Skip to main content <#maincontent>
We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!
Internet Archive logo A line drawing of the Internet Archive
headquarters building façade.
Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.
Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.
Upload icon An illustration of a horizontal line over an up pointing
arrow. Upload
User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up
| Log in
Web icon An illustration of a computer application window
Wayback Machine
Texts icon An illustration of an open book.
Books
Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip.
Video
Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker.
Audio
Software icon An illustration of a 3.5" floppy disk.
Software
Images icon An illustration of two photographs.
Images
Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape
Donate
Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses.
More
Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by
interacting with this icon.
Internet Archive Audio
Live Music Archive Librivox Free
Audio
Featured
* All Audio
* This Just In
* Grateful Dead
* Netlabels
* Old Time Radio
* 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
Top
* Audio Books & Poetry
* Computers, Technology and Science
* Music, Arts & Culture
* News & Public Affairs
* Spirituality & Religion
* Podcasts
* Radio News Archive
Images
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Featured
* All Images
* This Just In
* Flickr Commons
* Occupy Wall Street Flickr
* Cover Art
* USGS Maps
Top
* NASA Images
* Solar System Collection
* Ames Research Center
Software
Internet Arcade Console
Living Room
Featured
* All Software
* This Just In
* Old School Emulation
* MS-DOS Games
* Historical Software
* Classic PC Games
* Software Library
Top
* Kodi Archive and Support File
* Vintage Software
* APK
* MS-DOS
* CD-ROM Software
* CD-ROM Software Library
* Software Sites
* Tucows Software Library
* Shareware CD-ROMs
* Software Capsules Compilation
* CD-ROM Images
* ZX Spectrum
* DOOM Level CD
Books
Books to Borrow Open Library
Featured
* All Books
* All Texts
* This Just In
* Smithsonian Libraries
* FEDLINK (US)
* Genealogy
* Lincoln Collection
Top
* American Libraries
* Canadian Libraries
* Universal Library
* Project Gutenberg
* Children's Library
* Biodiversity Heritage Library
* Books by Language
* Additional Collections
Video
TV News Understanding 9/11
Featured
* All Video
* This Just In
* Prelinger Archives
* Democracy Now!
* Occupy Wall Street
* TV NSA Clip Library
Top
* Animation & Cartoons
* Arts & Music
* Computers & Technology
* Cultural & Academic Films
* Ephemeral Films
* Movies
* News & Public Affairs
* Spirituality & Religion
* Sports Videos
* Television
* Videogame Videos
* Vlogs
* Youth Media
Search the history of over 835 billion web pages
on the Internet.
Search the Wayback Machine
Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.
Mobile Apps
* Wayback Machine (iOS)
* Wayback Machine (Android)
Browser Extensions
* Chrome
* Firefox
* Safari
* Edge
Archive-It Subscription
* Explore the Collections
* Learn More
* Build Collections
Save Page Now
Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in
the future.
Please enter a valid web address
* About
* Blog
* Projects
* Help
* Donate
* Contact
* Jobs
* Volunteer
* People
* Sign up for free
* Log in
Search metadata
Search text contents
Search TV news captions
Search radio transcripts
Search archived web sites
Advanced Search
* About
* Blog
* Projects
* Help
* Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape
* Contact
* Jobs
* Volunteer
* People
Full text of "The Man In The White House His Powers And Duties
"
See other formats
THE MAN IN
THE WHITE
HOUSE
His Powers and Duties
WILFRED E. BINKLEY
* THE MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE
This page intentionally left blank
THE MAN IN THE
White House « « «x
HIS POWERS AND DUTIES
BY Wilfred E. Binkley
The Johns Hopkins University Press, BALTIMORE
MEIS NURIBUS
Alice
Isabel
Ruth
Martha
© 1958 The Johns Hopkins Press
© 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Originally published, 1958
Second printing, 1960
Third printing, 1968
Johns Hopkins Paperback edition, 1970, 2009
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
ISBN 13: 978-0-8018-9266-0
ISBN 10: 0-8018-9266-X
Preface
* THIS TREATISE onthe American presidency
has been undertaken in the belief that it is time to take one more
comprehensive survey of the institution into which that office has
evolved. Nearly half a century ago Woodrow Wilson took excep-
tion to the then widely held mechanistic theory of government
with the observation that politics responds to the law of Darwin
and not of Newton. This analogy of organic development suggests
an appropriate pattern of interpretation of the American presi-
dency as an ever evolving institution. No matter what the Consti-
tution of 1787 prescribed for the office of president, deep-seated
forces inherent in American society, playing upon the presidency
for more than a century and a half, have transformed the office
created by the framers into the unique institution the presidency
is today.
