This Day in Presidential History (Washington Seeks Treaty Advice; Senate Punts)

August 22, 1789—For the second time in less than a month, the U.S. Senate managed to tick off George Washington. This time, however, the Father of His Country, barely able to contain his anger, set a precedent in how future Presidents would abide by the treaty provision of the Constitution.

As the man who presided over the Constitutional Convention, Washington took with the utmost seriousness the document negotiated so painstakingly in Philadelphia. On this particular occasion, the clause about “advice and consent” came into play.

Washington was struggling with one of the most vexing problems of the young republic, one that would bedevil the United States for more than a century (and, some would argue, to this day): how to treat Native Americans.

The Treaty of Paris in 1783 had unleashed a trans-Appalachian wave of white settlers into lands occupied by Native-Americans—just as, ironically, the conclusion of the French and Indian War had encouraged American colonists to migrate west.

Washington approached the problem with a mixture of hard-headed realism and moral fervor.

He knew that a restless Native-American population within American territory or just outside its borders could serve as an ally of a hostile power—as had happened in the American Revolution, when he had felt compelled to order General John Sullivan to lead a detachment into upstate New York to eliminate Britain’s Indian confederates as a fighting force.

At the same time, Washington—along with the two other principal aides involved with Indian policy, Secretary of War Henry Knox and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson—believed, as historian Joseph J. Ellis wrote in American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, that “Indian removal was incompatible with the republican values they cherished."

Washington studied that treaty clause again. It was rather terse, but clearly some form of early participation by the Senate was envisioned.

It indicated that the President had “Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.'' Maybe even a council of advisors from the group might be warranted. Such a group would help the President secure a treaty with southern Indians, as well as the backing of Congress for the venture.

So Washington strode into the Senate chamber, with the hefty Knox puffing behind and ready to offer technical details on the negotiations with the Creek Indians.

Though Washington sat in the presiding officer’s chair while Vice President John Adams read his message, that six-foot-two-inch frame—several inches larger than the average male size of the day—filled the room anyway. Maybe that impression was furthered because the image-conscious President came in carrying his sword—a not-so-subtle reminder that momentous matters of war and peace were at stake.

(The President, a theater buff, sure knew how to milk a moment--he had advertised his availability to lead the army early in the war by wearing his officer's uniform from the Virginia militia, and as the war concluded he had put out a potential officers' mutiny caused by congressional foot-dragging on pay by taking out his spots, noting that he was aging and losing his sight in the service of his country, reducing just about everyone assembled to helpless blubbering.)

I say the Senators were sweating bullets in that August heat because a) Washington, for all his undoubted greatness, had a well-deserved reputation for hauteur; and b) they knew that one of them had managed to get under his skin a few weeks before.

Just over two weeks previously, a Senator from Georgia had invoked the concept of senatorial courtesy for the first time, helping to reject the President’s appointment for a naval post in Savannah because it hadn’t been cleared with him first--and he resented the fellow. Washington had replied with characteristic iciness (“Permit me to submit to your consideration whether on occasions where the propriety of Nominations appear questionable to you, it would not be expedient to communicate that circumstance to me, and thereby avail yourselves of the information which led me to make them, and which I would with pleasure lay before you").

This time, the advice Washington sought related to seven questions. Considerate fellow that he was, he didn’t design them as open-ended questions (“What do you think about…?”) or even as those multiple-choice monstrosities that have given agita to several generations of SAT takers. No, these questions only required a yes or no. Nothing hard.

Finally, Adams finished reading. “Do you advise and consent?” he asked.

The 26 freshman Senators at the time sat in absolute silence. At last, Robert Morris of Pennsylvania—who, as financier of the American Revolution, had grown used to General Washington’s frequent (usually futile) requests for aid—whispered to home-state colleague William Maclay, according to the latter’s journal: “We will see who will venture to break silence first."

Maybe the Senators thought the President was going to use that sword on them. In any case, whether the items Adams read didn’t sink in or they decided to revert to old habits, the self-styled “world’s greatest deliberative body” indicated that it needed more time.

In short, it did what it would always do so reflexively over the next two centuries: it referred the matter to a committee.

Now the President acted in a way that evoked what some of those present might have recalled at the Constitutional Convention, when the President announced that someone had been careless about leaving notes around—i.e., exposing the delegates to leaks— or what just about all of them must have heard about from the Battle of Monmouth, when the Continental Army’s commander in chief had turned on his dilatory subordinate, Gen. Charles Lee, and, reliable reports indicated, "turned the air blue" with his language.

