We're Going to Read Another Book This Month.

It's June here, but on our calendar, it's still February, the shortest month. Plenty of time to squeeze in a second president, especially since the first of the month only served for a few weeks. So let's read Edward Crapol's John Tyler: the Accidental President.

Here's the single most interesting thing about Tyler: he's the first man to appoint himself president. Seriously. We now understand the Vice-President to be the natural successor to the President, but when William Henry Harrison drops dead in the spring of 1841, no one has any real idea who gets to be President. Tyler steps up and announces he'll do the job--not as acting President, but as President for the rest of the term. He's headstrong and independent. This will cost him.

William Henry Harrison on American Time

I'm writing this post in a house built in 1791, or, as I keep thinking of it, during Washington's first term. It's a stone farm house in Kentucky, which, at the time, was perhaps the wildest bit of wilderness in America--some serious Daniel Boone-Cumberland Gap-type stuff going on here.

It's easy in America to be overwhelmed by time. We are still so young, relatively, even if we have a steady presence in the world that other, long-lived countries (such as Poland, founded around 1000 but which did not exist as a political entity at two different periods last century) do not. We are young, we lack--as they say--institutional memory. We create ideas about ourselves as a country that do not reflect the facts: the founders were all Christian, the slaves were better off under slavery, the whites destroyed the Indians without prejudice or hesitation.

William Henry Harrison: he does his work in the wilderness of Indiana Territory, defeating Tecumsah at Tippicanoe and cementing his legend, but only as a vaguely remembered campaign slogan, confused with "54-40 Or Fight!" in a junior high school class. But that historical fact--William Henry Harrison defeated Tecumsah at Tippicanoe--becomes the basis for the first true presidential campaign. The well-to-do Harrison, son of a Virginian who signed the Declaration of Independence and who was born in a plantation, is presented as a cider-drinking, log-cabin-residing plain-spoken Everyman for the Whig voters. And it works. He's elected as the ninth president, defeating the incumbent Van Buren.

He dies a month into his presidency, which is fitting, because it means he is only an idea, which is maybe all he ever was, all any president can ever be to his constituents, his country.

Indiana as Wilderness

From age two to age seven, I lived (with my family, as was custom those days), in Warsaw, Indiana, a town so conservative that it actually held a book burning while we lived there--Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar; I have to admit that it's a little upsetting to think about that happening in the town with my first public library.

And while I don't really have a whole treasure trove of memories--I was in single digits the whole time, let me remind you--I do remember a few things that run counter to the popular conception of the Midwest as flyover country: a barn burning by the side of the highway, an ice skating rink in the middle of a mall's food court, a praying mantis walking along the cement of our front porch.

Small things, indeed, but they remind me that Indiana still holds the possibility of being a place of wilderness and wonder, a place that hangs out in the back of my mind while reading Mr. Jefferson's Hammer. We've gone back in time here, even from Harrison's month as President in 1840, to the early days of America, when Indiana Territory was about as far west as any white man went, and Harrison, fighter and territorial governor, made his fame and fortune. And although nothing as clear as we might like--the Battle of Tippicanoe, which makes WHH's reputation, gets exaggerated, and this is less cowboys-vs-Indians than it is the federal government pitting tribes against each other (and inter-tribal relationships aren't a whole lot better)--the Indiana of 1800 still feels like a place of potential, of danger and wildness, of the elements that make a history exciting.

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.

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.

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.

Party Animal

I used to think that Martin van Buren's lasting contribution to American life was the phrase "OK," having been taught in grade school that it came from one of his nicknames: "Old Kinderhook."

Well, that and this:



Van Buren's a punchline, an answer to a trivia question; he's shorthand for "obscure president." And yet, if what I'm reading is right, Martin van Buren has more of a lasting effect on American politics than anyone between Jefferson and Lincoln. Van Buren, you see, invents the political party.

The Little Magician (along with "The Red Fox"; let's put it out there: van Buren has the best nicknames of any president) is one of the main developers of the Democratic Party in New York. Why New York? Because New York's the first state to extend the vote to non-landowning white males. So suddenly, controlling politics can't be the province of a few back-room deals, and the ideal of the founding fathers--no permanent political parties--goes out the window because there are literally thousands of new voters. Parties are a means of wrangling them, and van Buren's the one behind it.

So: Republican vs Democrat, Whig vs Free Soil, Know-Nothing vs Tea--it can all be traced back to van Buren. Whether we should be pleased by that, I'm not sure.