I suggest by the time we get to the end of this one,we will better understand how we got to the "Donald"
By Gene Healy
Introduction
2.
‘‘Progress’’ and the Presidency
If we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and
loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common
discipline, because without such discipline no progress is
made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready
and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at
a larger good.
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1933)
By the first decade of the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson had a
national platform as president of Princeton University, and a new
book, Constitutional Government in the United States. ‘‘Our life has
undergone radical changes since 1787,’’ he noted. Those changes
had been especially rapid since the young Wilson had first confessed
his dreams of power to his private journal in 1876.1 In the last decades
of the 19th century, unfettered American enterprise had transformed
a continent, filling up the frontier, building vast new cities, and
bringing forth new challenges and new problems.
The population of the United States had doubled between 1870 and
1900, the urban population more than tripled, as new immigrants
streamed to America’s booming cities.2 During those years, America
experienced the fastest rate of per capita gross national product
growth in its history up to that point.3 Increasing concentration of
industry was both a result and a cause of American prosperity, with
corporate behemoths like Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and the Northern
Securities railway company bringing lower prices and giving rise
to concern over corporate power. Finley Peter Dunne, the Irish
American humorist who wrote a popular column as the character
‘‘Mr. Dooley,’’ a thick-brogued barkeep, summed up Americans’
ambivalent attitudes toward progress at the dawn of the 20th
century:
I have seen America spread out from th’ Atlantic to th’ Pacific,
with a branch office iv th’ Standard Ile Compn’y in ivry
hamlet. I’ve seen th’ shackles dropped fr’m th’ slave, so’ he
cud by lynched in Ohio. . . . An’ th’ invintions . . . th’ cottongin an’ th’ gin sour an’ th’ bicycle an’ th’ flyin’-machine an’
th’ nickel-in-th’-slot machine . . . an’ th’ sody-fountain, an’
crownin’ wurruk iv our civilization—th’ cash raygister.4
The Progressives’ Intellectual Revolution
Growing concern over materialism was itself a reflection of material progress. The economic dynamism of the late 19th and early
20th century led to an intellectual revolution of rising expectations.
Americans who had grown up amid the creative destruction of the
Gilded Age had little patience for addressing the problems of growth
within a framework of laissez-faire and limited government; they
wanted action. Progressivism’s distinguishing characteristic was
activism, Richard Hofstadter explains, and its ethos one of intense
optimism.5 American ingenuity had tamed the frontier; surely it
could tame the trusts, vanquish machine politics, and alleviate
urban squalor.[Looks like American ingenuity sold out to the trusts,machine politics and poverty DC]
Toward those ends, the Progressives sought to both democratize
power and centralize it. They supported allowing citizens to vote
directly on legislative measures through initiatives and referendums,
direct primaries for party nominations, direct election of U.S. senators, and other measures designed to weaken the hold of party bosses
on the democratic process. To diminish the power of corporate elites
and better the lot of the American laborer, Progressives favored
increased regulation of trusts and working conditions, as well as
giving professional administrators the power to rationalize the productive chaos of an unplanned economy. All this required enhanced
executive authority. As constitutional scholar M.J.C. Vile has
observed, ‘‘Legislatures were more suspect in Progressive eyes than
executive officers, and the best solution for the problems of modern
government was seen to be the strengthening of executive power
at State and Federal levels.’’6
If the Constitution stood in the way of necessary reforms, then so
much the worse for the Constitution. For the activists of the new
century, power wielded in righteousness was benign, checks on such
power, perverse. And they had little use for the hoary republican
traditions that kept presidents from appealing directly to the public. The Progressives worked to undermine those traditions, the better
to mobilize the public and concentrate power in the service of reform.
Progressive activism at home was matched by activism abroad, with
many reformers embracing America’s rise to world power status,
and hoping imperial adventures overseas could serve as a catalyst
for domestic restructuring.
Modern conservatives don’t typically think of themselves as ideological fellow travelers with the left-leaning reformers of the early
20th century. Yet, few Progressives would have found anything to
argue with in the account of presidential greatness John Yoo offered
to an audience of Federalist Society lawyers in 2006:
the greatest presidents . . . have been the ones that have
drawn most deeply upon this reservoir of [inherent] constitutional power, [they] have made at times what people at the
time thought were dictatorial, extraordinary claims of executive power, but did so to protect the country. And because
of that, history has viewed them often as quite successful
not because they drew just on the power but because they
matched the power to great emergencies. Some of our worst
presidents have been of a set that felt constrained by the
understanding of constitutional law held at that time and
felt that as President, they could not do much.7
Twenty-first century conservatives may not share the Progressives’ zeal for regulatory solutions or their desire for economic regimentation. Yet, in their theory of crisis constitutionalism and their
notion of the presidency as a necessary unifying force in American
life, they’ve embraced essential elements of the Progressives’ vision
for the chief executive. Indeed, one of Progressivism’s leading theorists of the presidency, Henry Jones Ford, heralded the coming of
John Yoo by stressing the British model and proclaiming in 1898 that
‘‘American democracy [had] revived the oldest political institution of
the race, the elective kingship.’’8
The Progressives were ‘‘the nearest to presidential absolutists of
any theorists and practitioners of the presidency,’’ Raymond Tatalovich and Thomas S. Engeman write in their intellectual history of the
office, The Presidency and Political Science. In Progressive ideology,
the president was ‘‘the agent of modern revolution,’’ and his powers
needed to be ‘‘greatly invigorated to complete the herculean tasks’’
that revolution required. ‘‘To create a rational, egalitarian society,’’ Tatelovich and Engeman explain, ‘‘the Progressive president marshals public opinion while forcefully leading the political and social
agencies of scientific progress. For both tasks he needs the great
rhetorical power provided by the Progressives’ intellectual vision.’’9 [How ironic DC]
How important was that vision to the creation of the powerful
and all-consuming presidency we have today? It’s a difficult question
to answer. Certainly there’s a strong argument that underlying material conditions and technological change made the development of
the modern presidency inescapable. The problems that late 19th century economic growth brought to the surface gave rise to
demands for increased federal power, and new technologies of mass
communication made it easier for activist presidents to claim the
bulk of that power. Radio and television enhanced the president’s
emerging plebiscitary role, making him the center of public attention
and the locus of government action.
Yet, the deterministic account of a presidency reshaped solely by
changing material conditions slights the importance of ideas. And
in some important respects, it gets the chronology backward. Two
scholars who have tracked the relative prominence of Congress and
the presidency in the 19th-century press note that
presidential primacy in the news is not a recent development, but in fact predates the emergence of broadcast
technology. . . . Presidential dominance of news from Washington appears to have arisen from the transformation of
Congress and the presidency during the early decades of the
twentieth century. Presidents in the grip of progressivism
became national tribunes.10
There’s no doubt that technological change and changed economic
conditions played central roles in the transformation of the office.
But the story of the presidency’s growth is not one of Marxian
inevitability—it’s one of ideology meeting opportunity in the form
of successive national emergencies. The most astute among the Progressives recognized that given the American public’s latent resistance to centralized rule, a sustained atmosphere of crisis might be
necessary before the presidency’s promise could be fully realized.
Two world wars and the Great Depression made the Progressive
dream a reality, transforming the president into the focus of national
aspirations, a heroic figure charged with curing the ills of modern
life.[This is too funny,given the politics of the last 3 years ,they are caught in their own web DC]
This chapter will trace that transformation through the Progressive
presidencies of TR, Wilson, and FDR. Each would embrace the plebiscitary role. Each would work to expand executive power and eliminate obstacles to its use. Each would recognize that war is the health
of the presidency, though only Wilson and FDR would reign during
conflicts that allowed revolutionary expansions of presidential
power. Yet, with each we can see the modern presidency begin to
take shape.
We’ll pause along the way to wonder why historians have given short shrift to less dramatic figures like Taft, Harding, and Coolidge. Like the forgotten presidents of the late 19th century, these three were modest men, as presidents go, with limited and realistic goals for the office—the sorts of presidents that high school history teachers feel obliged to apologize for, because, well, they’re just so boring. And so they were, in a sense. Other presidents aspired to Carlylean ‘‘great man’’ status, setting ‘‘the common languid times’’ ablaze with fire from God’s own lightning. But Taft, Harding, and Coolidge thought ‘‘common languid times’’—otherwise known as ‘‘peace and prosperity’’—had much to recommend them.
No doubt many readers will sympathize with the bold activism of TR, Wilson, and FDR, the three presidential giants who dominated the first half of the 20th century. Many will find their innovations laudable—in some cases unavoidable. So be it. It’s not my purpose here to show, for example, that each element of TR’s Square Deal and FDR’s New Deal was unnecessary, or that America might have safely sat out the Second World War. My goal is far more modest. It is to make clear that the problems of the modern presidency did not begin when George W. Bush emerged victorious from 2000’s seemingly interminable Battle of the Chads.
Today, ever-increasing numbers of Americans resent President Bush’s arrogant insistence that he is the sole ‘‘decider’’ on all matters relating to national security. Many see his repeated appeals to the war metaphor as a cynical attempt to concentrate power and eliminate checks and balances. But none of this is new. The Imperial Presidency has been a regularly recurring feature of American life for nearly a century. George W. Bush has followed a path marked out by history’s ‘‘great’’ presidents. TR, Wilson, and FDR make the top 10 in nearly every scholarly survey ever conducted. If we worry about civil liberties abuses and extravagant claims of presidential power, then perhaps we should rethink how we measure presidential greatness.
Though we’ve grown up with a larger-than-life presidency, few of us embrace it without reservations. Many liberals—and some conservatives—fear that the modern president has accumulated far too much power in foreign affairs, power that can be used to start unnecessary wars and undermine civil liberties on the home front. Many conservatives—and some liberals—worry that the modern president has too much power over domestic affairs, power that can be used—or misused—to work dramatic changes in American life. In this chapter, we’ll examine the intellectual revolution that gave us the presidency as we know it today, for better, and too often, for worse.
