Son of Timatollah

I just finished the first volume of Allan Nevin’s Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (Easton Press, 1932). That marks the halfway point (for now) of my reading of biographies of the presidents of the United States in order of their service.

I'm not exactly sure when I started the project, sometime in 2004 or so, I think. I had read bios of Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin in the early 2000s, then David McCullough's John Adams: A Life, and Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis, before I dove in and found a Washington bio. It's been fairly steady since then.

Cleveland, elected in 1884, defeated for reelection in 1888, but elected again in 1892, is considered both the 22nd and 24th president. One of my trivial gripes with President Obama is his sometimes referring to the forty-three previous presidents, when there have been only forty-two previous presidents, but forty-three previous presidencies.

I couldn’t find what I felt would be a truly comprehensive recent bio of Cleveland. I pick these by reviewing sources on the Wikipedia page for the president whose bio I’m going to read, and then skimming Amazon reviews of the candidate bios. At Amazon, one learns that there are quite a few people out there who are engaged in or have completed this same project. So I ended up with this two-volume work, perfectly split with volume one finishing with Cleveland’s defeat by Benjamin Harrison, grandson of William Henry Harrison. William Henry Harrison's presidency is remembered almost solely for its short duration—Old Tippecanoe became ill almost immediately after his inauguration and only served 32 days—and its giving us the first instance of a vice-president ascending to president after the president’s death. (Tyler was a total mess.)

While matters of situation lead Democrats to want to compare President Obama to Franklin Roosevelt and matters of temperament lead one to compare him with Lincoln, it would be wise for a greater number of contemporary Democrats to study the presidency of Cleveland. Cleveland was elected president after having served previously for one-term as mayor of Buffalo and only one-half of his term as governor of New York. His success in Buffalo rooting out corruption and his success in Albany in spite of opposition from Tammany Hall within his own party had made him the choice of good-government types in both parties.

The GOP of the time had held the presidency since 1860 (excepting the weirdness that was the Andrew Johnson administration), and it had controlled both the House and the Senate for most of the same time. While its opposition to slavery was clearly its core strength during the Civil War and during Reconstruction, its recognition of an active role of the general government in developing the national economy was also clear at the time of its founding. That active role grew in the post-Civil War era into a cozy relationship between business and the GOP that continues to this day. And not unlike this day, there had also evolved in the Democratic Party and goodly number of politicians who had ties to both national and local industry. The big businesses of the day were railroads, who had received numerous grants, concessions, franchises, and subsidies from the federal and state governments to build rail lines locally and across the continent; iron and steel, with plants in the “New South”, e.g. Birmingham, joining existing mills in Pennsylvania and New York; and textiles (still located then along the fall line from New England into the Piedmont). Labor had just begun to come onto the scene.

Both finance and taxation were issues during the times, with Civil War import tariffs still on the books, even having been increased in the time since the war. The Federal government enjoyed revenue in surplus of its expenses, largely due to those tariffs, as well as taxes on liquor and tobacco, and most everyone recognized that the surplus would eventually lead to an end to federal indebtedness, something the economists of the time, as likely would those today, recognized as just as great an evil as continually increasing debt. Federal bonds were part and parcel of the monetary system then, just as they are now. The money of the time was gold coin, silver coin, and greenbacks, and the use of fiat money (greenbacks) was unpopular with creditors and financial interests of the east, but very popular with the debtors and the farmers and developers of the west.

We can look forward to a 2012 campaign in which health care, taxes, deficit/debt, and money are issues, with the last not really being able to be debated much because the Federal Reserve remains, for now at least, mostly off limits to debate. Excepting Ron Paul, few candidates on the right openly discuss the crazy idea of returning to basing the money supply on the ability to mine a selected metal (as much as many of them might like to). The campaigns of 1888, 1892, 1896, and 1900 would see each of the issues above come into consideration and dispute.

In 1888, the tariff was the dominant campaign issue, with Cleveland’s vigorous call for tariff reform—both reducing the surplus and leading toward freer trade—coming too late in his first term to prevent his proposal being defeated and giving the Republicans and their business supporters an issue they used successfully to prevent his reelection, but leading to the excesses of the McKinley tariff of 1890. At the time, though, big employers had far greater leverage over the votes of their employees, since unionization was rare, and employers could either escort their employees to the ballot box and ensure how they voted, or still, in some cases, collect the ballots of their employees and have them taken to the ballot box themselves. There was a time, we forget, before the Australian ballot.