The President, Maclay observed in his journal, “started up in a violent fret. ‘This defeats every purpose of my coming here,’ were the first words that he said.”

As the first President, Washington became famous for establishing wise precedents. Would that the same could be said for Congress. The Senators began offering one contradictory motion after another.

Years later, Vice-President Adams’ son John Quincy Adams—himself appointed to the diplomatic service by Washington, before succeeding him and his father in the Oval Office—pondered the result in his diary:

When Washington left the Senate chamber he said he would be damned if he ever went there again. And ever since that time treaties have been negotiated by the executive before submitting them to the consideration of the Senate.

Quote of the Day (Sila Calderon, on the Importance of Libraries)

“Governing and public service are a balancing act, and there are no pain-free ways to save millions of dollars in taxpayer money in this terrible economy. But the libraries don't just serve one interest. They serve everybody - bringing the world to the wealthy, to the middle class, and crucially, to the disadvantaged and underserviced communities.”—Former Governor of Puerto Rico (and current New York Public Library trustee) Sila M. Calderon, “A Recession is no Excuse to Slash Support for Our Libraries,” New York Daily News, June 9, 2009

Quote of the Day (Dwight Eisenhower, on “Prophets of Gloom and Doom”)

“During these long months, while this program [tax reform] was being developed and brought before the national Legislature--debated, argued, and enacted--there have been sitting on the sidelines, of course, the prophets of gloom and doom. Some of them saw a great inflation that the policies of the administration in taking off controls was leading to. They have been proved wrong.”—President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Address at the Illinois State Fair at Springfield, August 19, 1954

I should have written about this quote two days ago, on the 45th anniversary of the day it was delivered—but William Safire’s “On Language” column in The New York Times Magazine from last March inexplicably (and, more important, incorrectly) listed the date as two days later than it actually was. You just can’t trust left-wing newspapers—nor the rightwing pundits they have hired in their ideological-affirmative-action-program—anymore!

The column reflected Safire’s fascination with how the rhyming phrase (“gloom and doom”) was echoed in later coinages: “nattering nabobs of negativism” (written by the former Times op-ed columnist when he was a speechwriter for the abominable Spiro Agnew) and “troubadors of troubles and crooners of catastrophe” (Clare Boothe Luce, laying on the archness a bit too thickly for my tastes).

Nowadays, Dwight Eisenhower is little credited with eloquence, even by admirers. As a former speechwriter himself, under his commander in the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur, he had become a bit dry-eyed about the uses of rhetoric, telling an aide that if Americans wanted a wordsmith in the Oval Office, “we ought to elect Ernest Hemingway.”

But in his own way, he contributed a far number of catchphrases that made their way into the language of politics, with the most famous ones being “the domino theory” and “the military-industrial complex.”

What interests me about this particular speech is not its scintillating rhetoric (of which it is nearly shorn) so much as its very ordinariness. Indeed, its one memorable phrase—the one Safire quoted about “prophets of gloom and doom”—stands out all the more starkly for being part of an address designed to be folksy rather than grandiloquent--sort of the way, I recall a connoisseur of Dylan songs wrote some years ago, that "Like A Rolling Stone" would have a seemingly endless stream of banal phrases, only to conclude each verse with an absolutely savage line ("And say, would you like to...make a deal?")

This kind of speech is your bread-and-butter Presidential “Rose Garden” speech—i.e., one that you dash off for a not especially memorable occasion. It was nothing like Ike’s “Atoms for Peace” speech, when, casting about for a different tone—and, as it turned out, a different policy—he required multiple drafts before getting what he wanted, on a matter he considered of crucial importance.

Again, this was an ordinary occasion—a midterm rally—in front of the kind of mid-America audience that had swept the President into office nearly two years before. And Ike was speaking in front of an unusually warm, appreciative crowd (225,000 strong—the largest in the history of that state fair, at least up to that point), engaging in the usual kids of stuff visiting Presidents do: making mild-mannered fun of a local politico, urging the crowd to vote Republican—as well as what every President, no matter what his party, just loves to do: crow about his success.

