TheAgitator.com
In Praise of Small Men
Monday, February 18th, 2008Today seems like an appropriate time to plug Gene Healy’s much-needed new book, The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Presidential Power. Here, a couple of excerpts particularly relevant on a day Congress has set aside to honor an office that’s increasingly looking like America’s elected king.
Like other Americans, historians prefer a cinematic presidency–not for them the stolid, boring competence of a Warren G. Harding or a Calvin Coolidge. Instead, presidential scholars insist that America’s great presidents are the nation builders and the war leaders–men who overturned the settled constitutional order during periods of crisis. That’s nowhere clearer than in the periodic polls of scholars ranking the presidents, a practice introduced by Arthur Schlesinger Sr. in 1948 and repeated by his son.
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Summing up the results of his 1962 survey, Schelsinger noted that “Mediocre Presidents believe in negative government and self-subordination to the legislative power. And scholars continue to see it that way. Thus, in Schlesinger, Jr.’s 1996 survey, five of the top 10 president war leaders; among them James K. Polk, Harry Truman, and Woodrow Wilson. Polk’s major achievement was starting a war of conquest. Truman launched our first major undeclared war and had to be rebuked by the Supreme Court for claiming that his powers as commander in chief allowed him to seize American companies. After running for reelection as a peace candidate, Wilson took the country into the pointless carnage of World War I and carried out perhaps the harshest crackdown on civil liberties in American history. Wilson’s successor Warren G. Harding pardoned the peaceful protesters Wilson had imprisoned and ushered in the boom times of the Roaring Twenties. Yet, Harding comes in dead last in Schlesinger’s poll.
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Whether they’re conservative or liberal, America’s professors prefer presidents who dream big and attempt great things–even when they leave wreckage in their wake. The worst fate for any president, it seems is to become one of history’s timeservers, men like Hayes, Arthur, Harding, or Coolidge–men whose ambition was so completely flaccid that they could content themselves simply with presiding over peace and prosperity.
Indeed, I’d say among the presidents routinely described as “great,” only Washington really fits the description (I much prefer Jefferson, the philosopher to Jefferson, the president). It doesn’t take a great man to collect and wield power. All men do that, and always have. It takes a great man to resist the trappings of high office, and the urge to inflict his vision on everyone else. It’s strange how we celebrate our overthrow of the British monarchy each July, and regularly pat ourselves on the back for our system of checks and balances, yet then turn around and celebrate the men who have most behaved like tyrants, and done all in their might to circumvent the restrictions the Constitution puts on their powers.
Healy concludes the introduction to his book thusly,
…a presidency of limited powers and modest goals was what the Framers gave us under the Constitution. [I]t is worth fighting to restore.
So the hell with the Roosevelts, Trumans, Wilsons, and Polks. Today, let’s honor the Coolidges, Clevelands, Hardings, and Hayeses. Oh, and my favorite, William Henry Harrison, our only Hoosier president, who had the good sense to die two weeks after taking office.
He was our least accomplished president ever.
And thus, one of our best.
I’ve always wondered if a president who’s legacy was dismantling large swaths of the federal government wouldn’t be seen as tyrannical as those who caused the growth. Could a president effectively shut down the department of education, or would that be seen as a deriliction of duty to uphold existing laws? When I play the president in my dreams, how much could I get away with?
I prefer Jefferson, the dry cleaner.
From the book exerpts:
So… How does Bush fit into this theory? He certainly turned the Constitution on end and left wreckage in his wake. And nation building has been his middle name (albeit not any nations in this hemisphere). He’s also changed the way we think about foreign policy. Instead of how long between wars we now think in terms of how many wars we’re in at one time. I mean is that the substance of a greatness or what?
Everyone should read or reread Plato’s Myth of Er found in the last book of the Republic.
Do not trust people with too much ambition when it comes to politics.
“There came also the soul of Odysseus having yet to make a choice, and his lot happened to be the last of them all. Now the recollection of former tolls had disenchanted him of ambition, and he went about for a considerable time in search of the life of a private man who had no cares; he had some difficulty in finding this, which was lying about and had been neglected by everybody else; and when he saw it, he said that he would have done the had his lot been first instead of last, and that he was delighted to have it.”
I have to quibble with the inclusion of Washington as “truly great”. He was the first (naturally) to begin the executive power grab and started the “war on untaxed whiskey”.
That’s why I liked Romney. He seemed to be an unambitious, competent, manager. (He surely didn’t use the Massachusetts corner office as a power grab, or for much of anything else.) Oh well.
KB, when there was no law against it, Washington did not accept a third term. He resisted the offer of power. Seems like a categorical “great” action.
Declining a third term doesn’t negate invoking martial law and deploying the militia against tax resistors. Some were even charged with treason, and one was sentenced to death (the sentence was commuted).
The Whiskey Rebellion undoes any “greatness” attributable to Washington.
Meh. I don’t think Harding was as bad as they say, but he sure was incompetent and allowed his Cabinet to traffic in bribes and corruption. FDR, though he did have some kingly tendencies, did help end the depression and beat the Japanese.
I think Polk was a shit president for the war of conquest.
