Cleaving Mt Rushmore
Atlanta, GA
Yesterday, in honor of the President’s Day weekend, we considered what makes a great president, and contemplated the criteria most historians use to select them.
Most presidential biographers consider things such as “boldness”, “action”, and “decisiveness” to be pillars of worthy leaders and great men. I, on the other hand, simply want someone who will respect his oath, and leave us alone.
As we know, almost none of our presidents was up to the lofty task of doing nothing. Later in the week we will honor a few who came closest. But first…in chronological order…we will wallow in the mire with those who dragged the Constitution thru the mud. Today, to start us off, we consider a couple of the more prominent pigs in the presidential sty.
Abraham Lincoln. This is not a troll. I know we’re supposed to revere our 16th president. But by any objective standard of constitutional governance, loss of innocent life, and destruction of private property, he has to be on the naughty list. And probably toward the top. Not only for what he did, but for how he did it, and the precedent he set.
Had Lincoln not been assassinated, or were anyone else’s name appended to his deplorable record, his shade would be pelted with sacks of scorn as it wandered the halls of history.
Lincoln was a provincial railroad lawyer. When he was elected to office, he was a hack railroad politician. He was an “American System” Whig in the Henry Clay tradition. Through that lens, much of what he did comes into focus. Notwithstanding the exalted deity he became in death, he was in life a self-interested power-politician, whose every act forwarded the interests of his corporate sponsors. Toward that end, he pushed Indians from the Plains, wanted blacks excluded from Illinois, conveyed funds to industrial cronies, and launched a war to preserve and collect their protective tariffs.
By his reasoning, he attacked his own country to quell a “rebellion”. For him to have lawfully done so, the Constitution requires that the governors of the affected states request the presence of the US military. Obviously, none did.
The alternate (and correct) interpretation of the war is that Lincoln invaded sovereign states (separate countries) that had reclaimed their delegated powers, and left the union. For Lincoln to do this, he would’ve needed Congress to declare war. It did not do so.
Lincoln didn’t weave his presumptive powers purely from whole cloth. Much as modern presidents lean on Lincoln to support their usurpations, Lincoln relied on a couple of his notable predecessors to justify his encroachments.
George Washington sent an uninvited army into western Pennsylvania to quiet a “rebellion” and to collect a tax, which was the same implicit rationale Lincoln used when his troops marched toward Manassas. A couple generations later, Andrew Jackson over-stepped his bounds by threatening South Carolina when it promised to nullify US law within its borders. Even so, Lincoln obviously went much further than either of these men did.
Under Lincoln, while the South was being destroyed, the North became a virtual dictatorship. He unilaterally suspended habeas corpus, arrested journalists, jailed judges, and shut down newspapers. The president did to civil liberties more or less what the Japanese would do to Nanking.
Lincoln advocated for the Corwin Amendment that would have protected Southern slavery in perpetuity. He implemented the first income tax, sent troops to polling places to repel or intimidate voters, supported inflationary “greenbacks” to fund his war, signed the confiscatory National Banking Act to centralize finances, and forced the displacement (and massacre) of Indians to accommodate the railroads. When the Supreme Court declared his tyrannical actions unconstitutional, he threatened the Chief Justice with incarceration.
Even on race, Lincoln was more cynical than sincere. He had no intention of touching slavery in states where it already existed. He wanted to exclude it from the territories…not to create space for free blacks, but to preserve it for emigrating whites. His preferred destination for blacks was distant colonies where they’d not mingle with what he (and most whites of his time) considered to be his own superior race. Only when the Southern states seemed capable of winning the war, and having France and Britain recognize their independence, did Lincoln pull the slavery card from the bottom of his deck.
The Constitution confers no presidential proclamation power in Article II, yet Lincoln usurped it to “emancipate” the slaves. For such an unconstitutional maneuver, he had an unfortunate precedent in Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation. In each case, the overt objective was worthy, but the means and the precedent served more to increase presidential power than to achieve the intended result.
As good as it sounds, the Emancipation Proclamation had one unfortunate flaw: it didn’t free a single slave. It applied only to Confederate states, where Lincoln had no authority. In border or other Union states, where he did have power, slaves remained shackled. Likewise in parts of the Confederacy where the Union army held control.
This was not a moral act of a courageous man. It was a cynical war measure from a desperate dictator, issued when the Union cause was on the ropes. He had hoped it would introduce a moral impediment to British and French recognition of the Confederacy, while enticing southern slaves to rebel.
It actually caused northern soldiers to do so. When the proclamation was issued, many Union troops resisted or deserted in droves. Retrospective northern propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, the Northern attitude toward blacks, and Yankee willingness to fight to have them freed, were little different than that of their counterparts in grey.
Almost 800,000 Americans died and large swaths of the states were decimated under Lincoln’s reign, during which the Constitution was shredded, and the federal republic became a consolidated “nation” unrecognizable to the limited republic of the founders. And every president since has justified his own damn fool policies by reassuring the world that Lincoln did them first.
For that, Abraham Lincoln got a temple in Washington and his mug on Mt Rushmore, right beside…
Theodore Roosevelt. Here’s another president we’re all supposed to love. But, like Lincoln, he was often despised…for good reason…in his own time.
