Flashback, March 1853: King, Unusual VP, Takes Oath in Unusual Place

William Rufus King is not an instantly recognizable name, but in his extremely short tenure as Vice-President under Franklin Pierce, he still recorded some firsts.

For one thing, he became the first—and, to date, still the only—Veep to take the oath of office outside the U.S., and on a date different from his running mate. Second, he assumed office when he, and just about anyone else with any knowledge of the situation, was aware that he was gravely ill. In fact, it required an act of Congress that his swearing-in occur not March 4—the way all Presidents and Vice-Presidents had done (and would do) from Washington’s second inaugural to FDR’s first—but March 24. Third, it is very possible that he was the first homosexual to achieve the Vice-Presidency—and his purported lover may have been the first homosexual President of the U.S.

Several years ago, a controversy flared up over C.A. Tripp’s claim that Abraham Lincoln was gay. Not only was the explanation highly speculative, but the supporting “evidence” was threadbare. As it turned out, many gay-rights advocates might have ignored a considerably more likely prospect: Honest Abe’s predecessor, James Buchanan.

Tripp made much of the 16^th President’s closeness to the friend of his young manhood, Joshua Speed. But they stopped being on easy terms with one another after Lincoln’s marriage to Mary Todd. Lincoln would go on to father three sons. Even during his time in office, when enemies seized on any remotely plausible rumor to cast doubt on his personality and policies, nobody thought to throw this particular rumor about intimate relations with men at him.

Nevertheless, who can blame gays for claiming the Great Emancipator as an Executive Branch role model? Certainly, you wouldn't want Buchanan, nor the good friend of his listed by Time magazine as among the 10 worst U.S. Vice-Presidents. (This ranking, by the way, was patently unfair: King had only three weeks to live after his inaugural oath, so he did not have time to cause mischief, as, for instance, Spiro Agnew and Dick Cheney did. By rights, Time should have given him no more than an incomplete.)

But it is important to recall this about King's short tenure: the Vice-Presidency—a position only the proverbial heartbeat away from the most powerful office in the nation—would be occupied by a man who himself was already dying of tuberculosis.

In a couple of ways, it seems inconceivable today to anoint for such a job an old party warhorse such as King:

*The fear that the President might die in office has been so frequently justified by events that parties are loath to nominate someone who is not physically vigorous—or, at least, who is not constantly monitored by physicians (e.g., cardiac patient Cheney). King was the same age at the time of his election as Joe Biden, but modern medical, nutritional and exercise knowledge enable Obama’s Veep to endure the stress of a campaign and office better than the running mate of Pierce. (Screening has allowed doctors to test whether additional problems are surfacing from Biden’s two aneurysms from 25 years ago.)

*Parties and Presidential candidates no longer fear running mates with their own independent sources of power, as Aaron Burr had when he vied with his ostensible boss, Thomas Jefferson, for the Presidency in the House of Representatives, in the disputed election of 1800.

*Vice-Presidential candidates are no longer content to sit at home, awaiting the verdict of voters, but instead are expected to barnstorm across the country, appearing in all media, all the time.

And yet, in another sense, our age can identify all too readily with King. Those living in a bitter era when a Congressman can leap to his feet and shout “Liar!” at the President during a State of the Union message can begin to understand an antebellum Congress in which duels were not uncommon and a U.S. Senator (Charles Sumner of Massachusetts) could be nearly caned to death right on the floor of the chamber over the slavery issue. King himself almost became involved in two duels, and he was considered one of the more even-tempered men of the Senate.

In fact, King was thought of as one of the above-average members of that body. He was certainly not intellectual, nor oratorical, so he, by default, could not be considered in the same breath as the “Great Triumvirate” of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. But, for all his sympathies as a slaveholder, he continually tried to tamp down secessionist fervor in the South (even joining in the desperate effort to craft the Compromise of 1850). Furthermore, even though he insisted on wearing powdered wigs long after they had gone out of fashion, his bearing was consistently acclaimed as handsome.

In short, he looked and acted like a Senator. His colleagues thought so well of him that, between 1836 and 1850, King won a record 11 elections to the post of Senate president pro tempore, the constitutionally recognized officer of the Senate who presides over the chamber in the absence of the vice president.

One Washington figure to whom he especially endeared himself was Buchanan. King met the future president in 1834, began rooming with him two years later, and continued to do so (except for King’s break for a diplomatic posting to France) until his final illness.

By itself, men sharing the same house, even the same bed, was not unusual in 19^th century Washington, since lack of ready transportation forced Congressmen into unusual arrangements. Some historians have pointed to a broken-off engagement that ended tragically with his fiancee’s early death as the reason why Buchanan never married, rather than any repressed homosexual leanings. Moreover, imposing post-Freudian understanding of relations between men up through the 19th century can be an anachronistic exercise, as expressions of friendship tended to be more effusive in those days.