The Framers, according to Wilson, thought as Newtonians, and constructed a ‘‘mechanical’’ theory of government, in which power was set against power, frustrating unified action. ‘‘The trouble with this theory,’’ Wilson wrote, ‘‘is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.’’ Checks and balances might be appropriate in a machine, wrote Wilson, but government is the living agent of the people’s will, and ‘‘no living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live.’’12
In this theory of government-as-human-body, it is the chief executive’s role to direct the limbs. He alone has been selected by the nation as a whole, and therefore his, rightfully, ‘‘is the only national voice in affairs.’’ If he can draw upon that position to shape and enact the national will: ‘‘The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can.’’13 Political scientist Gary L. Gregg II notes that ‘‘it might not be terribly far from the mark to liken Wilson’s doctrine of presidential government to the reversal of the Whig revolution of 1689.’’ Where that revolution had repudiated royal absolutism, Professor Wilson’s doctrine would restore it, in the form of executive supremacy based on ‘‘the people’s direct and exclusive link to the single man in the White House as their only national representative.’’14
A year after Wilson released Constitutional Government, journalist Herbert Croly published The Promise of American Life, which quickly became known as the Progressive ‘‘bible.’’ Promise echoed and amplified Wilson’s view of the presidency. In it, Croly famously called for using Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. The Hamiltonian part of the program was a strong central state; the Jeffersonian element, a focus on democracy and equal regard for citizens.
For the most part, though, Croly’s vision was a self-conscious repudiation of Jefferson’s. For Jefferson, the pursuit of happiness was an individual enterprise, secured by a government that protected private rights. For Croly’s Progressives, private rights were America’s ‘‘golden calf,’’ a false idol that sapped the energy necessary for social progress. The pursuit of happiness, properly understood, was a collective enterprise that could only be realized through increased central direction. And where the Founding Generation, Federalist and Anti-Federalist alike, shared a pessimistic view of human nature—especially where it intersected with political power—the Progressives believed with Croly that ‘‘democracy must stand or fall on a platform of possible human perfectibility.’’15
The Progressives’ vision of perfection wasn’t one of bourgeois complacency, with each man under his own vine and fig tree, at peace with the world. It was decidedly more martial. In his follow up to Promise, 1914’s Progressive Democracy, Croly envisioned an American economy made up of regulated ‘‘workplace democracies.’’ ‘‘The morale of the scientifically managed industries,’’ he wrote, ‘‘will be superior to that of the business autocracies, just as the morale of an army of patriots, who are fighting on behalf of a genuinely national cause, is superior to that of an army of merely mercenary or drafted soldiers.’’ To direct this worker’s army, the federal commander in chief would employ ‘‘a general staff for a modern progressive state . . . which will have much more to do than the general staff of an army.’’16 Of course, the army itself would have plenty to do as well. As Croly saw it, ‘‘peace will prevail in international relations, just as order prevails within a nation, because of the righteous use of superior force.’’17
Even those Progressives who opposed military activism abroad, like Harvard philosopher William James, sought to harness the war spirit of the collective in support of national reform. Professor James was a prominent member of the Anti-Imperialist League formed around opposition to the Spanish-American War and an early critic of his former student Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘‘adolescent’’ fascination with militarism. But James understood war’s appeal. In a famous speech delivered at Stanford University in 1906, he expressed his sympathy with those Progressive militarists who condemned ‘‘a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zo-ophily, of ‘consumer’s leagues’ and ‘associated charities,’ of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more!’’ ‘‘Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!’’ Progressives should stand for peace, he argued, but they should also recognize that only ‘‘the Moral Equivalent of War’’ could tear Americans away from private pursuits and enlist them in a Progressive ‘‘army’’ devoted to national greatness:
A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built.
Compulsory national service—a favorite policy of Progressives then and now—could, James argued, put the martial virtues to work conquering poverty and backwardness, with American youths drafted off to coal mines, freight trains, and fishing fleets, ‘‘to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.’’18
Other Progressives doubted that anything short of a real war could get Americans to accept the regimentation the Progressive vision required. Colonel Edward Mandell House, Woodrow Wilson’s White House consigliere, was one of them, judging by his 1912 novel Philip Dru: Administrator. In the book, the title character emerges victorious in a second American Civil War and uses the crisis to establish a benevolent dictatorship and effect a comprehensive restructuring of the laws, extending as far as ‘‘Burial Reform’’ (only cremation was properly Progressive, it seems).19
Herbert Croly sided with the opportunistic militarists among the Progressives: what was needed was war, not its mere ‘‘moral equivalent.’’ ‘‘It is entirely possible,’’ Croly wrote in Promise, ‘‘that hereafter the United States will be forced into the adoption of a really national domestic policy because of the dangers and duties incurred through her relations with foreign countries.’’20
Among those excited by Croly’s Promise of American Life was our 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. Two years after leaving office, TR wrote to Croly: ‘‘I do not know when I have read a book which I felt profited me as much as your book on American life. . . . I shall use your ideas freely in speeches I intend to make.’’21 The admiration was mutual. In Promise, Croly had described TR as a ‘‘Thor wielding with power and effect a sledge-hammer in the cause of national righteousness,’’ a demigod capable of ‘‘emancipating American democracy from its Jeffersonian bondage.’’22
Yet, Roosevelt’s enduring appeal is a mystery. One might dismiss TR’s creepy racial Darwinism and obsession with ‘‘race suicide’’ as an unfortunate product of the times.24 More perplexing are the qualities TR is still admired for today. What is it, after all, that’s so attractive about his political philosophy, such as it was: a loudmouthed cult of manliness; a warped belief that war can be a wonderful pick-me-up for whatever ails the national spirit; and a contemptuous attitude toward limits on presidential power?
We’ll pause along the way to wonder why historians have given short shrift to less dramatic figures like Taft, Harding, and Coolidge. Like the forgotten presidents of the late 19th century, these three were modest men, as presidents go, with limited and realistic goals for the office—the sorts of presidents that high school history teachers feel obliged to apologize for, because, well, they’re just so boring. And so they were, in a sense. Other presidents aspired to Carlylean ‘‘great man’’ status, setting ‘‘the common languid times’’ ablaze with fire from God’s own lightning. But Taft, Harding, and Coolidge thought ‘‘common languid times’’—otherwise known as ‘‘peace and prosperity’’—had much to recommend them.
No doubt many readers will sympathize with the bold activism of TR, Wilson, and FDR, the three presidential giants who dominated the first half of the 20th century. Many will find their innovations laudable—in some cases unavoidable. So be it. It’s not my purpose here to show, for example, that each element of TR’s Square Deal and FDR’s New Deal was unnecessary, or that America might have safely sat out the Second World War. My goal is far more modest. It is to make clear that the problems of the modern presidency did not begin when George W. Bush emerged victorious from 2000’s seemingly interminable Battle of the Chads.
Today, ever-increasing numbers of Americans resent President Bush’s arrogant insistence that he is the sole ‘‘decider’’ on all matters relating to national security. Many see his repeated appeals to the war metaphor as a cynical attempt to concentrate power and eliminate checks and balances. But none of this is new. The Imperial Presidency has been a regularly recurring feature of American life for nearly a century. George W. Bush has followed a path marked out by history’s ‘‘great’’ presidents. TR, Wilson, and FDR make the top 10 in nearly every scholarly survey ever conducted. If we worry about civil liberties abuses and extravagant claims of presidential power, then perhaps we should rethink how we measure presidential greatness.
Though we’ve grown up with a larger-than-life presidency, few of us embrace it without reservations. Many liberals—and some conservatives—fear that the modern president has accumulated far too much power in foreign affairs, power that can be used to start unnecessary wars and undermine civil liberties on the home front. Many conservatives—and some liberals—worry that the modern president has too much power over domestic affairs, power that can be used—or misused—to work dramatic changes in American life. In this chapter, we’ll examine the intellectual revolution that gave us the presidency as we know it today, for better, and too often, for worse.
‘‘As Big a Man as He Can’’
In the 20-odd years between the publication of his first book and
1908’s Constitutional Government, Woodrow Wilson’s constitutional
views had changed substantially. Where the young Wilson had seen
the amendment process as perhaps the only legitimate means by
which reformers could correct the Framers’ errors, the Wilson of
Constitutional Government celebrated the modern notion of the ‘‘Living Constitution.’’ No mere ‘‘lawyer’s document,’’ the Constitution,
Wilson argued, should instead be understood as ‘‘a vehicle of life,’’
and reinterpreted according to ‘‘Darwinian principles,’’ the better to
serve the living.11 The Framers, according to Wilson, thought as Newtonians, and constructed a ‘‘mechanical’’ theory of government, in which power was set against power, frustrating unified action. ‘‘The trouble with this theory,’’ Wilson wrote, ‘‘is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.’’ Checks and balances might be appropriate in a machine, wrote Wilson, but government is the living agent of the people’s will, and ‘‘no living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live.’’12
In this theory of government-as-human-body, it is the chief executive’s role to direct the limbs. He alone has been selected by the nation as a whole, and therefore his, rightfully, ‘‘is the only national voice in affairs.’’ If he can draw upon that position to shape and enact the national will: ‘‘The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can.’’13 Political scientist Gary L. Gregg II notes that ‘‘it might not be terribly far from the mark to liken Wilson’s doctrine of presidential government to the reversal of the Whig revolution of 1689.’’ Where that revolution had repudiated royal absolutism, Professor Wilson’s doctrine would restore it, in the form of executive supremacy based on ‘‘the people’s direct and exclusive link to the single man in the White House as their only national representative.’’14
A year after Wilson released Constitutional Government, journalist Herbert Croly published The Promise of American Life, which quickly became known as the Progressive ‘‘bible.’’ Promise echoed and amplified Wilson’s view of the presidency. In it, Croly famously called for using Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. The Hamiltonian part of the program was a strong central state; the Jeffersonian element, a focus on democracy and equal regard for citizens.