Not to draw the parallelism too closely, but the contemporary debate over taxes is similar. The current tax structure, brought to you by a GOP bought lock, stock, and barrel, by big business and big finance, in cahoots with a substantial wing of the Democratic Party, similarly in the pocket of big finance (more) and big business (some), gave us the Bush era tax cuts, which, as sensible people know, has continued a shift in wealth from the middle-class to the rich without delivering one bit the promised increase in jobs or prosperity. The Gilded Age tariffs, similarly, put big money into the pockets of industrialists and financiers, by protecting their businesses from foreign competition while increasing the cost of necessities and other products to those who farmed and those who worked.

Cleveland began his term recognized as a conservative Democrat with some connection to those with financial interests, particularly in his being a hard (gold) money guy. But he clearly came out for a more sensible structure for tariffs that would reduce the costs of raw materials and manufactured products, to the advantage of ordinary citizens. The debt situation of his time is topsy-turvy to ours now, but the necessity of reforming the way the Federal government raises revenue is just as important in this election as it was then. We have to ensure that all pay their fair share, understanding that it is completely and totally fair to expect those who can pay more to actually pay more through real, progressive income tax rates.

So, I encourage my fellow Democrats to learn more about President Cleveland and not to look only to the Great Depression and FDR for parallels in economies and politics.

Labels: biography, cleveland, gilded age, grover cleveland, obama, parallel, president

Okay, a backlog of half-thought ideas that have been half-stewing in the back of my half-brain. Just for you.

• People seem to think that just because someone is capable of running a mean-spirited take-no-prisoners political campaign that somehow that makes them capable of securing the national defense, conducting a war, anticipating emergencies, leading the nation through bad times. Recent history—Bush 43, Clinton, Bush 41— suggests that's not the case. If anything, recent history suggests that the correlation is negative.


• What is so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding? I don't think that question has been successfully answered.


• Air traffic, for all it's problems, like Frontier's taking all the bags off of the incoming flight to Denver from Orlando to the International Gates the other day, from which they had to bring them back one baggage cart at a time (it took four trips, and my bags were on carts 3 and 4), is effectively teleportation. The very idea that you can get into a metal tube and be across the continent in less than six hours, around the world in less than a day, remains an incredible human accomplishment.


• I finished the William Henry Harrison bio last week some time. Very interesting, because, as with the bio of Andrew Jackson, it concerns what was then known as The West—between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi—and the clash between US nationals and other immigrants and the Indian populations. Also, compared to the bio of Martin Van Buren, it was an enjoyable read. This may be because it was written in 1939 instead of 1996. Alas, the bio of John Tyler that I am currently reading, also written before WWII, is not as enjoyable, because the author seems intent on pushing The Noble South idea and Tyler's devotion to it.


• The iPhone is truly enjoyable. The web browser actually works, and it syncs up so well with the Mac compared to the hoops I used to have to jump through to get info to sync with my old Palm Treo.


• Why do so many meditation exercises focus on the breath? Well, if the point of meditation is to reduce attachment, what is the single thing one, anyone, is most attached to? Ever been around someone with COPD/emphysema?


• I haven't watched these Reverend Wright videos, and I don't intend to anytime soon. Okay, so Obama's preacher is out there. Instead of asking—or implying—if Obama shares the same views, why not ask instead how it is that Obama can address patriotism from such a clear and meaningful perspective and maintain his friendship with his former minister who seems to have said some face-value unpatriotic things. There's a Covey idea which is "don't give up, don't give in," that might apply here. I look forward to hearing more of what Obama has to say about it. It is important to listen to those we disagree with, even those whose ideas repulse us, maybe especially if the people spewing those ideas are close to us, even if you are running for President of the United States. I'm not for misplaced loyalty, but I am for appropriate loyalty.


• Jeopardy!: 23 April. Don't worry, there'll be more reminders.