Many Americans look back on the Eisenhower administration as a decade of peace and prosperity, and it is true that, except for a mild recession toward the end of his second term, America did not experience the economic failure being predicted by economic soothsayers.

In another sense, though, that success bred a complacency that encouraged Americans not to examine their business shortcomings too much—leaving the auto industry, for instance, vulnerable to Japanese carmakers who built more dependable, fuel-efficient vehicles.

Moreover, a success that Ike claimed on the foreign-policy front—preventing Iran from going Communist—turned out to be a pyrrhic victory at best, since the CIA-sponsored coup did as much as anything else to poison attitudes in that country toward Americans as any other single event over the past half-century.

If the Eisenhower era was not quite the paradise its supporters claim, there is no doubt that the President’s foray into wordsmithing was a success. When I typed “prophets of gloom and doom” into Google, I got 93,600 hits—the vast majority of which, I’d wager, haven’t the least idea where the phrase came from.

This Day in Theater History (Home Secured for Ireland’s Abbey Theatre)

August 20, 1904—With the aid of a wealthy Englishwoman, the Irish National Theatre Society was about to end a nomadic existence that saw it in five different venues in six years when the troupe purchased a lot on Old Abbey Street in Dublin.

The facility—site of the old Merchants’ Institute, with additional property tagged onto the site from an adjacent lot that had once housed a morgue—was retrofitted to become the Abbey Theatre, a driving force in the Irish Literary Renaissance that would later produce the plays of John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw, and William Butler Yeats.

One of the more interesting quotes I came across while researching this post came from an exceptionally unusual source: Theodore Roosevelt, in a piece published in The Outlook in December 1911:

“In the Abbey Theatre Lady Gregory and those associated with her–and Americans should feel proud of the fact that an American was one of the first to give her encouragement and aid–have not only made an extraordinary contribution to the sum of Irish literary and artistic achievement, but have done more for the drama than has been accomplished in any other nation of recent years. England, Australia South Africa, Hungary, and Germany are all now seeking to profit by this unique achievement.”

Take a look at that quote. Today, for theater aficionados, it merely states the obvious. In the Abbey’s early days, however, this was really going out on a limb, and Roosevelt should be accorded due credit for foresight—and, indeed, you can consider it done here.

Nevertheless, you’re undoubtedly wondering: why did I call T.R. an “exceptionally unusual” source about this? Well, consider:

* He was an inveterate Anglophile, with not a great amount of relish for things Irish—and, judging from his interactions with members of Tammany Hall in his first days in politics, not a terrible amount of affection or understanding for Irish emigrants to the U.S.

* Despite a larger-than-life personality that lent itself repeatedly to dramatists and screenwriters (e.g., The Wind and the Lion), T.R. did not, unlike George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, evince much interest in the theater.

* Since returning from his African game-hunting sojourn (a far more characteristic TR activity!), Roosevelt’s attention had been increasingly absorbed by the passive, conservative tendencies of his successor in the Presidency, William Howard Taft—so much so that he was considering splitting the Republican Party by challenging Taft for another term.

* The hyperactive T.R. seemed constitutionally incapable of sitting still for a minute, so imagining him sitting for two hours watching a performance not his own boggles the mind.

Roosevelt showed his support for the Abbey at a crucial time in its American tour: Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World was sparking protests, just as it had in Dublin at its premiere. His praise came at the urging of his blueblooded Boston friend, art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner—who, in turn, was spurred on by Lady Gregory.

It was natural that Lady Gregory would spearhead this effort. Though not considered one of the geniuses of the Irish Literary Renaissance, it is inconceivable that this movement—and, in particular, the Abbey Theatre—could have come to fruition without her.

It wasn’t only that this member of the Protestant Ascendancy encouraged (and sometimes even financially supported) some of the male members of the group; that she wrote 25 plays herself, many of which were among the most popular mounted by the theater in its early years; or that she was a director of the institution from its founding until her death in 1932.

No, the playwright-folklorist also served as proselytizer and businesswoman behind what might have seemed initially like a hopelessly quixotic venture.

Annie Horniman, an enthusiastic if eccentric theater aficionado, agreed to fund the project, but because she resided in England, the patent from the royal crown required to operate the theater needed someone from Ireland. (It was probably just as well that Ms. Horniman stayed somewhat in the background—had opponents of the theater known that she’d based her funding decision on a tarot-card reading, there’s no telling what use they would have put this knowledge.) That turned out to be Lady Gregory.