For the most part, though, Croly’s vision was a self-conscious repudiation of Jefferson’s. For Jefferson, the pursuit of happiness was an individual enterprise, secured by a government that protected private rights. For Croly’s Progressives, private rights were America’s ‘‘golden calf,’’ a false idol that sapped the energy necessary for social progress. The pursuit of happiness, properly understood, was a collective enterprise that could only be realized through increased central direction. And where the Founding Generation, Federalist and Anti-Federalist alike, shared a pessimistic view of human nature—especially where it intersected with political power—the Progressives believed with Croly that ‘‘democracy must stand or fall on a platform of possible human perfectibility.’’15
The Progressives’ vision of perfection wasn’t one of bourgeois complacency, with each man under his own vine and fig tree, at peace with the world. It was decidedly more martial. In his follow up to Promise, 1914’s Progressive Democracy, Croly envisioned an American economy made up of regulated ‘‘workplace democracies.’’ ‘‘The morale of the scientifically managed industries,’’ he wrote, ‘‘will be superior to that of the business autocracies, just as the morale of an army of patriots, who are fighting on behalf of a genuinely national cause, is superior to that of an army of merely mercenary or drafted soldiers.’’ To direct this worker’s army, the federal commander in chief would employ ‘‘a general staff for a modern progressive state . . . which will have much more to do than the general staff of an army.’’16 Of course, the army itself would have plenty to do as well. As Croly saw it, ‘‘peace will prevail in international relations, just as order prevails within a nation, because of the righteous use of superior force.’’17
Even those Progressives who opposed military activism abroad, like Harvard philosopher William James, sought to harness the war spirit of the collective in support of national reform. Professor James was a prominent member of the Anti-Imperialist League formed around opposition to the Spanish-American War and an early critic of his former student Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘‘adolescent’’ fascination with militarism. But James understood war’s appeal. In a famous speech delivered at Stanford University in 1906, he expressed his sympathy with those Progressive militarists who condemned ‘‘a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zo-ophily, of ‘consumer’s leagues’ and ‘associated charities,’ of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more!’’ ‘‘Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!’’ Progressives should stand for peace, he argued, but they should also recognize that only ‘‘the Moral Equivalent of War’’ could tear Americans away from private pursuits and enlist them in a Progressive ‘‘army’’ devoted to national greatness:
A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built.
Compulsory national service—a favorite policy of Progressives then and now—could, James argued, put the martial virtues to work conquering poverty and backwardness, with American youths drafted off to coal mines, freight trains, and fishing fleets, ‘‘to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.’’18
Other Progressives doubted that anything short of a real war could get Americans to accept the regimentation the Progressive vision required. Colonel Edward Mandell House, Woodrow Wilson’s White House consigliere, was one of them, judging by his 1912 novel Philip Dru: Administrator. In the book, the title character emerges victorious in a second American Civil War and uses the crisis to establish a benevolent dictatorship and effect a comprehensive restructuring of the laws, extending as far as ‘‘Burial Reform’’ (only cremation was properly Progressive, it seems).19
Herbert Croly sided with the opportunistic militarists among the Progressives: what was needed was war, not its mere ‘‘moral equivalent.’’ ‘‘It is entirely possible,’’ Croly wrote in Promise, ‘‘that hereafter the United States will be forced into the adoption of a really national domestic policy because of the dangers and duties incurred through her relations with foreign countries.’’20
Among those excited by Croly’s Promise of American Life was our 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. Two years after leaving office, TR wrote to Croly: ‘‘I do not know when I have read a book which I felt profited me as much as your book on American life. . . . I shall use your ideas freely in speeches I intend to make.’’21 The admiration was mutual. In Promise, Croly had described TR as a ‘‘Thor wielding with power and effect a sledge-hammer in the cause of national righteousness,’’ a demigod capable of ‘‘emancipating American democracy from its Jeffersonian bondage.’’22
TR and the Joy of Power
What had inspired Croly inspired many others as well, then and
now. ‘‘Roosevelt bit me and I went mad,’’ is how Progressive journalist William Allen White explained his rabid support of TR’s run
for a third term in 1912.23 Intellectuals and political leaders from
Roosevelt’s time to ours have found something intoxicating in TR’s
irrepressible personality. Yet, Roosevelt’s enduring appeal is a mystery. One might dismiss TR’s creepy racial Darwinism and obsession with ‘‘race suicide’’ as an unfortunate product of the times.24 More perplexing are the qualities TR is still admired for today. What is it, after all, that’s so attractive about his political philosophy, such as it was: a loudmouthed cult of manliness; a warped belief that war can be a wonderful pick-me-up for whatever ails the national spirit; and a contemptuous attitude toward limits on presidential power?
TR in the White House
Love or hate him, though, TR cut a figure that was hard to ignore.
He would become our first celebrity president, and the first to be
known by his initials.25 More than any of his predecessors, Roosevelt
sensed the latent power in the office and reveled in it. Progressive
journalist Lincoln Steffens described the atmosphere in TR’s White
House in the days following McKinley’s assassination and Roosevelt’s ascension to office: the whole country was in mourning, and no doubt the president felt that he should hold himself down; he didn’t; he tried to, but his joy showed in every word and movement. . . . With his feet, his fists, his face and with free words he laughed at his luck. He laughed . . . with glee at the power and place that had come to him.26
In his exercise of power, TR found himself held back somewhat by the absence of crisis and the remnants of 19th-century political culture. The office of the presidency was not yet the ‘‘sledgehammer’’ it would become. However, Roosevelt did expand executive authority in significant ways both at home and abroad.
Like Andrew Jackson, TR viewed himself as enjoying a special mandate as the sole representative of the people as a whole. Far more than Jackson, though, he used the ‘‘bully pulpit’’ to go ‘‘over the heads of the Senate and House leaders to the people’’ with direct appeals.27 By publicly stumping for the Hepburn Act of 1906, which strengthened the Interstate Commerce Commission’s control over railroad rates, TR helped push it through, despite vigorous opposition from Nelson Aldrich, the Senate majority leader and a member of the president’s own party.28
TR also helped initiate the modern method of rule by executive order, a practice colorfully described by President Clinton’s adviser Paul Begala as ‘‘Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool.’’29 Between the end of the Civil War and the first Roosevelt, presidents had issued a total of 158 such orders; in his seven years in office, TR alone issued 1,006, more than all prior or subsequent presidents, save for the other presidential giants of the early 20th century, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. One of TR’s executive orders set aside 16 million acres of public land just before a bill passed by Congress restricted his authority to make such grants.30 Another seemed to reflect the view that the president had dominion over the English language itself: Roosevelt attempted to revolutionize American spelling by shifting the federal government to a system of ‘‘Simplified Spelling.’’ Under that system, ‘‘kissed’’ would read ‘‘kist,’’; ‘‘through,’’ ‘‘thru,’’; ‘‘enough,’’ ‘‘enuf,’’ and so on. The Baltimore Sun cracked that perhaps Roosevelt’s last name should be spelled ‘‘Butt-in-sky.’’ The House of Representatives voted 142–24 to get TR to rescind the order, which he did.31
TR’s promiscuous use of executive orders followed from his expansive theory of presidential prerogatives; as he’d later explain, he believed that the president had a broad general power to do good. He put that theory to work in May 1902, when 125,000 coal miners walked off their jobs in Pennsylvania. Roosevelt vowed that he would bring an end to the strike before winter, despite the fact that, by his own admission, he lacked any constitutional authority to do so.32 Faced with intransigence on the part of the mine owners, he resolved to use the army to ‘‘dispossess the operators and run the mines as a receiver’’ until the strike could be settled.33 By October, Elihu Root, TR’s secretary of war, had put a force of 10,000 soldiers on alert, ready to go into Pennsylvania. House Republican Whip James E. Watson, upon hearing of the plan, demanded, ‘‘What about the Constitution of the United States? What about seizing private property without due process of law?’’ TR seized Watson by the shoulder and wailed, ‘‘The Constitution was made for the people and not the people for the Constitution!’’34
Roosevelt expanded executive authority in foreign affairs as well, perhaps most famously by using American military might to secure U.S. rights to the Panama Canal project. When the Colombian Senate rejected the Hay-Herran treaty granting American rights to the Canal Zone, TR refused further negotiation with Colombia, choosing instead to bank on a Panamanian secession movement financed by canal interests. Ordered to the harbor of Colon by Roosevelt, the USS Nashville ensured the success of the Panamanian rebels by preventing Colombian forces from putting down the secession. ‘‘I took the canal zone and let Congress debate,’’ TR said later, ‘‘and while the debate goes on the canal does also.’’35 In 1907, when Roosevelt decided to send all 16 U.S. battleships around the world in a demonstration of American power, he informed skeptical congressmen that he had enough funds to get them halfway, and the choice was theirs as to whether to provide funding for the Great White Fleet’s return.36 That pattern—with the commander in chief ordering the U.S. military wherever he pleased, and daring Congress to cut off funds—would be repeated many times throughout the century.
Despite all his flexing, TR did not completely revolutionize the office of the presidency. Political conditions—domestic tranquility and the absence of war—would not allow it. Roosevelt recognized this, and, perversely, complained that the relative happiness of his countrymen had denied him a proper shot at greatness. As he put it in 1910: ‘‘A man has to take advantage of his opportunities, but the opportunities have to come. If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not the great occasion, you don’t get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name now.’’ TR would later come to envy Woodrow Wilson because Wilson got to fight the European war TR himself had pushed for.37
‘‘Even a Rat in a Corner Will Fight’’
Having pledged in 1904 not to seek election to another full term (a pledge he’d come greatly to regret), Roosevelt picked his good friend and second-term secretary of war, William Howard Taft, to succeed him, a choice quickly ratified at the Republican National Convention in 1908. Taft went on to win easily over William Jennings Bryan in the general election.
Unlike Roosevelt, Taft hated politics. He was where he was due to intellect, ability, and the incessant prodding of an ambitious wife. But on the whole, he’d rather have been on the Supreme Court (a wish fulfilled in 1921 when President Harding named him chief justice).
For the most part, Taft governed as a Progressive: he greatly accelerated trust busting and lent his support to the 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution, providing for an income tax and direct election of senators. Yet, history does not remember Taft as a heroic, reformist president. In fact, since he did not start any major wars or offer any Deals, Square or New, Taft is now best known for being shaped like a zeppelin—he weighed in at 355 pounds on the eve of his inauguration.
