Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, Warning About 'Special Interests’ vs. Democracy)

"At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.” —U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), “The New Nationalism,” speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, August 31, 1910

Photo of the Day: Honest Abe’s Stovepipe Hat

Few objects are so associated with a single person as the stovepipe hat with Abraham Lincoln. This form of headgear was quite popular in the 19^th century, but, if you’re like me, you’re hard pressed to think of another wearer than America’s 16^th President.

I photographed the one you see here back in June 2021, while in Manchester, VT, for a beloved relative’s wedding. It’s part of the items on display in Hildene, the summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln, the President’s oldest son.

Abe Lincoln wore several such hats in his lifetime, as soon as he was old enough to afford one in adulthood. It certainly afforded convenience (he took to carrying his paperwork in it as a young attorney), but I think it also made him look more imposing. 

Typically seven to eight inches tall, these hats, when topping his 6 ft.-4 in. frame, brought his total height to nearly seven feet tall, making him stand out as much as modern pro basketball centers.

Believe it or not, this hat—black and narrow-brimmed, made from glossy black pile textile that covers a paper card support—is only three of Lincoln’s still in existence. Evidently he bought it at Siger and Nichols, a firm then based on Maiden Lane in New York City.

There are plenty of reasons to visit Vermont, but if you find yourself in the southwestern corner of the state, you should make it a point to visit Hildene.

Robert Todd Lincoln was one of the more consequential offspring of American Presidents, serving variously as Secretary of War, U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, and president of the Pullman railroad company.

But there is no doubt that all visitors to this 24-room Georgian revival mansion will want to view its historic exhibit associated with Robert’s father, which not only includes this hat but also an oval dressing mirror from the White House and a Bible owned by the President.

Abraham Lincoln’s words and actions still matter to America. But artifacts like this hat at Hildene also have their function: sort of like relics of a man who’s become known, in effect (and probably to his ironic amusement, could he see it), as America’s great secular saint.

Quote of the Day (Ron Chernow, on George Washington’s ‘One Major Blunder As President’)

“Washington committed only one major blunder as president: He failed to put his name on Mount Vernon and thereby bungled an early opportunity at branding. Clearly deficient in the art of the deal, the poor man had to settle for the lowly title of father of his country.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow, “Ron Chernow Stands for Press Freedom at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” www.pen.org, April 30, 2019

Quote of the Day (Dwight Eisenhower, on a Global ‘Community of Dreadful Fear and Hate’)

“Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

“Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.”—Soldier and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), “Military-Industrial Complex” Speech (Farewell Address to the Nation), Jan. 17, 1961

The last televised speech of Dwight Eisenhower to his countrymen, which occurred 65 years ago today, might be the most famous Presidential farewell address since George Washington left office, largely because the former Allied commander at D-Day unexpectedly cautioned about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex" that had developed in America because of World War II and the Cold War.

But, as I discovered when I read the text in full, other aspects of his speech have also proved relevant, in ways that few could have anticipated at the time.

Take scientific research, for instance. Ike not only speculated that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite,” but conversely also admonished against “the prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.”

If the second danger sounds familiar to you, it should. Keep in mind, for instance, this blog post from earlier this week from science magazine EOS:

"Academic science has been under pressure not only through the administration’s targeting of universities directly but also through its efforts to remake the federal grantmaking process, reduce the amounts and types of external research funded, and reduce budget appropriations for scientific research by more than 20% through large-scale cutbacks and reorganizations in federal science agencies. Unsurprisingly, the administration’s actions are having ripple effects for higher education, business (among companies who supply scientific products, for instance), and public health."

But the section of the speech that should receive the most renewed attention is the quote above, especially in light of Donald Trump’s refusal to rule out military force if the United States can’t purchase Greenland from Denmark.

As NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Eisenhower knew the organization’s importance in deterring the aggression of a larger power against a smaller nation. After all, two world wars in which he served began in precisely this manner.

He would be embarrassed at the thought that a later President of his own party is threatening the independence of a smaller member of NATO—and in this case, as well as in the current President’s inexplicable preference for Russia over Ukraine, is also risking the very existence of the alliance.

In a blog post from last March, David Lake, a senior fellow at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, adeptly summarized the implications of this:

“This is the most basic rule of leadership: leaders need followers, and others will follow only if they are confident the leader is taking them where they want to go. To accept U.S. influence over their foreign policies, allies must have some confidence that Washington will be attentive to their needs. Allowing another country to exert authority over one’s policies is an awesome choice, and one made only if the ally is confident that this authority will be wielded in the common interest. In ignoring Europe, in the case of Ukraine; initiating trade wars and putting tariffs on our allies even before our geopolitical competitors; disparaging NATO; threatening to seize the Panama Canal, Greenland, and possibly Canada; and intervening in the domestic politics of our allies, Trump is flouting the basic rule of leadership."