For all its contributions to Irish culture, the Abbey Theatre had a difficult time just surviving in its early days. In contrast, the company often played to packed houses when it toured the U.K. and U.S.

The theater was also, of course, not without controversy. The best-known battles were waged against patriotically correct rioters screaming against Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. But even the in-house battles that resulted in the exiles of O’Casey and Frank O’Connor could be enervating.

And yet, the group’s glories endure. To Ireland’s eternal credit, the Abbey became, in 1924, the first state-subsidized theater in the English-speaking world. It awakened not just a country but a world to the possibilities of a dramatic movement based on authenticity rather than on melodrama.

One who felt the influence most powerfully was Eugene O’Neill, the first indisputably great American playwright, who noted: “As a boy I saw so much of the old, ranting, artificial, romantic stage stuff that I always had a sort of contempt for the theatre. It was seeing the Irish players for the first time that gave me a glimpse of my opportunity."

Song Lyric of the Day (John Lennon, on the End of the Beatles)

“I was the walrus,

But now I'm John,

And so dear friends,

You just have to carry on.

The dream is over.”—John Lennon, “God,” from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970)

“I don’t believe in Beatles,” John Lennon sang in this same song—and on this date 40 years ago, he proved it.

There had been tensions among the members of the Fab Four for awhile: the year before, Ringo Starr had temporarily left the group (though it was short-lived and not publicly announced), and George Harrison had followed suit on January 10 while working on what would later become the documentary film Let It Be.

But now, after a 3½-hour mid-afternoon session at their Abbey Road studio, when the band had settled on the final mix of Lennon’s “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and organized the master tape for the Abbey Road album, the Beatles had spent their last hours recording together as one unit. (For an in-depth—and very fine—description of this last session, see this post from the “Beatle Tracks Band” blog.)

The phrase “never again” is a harsh one, and for that reason, despite the legal acrimony that was about to ensue, I doubt that any of the Beatles believed, in their heart of hearts, that this was the end. Maybe it wouldn’t be as a touring band, but they’d shared too much for the goodbyes to mean forever.

But two days later would be their last photographic session, and three weeks after that Lennon would tell his bandmates that he was through. (The secret would still be kept for several months before Paul McCartney finally announced that he was going.) And who on earth would ever expect that, 11 years later, any attempt at a reunion would forever be short-circuited by Lennon's murder?

Nevertheless, if you have to go out, there are far worse ways to go—and few better—than the Beatles did with their swan-song LP, Abbey Road. They’d called upon the services of their old-pro producer, George Martin, when the live-in-studio sessions surrounding what was intended to be called Get Back collapsed in disagreements over the final product.

(Madman producer Phil Spector came out of retirement to try to pull that mess together. The resulting album, Let It Be, horrified McCartney as soon as he listened to all those strings on “The Long and Winding Road.” Yet, for all its brilliant parts, I’m not sure his version--titled Let It Be…Naked-- released nearly six years ago, is much, if any, improvement.)

The result of Martin's renewed collaboration with Paul, John, George and Ringo was a triumph. It not only marked the undeniable emergence of Harrison as a songwriting talent with “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something” (described by Frank Sinatra, who would know, as the greatest love song of all time), but provided, in the “Golden Slumbers” suite on Side 2, one of the most ambitious, unexpected—and beautiful—set of minutes throughout the Beatles’ entire recorded output.

With all due respect to the late, great John, the dream is not over. Like Todd Rundgren (who produced an early Beatles parody-homage, Deface the Music), I say that “A Dream Goes on Forever.” Listen to Abbey Road again and tell me if I’m not right.

This Day in Catholic History (Humanist Pius II Elected Pope in Unholy Manner)

August 19, 1458—They ate and slept alone in dark cells specially built for their irregular meetings. They huddled in the hall and even in the privies, engaging in zenophobia, browbeating, bribery, and maybe a couple of prayers. When they were finished, the College of Cardinals had elected Aeneus Silvius Piccolomini, a humanist and reformed roué, who took the name Pius II.

That brief description only hints at what happened in the papal conclave. In its way, Pius’ election was as much a free-for-all and scandal as the American elections of 1800, 1824, 1876, 1960, and 2000.

