Photo of the Day: At Least Somebody Loved ‘America’s Worst President’

When I took this photo in Washington in November 2013, I could not foresee using it anytime soon. Then New York Times columnist Gail Collins’ piece from earlier this week, “Hillary Versus History,” engaging in what she called “random irrelevant trivia about presidential elections of the past”—but which, one suspects, she regarded as anything but irrelevant to today—gave me the opportunity.

The last time one Democrat was elected to succeed another, without first becoming Vice-President, was when James Buchanan followed Franklin Pierce, back in the election of 1856. That one didn’t go over terribly well. Buchanan, despite one of the most glittering pre-Presidential resumes in history, became a disaster.

Was Buchanan “the worst President ever,” as Collins suggests? My vote still goes to Richard Nixon, for his cynicism, vindictiveness, and the gargantuan set of scandals that, for the sake of simplicity, is now remembered with the word “Watergate.”

But I’ll grant Collins the point that even Tricky Dick has not only defenders, but even Democratic historians who, looking back in the 35 years since Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, reluctantly allow that this GOP predecessor had his good points as far as domestic policy was concerned (e.g., the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency).

Collins is indisputably correct, that “you very seldom run into fans of Buchanan, the man who cozied up to slaveholders and failed to stop Southern secession.” That is why, when I came upon the James Buchanan Memorial in today’s “Photo of the Day” a year and a half ago, I was absolutely dumbfounded.

I’m not going to get into the aesthetics of this sculpture of James Buchanan by Hans Schuler in DC’s Meridian Hill Park (now also nicknamed “Malcolm X Park”—a moniker that, if Buchanan could hear it now, would give this Northern “doughface” sympathizer of the South fits). But I must say that I had a WTF? moment when I read its inscription: “THE INCORRUPTIBLE STATESMAN WHOSE WALK WAS UPON THE MOUNTAIN RANGES OF THE LAW.” And framing him between statues of "Diplomacy" and "Law"--too much!

The only people who could have wanted such a memorial made, with such a ludicrous description of his character and legacy, would have been Southern Democratic segregationists who never got over their loss in the Civil War, I figured. But not so—they weren’t pushing to see him honored, either. On the other side, there was active opposition from the most prominent Senate Republican of the time, Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, who noted that the statue would honor the only president "upon whom rests the shadow of disloyalty in the great office to which he was elected."

So who wanted it? As Brady Carlson wrote, in an entertaining post on the memorial, it was Buchanan's niece. Yes, his niece.

The only bachelor to become President, Buchanan never had any offspring. (I’m not going to get into the issue of whether or not he was gay—not in this post, anyway.) But he needed someone with the feminine touch to help with social occasions. When the widower Thomas Jefferson became President, that function was filled by the wife of his Secretary of State, Dolley Madison (giving her great on-the-job training for when she officially filled the role, as the actual President’s wife). Now, under Buchanan, that function was performed by Harriet Lane. It is one of the great anomalies of White House history that the first person known to have been called “First Lady” was not the wife of the President, but his niece.

Buchanan looked on his niece not just as something like his daughter (he had, in fact, adopted her, after the death of both her parents when she was 10) but also—surprisingly enough for someone so conservative—as an intellectual equal, someone whom he could sound out for advice on career decisions, for instance. Twenty-six years old when her uncle was inaugurated, she was, by all accounts, a lively, intelligent young woman who, in a different time, might have aspired to high office herself.

James Buchanan’s life was blighted by national tragedy; Harriet’s, by personal tragedy, as her husband and two sons died within three years. Quite affluent by this time (the mid-1850s), as a result of inheritances from her uncle and her banker husband, she devoted the remainder of her life, as recounted in this 2006 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article by Mark Roth, to eminently worthwhile philanthropy: improving prison and hospital conditions, establishing an institute for the blind in New York and fighting illegal liquor sales on Chippewa Indian reservations.

But part of her estate, at the time of her death in 1903, was earmarked for a memorial to her uncle. Nowadays, the government would practically grab with both hands at a project in which no public funds would be expended (particularly when what would be $100,000 in today's currency would be involved), but for a long time there were no takers. Then, with somebody noticing that her bequest came with an expiration date—15 years—lawmakers reluctantly signed on, perhaps consoling themselves with the thought that the project might mean more work for the construction industry.

Though Woodrow Wilson signed the legislation enabling the memorial, it was another President, almost as maligned as Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, who spoke at the monument’s dedication. Hoover—beleaguered, in the form of the Great Depression, by the steepest challenge to face an American President since the secession movement that made Buchanan so unhappy—made one assertion that, while historically debatable, was, given his own predicament, heartfelt:  “James Buchanan occupied the presidency at a moment when no human power could have stayed the inexorable advance of a great national conflict.”

But another sentence, about the contribution of Buchanan’s niece to this most unexpected bit of DC memorial art, was inarguable: “It is due to Miss Lane's devoted appreciation of his kindness that this statue has been erected."

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, on a ‘President of the Whole People’)

“The candidate is the candidate of a party; but if the president is worth his salt he is the president of the whole people.”– President Theodore Roosevelt, speech at City Park, Little Rock, Arkansas, October 25, 1905

This quote struck me with full force these last couple of days during a week at the Chautauqua Institution devoted to “America 1863”: specifically, how American Presidents in the 1860s determined “the whole people.” James Buchanan was so set on placating Southern slaveholders that the possibility of the most basic rights for African-Americans never entered his mind. Andrew Johnson, who initially wanted to deal harshly with the planter class for driving secession, eventually fell victim to the poisonous consciousness this group inflicted on poor whites by allying himself with the slaveowners against freedmen.

It was only Abraham Lincoln, with his “new birth of freedom,” who enlarged the notion of “the whole people.” The 13^th Amendment, outlawing slavery, was, as indicated in the Steven Spielberg film Lincoln, legislation that Lincoln pushed through an often-recalcitrant Congress. It gave irresistible momentum to the 14^th Amendment, which declared that all persons “born or naturalized in the United States” were citizens—not only the slaves that the war revolved around but also the immigrants subject to the prejudice of the “Know-Nothings” in the 1850s. As such, the 14^th Amendment sought to put into practice Lincoln’s great line: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.”

Andrew Johnson would have been appalled at Theodore Roosevelt’s expansive notion of executive power. But the latter notion rested on T.R.’s belief that the President was the “steward of the people,” a stance that allowed him to arbitrate, more fairly than his predecessors, between capital and labor, and to conserve our national parks for “the whole people” of future generations.

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.)