Quote of the Day (John F. Kennedy, on ‘The Comfort of Opinion’)

"As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality. For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." — President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), Yale University Commencement Address, June 11, 1962

Though I understand the impulse perfectly, it’s too bad that some people don’t recall more about John F. Kennedy than his assassination 62 years ago today and the trauma it inflicted on this nation. That goes as well for his deeply imperfect private life (which, as I noted in this prior blog post, on at least one occasion left him potentially subject to manipulation by J. Edgar Hoover).

As constant and, yes, as reckless as Kennedy’s philandering was, an awful lot of people today—including many whose evangelical faith would once have scorned adulterers in high places—overlook a later occupant of the Oval Office with such a propensity as bad, if not worse. And that later President has rarely if ever sounded the grace notes in public discourse that Kennedy consistently did.

JFK belonged to an era when statesmen and politicians didn’t communicate by cable TV or podcast soundbites, tweets, or memes. He addressed audiences that paid relatively prolonged attention, with words that sought to reason with, and, ultimately, persuade and even inspire them.

I wish more people wouldn’t blindly accept everything they read on social media. The Internet allows you to go right to original, primary sources—speeches, diaries, extended TV interviews, sometimes even court transcripts, even more—to see what a politician said or wrote. And with a bit more curiosity and digging, you can discover the context in which it was expressed.

So it is with the speech I’m quoting from today. The excerpt here has something to recommend (or dispute) about “a prefabricated set of interpretations” or even whether such preconceptions are more dangerous these days than lies.

But reading the context of the quote—the speech in full—reveals that JFK was making larger points, about the size and distribution of government, public fiscal policy, and public confidence in business and America. The conditions that held sway when he discussed all of this might have changed, but the issues endure. In fact, they go back to the creation of the Constitution.

All of this is in keeping with the fact that JFK was not afraid of public debate. Faced with challenges to his policies, he could deflect rather than denigrate. Asked at a press conference about a Republican National Committee resolution calling his administration a failure, for instance, he chuckled, “I assume it passed unanimously.”

Notice that he didn’t say, “You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter,” as the current Oval Office occupant (hilariously hailed as a great communicator by many in the media) told an ABC reporter in the last week. Nor would JFK have chided a female Bloomberg News journalist, with two words that deserve their own corner in infamy, “Quiet, Piggy.”

These exchanges sum up how much we lost in this country since that terrible day in Dallas six decades ago: respect for differences of opinion and basic Presidential dignity. On my worst days, I fear that we may never recover them.

Quote of the Day (John Adams, on Threats to the Constitution)

“Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” —John Adams (1735-1826), signer of the Declaration of Independence and second U.S. President, in a letter to the Officers of the first Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, Oct. 11, 1798, quoted by Maria Campbell, Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull (1847)

Quote of the Day (Barack Obama, on Labor Unions)

“It was working men and women who made the 20th century the American century. It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.”—Former President Barack Obama, “President Obama on Labor Day: The Fight for America's Workers Continues” (address at the Milwaukee Laborfest), Sept. 6, 2010

Quote of the Day (Franklin Roosevelt, on Americans’ Rights and Those Who ‘Died to Win Them’)

“Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them.”— U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), “Proclamation 2524—Bill of Rights Day,” Nov. 27, 1941, The American Presidency Project

Quote of the Day (Franklin Roosevelt, on the ‘War for the Survival of Democracy’)

“In this world of ours in other lands, there are some people, who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. They have yielded their democracy.

“I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.”— U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa., June 27, 1936

That “war” continues, though in our country the prospects for victory look increasingly uncertain.

Quote of the Day (William Leuchtenburg, on ‘A Chief Executive With This Sort of Temperament’)

“We really have no precedent for a chief executive with this sort of temperament – so careless about his statements, so quick to take offense. There is concern not just here at home but abroad, as I know from letters I’m getting from historians particularly in Europe. There is great alarm about how irresponsible the man seems.”—American Presidential historian William Leuchtenburg (1922-2025), on Donald Trump after the first two weeks of his first term, quoted by Joe Killian, “NC Political, Historical Experts Reflect on Trump Presidency,” NC Newsline, Feb. 2, 2017

It is so much worse now.

