great power comes great responsbility” first presented in Spidey’s origin story from Amazing Fantasy #15 [see below] and repeated frequently thereafter. It was the guiding philosophy not only for Peter, who gave up his career to stay home and help, er, organize his community, but for the whole Marvel superhero line.  Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, the X-Men and the rest regularly fought right-wing demagogues, racists, neo-Nazis, war profiteers, and colonialists along with the Green Goblin and Doctor Doom, who come to think of it were good enemies for a liberal hero, too, an irresponsible businessman and an unreconstructed monarchist, respectively.

Sure that “responsibility” line was in the movie, too, but I feel quite certain that Obama first read it in the original. And he also may not be the only member of his generation to pick up some of his liberal ideas from the House of Ideas [one of Stan Lee's many nick-names for his company]. One idea in particular was that a decent person or nation had a duty to do something with whatever gifts it had been given — freedom, a sharp mind, spider-powers, a nuclear arsenal, or whatever — besides showing off.  I do believe today was the first time Parade Magazine ever choked me up.

Via Matthew Yglesias, here’s a sharply worded article by University of Baltimore law professor Garrett Epps in The Atlantic, entitled, “The Founders’ Great Mistake.”  Well, that’s just catnip for us here at Publick Occurrences.  Epps argues that the Constitution, in its current form, gives presidents appalling license to do the country harm.

One quote that struck me:

Intoxicated by the image of the hero-president, unencumbered by any direct political check, stubborn presidents . . . have no incentive to change course.

This gets at Jeff’s media criticism in the post below.  It’s not just presidents who believe their own hype, but a media and public that feeds an almost monarchical conception of the presidency in all its majesty.  Now, somewhere Brendan McConville is probably saying, “I told you so,” although that’s a gross simplification of his thesis.

Epps has a few suggestions for reforming the presidency.  First, we should get rid of the electoral college, and shorten the “interregnum” period between the election and the inauguration.  Secondly, the powers of the presidency ought to be specifically enumerated.  Third (and here things get a little weird), if a president’s party loses seats in Congress, he should be forced to shuffle his Cabinet.  Finally, the executive should be split—perhaps by separately electing an independent attorney general during the midterm elections.

Epps isn’t the first person to suggest a radical overhaul to the Constitution—there have been a number of books with that thesis in recent years.  But heck, Epps’s article is shorter.  Let’s have at it.

Which provisions of the Constitution would you change, and what features would you add?

My last post referred to Lincoln, FDR, and JFK as “pretty good presidents,” but heck, Lincoln and FDR were great presidents, while JFK never even had the chance to finish out his first term.  I’ll let 20th-century historians debate JFK’s greatness, but I hope we can at least agree that there’s always been something a little fishy about the mythmaking surrounding “Camelot” and the Kennedys as an “American aristocracy.”

Ted Sorensen exemplified this during the panel at the New York Times.  When asked who New York Governor David Paterson should choose to fill Hillary Clinton’s vacated senate seat, Sorensen replied, “I always rely on DNA.”

Really?  How did that work out for the Hapsburgs?

Now this line also got a laugh.  And at the lordly New York Times, you rather worry that they were laughing with him rather than at him.  But does Sorensen choose his doctors and airline pilots this way?  Sorensen, of course, refers to Caroline Kennedy’s bid for Paterson to name her to the seat.  And at the end of the day, you can’t really blame him for his preference.

Still, it’s irritating.  I’m neither the first nor the smartest person to say this, but if Caroline Kennedy wants to demonstrate her fitness to hold a Democratic seat as junior senator for New York, she should run for the office in 2010.  In the meantime, Paterson should pick a placeholder.  It’s bad enough when Senate seats become dynastic, but you should at least burnish your résumé by showing you can face the electorate and win.

This is Common-place, so it seems fitting to give the floor to Common Sense (by Thomas Paine):

But it is not so much the absurdity as the evil of hereditary succession which concerns mankind. Did it ensure a race of good and wise men it would have the seal of divine authority, but as it opens a door to the foolish, the wicked; and the improper, it hath in it the nature of oppression. Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.

Furthermore, as someone at the panel pointed out, if you’re going to rely on DNA, then Andrew Cuomo would serve just as well, wouldn’t he?  Once again, Paine has the last word:

However, it is needless to spend much time in exposing the folly of hereditary right, if there are any so weak as to believe it, let them promiscuously worship the ass and lion, and welcome. I shall neither copy their humility, nor disturb their devotion.