Laconic indeed is the Constitution in its provisions for the
presidency, but these provisions have been magnified, minimized,
tortured out of the plain meaning of the Constitution’s words, or
even serenely ignored, all by way of statute, judicial judgment, or
sheer usage and custom. For example, the Founding Fathers
envisaged a nation free from national political parties, a nation in
which quadrennially assemblies of notables (presidential electors),
convening in their respective state capitals with each elector
exercising his individual judgment, would vote blindly by ballot
for two persons, not knowing which of his two choices might help
elect the president and which the vice-president. But natural forces
in American society promptly set to work, political parties
emerged spontaneously, in due time national party conventions
unexpectedly evolved as products of pure custom, which they
remain to this very day, sheer usage converted the Electoral
College into nothing but the registrar of the popular vote, and the
presidency designed by the framers was converted into the authen-
tic organ of American democracy. The would-be partyless presi-
dent was meanwhile transfigured into the political chieftain of the
party that elects him.
The Constitution gave the president the veto power ostensibly
to protect his office from potential congressional aggression, but
strong presidents utilized the veto to make the presidency indubi-
tably the third house of the national legislature. The Supreme
Court has held that, as chief executive, functioning in the field
of international relations and as the head of a sovereign nation,
the president of the United States possesses inherent plenary
powers invisible to the eye of the uninitiated reader of the Consti-
tution. Moreover, as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces
the president can constitutionally dispatch troops to the moon
just as soon as the wizards of modern mechanics have devised the
appropriate apparatus of transportation.
Shifting metaphors from biology to geology, it can be said that
the administrations of strong presidents such as Washington,
Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts each in its
turn has deposited an alluvial sediment and thereby contributed to
the formation of the strata that constitute the bedrock of the
presidency today. Verily the great office like all other institutions
has its fascinating natural history.
Wilfred E. Binkley
Ada, Ohio
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Incorporated in this book are some parts of articles first
published in periodicals: “The Presidency as an Institution” in
the Western Reserve Law Review (Summer, 1954); “The President
as a Symbol” (September, 1952), and “The President as Chief
Legislator” (September, 1956) in the Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, and “President and
Congress” in the Journal of Politics (February, 1949). I am great-
ful to the editors of these periodicals for permission to use parts
of these articles in a revised form. The typing was done by two
competent secretaries, Mrs. Betty Boyer of Pittsburgh and Miss
Sally Allen, a student at Ohio Northern University, both of whom
fortunately understood what they were typing.
The reprinting of The Man in the White House, first published in
1958, is sponsored by the Johns Hopkins University Press Advisory
Board in honor of Christopher Lynch and with grateful acknowledgment
of his service.
Contents
Preface v
The Presidency as an Institution 1
Apprenticeship for the Presidency 21
Pressures on the President 51
The Influence of Nominating Methods 79
The Presidency as Molded
by the Campaign and Election 96
The President as Party Leader 114
The President and Congress 142
The President as Chief Legislator 161
The Chief Executive 185
Implementing the Presidency 206
The Commander-in-Chief 225
The President as Chief Diplomat 245
The Vice-Presidency
and Succession to the Presidency 262
The President as a National Symbol 288
Bibliography 298
Index 305
This page intentionally left blank
The Presidency
as an Institution
* IN ONE OF those exquisite phrases that he so
neatly turns, Walton Hamilton characterized the term institution
as “ʻa verbal symbol which for want of a better describes a cluster
of social usages.’ That phrase, “a cluster of social usages,” serves
to floodlight the concept “‘institution.’’ As to the particular insti-
tution under consideration, we seem never to have neglected the
presidency as a product of Constitution, statute, and judicial inter-
pretation. But if the mythical Man from Mars were to arrive and,
by some miraculous means, were to become cognizant of every
clause of the Constitution, every statutory provision and every
judicial judgment pertaining to the president, he would yet be woe-
fully ignorant of the presidency as an institution.