Flashback, February 1825: Adams Victory in Disputed Presidential Race Launches ‘Corrupt Bargain’ Charge

With none of the three major candidates winning a majority of votes in the Electoral College, the 1824 Presidential election was thrown into the House of Representatives, which awarded the office to John Quincy Adams in February 1825.

I wrote 15 years ago about Adams’ first year in the White House, while surveying his prior distinguished diplomatic career and consequential post-Presidency. But the month in which he fulfilled his ambition for the nation’s highest office was so astonishing—and such an anticipation of how current thinly sourced smear campaigns can poison the electorate—that it deserves exploration in depth.

With the popular James Monroe declining to run for a third term, the stage was set for an electoral free-for-all in 1824, featuring four candidates:

*Secretary of State Adams, the son of another President, John Adams, drew strength from the Northeast, especially New England.

*Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, looked to a base mostly confined to the West and South, with residual support in the Northeast.

*Treasury Secretary William Crawford, though the favorite of the Democratic-Republican Party establishment, had suffered a debilitating stroke before the election. Though unable to campaign, he retained support in the Deep South.

*Speaker of the House Henry Clay, who earned the least votes in the Electoral College, ended up exerting the greatest influence on the vote.

The election of 1824 was the first that used the procedures outlined in the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which called for the House of Representatives to pick among the top three candidates in the Electoral College.

Those three turned out to be Adams, Jackson, and Crawford. Although Jackson led the Electoral College count (and, most historians contend, what would have been the popular vote), he did not have a majority. Crawford’s medical condition effectively made it a two-man race between Adams and Jackson.

Four years before, it took the Missouri Compromise to avert a civil war over slavery. Many of the sectional differences barely muzzled in that agreement were coming to the fore again.

A sense of déjà vu must have particularly gripped Adams: as in the election of 1800 (lost by his father), it would take a New York Federalist to secure the outcome.

But, while Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton had persuaded his side to vote for Thomas Jefferson rather than Aaron Burr in that earlier election on the 36^th House ballot, it took only one ballot—cast by 60-year-old aristocrat Stephen Van Rensselaer III—to settle matters in 1825.

Legend holds that, while agonizing on the House floor over whom to support, Rensselaer noticed a ballot placed in front of him reading, ADAMS. Believing this to be divinely inspired, the congressman voted accordingly.

If only matters had remained that simple…

In an early attempt at creating a unifying “team of rivals” strategy that Abraham Lincoln later used, Adams asked Crawford to remain as treasury secretary and Jackson to take over the War Department. Both declined.

The selection of the third rival, Clay, sparked enormous controversy. The President-elect knew him as a fellow diplomat in the Treaty of Ghent negotiations that ended the War of 1812, and though he didn’t particularly trust the Kentuckian or care for his drinking and gambling, he knew he was able and shared common domestic policy goals.

Adams asked Clay to become Secretary of State after his House of Representatives victory, not before (contrary to what some Websites and podcasts claim to this day).

But, because Clay had swung the vote of his state’s delegation to Adams, and the State Department had served as a steppingstone to the Presidency for all occupants of the office in the prior 25 years, an anonymous letter soon appeared in Philadelphia’s Columbian Observer charging that the two men had engaged in a “corrupt bargain.”

Eventually, the “anonymous” Congressman emerged from the shadows to admit being the source of the allegation: George Kremer of Pennsylvania.

William Russ, Jr.’s article about the incident in the October 1940 issue of the academic journal Pennsylvania History noted not only that Kremer had “sunk into oblivion, even locally,” but that before and after his moment in the spotlight he was “obscure.” That difficulty in remembering him has only increased with time.

In 1825, Kremer, then completing his first term as a congressman, was hardly a disinterested observer, and certainly not a distinguished one. Successive stints as a storekeeper, lawyer, and two-year state legislator had done nothing to disabuse perceptions that he was a backbench time-server, a reputation not helped by his propensity for wearing a leopard-skin coat on the floor of the House. 

The topic that preoccupied Kremer in Congress–eliminating waste and abuse in government—frequently seemed like a pretext to contest initiatives that involved funding internal improvements—the policies that Clay and Adams supported and that Jackson opposed. Kremer, in fact, often anticipated many of the same arguments that MAGA supporters use today against government expenditures.

Challenged by Clay to testify and offer evidence before a congressional committee that would investigate the corruption allegations, however, Kremer backed down, saying at first, bizarrely, that he hadn’t intended to "to charge Mr. Clay with corruption," then refusing to testify on constitutional grounds, before finally crowing, after his three terms in Congress, how proud he was for his part in spreading the news about the scandal.

To be sure, backers of all four major candidates maneuvered furiously for advantage behind the scenes. But no documentary evidence has ever been produced substantiating the claims about Clay and Adams.