Taft’s 1910 decision to remove conservationist Gifford Pinchot as the Interior Department’s chief forester began the cooling of the Taft/TR relationship, a process that would eventually result in Roosevelt’s challenging Taft for the Republican nomination in 1912, then bolting for the Progressive Party when the nomination was denied him.
The 1912 campaign revealed Roosevelt’s increasingly radical view of the president’s role—as well as a growing tendency toward public deification of the presidency. At a Carnegie Hall rally in March, Roosevelt took a page from Carlyle and declaimed, ‘‘In order to succeed we need leaders of inspired idealism, leaders to whom are granted great visions, who dream greatly and strive to make their dreams come true; who can kindle the people with the fire from their own burning souls.’’ At the Progressive Party Convention in Chicago in August, delegates sang ‘‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’’ and a reworked version of the revivalist hymn ‘‘Follow, Follow, We Will Follow Jesus,’’ where ‘‘Roosevelt’’ replaced the Son of God, making it ‘‘Follow, Follow, We Will Follow Roosevelt.’’38 TR spoke at Castro-like length, building to his peroration: ‘‘We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!’’
‘‘I am a man of peace, and I don’t want to fight,’’ Taft protested at one point, summing up with a characteristically inept turn of phrase: ‘‘but even a rat in a corner will fight.’’39 In September 1912, Taft temporarily overcame his reluctance to make campaign speeches, and denounced Roosevelt’s view of government power at a gathering of Republicans in Beverly, Massachusetts, which included his son Robert, the future senator from Ohio, presidential aspirant, and critic of executive aggrandizement.
Without mentioning TR by name, President Taft denounced the Rooseveltian conception of the office: the president as tribune of the people, alone elected by the whole country and therefore justified in using the ‘‘bully pulpit’’ to arouse the electorate and pressure Congress. As Taft saw it, the people ‘‘have not any of them given into the hands of any one the mandate to speak for them peculiarly as the people’s representatives.’’40
Roosevelt attacked that view in his 1913 autobiography, carrying on the debate well after both men had lost the election. In that book, TR articulated his ‘‘Stewardship Doctrine’’ of presidential power. The president, Roosevelt declared,
was a steward of the people bound actively and affirmatively to do all he could for the people, and was not to content himself with the negative merit of keeping his talents undamaged in a napkin. . . . My belief was that it was not only his right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or the laws.41
In a series of lectures delivered at Columbia University in 1915 and 1916, Taft fired back. He likened TR’s self-congratulatory assessment of his own presidency to a precocious little girl’s bragging to her father that she was the best scholar in the class: ‘‘the teacher didn’t tell me—I just noticed it myself.’’ The Stewardship Doctrine disturbed Taft, especially when combined with TR’s vision of the chief executive as fiery soul-kindler. In the book that grew out of his Columbia lectures, Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers, Taft warned:
Ascribing an undefined residuum of power to the President is an unsafe doctrine and . . . it might lead under emergencies to results of an arbitrary character, doing irremediable injustice to private right. The mainspring of such a view is that the executive is charged with responsibility for the welfare of all the people in a general way, that he is to play the part of a universal Providence and set all things right, and that anything that in his judgment will help the people he ought to do, unless he is expressly forbidden not to do it. The wide field of action that this would give to the executive, one can hardly limit.42
Yet, by that point the debate was truly academic. At the height of the Progressive Era’s romance of government activism, Taft’s gospel of self-restraint was a losing position politically. Americans were increasingly coming to think of the president in modern terms, as a dynamic national leader whose task it was to provide benefits, institute reforms, and fulfill the national destiny, whatever that might be.
The winner of the 1912 race, Woodrow Wilson, would in his first term continue to expand presidential power along the lines suggested by Roosevelt’s Stewardship Doctrine. In his second term, with American entry into the Great War, Wilson would go on to wield powers of which even TR hardly dared dream.
Warrior-Priest
Something of Wilson’s staggering self-regard can be seen in his
comment the day after his election, when he met with the Democratic
Party chairman to discuss appointments: ‘‘Before we proceed, I want it understood that I owe you nothing. Remember that God ordained
that I should be the next President of the United States.’’43 That attitude
carried Wilson throughout his presidency and the war that helped
reshape the office. According to British Prime Minister David Lloyd
George, at the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson asked him and French
premier Georges Clemenceau: ‘‘Why has Jesus Christ so far not
succeeded in inducing the world to follow his teachings in these
matters? It is because he taught the ideal without devising any
practical means of attaining it. That is the reason why I am proposing
a practical scheme to carry out His aims.’’44 (Lloyd George later
cracked that he hadn’t done too badly in the negotiations, ‘‘seated
as I was between Jesus Christ and Napoleon Bonaparte.’’)45
Wilson in Peace
From the start of his administration, Wilson set out to fulfill the
promise of Constitutional Government, and become ‘‘as big a man’’
as he could. ‘‘I have been smashing precedents almost daily ever
since I got here,’’ Wilson bragged to a friend in 1913. One of the precedents that Wilson smashed was the Jeffersonian tradition that the president’s annual message would be delivered in writing. Jefferson believed that appearing before Congress to deliver the message was anti-republican; like the king’s ‘‘Speech from the Throne,’’ it left the impression that it was the executive’s role to tell Congress what to do. Wilson had no such qualms: he delivered his first State of the Union in person to Congress assembled. One senator decried the change in pointed terms: ‘‘I am sorry to see revived the old Federalistic custom of speeches from the throne. . . . I regret this cheap and tawdry imitation of English royalty.’’ On the way home after the speech, the first lady remarked that she bet TR wished he had thought of trying that first; ‘‘Yes,’’ Woodrow chuckled, ‘‘I think I put one over on Teddy.’’46
The new practice was in keeping with Wilson’s view that the president ought to act as ‘‘prime minister, as much concerned with the guidance of legislation as with the just and orderly execution of law.’’47 Wilson drafted a key clause of the Clayton Antitrust Act, and according to Representative Carter Glass, he ‘‘dominated’’ the debate over the shape of the Federal Reserve Act.
Still, many Progressives remained unsatisfied with Wilson’s leadership. Many condemned his initial reluctance to involve the United States in the conflict that began raging across Europe early in his first term.48 After the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, prominent Progressives led the ‘‘preparedness’’ movement, urging Americans to get ready for war. ‘‘We should in all humility,’’ Roosevelt declared in 1915, ‘‘imitate not a little of the spirit so in evidence among the Germans and the Japanese, the two nations which in modern times have shown the most practical type of patriotism . . . and the greatest farsightedness in safeguarding the country from without.’’49 The 1916 Progressive Party platform blasted Wilson’s alleged timidity and called for a larger army and universal compulsory military training to, as one historian has described it, heal ‘‘the divisiveness and flabbiness of the body politic.’’50
TNR’s writers pushed tirelessly for war, seeing it as a means to shock America out of its soporific bourgeois contentment and bring about what one editorialist described as ‘‘the substitution of national and social and organic forces for the more or less mechanical private forces operative in peace.’’52 For Croly, war would give the United States what it desperately needed: ‘‘the tonic of a serious moral adventure.’’53 And for philosopher John Dewey, a TNR contributor, it would provide the ‘‘immense impetus to reorganization’’ long sought by the Progressives.54
Randolph Bourne, Dewey’s one time student at Columbia, described the same phenomenon in pithier and more pessimistic terms: ‘‘War is the Health of the State.’’ Bourne, a contributing editor for The New Republic in its early years, was one of the few associated with the magazine who vehemently opposed American entry into the Great War. Bourne appears in John Dos Passos’s bitter anti-war novel Nineteen Nineteen as a ‘‘little sparrow like man,’’ ‘‘poor and twisted in body’’ but bursting with enthusiasm for ‘‘pretty girls and good food and evenings of talk.’’ ‘‘In the crazy spring of 1917,’’ Dos Passos wrote, Bourne ‘‘began to get unpopular where his bread was buttered at The New Republic,’’ because he saw clearly and would not tolerate cant: ‘‘for New Freedom, read Conscription, for Democracy, Win the War. . . Buy a Liberty Bond, Strafe the Hun, Jail the Objectors.’’