Labels: air, biography, breath, iphone, Jeopardy, meditation, obama, potpourri, presidential, teleportation, traffic, treo

I just finished reading Ralph Ketcham's James Madison: A Biography (University of Virginia Press, 1990; originally published 1971). A brief glimpse of what I learned:

• Madison was originally for representation proportional to population in the Senate, as well as in the House. He was opposed to the compromise by which the states got equal votes in the Senate, which, of course, gives voters in Wyoming disproportionate power relative to voters in California. However, he came to embrace the compromise and the Federal system that evolved from it.

  The document finally approved was in some ways very different than the plan he had proposed in May. The small states had imposed what Madison persistently regarded as the unjust and impractical principle of state equality in the Senate. The clause empowering Congress to "negative" state laws, long thought by Madison to be the only effective way to prevent state encroachment on national authority, had been dropped in favor of the less explicit supreme-law clause. ...Madison came gradually to see the virtue of this change. An enumeration of the powers to Congress was substituted for the broad power "to legislate in all cases to which the separate States are incompetent." After the decision in favor of state equality in the Senate, Madison more and more approved enumeration as a necessary check on a poorly constructed Congress.



• What one might call Madisonian Republicanism—Aside for a pet peeve: The anti-Federalist faction of Jefferson and Madison that continues today in the form of the Democratic Party came to be called, at the time, Republican. Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and more all considered themselves Republicans, devoted to republican principles. The "Democratic-Republican" label popular in lists of office holders is an after-the-fact usage designed to distinguish that faction from the contemporary Republican Party, founded before the Civil War in Ripon, Wisconsin. The rate of evolution of the then Republican Party into the Democratic Party will progress in a step-like fashion when we get to the administration of Andrew Jackson. End pet peeve. Where was I? Oh yeah—Madisonian Republicanism is based on the idea that all political power comes from the people. It is assigned by the people to the national government formalized by the Constitution, and it is, in parallel, assigned by the people to the various state governments. In no way was the Constitution as envisioned by Madison, or the national government, a result of the allocation of power by the states to the national government. The power is allocated by the people to both.


• Madison, by serving as Jefferson's Secretary of State, helped deal himself the bad hand he had to play as President. The slowness by which he and Jefferson came to understand the necessity of a strong navy in order to have a chance to stand up to British or French insults meant that when Jefferson left office, the navy that John Adams had gotten built up had largely been let go to rot. Madison showed no willingness to expend political capital to develop the military means of resisting either European power. Madison had to wait until into his term for War Hawk Republicans to be elected (e.g., Henry Clay), almost organically and not by any strength of Madison's leadership, to pass legislation to strengthen the military.


• Madison's main weakness as President has to be seen, in my opinion, as his inability or delay to put the right people into the right positions. Because of a divergence of opinion with Monroe during the end of the Jefferson administration (Monroe was run by some Republicans as an alternative to Madison for President), Madison ended up with a Secretary of State who actually worked against administration efforts. Monroe only assumed the office in 1811, two years into Madison's first administration. He had several ineffective Secretaries of War, not relieving one, Armstrong, until after the burning of Washington, even though it was obvious that the Secretary was not following Madison's directions.


• Madison's second weakness as President was an unwillingness, in general, to lobby Congress to pass laws supporting his policies. The naval example above is just one instance. Likely from his role in the development and ratification of the Constitution he was constrained by his previous statements as to what Presidential power was, how it was to be exercised, etc. So he stayed put, at the White House, certainly socializing with Congressmen and their wives at Dolley Madison's regular events, but not really doing the kind of horse trading required to advance policies. (That approach may last until Jackson: I'm not expecting either Monroe or John Quincy Adams to behave much differently.)


• In reading both Jefferson's and Madison's biographies, you learn who the people were that give their names to so many of the locales in the southeast and other parts of the USA: Albert Gallatin, the Swiss-born financier who was Secretary of the Treasury to both Jefferson and Madison; Alexander Dallas, the Pennsylvania financier, who replaced him; Giles, Lowndes, Grundy, Macon, and Roane all morph from place names to the people those places are named for.


• Madison actually served longer as Rector of the University of Virginia than Jefferson did.


• Madison lived until 1836, dying within a week of the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Some wanted for him to take stimulants so he could last until that day, joining Adams and Jefferson (1826) and Monroe (1831) as Presidents who had died on Independence Day.

And now, on to Monroe.

Labels: biography, james monroe, ketcham, monroe, president, ralph ketcham