Moreover, despite friction between the two men in the past, even a shouting match, there could be little doubt that the House Speaker preferred Adams to Jackson—or, to put it another way, that Clay regarded Jackson as unsuited for the Presidency by virtue of his military background, hair-trigger temper, and distrust of banks.

None of that mattered to Jackson. He could have remembered that Adams, unlike Presidential aspirants like Crawford and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, had come to his defense in the Monroe Administration over his overly aggressive responses to Native American raids from Florida into Georgia.

But it was easier for him to think he’d lost because of the “corrupt bargain” than because of his incompatibility with Clay. So he not only nursed a grudge against the two men, but encouraged his supporters to regard the new administration as illegitimate—not unlike how Donald Trump convinced his followers that, all evidence to the contrary, the election of 2020 had been stolen from him at the polls.

Like his father, Adams erred in believing that he could govern above the fray, without benefit of political adherents. Jackson would not make the same mistake. (The “spoils system” is one Jacksonian legacy that Trump seems especially eager to copy in his return to the White House.)

When Adams left office four years later, defeated by the man he’d beaten previously, Jackson, he was one of the unhappiest men ever to occupy the White House.

Like his father, John Quincy Adams was so peeved by what transpired in his single term in office that he didn’t stick around for the inauguration of his successor.

Historians still regard Adams as the greatest Secretary of State in our history, and, like Jimmy Carter, he earned great respect for his post-Presidential career (see my prior blog post about his fight against the Jacksonian “gag rule” meant to squelch any opposition to slavery in Congress).

But his term in the White House was virtually unrelieved misery for him and his family, because of the stark mismatch between his lofty policy goals and miniscule political instincts. 

Quote of the Day (Jimmy Carter, on Criticism and Scrutiny of Government Officials)

“Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the public are an important part of our democratic society. Now, as in the past, only the understanding and involvement of the people through full and open debate can help to avoid serious mistakes and assure the continued dignity and safety of the Nation.”—Jimmy Carter, 39^th President of the United States (1924-2024), “Farewell Address to the Nation,” Jan. 14, 1981

‘Golden Age’? How About ‘Gilded Age II’?

Humorist Calvin Trillin, taking note of the fashionably attired friends of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, referred to the festivities surrounding the 1981 Presidential inauguration as “The Night of the Minks.”

Considering the attendees who helped Donald Trump plan his attempted coup four years ago, allowed him to escape legal and political punishment for it, or financed his return to the Oval Office, the parties after this week’s transfer of power might have been termed “The Night of the Finks.”

Viewers were informed, at noon on Monday, that “a golden age for America begins right now.”

Well, the newly inaugurated President got the letter “g” right in the key word in that sentence, but that’s about it. The correct word was “Gilded.”

You might recall “The Gilded Age” as the title of an HBO series about the filthy rich in New York following the Civil War. It took its name from an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirized greed, political corruption, and conspicuous consumption in that period.

Alas, the book’s subtitle has a lasting significance that its collaborators could never have imagined: “A Tale of Today.”

Much like our time, the innovations in technology and finance introduced 150 years ago gave rise to fortunes of staggering proportions and equally vast inequality. The possessors of these riches, memorably dubbed “robber barons,” were—and are—not shy about crushing union and safety activism, buying legislators, and subverting attempts to regulate their businesses even while flaunting their wealth and influence.

Taking note of the assembly of the well-heeled on hand after the oath of office—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, Alphabet Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin, and Apple CEO Tim Cook—one person on LinkedIn hailed “businesses and government [that] run their companies or departments like sports teams who put the best on the field.”

So much depends on the eye of the beholder. He saw business all-stars; I saw successors to the 1933 Weimar businessmen determined but unable to control the twitchy guy who’d taken over their country.

Some of them proceeded cheerfully, others nervously, but all optimistically to congratulate a fellow billionaire who, unlike most of them, was born into wealth, then saved by his father from falling off several financial cliffs in the early 1990s.

If they felt any jealousy over his inherited fortune, they gave no sign of it as they greeted the newly sworn-in President and recently convicted felon. It was more important that he help them maintain their privileged perch—the tax cut that has disproportionately benefited them, the government regulations from which they beg relief.

What they all share is, in the apt phrase of The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer, “a playbook for exploiting public office for private gain.”

Somehow, they all managed to stifle their guffaws over the new President’s hobbyhorse about renaming the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.” Maybe they didn’t realize that the true “Gulf of America” was what now separated them from the poorest, most desperate citizens of their country.