At the end, only the magazine Seven Arts would publish Bourne’s writings against the war. Dos Passos wrote, ‘‘Friends didn’t like to be seen with Bourne. His father wrote him begging him not to disgrace the family name. The rainbow tinted future of reformed democracy went pop like a pricked soap bubble.’’55 Hounded by police on suspicion of espionage and disloyalty, Bourne died in the 1918 flu epidemic that was one of the Great War’s many gifts to America.56
In the posthumously published, fragmentary essay that contains his famous aphorism, Bourne warned that
the moment war is declared . . . the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government’s disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men.57
‘‘The Spirit of Ruthless Brutality’’
At first, Wilson resisted the growing war fever. But before long,
his initial policy of neutrality became neutral in name only. German
and English war policies both violated international law, with the
British imposing a blockade designed to starve Germany into submission, and the Germans adopting unrestricted submarine warfare
to cut off supplies to the U.K.; yet Wilson condemned German abuses
of neutral rights while tolerating British violations. Why, secretary
of state William Jennings Bryan asked in April 1915, shortly before
the sinking of the Lusitania, ‘‘do Americans take the risk’’ of traveling
on British ships carrying munitions in a war zone despite German
warnings, and why should they ‘‘be shocked at the drowning of a
few people, if there is no objection to starving a nation?’’58 Bryan resigned in June, after Wilson rejected his advice to pursue a more
even handed policy. Once reluctant to risk American blood and treasure in the carnage of the Great War, Wilson came to see intervention as a way to realize what he’d earlier described as America’s God-ordained destiny: ‘‘that we are chosen and prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.’’59 He shifted to a policy of armed ‘‘neutrality’’ that brought American involvement ever closer. Wilson had earlier shown how little respect he had for constitutional limits on his power, unilaterally ordering interventions in Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.60 And though Congress formally declared war on Germany in 1917, ‘‘it was Wilson,’’ constitutional scholar Louis Fisher writes, ‘‘who made the basic policy decision to move from neutrality to armed neutrality and finally to a state of war.’’61
The result of the war, Randolph Bourne had earlier predicted, would be a ‘‘semi-military State-socialism’’ at home.62 Bourne was right: wartime legislation gave the president enormous power to direct the economy, including power to seize all U.S. railroads, to license and control food and fuel production throughout the United States, and unilaterally to restructure the executive branch and create new agencies. Among the agencies Wilson created was the War Industries Board. Headed by financier Bernard Baruch, the WIB took control of all war-related production, backing up its dictates with the ultimate sanction: the power to seize production facilities.63
The federal assault on the rights of property and contract was matched by attacks on the freedoms of speech and assembly. At the start of the war, Wilson had warned, ‘‘to fight, you must be brutal . . . and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life. . . . Conformity will be the only virtue. And every man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.’’64 If Wilson sounded worried about that prospect, he soon overcame his reservations. His administration would carry out the most brutal campaign against dissent in American history.[good old American freedom,nice in theory,horrible in practice and nothing has changed in 100 years for the better.DC]
Concerns about German saboteurs led to unrestrained domestic spying by U.S. Army intelligence operatives. During the war, army spies had free rein to gather information on potential subversives, and were often empowered to make arrests as special police officers. To enforce uniformity at home, the Wilson administration relied heavily on quasi-private volunteer organizations of self-styled patriots eager to inform on their fellow citizens. Such groups included the colorfully named ‘‘Boy Spies of America,’’ the ‘‘Sedition Slammers,’’ and the ‘‘Terrible Threateners,’’ but the largest and most important was the ‘‘American Protective League,’’[And to think that some 20-25 years down the road a similar group in Germany called the SS would become so infamous,yet Americans let the APL activity pass because they were not constantly reminded of it for 100 years,you should ask yourself why that is DC] over 200,000 strong.65 At the War Department’s request, APL volunteers harassed labor organizers, intimidated and arrested opponents of the draft, and investigated such potential subversives as Mexican-American leaders in Los Angeles, pacifist groups, and anti-war religious sects. By the end of the war, the APL had carried out some six million investigations.66 Through it all, the army caught exactly one German spy.67 [If you think that is the whole story about the APL,you are being naive,good subject to look into,as well as the 1918 'flu',being something other then what it has been sold as DC]
The Espionage Act and the Sedition Act were the Wilson administration’s two key legal tools for the suppression of dissent. The former criminalized attempts to cause insubordination in the armed forces or to ‘‘obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States.’’ The Sedition Act went even further, proscribing ‘‘disloyal’’ and ‘‘abusive’’ statements about the U.S. Army or the American form of government, and making it criminal to ‘‘by word or act oppose the cause of the United States.’’68 During the course of the war, there were over 2,000 prosecutions under the Espionage Act alone. All told, over 30 people received 20-year sentences and 70 got 10-year terms. Among them were Socialist Party leader and perennial presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, for making a speech praising three Socialists imprisoned under the act, and movie producer Robert Goldstein, for ‘‘sowing . . . animosity and want of confidence between us and our allies.’’69 The offending film, The Spirit of ’76, celebrated the American Revolution and showed British soldiers bayoneting women and children.70 [Jeez,heaven forbid,anyone speak the damn Truth,see our freedom of speech is no such thing because the idiot liberals thought they had a good idea...lets oppress our brothers and sisters...not going to end well for that idea...blowback will be stupendous DC]
The campaign against dissent inspired a good deal of regret among the Progressives, yet on the whole they welcomed the growth of the president’s power to direct American life. In an unsigned editorial that ran on November 16, 1918, TNR sang the praises of wartime centralization:
The whole issue hinges on social control. For forty years we have been widening the sphere of this control, subordinating the individual to the group and the group to society. Without such control, vastly magnified, we should not have been able to carry on the war. . . . We conscripted lives, property and services; we took over railroads, telegraphs and other economic instruments. We fixed wages, prices, the quantity of coal, power, labor or transportation a man might command, and the quantity of food he might consume. . . . All this we did on the narrowest of legal bases, for no one dared question our power.71[There is Their 'New Republic' DC]
TNR favored the continuation of such controls, hoping to fulfill the promise of American life through expert direction of the economy. That was not to be—at least not immediately.
The Presidency in the Era of Normalcy
The postwar era saw a return to earlier traditions of American
governance: a more restrained presidency, one that spoke more
softly and shunned grand schemes to remake American society. That
era, nicely captured by President Warren G. Harding’s neologism
‘‘normalcy,’’ was one that brought middle-class prosperity to more
and more Americans as the decade progressed. By 1923, the unemployment rate stood at 3 percent, and by 1929 manufacturing output
had nearly doubled from its level in 1921.72 Prohibition, lazily
enforced as it was by Harding, did little to spoil the party.73 Harding took office after the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, in part over concerns that participation in the League of Nations would require an unconstitutional delegation of Congress’s power to declare war to the president.74 ‘‘I shall consent to nothing,’’ Wilson told reporters who asked about reservations to the treaty, ‘‘the Senate must take its medicine.’’75 Wilson’s relentless crosscountry campaign to force Congress to ratify the treaty ended when he suffered a massive stroke in September 1919. Though he’d cling to life for another four years, it was Wilson’s devotion to the plebiscitary presidency that wrecked his health and, perhaps, eventually killed him.
Yet, Wilson’s burning ambition continued even after the stroke. Half-paralyzed, wheelchair-bound, and only intermittently lucid, in the summer of 1920 he waited eagerly, hoping to hear that the Democratic Convention would nominate him for an unprecedented third term. The news that the convention had settled on James M. Cox and Franklin Roosevelt as the nominees ‘‘produced a string of curses from the president that left his valet in a state of shock.’’76
In his first State of the Union, Warren Harding expressed regret over the ‘‘excessive grants of authority’’ and ‘‘extraordinary concentration of powers in the Chief Executive’’ that had taken place during the war. The arrival of peace and repeal of much of the wartime legislation had started to right the balance, Harding said, ‘‘but I have wish to go further than that,’’ restoring ‘‘mutuality of confidence and respect’’ among the branches, and renouncing ‘‘encroachment upon the functions of Congress or attempted dictation of its policy.’’77
Harding gets rough treatment from presidential scholars, finishing last or next-to-last in most presidential rankings. Most cite the Teapot Dome scandal, in which Harding’s secretary of the interior took kickbacks in exchange for oil leases on public lands. But it’s hard to believe that’s the only reason for Harding’s abysmal ranking: Harding wasn’t personally corrupt, after all, and he never profited from his cronies’ misdeeds. His sins were sins of omission: negligent supervision and unmerited trust in his appointees.
Place those faults against Harding’s great merits: he presided over the dismantling of Wilson’s draconian wartime controls, ushering in an era of prosperous normalcy. (Is it the normalcy that presidential scholars hold against him?) In 2001, two Ohio University economists developed an alternative presidential ranking scheme, based on reductions in size of government and ability to control inflation. Harding came in first.78 By 1924, federal spending had been cut nearly in half, leading to large government surpluses.79 And Harding’s good nature and liberal instincts led him to overrule his political advisers and pardon 25 nonviolent protesters that Wilson had locked up, including Eugene Debs. ‘‘I want him to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife,’’ Harding said.80
History remembers Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, mostly for his reticence and for fiscal policies that combined Yankee parsimony with generous tax cuts. Less well known is Coolidge’s admirable record on civil liberties. Coolidge ordered the release of Wilson’s remaining political prisoners, and his attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, put an end to political surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, abolishing the FBI’s General Intelligence Division.81 ‘‘The Bureau of Investigation,’’ Stone declared, ‘‘is not concerned with political or other opinions of individuals. It is concerned only with their conduct and then only with such conduct as is forbidden by the laws of the United States. When a police system passes beyond these limits, it is dangerous to the proper administration of justice and to human liberty.’’82
Coolidge kept things entirely too cool for historians who like presidential drama: he slept too much, didn’t do enough, and didn’t talk enough. There was method to his muteness, however. As Coolidge told his commerce secretary and successor, Herbert Hoover, ‘‘Nine-tenths of visitors to the White House want something they ought not to have. If you keep dead still, they will run down in three or four minutes.’’83
The Coolidge theory of the presidency was far more restrained than Teddy Roosevelt’s swaggering Stewardship Doctrine. Where TR saw it as his ‘‘duty to do anything the needs of the nation demanded,’’ upon ascending to office, Coolidge remarked that he did not intend ‘‘to surrender to every emotional movement’’ seeking remedies for problems better handled by state, local, or private actors.84 Thus, Coolidge was the last president to resist the growing expectation that the president should serve as Rossiter’s Protector of the Peace, providing federal aid and comfort to Americans afflicted by natural disasters. When the Mississippi River overflowed its banks in April 1927, killing hundreds and devastating surrounding communities, he appointed Herbert Hoover to coordinate appeals for private donations, but resisted the pressure to take on a more public role and fought congressional efforts to promote a large federal role in relief. The governor of Mississippi urged the president to visit the flood area, to ‘‘center the eyes of the nation’’ on the disaster and unite the country behind relief efforts, but Coolidge refused, just as he refused a request by NBC to broadcast a nationwide radio appeal. One editorialist charged that Coolidge had either ‘‘the coldest heart in America or the dullest imagination.’’ Yet here again, Coolidge’s reticence reflected a fear that careless use of the bully pulpit would inflame public demands for federal action in areas properly reserved to the states and the people.85
Presidents in the decade of normalcy pounded that pulpit far less than either TR or Wilson. For the most part, they declined to follow Wilson’s practice of delivering the State of the Union in person to Congress. Harding appeared in person twice, Coolidge once, and Hoover reverted entirely to the Jeffersonian practice.86 Neither Harding nor Coolidge was quite as reticent or retiring as some of their 19th-century predecessors—Harding put the first professional presidential speechwriter on staff, while Coolidge made good use of the opportunities afforded by radio broadcasts.87 Yet, neither sought to light fires in the minds of men. Upon Silent Cal’s passing, H. L. Mencken eulogized that as president, Coolidge ‘‘had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.’’88 For Mencken, this was praise. It would be quite some time before that could fairly be said of another president.