Mark Twain, who met Roosevelt twice, called him “far and away the worst president we have ever had” and “the most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the civil war”. Roosevelt, said Twain, was “clearly insane”.
But whatever was going on in his head, his mind was fertile, and he put it entirely into everything he did. Roosevelt rarely rested. He looked and acted like a caricature of himself. The teeth, the glasses, the bombast, the bravado: had he not existed, he couldn’t have been made up.
He loathed lethargy. Each day, he drank a gallon of coffee and read at least one book. He once told friends he needed time away, to get some much needed rest. He would take a month, he told them, to relax, and do absolutely nothing…except write a biography of Oliver Cromwell. Which he did.
He was from New York, but had Southern roots. His mother grew up (and Roosevelt spent considerable time) at Bulloch Hall, a few miles from where I am writing this. To his credit, he respected that heritage and tried to heal the wounds of Reconstruction.
He craved attention, and had to be always at its center. His daughter described him as wanting to be the the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. It was said that after you met Roosevelt, you had to go home and “wring the personality from your clothes”.
You might need to wash some blood out as well. Roosevelt reveled in violence, and had almost a lust for killing. He was a sickly kid who as an adult seemed to over-compensate by being excessively “manly”. When Roosevelt killed his first buffalo, a contemporary wrote, “he abandoned himself to complete hysteria, whooping and shrieking”. He had a similar reaction in 1898 when he killed his first Spaniard. Once, after a fight with his girlfriend, he came home and shot his own dog.
“He gushes over war”, wrote William James. One of his college friends wrote that “he would like above all things to go to war with someone. He wants to be killing something all the time.”
Roosevelt later wrote another friend that, “Frankly, I don’t know that I should be sorry to see a spar with Germany. The burning of New York and a few other sea coast cities would be a good object lesson on the need for an adequate system of good defenses.” Naturally, despite the 13th Amendment, he favored universal conscription of both men and women.
Roosevelt considered the Constitution an anachronism, claimed that it was written for another time, and was no longer relevant to his own. Amendments, deliberation, and ratification were tedious time-wasters. He, more than anyone else, gave the presidency its initial push toward the imperial monstrosity it is today.
Roosevelt revived Hamilton’s theory of “implied powers”, and arrogated them to himself. He viewed his office as the essence of the government. And Theodore Roosevelt as the essence of the office.
His interpretation of presidential power was that what the Constitution didn’t expressly forbid, it implicitly permitted. This is the opposite of the actual intent of the document, and makes the Ninth and Tenth Amendments meaningless (which, for all intents and purposes, thanks to men like Roosevelt, they now are).
He viewed himself as the representative of one “American people”, which is an abstraction that doesn’t exist. In reality, the united States are a collection of separate societies that delegated particular powers for a few specific purposes. The “people” don’t elect a president. The states do, thru the Electoral College. No one person represents every American citizen.
Roosevelt was incapable of minding his own business. He involved himself in everything…with a vengeance. To him, the president was not merely an executive, but also chief legislator.
He was the progenitor of the modern busybody. He injected himself everywhere…from college football regulations to how Americans should spell. He fiddled with everything. Nothing, no matter how minuscule, was beyond the purview of the president.
Roosevelt loved spouting off, and telling people what to do. Before the War Between the States, no president had issued more than 35 executive orders (Joe Biden has almost matched that total in three weeks). Jefferson issued four in his two terms; Madison and Monroe one apiece. From the end of the war to the end of the century, the most prolific was Grant (217).
Roosevelt issued 1,081.
As the first “progressive” president, Roosevelt vigorously implemented specious interstate commerce provisions, threatened to nationalize the coal industry, and put his administration in charge of food safety. His reputation as a “trust-buster” is overblown, but his capriciousness in enforcement did considerable damage and set horrible precedent. Having come to the vice presidency by the influence of the House of Morgan, Roosevelt as president directed most of his regulatory ire at the rival Rockefellers.
He inverted the Monroe Doctrine by inventing the Roosevelt corollary. Instead of the US staying out of Europe’s backyard if Europeans stayed out of ours, Roosevelt decided preemptive intervention was warranted to preserve order in Latin America, and to ensure obligations to western creditors were fulfilled. Presidents regularly do this sort of thing now, and no one bats an eye. If they did, they would be referred to Roosevelt for justification.
Roosevelt insisted on the need for “a proper policing of the world”. And he planned to be the cop on the beat. As vice president and president, he oversaw the violent suppression of the Filipino nationalists. Over 100,000 US troops brutally fought and tortured the dispossessed natives, of whom almost 200,000 lost their lives. Others were confined to concentration camps, in vicious subservience to the white man’s burden.
Congress, as we all know, can take thirty days to make instant coffee. Constitutional niceties aside, Roosevelt was unwilling to wait. Of his own volition, he incited a revolution to steal part of Colombia. It became “independent” Panama, and Roosevelt claimed US provenance over the Canal Zone. More than once, as in the Dominican Republic, he simply rechristened a treaty as an “agreement” so he could ignore the Senate, and do what he wanted.
Theodore Roosevelt altered forever the popular perception of the presidency. By doing so, he razed it to a lower plane. Such a man couldn’t help but make the office about himself, and into the cultural phenomenon…and cult of personality…it has since become.
Tomorrow, we continue our sojourn thru the executive enormities of the 20th century.
JD