They wouldn’t have found that out from the wall-to-wall, breathless media coverage surrounding the inaugural, which did not constitute political journalism or even fashion reporting so much as plutography—an obscene depiction of the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Stepping to the front of the line to make the most of their relationship with Trump have been Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, until recently the co-heads of the President-elect’s new Department of Government Efficiency—an advisory commission that, Musk blithely assured the public in November, could find $2 trillion in federal spending cuts.

With Musk more recently suggesting that $1 trillion might be more feasible, that hope didn’t make it to the inauguration.

Neither, as it happened, did Ramaswamy, the biotech and finance entrepreneur who auditioned as Trump’s most shameless Mini-Me in the GOP primaries, a candidate utterly unable to articulate a single point of difference with the eventual nominee.

Late last week, having already royally ticked off transition team members with his arrogance, Ramaswamy gave his rapidly growing army of enemies the only weapon they needed with his X post on H 1-B visas. Tech companies, he claimed, hire foreign workers in part because of a mindset in the country that has “venerated mediocrity over excellence.”

With immigration-conscious MAGA believers suitably inflamed, that was all Musk needed to elbow him out of co-leading the commission, according to a Politico report. 

Now, Mini-Me is consoling himself by contemplating a campaign for governor of Ohio, a state that has already inexplicably propelled another former tech finance guy, J.D. Vance, into the political stratosphere.

Not that Musk didn’t cause some head-scratching himself. On Monday night, exuberant over his newly exalted position, the X-Man pushed his arms upward and outward from his chest in a way that the Anti-Defamation League charitably characterized as an “awkward gesture” but that more than a few saw as a Nazi or Fascist salute.

Given Musk’s full-throated support for the far right in Europe (“Only AfD can save Germany, end of story"), his straight-arm gesture the other night looks a lot like Dr. Strangelove’s impulsive “Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!"

Throughout the day and night on Monday, you couldn’t help noticing Melania Trump’s navy blue boater-style toque. The past and present First Lady adored it so much that she kept it on even after she stepped inside the Capitol and watched her husband take the oath of office again.

The hat was really expansive. Could she have been concealing the expression in her eyes from a curious public? Moreover, the President’s niece Mary spoke for many in saying that the headgear was Melania’s ingeniously convenient device for preventing her husband from kissing her.

Much remains to be seen for Trump’s return to power, but in terms of the First Lady’s hat, one can already conclude: Mission Accomplished.

“The robber barons probably looked in the mirror and thought they were God too,” noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in an interview with The Financial Times this past weekend.

As they look in the mirror, how many of these contemporary fat cats must wonder, “If a know-nothing like Trump can get to the White House, why can’t I?”

Just imagine: Even now, as one billionaire after another waltzed around the inaugural ball, at least one—not unlike Yeats’ “rough beast, its hour come round at last” in “The Second Coming”—might have imagined fitting into the MAGA mold of a White House plutocrat in populist’s clothing.

(The image accompanying this post shows the new-money Gladys, George, and Bertha Russell of New York in the Season 2 premiere of The Gilded Age.)

Flashback, November 1874: GOP Midterm Losses Sound Uncertain Trumpet for Civil Rights

Stunned and staggered by the midterm elections, the Republican Party wrestled 150 years ago this month with what to do after losing control of the House of Representatives for the first time since before the Civil War.

Its solution—failing to enforce civil-rights measures that they themselves had enacted—was the opening note in a retreat from the Reconstruction program that President Ulysses S. Grant (pictured) had championed in the defeated Confederate states.

Their surrender would be formalized in the controversial Compromise of 1877 that enabled them to hold onto the White House for Rutherford B. Hayes at the price of withdrawing federal troops from the South.

The surprising magnitude of the GOP losses—"the greatest reversal of partisan alignments in the entire nineteenth century,” according to prominent Reconstruction historian Eric Foner—will feel uncannily familiar to Democrats this month: thinner margins of victory in regions they once won going away, and outright losses in other places considered party strongholds.

Dissatisfaction spread rapidly with the so-called Radical Republican faction, just as moderate Democrats have been heaping scorn on the “woke” segment of their party in the wake of Kamala Harris’ loss of the Presidency to Donald Trump.

Yet the 1874 Republicans, like the 2024 Democrats, fell victim to larger forces with often interlocking impacts on the electorate.

Midterm elections in Presidents’ second terms have been nicknamed “the six-year itch” because of voters’ unease with the party in power. 

The most significant of such losses have, in the case of 1874 as well as 1918, 1938, and 1966, abruptly curtailed reform eras. These epitomized the down points in what the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the cycles of American history.”

