Monday, May 17, 2010

Another Chance, Kinda


F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that "There are no second acts in American lives." He obviously hadn't been paying attention to American politics, because there are plenty of second acts there; even George Washington's presidency is a second act, following the first act of his generalship in the Revolutionary War (fun fact: Washington retires to Mount Vernon after the war's end pretty much convinced he's going to die soon, since all his male relatives passed away early on; he doesn't, and become president).

Martin van Buren is a great example of a second act. 1840 sees van Buren lose the presidency to William Henry Harrison, thereby becoming the first single-term president whose name isn't Adams. In 1844, he's convinced he can come back and win again, but even though he has a slight majority at the Democratic convention, he can't get the necessary two-thirds of delegates because he opposes immediate annexation of the newly-independent Texas. His support collapses, and on the eighth ballot, James K. Polk gets the nomination.

Polk wins, which would shut van Buren out of the Oval Office for eight years except for the fact that Polk pledges to serve a single term. So in 1848, the Little Magician is back with a brand new party: The Free Soil Party. The annexation of Texas aggravates the slavery question: will the US allow slavery in these new territories? The two major parties are both in favor of managing slavery--in fact, early on, the abolitionist movement is seen as a group of crazy agitators--but they keep wanting to push it out west. And while there are plenty of people in the parties who oppose slavery (John Quincy Adams, for example), both parties favor the Union over everything else. Preserving the fragile coalition of states must take precedence.

But not for the Free Soil party. It opposes the westward expansion of slavery, and draws upon the members of the Whig and Democratic parties who find themselves under-represented by their leaders. For the 1848 election, they put up van Buren, as well as JQA's son, Charles Francis Adams for their presidential ticket.

They lose, as you might imagine. You don't have to be a member of the the United States Marijuana Party to know that single-issue parties traditionally don't do so well in American politics. But the Free Soilers do have a major effect on the election of 1848: they take away enough votes in New York (MvB's state) from Lewis Cass, the Democratic nominee and hand it to Zachary Taylor, the Whig nominee. New York's 36 electoral votes puts the victory into Taylor's hands.

It might not have been the second act he wanted, but Martin van Buren managed to decide a presidential election one more time.

Monday, May 3, 2010

Love Story, 1841


What do you say about a 68-year old President who died?

William Henry Harrison died 32 days into his term; he was president from March 4, 1841, to April 4, 1841 (and really, he dies at 12:30 in the morning, so giving him that 32nd day is generous). So how do you write a Presidential Biography about a tenure shorter than the time between haircuts?

I had initially thought about a young reader book (here's a weird thing I've noticed at my public library: there's a kids' book for just about every president, including the obscure ones, the ones they don't have an adult biography for; apparently while some kids are still getting stuck with an assigned report on Millard Fillmore, no sane adult wants to read about him). Then I found Robert M. Owens's Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy. Let's read that, instead, and perhaps if his presidency is uneventful, his life leading up to it won't be.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Stating the Case


I've figured out who the next president will be, thanks to reading these biographies. It's all so clear--I mean, out of the first eight presidents, five have this job, and we really can't count Washington in the list, since there's not really a government to have a job in before he becomes president. So I'm happy to announce that in 2016, the next President of the United States will be our current Secretary of State, Hilary Rodham Clinton!

Oh, wait. You're telling me that after Martin van Buren--Jackson's Secretary of State--becomes president in 1836, that only one other Secretary of State becomes President? Hmm...maybe Hil doesn't have this thing locked up.

But why have we made that change? At first glance, Secretary of State seems like the perfect position to become president: you get plenty of foreign policy experience, you're one of the president's trusted advisers, you're important enough to be the first cabinet member in the president succession line. The State Department website describes the job's duties thusly: The Secretary of State, appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, is the President's chief foreign affairs adviser. The Secretary carries out the President's foreign policies through the State Department and the Foreign Service of the United States.

That's some important stuff. So why do we keep electing senators and governors, guys with single state experience, to run the whole dang country? Perhaps it's due to a desire to start over every 4 or 8 years--to separate ourselves from the previous administrations. But Bush the Elder won on what was basically a four-more-years-of-Reagan platform (I've always thought the Republicans must have regretted the presidential term limit amendment they put in the Constitution after FDR, as Reagan would have won a third term handily), and Gore tried to win on a four-more-years-of-Clinton platform (while at the same time trying to distance himself from Clinton himself). So that can't be the whole reason.

Perhaps it's due to the idea that we're less regionally defined now. This seems odd to write in the era of red-state-blue-state politics, but after slavery (and it's worth pointing out that Buchanan, the president right before Lincoln, is the last SoS to become president), we no longer think too much about a president who represents our region of the country--that's how you get Vermonters voting for an Arkansan and Alaskans voting for a Texan. So maybe the SoS was the guy who, by virtue of focusing on foreigners, was free of the regional stain--which is how a New Yorker like van Buren could appeal--for a single election cycle, anyway--to the slaveholding Southern Jacksonites.

So, Hillary, good luck. While the State job is an impressive line on the resume, it's not the growth position it once was.