But the relationship between Buchanan and King was close enough to set off more gossiping than normal, marked by the following:

* The two men were nicknamed “the Siamese Twins”;

* Andrew Jackson (whose lead King followed on Capitol Hill) dubbed the Alabaman "Miss Nancy," and

* Buchanan and King were lifelong bachelors, without children.

In other words, even much contemporary comment took note of them. 

One incident in particular fueled speculation about King. The origins of his near-duel with Clay are well-known (recorded in Congressional remarks), but not what lay behind an incident involving Major Michael Kenan back in Cahaba, Alabama. The major’s insult led King to withdraw a dagger from his cane and pass it across Kenan’s chest. Kenan then sent a challenge to King, which the senator refused to accept because of the nature of the insult. Kenan then induced a neighbor to challenge King, and this duel was only averted when the neighbor, after due consideration, decided it wasn’t worth engaging in an affair of honor when he was totally unaware of what it was really about.

One of my college professors, taking note of Buchanan’s childless status, suggested that lack of potency (wink, wink!) also underlay the president’s ineffectual attempts to head off secession. Nowadays, that kind of insinuation would have landed my professor before an academic committee, where he would have been fortunate to emerge unscathed. (In any event, his assumption is simply not historical: under the same reasoning, two reputed homosexuals or bisexuals, Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great--legendary masters of the battlefield--would have to be regarded as ineffective. The idea is preposterous on its face.)

Absent documentary evidence, any conclusions about the sexuality of King and Buchanan, like that of Revolutionary War general Baron von Steuben (discussed in a prior post of mine), can only rest on speculation. What is not speculation is that, when Buchanan’s bid for the presidential nomination at the 1852 Democratic Convention foundered, King was offered the consolation prize—the Vice-Presidency—to placate his close friend and allies in the Southern wing of the party, who had pushed his candidacy for the office for the last dozen years.

Shortly after he and running mate Franklin Pierce won the subsequent election, King fell ill. With doctors diagnosing tuberculosis, King journeyed to a sugar plantation in Cuba in the hope that a warm climate would help. Eventually, he notified Congress that he was too sick to make it back to Washington in time for the inauguration, so his former colleagues passed an act enabling him to take his oath outside the U.S. 

King was so frail when the oath was finally administered that he had to be lifted to his feet by two soldiers, the better to see the brown mountain peaks in the distance. With his condition deteriorating rapidly, he determined to leave Cuba so he could die at home. He was back at his Alabama plantation, Chestnut Hill, for only one day when he passed away on April 18, 1853, less than a month after perhaps the most unusual Vice-Presidential inauguration in American history.

In the end, it matters less whether Buchanan was literally intimate with King than that the future President— whose Mennonite, Quaker, and even many Democrat neighbors in the free state of Pennsylvania regarded slavery with horror—was metaphorically involved with the slaveholding class served by King—a group that gave Buchanan crucial support in his successful election in 1856, before undercutting him in the run-up to the Civil War. How King might have reacted to this turn of events regarding his very close friend rests on the same kind of speculation that has accrued ever since on the real nature of their relationship.

(The perhaps somewhat idealized image of King accompanying this post, taken from around 1840, comes from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)  

This Day in TV History (“All in the Family” Tackles Gay Theme)

Feb. 9, 1971—All in the Family, the CBS sitcom demolishing taboos ever since its debut four weeks before, pioneered treatment of gay characters in an episode co-written by creator Norman Lear.

Last month, I was unable to write about the 40th anniversary of the irreverent comedy that was an institution in my house throughout the Seventies. This particular episode, "Judging Books by Covers," gave me that opportunity again.

The archetypal comedies of the 1970-71 season for the “Tiffany Network” were All in the Family (hereinafter referred to as AITF) and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (MTM). Veteran TV director John Rich (The Dick Van Dyke Show), who had the opportunity to work on the pilots of both series, chose AITF because it was an extraordinary “experiment,” particularly in its use of language--i.e., the then-extraordinary, for TV, series of racial and ethnic slurs cast in every direction by blue-collar paterfamilias Archie Bunker. This episode proved him right.

As a comedy centered on character, MTM has aged better than the more ripped-from-the-headlines AITF. Indeed, the only signs distinguishing one season of MTM from another were a) the absence of Valerie Harper and Cloris Leachman, both of whom had spinoff series of their own; and b) Mary’s changing fashions and growing professional self-confidence.

Nevertheless, for all its stylish wit and its exquisite balance between character complexity and consistent high standards throughout its run, MTM sometimes pulled its punches—or, at least, was forced to by network censors. Mary Richards, for instance, was transformed from a divorcee to a single working girl who lit out for Minneapolis after being jilted by her fiancé. It wasn’t until its third season that the show featured a homosexual character: Phyllis’ brother.