The 1874 midterms were particularly consequential, though, because they spelled the premature end of a biracial coalition that redefined the nature of citizenship, expanded voting rights, and sought to increase economic opportunity—with especially significant achievements in passing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

But southern whites rebelled at African-Americans gaining the right to vote and, even more so, winning public office. Despite President Grant’s crackdowns on the Ku Klux Klan, fraud, intimidation, and domestic terrorism had become openly practiced, even institutionalized.

The midterms—which converted the party’s 110-vote margin in the House into a Democratic majority of sixty seats, while giving the Democrats a net gain of 10 seats in the Senate— concluded an awful year for the Republicans and for the freedmen they had made it a point to protect:

*The Panic of 1873 (which I discussed in this prior post) carried over into the next year, resulting in reduced state budgets and lower tax rates, private contractors who leased convicts (the start of the “chain gang” system), and slashed funding for the public schools that had been a major achievement of biracial legislatures.

*Grant’s veto of an “inflation bill,” which had been passed by Congress to mitigate the impact of the depression, gave the Democrats a wedge among eastern immigrants and western farmers.

*The “Sanborn incident,” involving private collection of taxes and excises, engulfed Treasury Secretary William Richardson in scandal and solidified the Grant cabinet’s reputation for corruption.

*The July 1874 collapse of the Freedman’s Bank, with operations promoted by the federal government but assets not regulated or guaranteed by it, depleted the wealth of thousands of African-Americans, left them distrustful of the private sector in the long term, and fueled specious white racist claims that blacks were too ignorant and financially feckless to be trusted with state fiscal responsibility.

*The 1873 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, precipitated by the contested gubernatorial election the year before, set off a firestorm of fraud, intimidation, and domestic terrorism by Democrats—as well as tensions among competing Republican factions— in southern states in 1874, most notably through the White League paramilitary organization that, in perpetrating violence against black officeholders and their white allies, effectively overthrew the governments of Louisiana and Alabama.

* Before the Civil War, white Northerners who went south to own, build, or manage slave plantations suffered little or no obloquy from their new neighbors. Now, however, because of their political alliance with blacks, they were stigmatized as “carpetbaggers” and, through the “Mississippi Plan”—devised in 1874 and implemented the following year—forced them either to switch from the Republicans to Democrats or leave the state.

When a political party loses its will, it runs the risk of losing its way—and that is exactly the situation in which the Republicans found themselves in the aftermath of the midterms.

The Radical Republicans, the party faction that had most zealously pursued racial equality and sought to enforce it in the South through the use of federal troops, increasingly lost favor with a Northern public that, with its minimal goals for the Civil War achieved (the end of slavery, restoration of the union), had no desire for racial equality.

As Ron Chernow noted in his biography Grant, the stinging setback his party was dealt at the polls meant that the new congressional Democratic majority, flashing its investigative powers, “turned a glaring searchlight on executive departments to ferret out corruption, a tactic used to discredit the administration on Reconstruction.” The new House Democratic committee chairs were now also empowered to stall additional pro-civil rights measures by the administration.

With his energy increasingly spent on combating this Congressional mischief and his anxiety rising that the Republicans would be punished further at the polls, President Grant now hesitated to employ federal troops on an indefinite basis against marauding Southern whites lest he be accused of “bayonet rule.”

With this backlash unpunished, Southern Democrats were well-launched on their program of “Redemption” of state governments from Republican rule. They were further aided by a Supreme Court that interpreted the 14^th Amendment broadly in one direction (defining corporations as “persons”) while narrowly construing its civil-rights protections for African-Americans.

It is well-known that, despite losing the popular vote, Republicans retained the White House in the 1876 election with a deal that secured an Electoral College victory in exchange for ending occupation of the Southern states. 

Yet corruption existed on the Democratic side, too, in a campaign of violence that further loosened Republican control of the Southern states.

“Time would reveal that 1874 inaugurated a new era in national politics,” writes Foner, “although one of stalemate rather than Democratic ascendancy.” With control of Congress split between the two parties, little important could get done in the next couple of decades.

As the ancillary rewards of an industrial economy beckoned, Republicans doffed their mantle as the rights-protecting “party of Lincoln” in favor of becoming the electoral home of Gilded Age robber barons.

Lacking the right to vote, blacks also were unable to gain patronage jobs that might have provided a ladder into the middle class, as well as informal welfare to cushion their losses in economic reversals.

The end of Reconstruction marked the dawn of legalized “Jim Crow” segregation—most entrenched politically in the South, but even economically in the North. It also gave rise to a disgraceful school of historiography that greatly exaggerated the failings of the Republican-led Southern governments in Reconstruction.