He would lack that which vitalizes the great office, that is, the
“cluster of social usages” that makes it a dynamic institution. He
would know nothing of those extralegal organizations, the major
political parties, which exist on a national scale, above everything
else, for the purpose of electing the president and which conse-
quently determine so largely what the presidency has been, is,
1 E. R. A. Seligman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vii, 84.
2 * The Man in the White House
and will be. He would know nothing of the national nominating
conventions that emerged without preconceived design and the
presidential campaigns that follow. He would lack knowledge of
the inauguration and the inaugural parade, which are utterly de-
void of legal validity but are none the less profoundly significant
of the great institution to the nation that views the majestic spec-
tacle from sidelines or as telecast over the national hookups. There
is the president’s leadership of his party and of Congress, his use
of patronage, his personal charm, if any, his tours of the country,
his public addresses and fireside chats. Here is but a random sam-
pling of the usages that, in their totality, constitute some essentials
of the presidency as an institution.
Walton Hamilton further observed that “institution is the sin-
gular of which mores or the folkways are the plural.’? But these
mores frequently make the transition into what the late Franklin
H. Giddings denominated ‘“‘stateways,” that is, laws with their
inevitable sanctions. This transition is what the philosopher
Emerson must have meant when he wrote, “The law is only a
memorandum.” He might as well have said, “Here are the mores
which we have reduced to writing in order that they may not be
forgotten.” The Constitution and even more the statutes pertain-
ing to the presidency are, as we shall see, by and large political
mores that have somehow made the transition into stateways.
It was a shrewd observation of President Grover Cleveland that
“Before I can understand a political problem I have got to know
how it originated.” Now that we are to investigate problems of
the presidency let us see how the office came about. We shall dis-
cover that it is a peculiarly American institution, that it had its
genesis in embryo in the first permanent English settlement in
America, the Jamestown colony in 1607.
The settlement of Jamestown was undertaken as a get-rich-quick
enterprise. Elizabethan and Jacobean England was fascinated with
fantastic tales of gold and silver and other resources in Virginia,
2 Ibid.
The Presidency as an Institution * 3
where the rich hauls of Cortez and Pizarro were, they believed,
about to be repeated. The London Company, a joint-stock cor-
poration, sold stock to eager buyers in England sure of enormous
dividends. The charter granted by James I was that of a com-
mercial corporation that, of course, required a business manager,
designated by the charter as governor. But since this economic
enterprise was to operate in a wilderness utterly devoid of civil
government, the manager was, by the terms of the charter, inci-
dentally constituted a magistrate to enforce the laws of England
in the Virginia settlement. A similar official functioned also under
the later charters of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay settle-
ments and indeed in all the thirteen colonies. The American pres-
idency is indeed a lineal descendant of that old colonial office of
governor, either a grandchild or a great-grandchild of it.
No dividends were ever declared by the London Company, and
King James eventually wound up the venture by annulling the
charter when the colony was only seventeen years old. But the
King then appointed a royal governor of Virginia and provided
him with a commission conveyed in an elaborate document in-
cluding, among other things, the civil powers of governor quite
as in the charter. In other colonies the letters patent, conveying
the land title to proprietors such as William Penn and Lord
Baltimore in Pennsylvania and Maryland, made the proprietors
governors invested with powers similar to those previously men-
tioned in the charter colonies and the royal provinces.
In due time there were thirteen colonies, with thirteen gover-
nors, thirteen governor’s councils gradually evolving into upper
branches of legislatures, and thirteen popular assemblies elected
by the colonists. But the royal agents, the colonial governors,
were sometimes practically compelled to come, hat in hand, to
the door of the colonial legislature pleading for funds for every
purpose, even for their very salaries. The colonial legislature had
3See these charters in William Macdonald, Documentary Source Book of
American History (1929), pp. 1-90.
4 * The Man in the White House
become absolute master of the purse strings.‘ So miserable did
they make the life of the governor that one American scholar has
declared that the American Revolution was consummated twenty-
five years before Lexington.
At any rate, when independence was achieved and the colonies
had become states, the state constitutions they framed promptly
reduced the governors to the “‘mere ciphers” that Madison de-
nominated them in the Federalist papers. So odious indeed had
the colonial experience made the very title governor that four rev-
olutionary states, in search of a decent term, designated the chief
executives of their states presidents, which title the framers of the
Philadelphia Constitution serenely appropriated for the chief ex-
ecutive of the United States.