On Friday, the New York Times hosted a roundtable discussion with Harold Holzer, Jonathan Alter, and Ted Sorensen.  It was a beautiful, cold day looking over the Hudson River from the 15th floor.  The panelists discussed how Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy dealt with crisis and war during their presidencies.  (Christie’s also displayed the original copy of Lincoln’s victory speech of November 10, 1864, which can be yours for $3-4 million.  The text of the speech itself is free.)

Jonathan Alter trucked out the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes quip that FDR had a “second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.”  After observing that Barack Obama has a “first-class intellect,” he noted that Obama’s temperament, in the face of our current crises, is as yet untested.  ”All presidents are blind dates,” Alter said, which got a laugh from the audience of jaded reporters and ad-salesmen.

Now, the idea of a date with Obama sounds like something Amber Lee Ettinger would say.   She just couldn’t wait for 2008.  But 2008 was just an election—now it’s 2009, and the guy’s got to run the country.  Alter’s comment calls to mind this interesting New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell on the difficulty of predicting who will be a good professional quarterback or public school teacher.  The same is true of picking an elected leader.  Can Obama keep his cool even when the pocket starts to close in?

The electorate’s expectations for Obama are pretty high.  Obama ran an impressive campaign in 2008, which is a pretty grueling executive responsibility in and of itself.  So there’s every reason to think that the temperament of “No-Drama Obama” will suit the country just fine.  On the other hand, the United States faces some pretty big challenges—and Obama can’t overcome them all with just, well, temperament.

The NYT chose three panelists who had written about Lincoln, FDR, and JFK.  The take-away theme was: history gives us reason to hope.  But then again, they cherry-picked three pretty good presidents for the discussion.

I do plan to have some thoughts on this “team of rivals” Cabinet concept, if I find time. The shorter version is that while it may be a good idea for a disciplined leader like Barack Obama to fill his Cabinet with strong personalities in this especially gutless, herd-minded age, the idea that this follows Abraham Lincoln’s example is considerably off-base, the adorable Doris Kearns Goodwin notwithstanding. Though the media and popular historians love to see genius strategies in every move that popular past presidents made, at the time of his election, Lincoln really was a minor figure laboring under serious political constraints — winning a four-way election where you were not even on the ballot in many parts of the country will have that effect — and he desperately needed all major northern factions on board with his presidency, including unionist Democrats and various state party bosses. In other words, the original “team of rivals” was a bug, not a feature, and the avoidance of “groupthink” was very far from being one of Lincoln’s most serious problems. Obama is in a vastly different and far stronger position.

Also, a memo to Hillary Clinton: Lincoln also chose his chief party rival, William Seward, as a Secretary of State, but that precedent may not portend great things for your historical stature. Once I started training to be a historian, I learned that Seward was one of the true giants of 19th-century American politics. Seward expected to be running Lincoln’s administration, and understandably (though inaccurately) so, as he was a co-founder and longtime standard-bearer of the Whig and Republican parties. But what happened to Seward’s public image after eight years as Secretary of State? He ended up a trivia question. The only thing I remember learning about William Seward as a school kid was “Seward’s Folly,” the purchase of Sarah Palin’s moose-hunting grounds. Seward was so eclipsed by Lincoln that the schoolbooks even left out the fact that John Wilkes Booth’s assassination conspiracy tried to get Seward, too, but only succeeded in stabbing him repeatedly in the face.

While there is nothing terribly controversial about it today, Thanksgivings were once highly politicized holidays, reviled by critics as what we would now call violations of the separation of church and state and shamelessly used by their supporters as opportunities to make pious but partisan pronouncements. (The plural was used on purpose because kings and presidents declared days of prayer and Thanksgiving whenever they felt like it, and there could be far more than one a year, not at any set time.) As a holiday observance, I offer one of John Adams’s Thanksgiving proclamations, from the spring of 1798. The Quasi-War with France was raging, and the Federalists were in the midst of creating their national security program, which would soon include the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Adams’s proclamation is taken from the New York Commercial Advertiser, 29 March 1798, and it is followed by a response from the Philadelphia Aurora of the same date. Clicking the image should bring up a readable version. (The images appear after the jump.)