It would take W.E.B. DuBois’ 1935 masterful reassessment of the post-Civil War period, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, and especially the revisionist historians who more assiduously investigated the period beginning 20 years later, before the successes and failures of these governments could be more fairly weighed.

The residue of the failure to achieve genuine racial equality, however, continues to poison American politics, stymieing economic progress and encouraging extremism.

This Day in Presidential History (Birth of Jimmy Carter, ‘Dasher’ From Plains)

Oct. 1, 1924— Jimmy Carter, who rose improbably from a humble speck on a map to the highest office in the land, was born in a hospital in Plains, Ga.—the first Oval Office occupant who came into the world in this formal medical institution.

Plains left its imprint on Carter in all kinds of ways. Indeed, it lies at the heart of one of the paradoxes of his life: a leader of fierce ambition who nevertheless kept coming back to a community and way of life where he could be of service.

Not that he never had the opportunity to leave for good, or that others didn’t want him to move. For instance, wife Rosalynn (a fellow Plains native) regarded it as a “monumental step backward” when he announced he was resigning from the U.S. Navy in 1953 to return to the town where his father Earl had made a difference in the life of other residents as a successful businessman who continually aided others.

When Carter’s Presidency ended after a single term in 1981, he didn’t go on the lecture circuit where he could charge exorbitant fees to business and industry groups, or hobnob on Martha’s Vineyard with fashionable culturati, but went back to Plains, where, finding the family peanut business $1 million in the red when placed in a blind trust during his President, they began to pare down their debt as they started a new life.

Trust me: It can be difficult blogging about a person or event in such a way that readers come away having learned anything new. No matter how often one may return to someone as consequential as a President, no single post, no matter how intrinsically interesting (as I believe was the case with Carter’s energy policy, recounted here), can do justice to a career.

For that reason, when I can, I try to write about something I’ve experienced directly relating to that. Fortunately, there were two such events relating to Carter.

The first involved not President Carter, but candidate Carter. Back in 1976, when he first ran for President, he had devoted much of his early resources to the Iowa Presidential caucus, effectively putting that state on the political map by placing first among the Democratic contenders. 

The code name that the Secret Service initially used for him, “Dasher,” testified to the tireless marathon campaign he subsequently conducted until his victory that fall.

The New Jersey Democratic primary, though held in June, was nothing like the afterthought it’s become in recent quadrennial cycles.

As a high school sophomore then in the first week of June, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see a potential President once I learned Carter was coming to my hometown of Englewood, NJ.

(I felt the same way in 1984, when Gary Hart came to Bergen County. I’m afraid that the candidate subsequently got into hot water when he took literally the musician warming up the crowd for him, Stephen Stills, when he performed “Love the One You’re With.”)

The 1976 Carter appearance in Englewood occurred at Galilee United Methodist Church, whose primarily African-American congregation was emblematic of one of a major component of the base he was cobbling together in a campaign that took the Democratic establishment by surprise.

Carter was introduced to the crowd by civil rights icon Andrew Young, eloquently vouching for him as an exemplar of a “New South” shedding its segregationist past at long last—a characterization all the more helpful for any in the audience who recalled the candidate’s remarks only two months before in which he used the phrase “ethnic purity” to defend the purity of white neighborhoods in cities.

(After his election, Carter appointed Young U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations—then forced his resignation two years later in the fallout over an unauthorized meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization.)

I don’t recall any policy positions that Carter enunciated that afternoon—he had carefully blurred many of them throughout the primary season—but I vividly remember, as he vigorously shook one hand after another, that grin so toothy that it became the fallback feature for cartoonists during his Presidency.

And I recollect the circumstances he faced then: Major rivals on the right (George Wallace, Henry Jackson) and the left (Morris Udall) had lost losing key primaries, leaving only Sen. Frank Church, Gov. Jerry Brown, and aging party lion Sen. Hubert Humphrey in a last-ditch “Anybody But Carter” movement.

The key takeaway of Carter’s address, then, in between his usual stump speech that he would be offering “a government as good as its people” to a country sick of Washington, was that the Democratic powers that be were united against him.

If this moment in time has any significance at all now, it’s as a foreshadowing of what happened with the Republicans 40 years later, when alarmed party leaders mounted their own effort against a candidate they feared would not make it that fall: Donald Trump.

In both campaigns, the leading candidate had built up too high a delegate candidate—and there were still too many candidates dividing the opposition to him—for the “Stop” movement to work.