War as Metaphor and Reality
Because ‘‘the sources of resistance to state-building are so strong’’
in American culture, writes Aaron L. Friedberg, the history of government growth in the United States has necessarily been a history
of crisis: ‘‘periods of accelerated state-building have generally been
preceded by the anticipation or the actual onset of war, or by a
growing sense of impending domestic economic and social crisis.’’89 ‘‘We Must Move as a
Trained and Loyal Army’’
In late 1929, America faced an economic crisis of historic proportions. At the Depression’s depth, unemployment approached a quarter of the labor force, and real GNP per capita fell by more than 30 percent.90 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected in a landslide in 1932, wasn’t the only political figure to analogize America’s economic collapse to an attack by a hostile power; his predecessor Hoover had made the comparison regularly. FDR employed the war metaphor far more effectively, however. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address tends to be remembered as an attempt to calm the public, a warning against ‘‘fear itself.’’ The martial metaphors that appear throughout the speech make clear, though, that FDR wanted fear replaced by collectivist ardor. Americans were to move forward as ‘‘a trained and loyal army,’’ with ‘‘a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.’’ Should the normal balance of legislative and executive powers prove insufficient, Roosevelt concluded, ‘‘I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.’’91
Two days after his inauguration, Roosevelt used the Trading with the Enemy Act to order the closure of all American banks. Passed during World War I, the act was designed to restrict trade with hostile foreign powers ‘‘during the time of war.’’ Ignoring that limitation, Roosevelt wielded it in peacetime against Americans. It would not be the last time his administration would invoke powers forged in the Great War to battle the Depression. ‘‘Progressives turned instinctively to the war mobilization as a design for recovery,’’ wrote historian William Leuchtenburg in his essay ‘‘The New Deal and the Analogue of War,’’ ‘‘There was scarcely a New Deal act or agency that did not owe something to the experience of World War I.’’92
That was certainly the case with the centerpiece of the first New Deal, the National Recovery Administration, modeled on the War Industries Board under Wilson. To head up the NRA, Roosevelt appointed General Hugh Johnson, a WIB official in World War I. The National Industrial Recovery Act that created Johnson’s agency empowered the president to approve or prescribe ‘‘codes of fair competition’’ for trades and industries throughout the United States, setting wages and prices and regulating labor practices. The NIRA essentially made the president commander in chief of the entire economy, allowing him to control the working conditions of 95 percent of industrial employees in the United States.93 Upon hearing of the NIRA, Benito Mussolini exclaimed, ‘‘Ecco un ditatore!’’ (‘‘Behold a dictator!’’)94
The Roosevelt administration encouraged loyal soldiers in the New Deal Army to display the NRA’s ‘‘Blue Eagle.’’ ‘‘In war, in the gloom of night attack,’’ Roosevelt explained, ‘‘soldiers wear a bright badge on their shoulders to be sure that comrades do not fire on comrades.’’95 General Johnson organized mass rallies to denounce the ‘‘slackers’’ and ‘‘chiselers’’ who resisted regimentation, declaring that ‘‘those who are not with us are against us.’’96 [Imagine that,some folks wanted to think for themselves DC]
In ‘‘The Moral Equivalent of War,’’ William James had envisioned a Progressive ‘‘army enlisted against Nature.’’97 FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, the vast work relief program created during his first 100 days, hewed closely to that vision. Over two and a half million men would eventually serve in the CCC.98 They’d report to army-run camps, and awake in their tents or barracks every morning to the sound of ‘‘Reveille.’’99 CCC enlistees were, as the assistant secretary of war put it in 1934, America’s ‘‘economic storm troops.’’100 As the decade progressed, and the possibility of another world war loomed, the CCC gave the army valuable experience in organizing and regimenting large numbers of young men.
War Itself
The Second World War, like the First, was formally declared by Congress. But like Wilson before him, FDR made many of the key decisions for American involvement unilaterally.101 One lasting effect of the war was the development of an internal security apparatus that would spy on Americans without restraint for nearly four decades. Three years before the outbreak of war in Europe, FDR reversed the proscription on FBI intelligence gathering laid down by Coolidge’s attorney general Harlan Fiske Stone. At a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover in August 1936, Roosevelt authorized the FBI director to monitor ‘‘subversive activities in the United States, particularly Fascism and Communism.’’102 Interpreting his instructions broadly, Hoover authorized the bureau to gather information from ‘‘all possible sources,’’ and defined ‘‘subversive activities’’ to include ‘‘the distribution of literature . . . opposed to the American way of life.’’103 In a 1939 press release, Roosevelt urged local law enforcement agencies to turn over information related to espionage and subversion.104 That same year, Hoover ordered the preparation of a detention list compiled mostly from subscribers to German, Italian, and Communist periodicals.105 In 1940, FDR authorized the use of warrantless wiretaps against those suspected of subversive tendencies.106
It was a short step from investigating potential saboteurs to investigating presidential critics. FDR ordered wiretaps on associates he suspected of leaking damaging information, just as Richard Nixon would decades later. And when Roosevelt received letters especially critical of his foreign policy, he had the FBI open files on the Americans who wrote them. ‘‘The President thought you might like to look these letters over, noting the names and addresses of the senders,’’ Roosevelt’s secretary wrote to Hoover in 1940. Hoover sent what information he had on the president’s critics and ordered surveillance of those that were unfamiliar—a practice he carried out repeatedly for FDR and his successors.107
The Presidency Transformed
By war’s end, the presidency’s dominance had been firmly established. The successive crises of World War I, the Great Depression,
and World War II had given rise to a new constitutional regime. In
1946, constitutional scholar Edward Corwin described that regime’s
characteristics, which included: the attribution to Congress of a legislative power of indefinite scope; the attribution to the President of the power and duty to stimulate constantly the positive exercise of this indefinite power for enlarged social objectives; and the right of Congress to delegate its powers ad libitum to the President for the achievement of such enlarged social objectives.108
In the 45th Federalist, Madison had explained that the powers of the federal government were ‘‘few and defined,’’ those of the states, ‘‘numerous and indefinite.’’ That distinction no longer held. FDR’s 12-year reign saw the realization of the Progressives’ dream of a federal government unrestrained by archaic checks and balances, and boldly directed by the people’s tribune. The general welfare and commerce clauses of the Constitution’s Article I, Section 8, had once served as checks on federal power, but after Roosevelt’s abortive attempt to pack the Court in 1937, the judicial branch would no longer stand in the way of unbridled congressional power to spend and regulate.109
Ironically, the removal of restraints on legislative power had, in many ways, weakened Congress’s authority relative to that of the president. That was in large part because, as Corwin noted, the new regime’s foundation was the delegation of legislative power to the executive branch. Article I, Section 1, of the Constitution tells us that ‘‘all legislative powers’’ are vested in the Congress; Article II, Section 3, stipulates that it is the president’s duty to ‘‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’’ Yet, the constitutional revolution ushered in by the New Deal combined both functions within the executive branch, with Congress passing broad general statutes and leaving it to the president or other executive branch officials to determine the rules that would bind private conduct.110 The National Industrial Recovery Act, which allowed the president to dictate wages, prices, and labor practices throughout the economy, was perhaps the starkest example of how unrestrained delegation allowed the executive to both make and enforce the law.
As recently as 1935, the Court had served as a bulwark against delegation.111 But by 1944, the Court recognized few if any limits on Congress’s ability to transfer its power to the executive branch. That year, in Yakus v. United States, the Court held that Congress could delegate to an executive agent the power to set maximum prices for virtually all goods throughout the economy.112 By the postwar era, Congress had long been out of practice when it came to taking responsibility for the laws Americans lived under.
FDR’s presidency was the culmination of tendencies visible in TR’s and Wilson’s before him. TR’s activist, celebrity presidency had heralded the coming of a new sort of chief executive, one who would evermore be the center of national attention, the motive force behind American government. Woodrow Wilson had proved what the Progressives had hypothesized: that soaring rhetoric combined with the panicked atmosphere of war could concentrate massive social power in the hands of the president. But it took FDR’s constitutional revolution to eliminate the vestiges of the old regime and usher in the modern presidency.
Under the original constitutional regime, the federal government was Congress centered and patronage based, that is, concerned with distribution of government jobs, public lands, and other benefits (tariff protection, internal improvements, and the like). In the main, it left social welfare policy and direct policing of citizens to the states.
But atop the federal ‘‘patronage state’’ of the original regime, the second Roosevelt grafted a ‘‘regulatory state’’ and a ‘‘redistributive state.’’ Under FDR, ‘‘for the first time,’’ Theodore Lowi writes, ‘‘the national government established a direct and coercive relationship between itself and individual citizens.’’113 The post–New Deal state had also pledged itself to the constant delivery of goods and benefits, with the public looking most of all to the president to meet the key test of the new regime’s legitimacy: ‘‘service delivery.’’114 The emerging ‘‘Second Republic of the United States’’ was one in which, as Lowi sums up, ‘‘the system of government had become an inverted pyramid, with everything coming to rest on a presidential pinpoint.’’115
The legendary ‘‘100 Days’’ of legislative activity that kicked off FDR’s first term brought to fruition Woodrow Wilson’s vision of the president as prime minister. The ‘‘100 Days’’ phrase had originated with Napoleon, describing the period beginning with his post-Elba return to Paris in 1815 and ending with the failure of his last attempt to defeat the coalition of European forces arrayed against him.116 But there would be no Waterloo for executive power after FDR.
As Corwin had noted, by the Second World War, Americans had become accustomed to the idea of the president using the bully pulpit to demand further delegations of legislative power to the executive branch, to fulfill goals that the Constitution had reserved to the states or the people. In his 1944 State of the Union address, conjured a ‘‘second Bill of Rights’’ into existence. Among the new rights were
the right to a useful and remunerative job. . . . The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; . . . The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; and The right to a good education.117
The president would provide all this and more.