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Gail Collins’s column made a bit of joke out of it, but the present situation does seem to make a pretty good argument for a parliamentary system where the rejected chief executive would be immediately out after an election and the new one could start governing immediately. Luckily for us, Obama already has started acting more like a president than Bush ever did, and on YouTube no less. Collins still has Bush in the second-worst slot, and there I think I might have to disagree:

In happier days, Bush may have nurtured hopes of making it into the list of America’s mediocre presidents, but somewhere between Iraq and Katrina, that goal became a mountain too high. However, he might still have a chance to avoid the absolute bottom of the barrel, a spot currently occupied by James Buchanan, at least in my opinion. Buchanan nailed down The Worst President title in the days between Abraham Lincoln’s election and inauguration, when the Southern states began seceding and Buchanan, after a little flailing about, did absolutely nothing. “Doing nothing is almost the worst thing a president can do,” said the historian Michael Beschloss.

I doubt this is an original thought with me, but there are actually far worse things that a president could do than nothing. For instance, attacking and occuying another nation for years, with essentially no provocation and on the most flimsy of evidence — Bush did that largely on his own, sui generis. Buchanan came into office with the sectional crisis in full swing, a situation to which he made his contributions, certainly, but one that predated his administration and probably outstripped the ability of any Democratic president of that period (when the Democrats depended heavily on southern votes) to adequately address. Buchanan and Bush were about equal in their feckless responses to other disasters on their watch, but I suspect that Hurricane Katrina and Great Depression II will be much better remembered than the North Carolina hurricane and economic Panic of 1857.

“OLD BUCK” AND THE POLITICAL CRISIS OF THE 1850S:
A report from the historical trenches outside Lancaster, Pa.

By Christopher Childers
Louisiana State University

James Buchanan has never enjoyed a good reputation among historians and president-raters; most people rate his presidency at or near the worst in American history. Yet even as students of the 1850s note his shortcomings, many—if not most—of the scholars of this period qualify their answer. For James Buchanan, the “Old Public Functionary,” possessed perhaps the most experience of any president in our history. Buchanan’s résumé reveals a man who had spent his life immersed in the American political system and the U.S. government. Congressman, senator, minister to the Court of St. James, minister to Russia, secretary of state — Buchanan held all these positions in a political career that spanned from the 1820s to the commencement of the Civil War. By almost any measure, James Buchanan had sterling credentials for the office of president.

Amid a sea of withering criticism, occasional ambivalence has been the best Buchanan has been able to do in the eyes of America’s leading historians . For example, Kenneth M. Stampp addressed Buchanan in two of his books: And the War Came (1950) and America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (1990). In the earlier book, Stampp was relatively kind. One of the northern Democrats’ most sympathetic historians, Roy F. Nichols, lauded Stampp for taking a “sensible view” of Buchanan, “making him neither the villain nor the constitutional saint.” Forty years later, however, even Stampp penned a scathing portrait of Buchanan, and his most recent biographer, Jean Baker, author of two other books on the northern Democracy, largely followed suit.

Where could Old Buck’s reputation go from here? Last month, a panel of distinguished historians gathered in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, James Buchanan’s hometown, to participate in a symposium on the man and the crises he faced during his presidency. On the symposium’s first night, participants assembled on the grounds of Buchanan’s home, Wheatland, for a discussion between two of the greatest historians of the 1850s—Michael F. Holt and William Freehling. Wheatland made a marvelous setting for this wide-ranging discussion of the Buchanan years. Pennsylvania’s only presidential home is an imposing red brick building that stands well-preserved on the beautifully maintained grounds about a mile outside the Lancaster city center. Apparently, Lancaster-area brides find Wheatland an appealing place to wed despite its owner’s poor reputation; as the symposium participants met under a tent on the grounds, a couple married in the mansion.

Interestingly, the majority of the questions that Holt and Freehling fielded concerned counterfactuals—the great “what ifs?” of sectional crisis history. What if Buchanan had stuck with his earlier advocacy of extending the Missouri Compromise line rather than endorsing the Kansas-Nebraska Act? What if Buchanan had asserted national authority in the Kansas imbroglio? What if Buchanan had taken a stronger posture in the secession crisis? The Buchanan presidency seems to provoke many “what if” questions from people who cannot escape the conclusion that many things went terribly wrong between the years of 1857 and 1861.