At the time of the AITF episode on homosexuality, television shied away from treating gays. There were certainly flamboyant types on the air, mind you (e.g., Paul Lynde’s “Uncle Arthur” on Bewitched). But it was impossible to see homosexuals in anything other than the stereotype of Ernie Kovacs’ lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils.

Come to think of it, Rich was only half correct when he signed on for what he believed to be an “experiment” in AITF. It was more like a revolution.

Particularly in its early seasons, AITF was centered around the assault of the modern world on Archie. He perpetually retreated to the male domain of Kelsey’s Tavern when he couldn’t take what always seemed to land on his doorstep at Hauser Street in Queens. But in this episode, even Kelsey’s was no longer a place where he could figure out, as the opening song “Those Were The Days” went, “girls were girls and men were men.”

What drives him there to begin with this time is the open-arms treatment of daughter Gloria and son-in-law Mike of their friend Roger—or, as Archie puts it, “Sweetie-Pie Roger” or “Tinkerbelle.” Roger has just returned with pictures from a vacation in England (“a fag country,” Archie tells “Meathead” Mike), and it looks like he’s raided every clothing shop on Carnaby Street. It’s all too much for Archie, who’s glad to get away to his favorite bar, filled with macho guys like his friend Steve, a former professional football player.

Bit by bit, Archie is rattled there, too. For starters, he can’t understand how Steve could not only know Roger, but act friendly toward him. But his world is really turned upside down when Steve (after beating him a couple of times arm-wrestling) confirms the secret Mike had earlier heard from the bartender: it’s not fluttery Roger who’s gay, but he-man Steve.

At the time this episode aired, it was only a year and a half after the Stonewall riot, and a full four years before former pro running back David Kopay came out of the closet. It would take a half-dozen years more before primetime TV featured an ongoing gay character: Billy Crystal’s Jodie Dallas on Soap.

This particular episode was supposed to air February 2, 1971, but it was moved back a week. One wonders if his controversial subject matter was behind the move. Lear certainly had to battle network censors countless times to get his way, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this was one of those cases.

Ironically, the censors might have relaxed if they had known that nobody would be watching the show. That’s what happened in its early weeks. Everybody associated with the sitcom, in fact, was ready for CBS’ cancellation announcement throughout the spring and early summer.

The first inkling that things might be different came to Rich, on vacation in Hawaii at the time. As he recounted in an appearance on the public-radio show Fresh Air a few years ago, a Japanese woman he met told him she had to go home to watch AITF. “That Archie Bunker, he’s my husband,” she said.

He had been hearing such comments more frequently, and in increasingly surprising cases such as this one. The universality of this character began to impress itself on him. Several weeks later, CBS network executive Fred Silverman, pleasantly surprised that summer reruns of the show were proving to be a smash hit, issued a stay of execution. The next year, AITF stormed to the top of the ratings, where it stayed through much of the rest of the decade.

(Incidentally, Anthony Geary and Phil Carey, who played, respectively, Roger and Steve, would go on to bigger roles on daytime soap operas: Geary on General Hospital and Carey on One Life to Live.

Quote of the Day (Caitlin Flanagan and Benjamin Schwarz, on Growing Black-Gay Tensions)

“Comparing the infringement on civil rights that gays are experiencing to that suffered by black Americans is to begin a game of ‘top my oppression’ that you’re not going to win. The struggle for equality — beginning with freedom from human bondage (see: references to the book of Exodus at the Gospel Brunch) — has been so central to African-American identity that many blacks find homosexual claims of a commensurate level of injustice frivolous, and even offensive.”-- Caitlin Flanagan and Benjamin Schwarz, “Showdown in the Big Tent,” The New York Times, Dec. 7, 2008

Flanagan and Schwarz’s op-ed article in the Times more than two weeks ago is one of the first in the mainstream media to discuss openly what many progressives noted privately with dismay: the overwhelming support of African-Americans for California’s Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman.

For all its pretensions to objectivity and disdain for PR and marketing, the media Powers That Be have long operated under the same mantra as Madison Avenue: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

If journalists had done their jobs all these years, they might have examined a number of stray incidents—Protestant African-American ministers who lent crucial support to the Bush Administration in the closing days of the 2004 Presidential campaign in the election-deciding state of Ohio, anti-gay statements by black athletes such as Tim Hardaway and the late Reggie White—and begun to notice a pattern. Instead, they concentrated on simpler, more seemingly conservative targets on which to pin the label of homophobia: the Mormon and Roman Catholic Churches.