The intense antipathy generated against the executive in coloni-
al times planted a persistent American prejudice against the ex-
ecutive. Repression of the chief executive was virtually a dogma
of the Webster-Clay Whigs, and the Republican party is by no
means free from it today. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that
the grim specter of the old colonial governor to this very day
haunts the chambers of our state legislatures and the halls of our
Congress. The Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution,
limiting the president to two terms or sometimes little more than
a term and a half, and the proposed Bricker Amendment, de-
signed to limit the president’s negotiating power in foreign re-
lations, are only recent incantations designed to lay the ghost.
There will be others.
Since the Congress, under the Articles of Confederation, had no
delegated power to exact statutes, no national executive as such
existed in America prior to the Constitution. It was when the
+ Charles E. Merriam, A History of American Political Theories (1926), pp. 34-
37.
5 The Federalist, No. 48
6 Alexander Johnson, “What the Federal Constitution Owes to the Several
States,” New Princeton Review (1887). Quoted by James Bryce, The American
Commonwealth (Commonwealth ed., 1908), u, 719.
The Presidency as an Institution * 5
framers of the Constitution provided the imposing list of legisla-
tive powers for Congress’ that the creation of a national executive
became imperative. This, however, required no stroke of inven-
tive statesmanship but merely the appropriation and adaptation of
the native American institution of the executive already 180 years
old. The evidence that this is precisely what the framers did is
found in one clause after another of the Philadelphia Constitution.
There was no need of inventing a title for the new American chief
executive when they could merely reach out and appropriate that
already used for the chief executive in Delaware, New Hampshire,
Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. When the framers made the
president commander-in-chief, they only copied precisely what the
framers of twelve of the thirteen state constitutions had already
done with their chief executives. The president was given the pow-
er of pardon in imitation of the governors of nine of the states.
Almost all of the states prescribed a form of the executive’s oath
of office, and apparently Gouverneur Morris only rephrased that
of the Pennsylvania Constitution in his own incomparable style.
“Not creative genius,” wrote the late Professor Alexander John-
son, “but wise and discreet selection was the proper work of the
Convention.’’* Verily the president of the United States was cre-
ated in the image of the state governor, and he is in fact a glorified
state governor.
On one item the framers failed to practice the art of statesman-
ship—on the method of electing the president. One can scarcely
do better than quote Alexander Johnson on this matter: “The
presidential electoral system was almost the only feature of the
Constitution not suggested by State experience, almost the only
feature that was purely artificial, not a natural growth, and de-
mocracy has ridden right over it.”’» Curiously enough the framers,
early in their deliberations, had decided to have the president
7 U. S. Constitution, Art. 1, sec. 8.
8 Alexander Johnson, op. cit. above, Chap. I, note 6.
9 Ibid.
6 * The Man inthe White House
elected by Congress just as the governor was then elected by the
legislature in most states. But this might have made the president
only a bigger “cipher” than the governors.
In plain truth the Electoral College was scarcely expected to
elect presidents after Washington would no longer be available.
The Constitution provided that each state was to choose, in any
manner that its legislature might prescribe, a number of electors
equal to the total number of its senators and representatives in
Congress. These electors, meeting in their respective state capitols,
were to vote for any one they personally thought suitable for pres-
ident and vice-president. Since formal nominations or political
parties were not anticipated, the framers expected that the elector-
al votes would be so widely scattered among the many voted for
as not to produce the majority required for election oftener than
once in twenty times as delegate George Mason calculated’® or
once in fifty times as he later estimated it. So the framers provided
that the real election would take place in the House of Represent-
atives, which would ballot on only the five who stood highest in
the scattered balloting of the Electoral College, with each state
casting one vote.
It was the unanticipated emergence of political parties as early
as the third presidential election that upset the calculations of the
framers and converted the presidential electors into the automata
or dummies that have transformed the Electoral College into an
organ for registering, somewhat inaccurately, the popular major-
ity. Here is the most influential one of the “cluster of social us-
ages” constituting the institution of the presidency. Arthur W.
Macmahon epitomizes the matter in his statement that “‘consider-
ed nationally political parties in the United States may be de-
scribed as loose alliances to win the stakes of power embodied in
the presidency.” The powers of the presidency are what our major
10 Chas. C. Tansill (ed.), Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the American
Union, 69th Cong., Ist Sess., House Document, No. 398, p. 663.
u Encyc. Soc. Sci., X1, 596.