The next day, the symposium shifted to Franklin & Marshall College, where Buchanan served as president of the board of trustees from 1852 to 1866. Old Buck certainly had a few sympathizers in the crowd; one man rose at the end of the last session to praise Buchanan, lamenting the fact that he has endured ceaseless opprobrium for 150 years. Few historical figures have endured such scrutiny and disdain, the man argued. And yet, even Buchanan’s most ardent home-town supporters, eventually concede that the president’s record certainly does not merit praise. Of course, many of the panelists grappled with this very question. Buchanan biographer (and symposium participant) Jean Baker has phrased the dilemma well, asking “why such a well-trained and well-intentioned public figure could have failed so abominably”?

Most all of the panelists agreed: James Buchanan’s was a failed presidency. And when someone spoke of his strengths, they surely did not speak of the sectional crisis. John Belohlavek spoke positively of Buchanan’s skill at managing foreign policy, while William B. MacKinnon praised his decisive efforts at ending the Mormon crisis in Utah. But a strong foreign policy aimed at territorial expansion and the tamping down of rebellion in Utah did not assuage most of the scholars at this symposium, who generally viewed Old Buck’s presidency harshly. Indeed, while other panelists conceded Belohlavek’s point, they noted that Buchanan tended to flee domestic crises by attending to foreign affairs.

In all fairness, and in spite of Buchanan’s obvious shortcomings, most of the historians agreed that Buchanan inherited a terrible situation. As Nicole Etcheson pointed out, the crisis in Kansas had already spun out of control as proslavery and antislavery settlers in the territory made a mockery of Stephen Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine. And as Holt and Freehling—two grey giants of the field—ably discussed, the great party system that had given form and organization to political conflict was in disarray. A sectional party had risen from the ashes of the Whig Party and the short-lived Know Nothings to challenge the Democrats. And while the feckless Republican candidate John C. Fremont lost his bid for the presidency in 1856, the specter of a sectional party hostile to southern interests threatened political stability and provoked bitter recriminations from southern Democrats and northern doughfaces.

Amidst this turmoil, James Buchanan won the presidency. Yet the scholars at Lancaster generally agreed that Buchanan made a bad situation worse. As Maury Klein noted, Buchanan picked an ineffective cabinet. Secretary of State Lewis Cass had long passed his prime and served as a mere figurehead; John B. Floyd, the Secretary of War, appeared downright crooked, especially after a congressional investigation severely tarnished the Buchanan administration’s image. At the outset of his presidency, Buchanan had tried to craft a sectionally balanced Cabinet and in the end created a mess. Perhaps more notably, Buchanan’s meddling in the Dred Scott case created a firestorm in the North at the very beginning of his presidency. The president’s statement that he would “cheerfully submit” to the Supreme Court’s decision in the case followed a brief conference between Buchanan and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney moments before he took the oath of office. But this paled in comparison to allegations that Buchanan had personally encouraged his friend Justice Robert C. Grier to vote with the majority and deny Scott’s plea. Legal historian Paul Finkelman presented a compelling argument that Buchanan’s early actions immediately handicapped his administration.

By 1860, old battles over Kansas, the Dred Scott decision, and internecine struggles within the Democratic Party had weakened the American political establishment and had rendered the Buchanan administration ineffective. When Abraham Lincoln won election to the presidency in November 1860, without a single electoral vote from the South, a crisis had finally emerged that compromise would not avert. But Buchanan faced his own crisis, in what Jean Baker has called his “extraordinary contradiction” that while Buchanan believed the Union inviolable, “he held no coercive power to prevent or overturn an illegal act by a state.” Buchanan’s belief that he possessed no power to maintain the Union paralyzed his administration and seemingly limited him to a wait-and-see approach, hoping that calmer heads would prevail and the crisis would pass. Jean Baker, Daniel Crofts, and Michael Holt discussed Buchanan’s actions in the secession crisis, a course that strongly favored the South. Buchanan seemed increasingly impotent in addressing the issues that the crisis posed and even acquiescent in the course of secession, to the point where he prepared to order Major Robert Anderson from Fort Sumter back to the scuttled Fort Moultrie, a move that essentially surrendered the federal installations in South Carolina. Only when three of Buchanan’s cabinet members threatened resignation did Buchanan change his course and take a more Unionist stance. In many respects, Buchanan seemed all too willing to leave the crisis for Lincoln to manage.

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