In fact, well before the war, it had become clear that increasing numbers of Americans looked to the president for personal help in a way that would have seemed peculiar—even dishonorable—to their fathers and grandfathers. Before the advent of the modern presidency, few Americans had bothered to write to the president, who was, after all, a distant official in Washington with duties that only rarely had a direct impact on ordinary people. FDR’s revolutionary presidency changed all that. ‘‘Tell me your troubles,’’ he urged listeners in one fireside chat—and they did.118 William Howard Taft got only about 200 letters a week, but FDR’s first inaugural address prompted nearly half a million. Ira Smith, head of the White House mail service for five decades starting with the McKinley administration, had handled the mail all by himself until FDR’s first term. But soon after Roosevelt’s ascension, Smith would require a staff of 50.119 FDR averaged 5,000 letters a day, and the flood never stopped. Presidents received over a million letters a year through the 1970s.120
A remarkable film produced in 1932 and released shortly after FDR’s election captured the changes in the public’s orientation toward the presidency. Financed by William Randolph Hearst and starring Walter Huston, Gabriel over the White House depicts a president literally touched by an angel and empowered to heal the country and the world. The movie’s fictional president, Judson C. Hammond, begins as an unflattering amalgam of Harding and Coolidge, a party hack more interested in bedding his comely assistant than in dealing with his country’s ongoing economic woes.
After Hammond is gravely injured in a car crash, the archangel Gabriel visits him in the hospital. Gabriel imbues the comatose Hammond with the Holy Spirit of presidential activism. Hammond awakens from the coma, declares a state of emergency, and threatens Congress with a declaration of martial law should they refuse to pass his legislative program, which includes federally subsidized agriculture, a ban on mortgage foreclosures, and a CCC-style ‘‘Army of Construction’’ that will give a job to every unemployed man in America. To eradicate organized crime, Hammond authorizes a special army unit to fight gangsters, several of whom are convicted via military tribunal, then executed with the Statue of Liberty visible in the background. Toward the end of the movie, President Hammond uses a demonstration of American air power to force other world leaders to disarm, thereby ending the scourge of war. Then, with his work on Earth done, the president ascends into Heaven.
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3. The Age of the Heroic Presidency
Notes Chapter 2
1. Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908, 1917), p. 46.
2. Richard Hofstadter, ed., The Progressive Movement: 1900–1915 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 1–2.
3. Robert E. Gallman, ‘‘Economic Growth and Structural Change in the Long Nineteenth Century,’’ in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol. II: The Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 23.
4. Quoted in Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age (New York: New York University Press, 1993), p. 354.
5. Richard Hofstadter, ‘‘Introduction: The Meaning of the Progressive Movement,’’ in The Progressive Movement: 1900–1915, ed. Richard Hofstadter (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 4–5.
6. M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), p. 292.
7. Richard A. Epstein, Roger Pilon, Geoffrey R. Stone, John Yoo; Moderator: William H. Pryor Jr., Debate: ‘‘Federalism and Separation of Powers: Executive Power in Wartime,’’ Engage 8 (May 2007), p. 58, http://www.fed-soc.org/doclib/20070913_ Engage8.2(06Convention).pdf.
8. Quoted in Raymond Tatelovich and Thomas S. Engeman, The Presidency and Political Science: Two Hundred Years of Constitutional Debate (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 77.
9. Ibid., p. 85.
10. Samuel Kernell and Gary C. Jacobson, ‘‘Congress and the Presidency as News in the Nineteenth Century,’’ Journal of Politics 49 (November 1987): 1031–32.
11. Wilson, Constitutional Government, p. 56. See also Christopher Wolfe, ‘‘Woodrow Wilson: Interpreting the Constitution,’’ Review of Politics 41 (January 1979).
12. Wilson, Constitutional Government, p. 56.
13. Ibid., p. 70.
14. Gary L. Gregg II, ‘‘Whiggism and Presidentialism: American Ambivalence toward Executive Power,’’ in The Presidency Then and Now, ed. Philip G. Henderson (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), p. 84.
15. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan Co., 1909), p. 400. Even Jefferson, who had a more sanguine view of human nature than most of his contemporaries, summed up his constitutional vision in decidedly un-Progressive terms: ‘‘In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.’’ Jefferson, ‘‘The Kentucky Resolutions,’’ in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 288.
16. Herbert Croly, Progressive Democracy (New York: Macmillan Co., 1915), pp. 370–71. It should be noted that not all Progressives shared Croly’s enthusiasm for central direction of the economy. The ‘‘New Freedom’’ Progressives, whose leader was, for a time, Woodrow Wilson, shared many of the reformers’ goals, but thought they were better achieved through harnessing competitive forces. Thus, for example, ‘‘New Freedom’’ Progressives thought vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws—breaking up the trusts to restore competition—was preferable to the increased regulation of corporate behavior favored by TR’s ‘‘New Nationalist’’ Progressives. In office, however, Wilson drifted toward New Nationalism: ‘‘In the wake of the excitement aroused by the Progressive Party, Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign was far more sympathetic to the decentralized state of courts and parties than TR’s, felt compelled, as president, to govern as a New Nationalist Progressive.’’ See Sidney M. Milkis, ‘‘Why the Election of 1912 Changed America,’’ Claremont Review of Books, February 15, 2003. Howard Gillman writes that under Wilson, the New Freedom agenda ‘‘was discarded in favor of a conception of governmental responsibilities that included rationalizing an [erratic] market through independent agencies and bureaus guided by the standards of scientific management.’’ Howard Gillman, ‘‘The Constitution Besieged: TR, Taft, and Wilson on the Virtue and Efficacy of a Faction-Free Republic,’’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 19 (1989): 195–96.
17. Croly, Promise of American Life, p. 312.
18. William James, ‘‘The Moral Equivalent of War,’’ in Memories and Studies (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1935), p. 291. See also Linda Schott, ‘‘Jane Addams and William James on Alternatives to War,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 54 (April 1993): 241–54.
19. Edward Mandell House, Philip Dru: Administrator (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Reprints, 1912, 2004), pp. 92–93.
20. William E. Leuchtenburg, ‘‘The New Deal and the Analogue of War,’’ in Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America, ed. John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and Everett Walters (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964), p. 502.
21. Wilfred M. McClay, ‘‘Croly’s Progressive America,’’ Public Interest, Fall 1999.
22. Croly, Promise of American Life, p. 173.
23. Milkis, ‘‘Why Election of 1912 Changed America.’’
24. TR was a fan of proto-Nazi Madison Grant, whose 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race—‘‘a capital book,’’ in Roosevelt’s estimation—called for the ‘‘elimination of those who are weak or unfit’’ and ‘‘worthless race types.’’ Michael Chapman, ‘‘TR: No Friend of the Constitution,’’ Cato Policy Report 24 (November/December 2002). See also Gary Gerstle, ‘‘Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism,’’ Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 1281 (‘‘Roosevelt’s nationalism expressed itself as a combative and unapologetic racial ideology that thrived on aggression and the vanquishing of savage and barbaric peoples’’).
25. The first observation (‘‘celebrity president’’) is Lewis L. Gould, ‘‘Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the Emergence of the Modern Presidency: An Introductory Essay,’’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 19 (Winter 1989): 43, and the second (‘‘initials’’), Sidney M. Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: 1776–1998 (Washington: CQ Press, 1999), p. 194.
26. Quoted in Richard J. Ellis, ‘‘The Joy of Power: Changing Conceptions of the Presidential Office,’’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 33 (June 2003): 282.
27. Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan Co., 1913), p. 383. There’s some debate about whether TR actually used the term ‘‘bully pulpit.’’ Sidney M. Milkis and Michael Nelson write that ‘‘there is no direct evidence that Theodore Roosevelt ever spoke or wrote this term.’’ Milkis and Nelson, American Presidency, n. 17, p. 218. But Donald J. Davidson quotes TR as saying, ‘‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’’ Donald J. Davidson, ed., The Wisdom of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Citadel Press, 2003), p. 11.
28. Jeffrey K. Tulis sees TR as representing a ‘‘middle way’’ between the reserved presidency of the 19th century and the fully developed ‘‘rhetorical presidency’’ of 323 NOTES TO PAGES 58–63 the 20th. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p 95.
29. James Bennet, ‘‘True to Form, Clinton Shifts Energies Back to U.S. Focus,’’ New York Times, July 5, 1998.
30. Sidney M. Milkis, ‘‘Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Modern Presidency,’’ Miller Center Report, Fall/Winter 2003. Another unilaterally expanded a federal entitlement by providing a disability pension to all Civil War veterans over age 62. William J. Olson and Alan Woll, ‘‘Executive Orders and National Emergencies: How Presidents Have Come to ‘Run the Country’ by Usurping Executive Power,’’ Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 358, October 28, 1999, p. 15.
31. Bill Kauffman, ‘‘T.R. vs. the Dictionary,’’ The American Enterprise, January 1, 2001.
32. In his autobiography, Roosevelt noted the weakness of his constitutional authority here: ‘‘There was no duty whatever laid upon me by the Constitution in this matter, and I had in theory no power to act directly unless the Governor of Pennsylvania or the legislature, if it were in session, should notify me that Pennsylvania could not keep order.’’ Roosevelt, Autobiography, p. 505.
33. Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), p. 69.
34. Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 165. Constitutional or not, the gambit worked: the strike settled when the owners agreed to arbitration.
35. Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), p. 49.
36. Panama and the Great White Fleet aside, Roosevelt’s record was not as bellicose as one might have expected given his romantic view of war. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. He pulled U.S. troops out of Cuba and supported U.S. withdrawal from the Philippines. See John B. Judis, The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (New York: Scribner, 2004); Tom Parker, ‘‘The Realistic Roosevelt,’’ National Interest (Fall 2004).
37. William Michael Treanor, ‘‘Fame, the Founding, and the Power to Declare War,’’ Cornell Law Review 82 (May 1997): 764.
38. James Chace, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—The Election That Changed the Country (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 161.
39. Quoted in Chace, p. 111.
40. ‘‘Taft Tells His Campaign Views; Interview with a New York Times Correspondent on the Issues to Be Met,’’ New York Times, August 13, 1912.
41. Roosevelt, Autobiography, p. 389.
42. William Howard Taft, Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers(New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), p. 144. See generally Michael J. Korzi, ‘‘Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers: A Reconsideration of William Howard Taft’s ‘Whig’ Theory of Presidential Leadership,’’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 33 (June 2003). Taft had a less restrictive view of the president’s freedom to act in foreign affairs, as evidenced by his unilateral actions in Nicaragua. See Fisher, Presidential War Power, pp. 52–54. Domestically, he was an exponent of ‘‘narrow’’ unitarianism. See Myers v. U.S., 272 U.S. 52 (1926).