That’s why, when the results came in for Proposition 8, many media mavens (except for the astute Samuel G. Freedman) were surprised by the seeming disparity between a single group’s economic and “lifestyle” views. They scratched their heads over exit poll results showing that seven in 10 African-American voters voted in favor of the measure.

Though the Times and other media outlets continued to lash the Mormons for their economic support of Proposition 8, responses on many progressive blogs featured a common lament by gays against African-American colleagues in the Rainbow Coalition: How could you, after all we did for you?

Though supporters of same-sex marriage, Flanagan and Schwarz offer some advice that gays might want to heed: Get over it, lest you divide the liberal community before it has a chance to accomplish something under President Obama. Along the way, the media should rethink the notion of why resort to judicial rulings without a majority voting consensus in favor of same-sex marriage is okay, but pro-lifers’ similar resort on behalf of even the mildest curbs on abortion (limits on partial-birth abortion, calls for brief waiting periods) constitutes litmus-test politics.

History happens to be on the side of Flanagan and Schwarz about the dangers of secularists picking fights with religiously inclined members of liberal coalitions. As Garry Wills pointed out in his history of religion and politics in the U.S., Under God, the caricature of William Jennings Bryan created by Clarence Darrow and H.L. Mencken in the Scopes “Monkey” trial did nothing to make born-again Christians feel welcome by liberals, even though Bryan was and remained a genuine radical when it came to opposing the mandarins of Wall Street.

More recently, Democrats suffered for two decades because of the growing political homelessness of Roman Catholics. Formerly among the most reliable shock troops of the New Deal coalition (actually, given landmark legislation passed by Alfred E. Smith and Robert Wagner after the Triangle factory fire, practically the inventors of the New Deal itself), Catholics found themselves marginalized because of the veto power of pro-choicers over party nominees (a phenomenon much less discussed in the media than the similar primacy of pro-lifers in the GOP).

Just as disastrously, the “Dutton Rules”—named after a prominent party activist from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s who helped rewrite delegate selection rules before the convention of 1972—shifted the longtime ideological focus away from income inequality and toward issues with greater appeal to a more affluent and secular base. That led to nearly 40 years of Democratic handwringing over the rise of the “Reagan Democrats,” and even the spectacle of Roman Catholics rejecting one of their co-religionists in the 2004 Presidential race.

If you want to understand just how disastrous that slippage was, just recall this: it took not just a mismanaged war, a united Democratic Party, and an opposing Vice-Presidential selection with little experience, but more important, the worst economic downtown since the Great Depression to ensure that Democrats regained the White House in 2008.

Don’t bet that eight years of being out of the White House will be enough to prevent gays and African-Americans from going toe to toe. Already, the lesbian director of People for the American Way, Kathryn Kolbert, had to warn against the “appallingly racist” reaction of some in the gay community to African-Americans following Proposition 8.

Blogger Andrew Sullivan, who wrote an Atlantic Monthly cover story (“Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters”) a year ago with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of positive adjectives toward Barack Obama, noticed after the election that the President-elect “has always opposed marriage equality, even splitting with his own church on the issue.” (

This is going to be interesting to watch. Early in the Bush Presidency, he could not say enough good things about the President and his conduct of the war on terror. Bush’s support for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between heterosexuals seems to have led the blogger to support Kerry in ’04. Are we about to watch Sullivan execute a similarly motivated shift?)

Outrage over African-American rejection’s of Proposition 8—and now over Obama’s invitation to Rick Warren to speak at the inauguration—can only be counterproductive. Recall what happened to Bill Clinton at the start of his Presidency, when he fell into a silly controversy over gays in the military instead of, as he promised, “focusing like a laser beam” on the economy (or, for that matter, terrorism--remember that the first World Trade Center bombing occurred only a little more than a month after he took office). Don’t think the GOP isn’t panting over a possible repeat of this divisiveness and diffuse focus.

Moreover, “bigots” is not the best term to apply to a group such as African-Americans that is still acutely—and often justifiably—aware of racial snubs.

And while we’re on the subject, other terms about yourself (e.g., “the reality-based community”) or others (“theocracy,” “the Christian industrial complex” or Sullivan’s ridiculous formulation, “Christianist”) that reek of condescension also don’t offer gays the possibility of How to Gain Friends and Influence People.

If gays think the results of Proposition 8 were wrong, they should remember the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prescription for what to do when the Supreme Court is wrong: debate, litigate, legislate. Somehow, they forgot the third leg of that triad.

As a way of reversing the results, gays might try talking to religiously minded voters on their own terms. Discuss the original biblical injunctions against homosexuality and why they are wrong. Detail the reason why civil unions are an inadequate substitute for gay marriage.

In other words, do anything but shout derogatory names and bandy about stereotypes, which only gets people’s backs up—and which, come to think of it, was part of what gay activists long told us they ostensibly were fighting against all along.