The second event related to Carter that I was involved with, indirectly, came after he left office. Not only, like most 20^th century Presidents, did he want to write a memoir giving his side of the story, but, with so much debt hanging over his head from the decline of the peanut business, he wanted to do so quickly.

Still, he wanted to do a good job of it—so, as he had done before he delivered his disastrous “crisis of confidence” speech in 1979, he called together the best minds he could think of for their advice. One such expert was the college professor I had for a year-long seminar on the American Presidency.

So my professor polled his experts—his students—on the single subject they wanted the President to cover.

I don’t think my topic was unusual. As much as anything else, the protracted Iranian hostage crisis had conveyed an image of American impotence, and had probably crystallized for the public a growing sense of Carter as incompetent. The Iranian militants had already given signs of growing radicalism. Why, then, had Carter agreed to admit the Shah of Iran for cancer treatment?

Carter insisted that he’d been told that the Shah was so close to death that the treatment he required was only available in the U.S. (It turned out, as Robin Young and Samantha Raphelson reported for Boston’s NPR affiliate WBUR in January 2020, that David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and former shah attorney John J. McCloy exaggerated the lack of medical options available to the Shah.)

The group gathered to meet Carter in 1981 included among its luminaries Edmund Morris. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt urged the ex-President to concentrate on creating a narrative, stressing that Carter’s was a great story that demonstrated the possibilities of America.

Published a year later, Carter’s Keeping Faith turned out to be in much the same vein as nearly all Presidential memoirs: stodgy and self-justifying, not one that most readers would enjoy reading. Maybe he just needed time to find his voice and best subject matter, though: An Hour Before Midnight, his memoir of growing up in Plains, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002.

What struck me about Carter’s meeting with these historians was less what he (or they) said or did but how he appeared—or, rather, how he and Rosalynn appeared. The sofa where the two sat was quite large, my professor recalled, but the former First Couple sat so close together that it represented a casual, maybe even unconscious, indication of their comfort in each other’s company, the product of a marriage that lasted 77 years—the longest in Presidential history.

With so much of Carter’s career turning on improbabilities, maybe the greatest of all might be the final chapter going on now. The former President has been in hospice care for 19 months, a far cry from the six months that 90% of such patients undergo.

He has defied the medical odds, just as he defied the low expectations of those who met him for the first time years ago. He has outlived some of his detractors and earned the surprised respect of others (including me) who regard him as a model for a modern ex-President.

Surely, Carter regards his longevity as a blessing—but even many Americans who thought of him as ultimately a failed President are likely to see what he has served as an active private citizen as a blessing to his country

Quote of the Day (Woodrow Wilson, on Universities and ‘The Object of Learning’)

“It is the object of learning not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of individual men, but also to advance civilization; and if it be true that each nation plays its special part in furthering the common advancement, every people should use its universities to perfect it in its proper role. A university should be an organ of memory for the state for the transmission of its best traditions. Every man sent out from a university should be a man of his nation, as well as a man of his time.” —Woodrow Wilson, 28^th President of the United States and Princeton University President (1856-1924) , “University Training and Citizenship,” The Forum, September 1894, reprinted in The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: College and State—Educational, Literary and Political Papers (1875-1913), edited by Ray Stannard Baker and William Dodd (1926)

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, on “The Worst Offense… Against the Republic’)

“The worst offense that can be committed against the Republic is the offense of the public man who tries to persuade others that an honest and efficient man is dishonest or unworthy. This wrong can be committed in a great many ways. Downright foul abuse may be, after all, less dangerous than incessant misstatements, sneers, and those half-truths that are the meanest lies.”—U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), “The Duties of Privilege,” originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, August 1894, reprinted as “The College Graduate and Public Life” in American Ideals and Other Essays, Social and Political (1897)

Theodore Roosevelt might have imagined individuals given to “downright foul abuse” or “incessant misstatements, sneers, and those half-truths that are the meanest lies,” but not a politician who could engage in both.

He could denounce robber barons resorting to ruthless business practices like monopolies, price-fixing, and bribery, but he could never foresee that one of these “malefactors of great wealth” he had criticized in a 1907 address could simply eliminate the middle man by entering politics as a means of further enriching himself and his family.

He could call for the idle rich of his time to enter politics in order to rescue it from machine politicians, but could never have guessed that many in this educated class would acquiesce in corruption themselves.

Most of all, though he did not have much use for the Democratic Party of his day, he would never have believed that his Republican Party—the same one to which his beloved father belonged, the party of Lincoln that had saved the Union and advocated for the rights of freedmen—might one day meekly yield to new forces of disunion and leave the nation dangerously fractured along racial, ethnic, class, and religious lines.