43. Quoted in Forrest McDonald, The American Presidency: An Intellectual History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), pp. 359–60.
44. Quoted in Francis D. Wormuth and Edwin B. Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in History and Law (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986, 1989), p. 289.
45. Quoted in Chace, Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs, p. 268.
46. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., ‘‘Annual Messages of the Presidents: Major Themes of American History,’’ in The State of the Union Messages of the Presidents 1790–1966, Vol. 1, ed. Fred L. Israel (New York: Chelsea House, 1966), p. xvii.
47. Quoted in Henry A. Turner, ‘‘Woodrow Wilson: Exponent of Executive Leadership,’’ Western Political Quarterly 4 (March 1951): 99, 105.
48. Of course, not all Progressives were militarists and imperialists. Prominent anti-war Progressives included Robert LaFollette, Jane Addams, and William Borah. But they were a minority. See William E. Leuchtenburg, ‘‘Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1898–1916,’’ Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (December 1952); Charles Hirschfeld, ‘‘Nationalist Progressivism and World War I,’’ Mid-America: An Historical Review 45 (July 1963); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), pp. 272–82.
49. Quoted in Arthur A. Ekirch Jr., ‘‘The Reform Mentality, War, Peace, and the National State: From the Progressives to Vietnam,’’ Journal of Libertarian Studies 3 (1979): 63.
50. Richard Weiss, ‘‘The Patrician as Patriot,’’ Reviews in American History 13 (September 1985): 405.
51. John Patrick Diggins, ‘‘The New Republic and Its Times,’’ New Republic, December 10, 1984, pp. 23, 25.
52. Quoted in Hirschfeld, ‘‘Nationalist Progressivism,’’ p. 142.
53. Quoted in Ekirch, ‘‘The Reform Mentality,’’ p. 64.
54. Ibid., p. 64.
55. John Dos Passos, Nineteen Nineteen (New York: Signet Classic, 1932, 1979), pp. 120–21.
56. A. F. Beringause, ‘‘The Double Martyrdom of Randolph Bourne,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 18 (October 1957): 597.
57. Randolph Bourne, ‘‘The State,’’ in The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911–1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), pp. 356–57.
58. Quoted in Kendrick A. Clements, ‘‘Woodrow Wilson and World War I,’’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 34 (March 2004): 78.
59. Quoted in Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997), p. 136.
60. In the 1914 occupation of Veracruz, Wilson requested congressional authorization, while maintaining he did not need it, then ordered U.S. Marines ashore before the Senate had voted. In 1915 he ordered American troops to Haiti without authorization. See Fisher, Presidential War Power, pp. 50–52.
61. Ibid., p. 57.
62. Quoted in Olaf Hansen, ed., ‘‘Introduction,’’ The Radical Will, p. 55.
63. See Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 123–58; Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 269–72.
64. Quoted in Beringause, ‘‘Double Martyrdom,’’ p. 602.
65. Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004), p. 156.
66. G. J. A. O’Toole, Honorable Treachery: A History of U.S. Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert Action from the American Revolution to the C.I.A. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991), p. 278.
67. Joan M. Jensen, Army Surveillance in America, 1775–1980 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 176–77.
68. Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times, pp. 151–52, 186.
69. Michael Linfield, Freedom under Fire: U.S. Civil Liberties in Times of War (Boston: South End Press, 1990), p. 45.
70. Stone, Perilous Times, pp. 172–73. Even so, Wilson thought Congress had given him insufficient power to maintain order at home. He pushed unsuccessfully for a measure that would have given censorship powers directly to the president, and he wanted the suppression of dissent to continue in peacetime, pocket-vetoing a bill to repeal the Espionage and Sedition Acts in 1920. Garry Wills, ‘‘The Presbyterian Nietzsche,’’ New York Review of Books, January 16, 1992.
71. Quoted in Porter, War and the Rise of the State, p. 276.
72. Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, pp. 123–58; Porter, War and the Rise of the State, p. 160.
73. Christopher S. Yoo, Steven G. Calabresi, and Laurence D. Nee, ‘‘The Unitary Executive during the Third Half-Century, 1889–1945,’’ Notre Dame Law Review 80 (November 2004).
74. See Fisher, Presidential War Power, pp. 70–72.
75. Quoted in Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, p. 142.
76. Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 460.
77. Warren G. Harding, First Annual Message, December 6, 1921.
78. Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, ‘‘Rating Presidential Performance,’’ in Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, ed. John V. Denson (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2001), p. 19.
79. Robert Sobel, Coolidge: An American Enigma (Washington: Regnery, 1998), p. 291.
80. Quoted in Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 216.
81. Stone, Perilous Times, p. 230. Alas, Attorney General Stone also appointed J. Edgar Hoover to head the FBI. But it took 12 years and an administration more accommodating than Coolidge’s to set Hoover free to spy at will. Stone, p. 249.
82. Quoted in Morton H. Halperin, Jerry J. Berman, Robert L. Borosage, and Christine M. Marwick, The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U.S. Intelligence Agencies (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 95.
83. Quoted in Sobel, Coolidge, p. 237.
84. Quoted in ibid., p. 244.
85. David Greenberg, ‘‘Help! Call the White House!’’ Slate.com, Tuesday, September 5, 2006; Sobel, Coolidge, pp. 315–17.
86. Schlesinger, ‘‘Annual Messages of the Presidents,’’ p. xvi
87. For Coolidge’s innovations, including, surprisingly, a historic number of press conferences, see Elmer E. Cornwell Jr., ‘‘Coolidge and Presidential Leadership,’’ Public Opinion Quarterly 21 (Summer 1957), who notes nonetheless that Coolidge’s radio addresses ‘‘were admirably calculated to convey a general impression of the man and his ideas without in the least offending by their partisanship’’ (p. 269).
88. H. L. Mencken, ‘‘Coolidge,’’ in The Vintage Mencken, ed. Alistair Cooke (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), p. 223.
89. Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 19–20.
90. Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, pp. 123–58; Porter, War and the Rise of the State, p. 161.
91. Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933.
92. William E. Leuchtenburg, ‘‘The New Deal,’’ pp. 92–93, 109.
93. Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, p. 180.
94. Quoted in David Schoenbrod, Power without Responsibility: How Congress Abuses the People through Delegation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 38.
95. Quoted in Leuchtenburg, ‘‘The New Deal,’’ p. 120.
96. John A. Garraty, ‘‘The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression,’’ American Historical Review 78 (October 1973): 925.
97. James, ‘‘Moral Equivalent of War,’’ p. 290.
98. Porter, War and the Rise of the State, p. 278.
99. Leuchtenburg, ‘‘The New Deal,’’ p. 115.
100. Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 21.
101. See Fisher, Presidential War Power, pp. 63–67; for a qualified defense of FDR, see Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1973), pp. 105–14.
102. Halperin et al., The Lawless State, pp. 95–96.
103. Stone, Perilous Times, p. 249.
104. Halperin et al., The Lawless State, p. 96.
105. Stone, Perilous Times, pp. 249–50.
106. Halperin, et al., The Lawless State, p. 96.
107. Barton J. Bernstein, ‘‘The Road to Watergate and Beyond: The Growth and Abuse of Executive Authority since 1940,’’ Law and Contemporary Problems 40 (Spring 1976): 63.
108. Edward S. Corwin, Total War and the Constitution (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 1947), p. 179.
109. See Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 (1937) (upholding the Social Security Act of 1935 under the general welfare clause: ‘‘Congress may spend money in aid of the ‘general welfare.’. . . The discretion belongs to Congress. . . . Needs that were narrow or parochial a century ago may be interwoven in our day with the well-being of the nation’’); N.L.R.B. v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 (1937) (upholding regulation of manufacturing and labor relations under the commerce clause); Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942) (Congress can regulate noncommercial activity that taken in the aggregate with other, similar activities substantially affects interstate commerce).
110. Along with the growth in presidential power came growth in quasi-independent administrative agencies, insulated from presidential control by law or practice. See Cass R. Sunstein, ‘‘Constitutionalism after the New Deal,’’ Harvard Law Review 101 (December 1987): 444: ‘‘There was some tension in the New Deal vision of the executive branch. The increase in presidential power was based on a belief in a direct relationship between the will of the people and the will of the President; hence the presidency, rather than the states or the common law courts, was regarded as the primary regulator. In contrast the faith in bureaucratic administration was based on the ability of regulators to discern the public interest and to promote, though indirectly and through their very insulation, democratic goals.’’
111. The Supreme Court’s 1935 decision striking down the industrial code provisions of the NIRA on nondelegation grounds helped inspire FDR’s attempt to subvert the judiciary’s independence by enlarging the Court. In Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935), the Court, led by Chief Justice Hughes, held that ‘‘Congress is not permitted to abdicate or to transfer to others the essential legislative functions with which it is thus vested.’’ But after Roosevelt’s effort to pack the Court, the judiciary never again struck down a New Deal statute for impermissible delegation.
112. Yakus v. U.S., 321 U.S. 414 (1944).
113. Theodore J. Lowi, The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 45–48, quote on p. 46 (emphasis in original).
114. Ibid., p. 51.
115. Ibid., p. 52.
116. The original 100 Days began with Bonaparte’s return to Paris on March 20, 1815, and ended with Louis XVIII’s restoration on June 28. William Safire, ‘‘Language: Breaking the Hours Barrier,’’ International Herald Tribune, January 28, 2007.
117. Franklin D. Roosevelt, State of the Union Message to Congress, January 11, 1944.
118. Leila A. Sussmann, ‘‘FDR and the White House Mail,’’ Public Opinion Quarterly 20 (Spring 1956): 10.
119. James T. Patterson, ‘‘The Rise of Presidential Power before World War II,’’ Law and Contemporary Problems 40 (Spring 1976): 54.
120. Willam E. Leuchtenburg, ‘‘The Twentieth-Century Presidency,’’ Miller Center Report (Spring 2000); Fred I. Greenstein, ‘‘Change and Continuity in the Modern Presidency,’’ in The New American Political System, ed. Anthony King (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1978).
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