In choosing Pius, the 19 cardinals assembled picked an aging poet who epitomized “The New Learning” of the Renaissance, a descendant of an aristocratic Italian family fallen on hard times—a marked contrast to his chief opponent, Guillaume d'Estouteville of Rouen, a Frenchman not above using family wealth and the power of the French king to his advantage.

Men both holier and more corrupt than Piccolomini have succeeded to the ancient leadership position once held by St. Peter. Few, however, have exceeded Pius in strength of intellect, complexity of character, or the surprising twists of his life.

How can I give you an idea of what he was like? Okay, try this: a cross between Geoffrey Chaucer and St. Thomas Becket.

Were he alive in the 20th century, I suspect Piccolomini would probably have spent the first part of his life as an auteur of the kind of Italian sex comedies that featured actresses such as Sophia Loren, Laura Antonelli, and Monica Bellucci. Instead, living in the High Renaissance, he made do with poetry, and especially De Duobus Amantibus (“A Tale of Two Lovers”), which readers couldn’t wait to snap up at the time. (Years later, after becoming pope, he attempted to round up and put out of circulation as many copies of this now-embarrassing work as possible. To his regret, nobody wanted to part with it.)

Verses, dialogues and letters poured from his pen. (Even one of his uncompleted works-- Historia rerum ubique gestarum—served a useful purpose as a vast compendium of scientific and geographic knowledge of the day, and was heavily annotated by Christopher Columbus as he sought to persuade one royal patron after another to back his voyage to the Indies.) Even the poet’s first name reminded humanist admirers of the recovery of ancient civilization.

By the time he turned 40, Piccolomini’s romantic exertions (including liaisons with a Scotswoman and an English lady that produced children) had physically and spiritually exhausted him. He was not only ready to renounce women for good (“Women is an imperfect creature…without faith, without fear, without constancy, without piety!”) but to take a step he’d been avoiding for years: holy orders. His rise through the upper ranks of the Vatican after that point was inexorable, rendering him papabile (like it sounds, “pope-able,” or a potential Pope candidate).

On opening day of the 1458 conclave, the odds-on favorite of the cardinals, Domenico Capranica, died suddenly, and factions formed quickly to seize his supporters. The principal point at issue was the rising influence of the French king in the wake of the Hundred Years War.

One of the fullest—albeit most biased—contemporary accounts of the ensuing events was a chapter in Pius’ autobiography, heavily redacted by Vatican censors after his death. His summary of d'Estouteville’s campaign pitch, in Secret Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope, reeks of the latter's naked ambition: “I am learned in pontifical law and can boast of royal blood. I am rich in friends and resources with which I can succour the impoverished Church. I hold also not a few ecclesiastical benefices, which I shall distribute among you and the others, when I resign them.”

In what Pius would call “the conspiracy of the privies,” d'Estouteville’s cabal among the cardinals met in the toilets because it was secluded. “A fit place for such a Pope to be elected!” Pius fumed. “For where could one more appropriately enter into a foul covenant than in privies?”

If Pius had given up on lust, he was not without pride, sometimes to an absurdly unself-conscious degree (“it was common talk that Aeneas, Cardinal of Siena, would be Pope, since no one was held in higher esteem,” he observes about his standing with the people). Now that stood him in good stead, as he faced down d'Estouteville’s pledged supporters.

One by one, he peeled them off, until he stood tantalizingly close to becoming pope. In particular, Aeneas played on the international situation, shrewdly appealing to the patriotism of the Italian cardinals, warning that d'Estouteville could very easily shift Vatican operations to France altogether.

The French cardinal had one last trick up his sleeve. As one of the three appointed to certify the accuracy of each vote, he announced at one point that Aeneas had eight votes. Nobody spoke until Aeneas urged the counters to “look more carefully at the ballots.” They did, and discovered that he had nine votes.


When one of the voters, Cardinal Prospero Colonna, changed his mind and decided to cast his lot with Aeneas, supporters of d'Estouteville tried to push him out of the room by force. But it was too late.

Pius was about to embark on a term short (five years) but not without fireworks (in one extraordinary confrontation, he wheeled on one of his tormenters among the cardinals, who had claimed that he should be made a saint, and announced that he'd do so, all right-- he would “canonize him to hell!”) or consequences (he was about to lead another Crusade when he caught fever and died).

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on the Horrors of Breakfast Talk)

“In England people actually try to be brilliant at breakfast. That is so dreadful of them! Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.”—Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (1895)