“Pointless carnage of WWI?” I think that’s a little much. We suffered comparatively little compared to France and England (less than a tenth as much), and without America the Allies wouldn’t have won. Maybe that would have been a good thing, but a German Empire encompassing all of Europe? Dangerous. I think Wilson’s biggest mistake (actually, the biggest mistake made by the Allies) was not pressing Germany into an unconditional surrender and eventually dismembering her in 1920 or so.
My favorite president? Eisenhower. Ended the Korean war, cut down on military spending, and managed to avoid nuclear war–or any other war, in a very tense time. He had his problems (like the covert actions in Iran and Guatemala), but he knew what he was doing.
Oh, and who coined the term “military-industrial complex?” Eisenhower.
So Radley, would you rank Clinton highly? He accomplished very little of his agenda. But the economy did well, free trade flourished, welfare was reformed. Our involvement in foreign wars didn’t turn out too badly (Kosovo, Haiti).
Conversation with my brother:
Brother: The citation uses “competence” and “Warren G. Harding” in the same sentence
Me: the basic idea is that being a flashy flamboyant member of the world ego stage is precisely the opposite of being a good president
Me: the less a president does, and especially the less he tries to expand the power of the federal government (especially the executive branch), the more competent he is to the task of being president
Me: george bush is possibly the worst president we’ve ever had for a number of reasons - but the biggest is that he daily wipes his @ss with the constitution, trying to get extra corny smudges on the bill of rights
Me: anyway, that’s the idea behind the article
Me: and i agree
KB,
We’ll have to agree to disagree since I think a 150+yr precedent outweighs the example you provided which is disingenuous at best and factually misleading at worst.
I am reminded of a passage from PJ O’Rourke in which he presented the basic problem of libertarianism. Bad government is easy to quantify, but how do you measure “good government”? Can the streets be too clean? Can crime be too low? Etc. etc.
fdr no more “helped end the depression” than a weatherman helps end winter. fdr’s depression was just another ‘panic’, which periodically bedevils entirely unregulated capitalist economies. america had had several of these, all evidently by-products of the business cycle, and in every case before fdr, we managed to work our way through them in 2-5 years.
“working through a panic” is a code for ruthlessly allowing weak or dying business entities to fail. then the bottom-feeders move in, money starts flowing again, and the cycle begins anew. it’s harsh; it’s no fun to go through; but it works.
fdr screwed it up. by meddling in the business cycle; and empowering that mistake with the power of government - which he expanded greatly - he just made things worse; and allowed the depression to drag on & on. allowing it to get so bad that it took a world war to finally overcome his inept “leadership” and get us back on our feet.
if you doubt that, consider that fdr had esentially unlimited powers, a compliant congress, and a public willing to accept his dictats, but - even allowing for make-work jobs such as the ccc & wpa - the unemployment rate in the decade of the ’30’s never dipped below 15%.
even though fdr was “helping to end the depression”. odd, that. for some reason, fdr’s *never* held accountable for his gross economic *failures*. everyone blames the banks; or the stock market; or the republicans.
just like teacher told ‘em to. and don’t even get me *started* on the fdr national ponzi scheme.
Edintally, before you wander off having agreed to disagree, please read up on the Whiskey Rebellion and tell me where I was either disingenous or misleading.
Washington did impose martial law. He did activate the militia from surrounding states and other parts of Pennsylvania. He did personally lead military troops to suppress American citizens who were rebelling against the tax. (That tax was a failure, by the way, and was repealed less than 10 years later.)
Those are facts, neither disingenous nor misleading.
I was very happy to see this post, since I’ve been arguing against these historian polls for quite some time. I don’t think we should be taking them seriously for the reasons you state and also because these historians are also willing to rate Dubbya. How can you possibly rank a sitting president??? I’m no fan of our current pres, but I don’t see how I can quantify his policies until we’ve suffered their consequences for at least…a decade?
[...] Zach points to Radley Balko. I think if we just remember this point it will be all the honor Washington would want. It [...]
> Me: george bush is possibly the worst president we’ve ever had
> for a number of reasons….
Reason #1 being that the person who would opine that doesn’t know a damned thing about Franklin D. Roosevelt, the biggest thief in human history.
> So Radley, would you rank Clinton highly? He accomplished very little
> of his agenda. But the economy did well, free trade flourished…
Has it occurred to you that that may be due to the fact that he, as you observe, accomplished very little of his (wife’s) agenda?
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Crete/3450/index.html
That anyone could manage to think highly of this repugnant rapist toad is just appalling.
I’ll have to be picky and point out that WHH’s grandson, President Benjamin Harrison, was really Indiana’s best claim to the presidency. Although neither was born in Indiana, Benjamin spent nearly all of his adult life as an Indianapolis attorney and represented Indiana in the US Senate. William Henry Harrison, a Virginian, was the governor of the Indiana Territory and distinguished himself in the Battle of Tippecanoe, but never really was of Indiana. But, considering our home state’s sparse presidential legacy (although we shouldn’t forget Lincoln, who spent most of his childhood in Indiana), I guess WHH counts.