The Presidency as an Institution * 7
parties exist to capture and control. It is the competition for that
very power that determines largely what the presidency as an in-
stitution has become and is today. No matter how bravely a pres-
ident may proclaim his personal convictions, he is inevitably the
organ of the most influential interest to whom he owes his election.
And Franklin Roosevelt, President by the electoral votes of every
state but two small ones in 1936, would possess and exercise power
impossible to Rutherford B. Hayes, declared elected by the margin
of a single furiously disputed electoral vote, and moreover only a
minority of the official popular vote. It is a fair approximation
to say that the presidency is today to no small extent what our
political parties have made it. Here again is the handiwork of
American folkways and mores with a minimum of stateways.
In our own generation the usages of the Electoral College have
come to make the presidency peculiarly sensitive to minority
groups concentrated largely in metropolitan centers. One of these
usages that long ago became a stateway is the election of the pres-
idential electors at large in each state, instead of by districts as
they originally sometimes were. Thus in each state the election of
presidential electors is, for the political parties, a game of all or
none. For example, this makes it theoretically possible for the
Negro vote in half a dozen big pivotal states to throw a presiden-
tial election to either party. This is true of other minorities suffi-
ciently determined to act in concert on election day. The recent
striking gains in civil rights are largely due to the balance of voting
power wielded by such minority groups in the great cities of pivot-
al states. One need only read President Truman’s veto of the Taft-
Hartley Act to see that it was consciously designed to hold the
party loyalty of a minority group, labor. The presidential elections
of 1952 and 1956 only suspended the decisive functioning of these
interest groups as balances of power. It was the stars in their courses
that fought for General Eisenhower—the stars on his uniform—
quite as they had done for General Grant. Judging by his elab-
orate legislative programs he learned promptly the art of wooing
8 » The Man inthe White House
the support of these minority groups. The program of the welfare
state stands secure. The ballots of minorities, with their balances
of power functioning through the usages of the Electoral College,
compel presidents and presidential candidates to play the game of
outpromising each other in legislative programs. Thus they hope
to capture the ballots of the minorities that collectively constitute
the majorities required to elect presidents.
The letters of Washington just before he assumed the duties of
the presidency reveal a deep concern as to what the public expect-
ed of him and what it would tolerate in his conduct of the new
office. He was acutely aware of an utter lack of precedents for
an American national chief executive.: He knew he would be es-
tablishing precedents, and he desired that they “may be fixed on
true principles.” The elaborate inaugural ceremony accompanying
his taking the oath of office did not pass unchallenged. Today we
generally recognize that, while the inauguration itself has no legal
force, it nevertheless symbolizes the fact that the president is chief
of state as well as chief executive. But to the post-Revolution pur-
ists the inauguration was a conspicuous violation of Republican
simplicity and an inexcusable aping of monarchy.
The elective branch of the colonial legislature had clung to the
control of finance with the tenacity of a bulldog. In this tradition
Congress established the Treasury Department and required that
it report directly to Congress, so that half a century later it was
still being debated whether the Treasury was an executive depart-
ment. Washington appointed Hamilton Secretary of the Treasury,
and in accordance with the law and the requests of the House of
Representatives, Hamilton made his famous reports to Congress
on manufacturers and on finance and pushed through the houses
his famous measures—the Hamiltonian program. What of Wash-
ington’s legislative program? There was none. Hamilton, an invet-
erate Anglophile, immediately upon appointment had assumed
that he was prime minister, even asking his friends to call him by
12 James Hart, The American Presidency in Action, 1789 (1948), pp. 7, 8.
The Presidency as an Institution * 9
that title, in the tradition of the British Chancellor of the Excheq-
uer. The conduct of the government was rapidly falling into the
pattern of a parliamentary system. Washington, without any con-
scious shirking of responsibility, was dropping into the back-
ground with a separateness suggestive of the British monarch.
Here is a striking illustration of the extent to which the presidency
is at any time a “‘cluster of social usages.” How often has the pres-
idency come to a parting of the ways and taken one instead of
another fork of the road? As strong as the trend toward parlia-
mentary usages then was, it promptly encountered adverse social
forces so strong and deep-seated in the emerging American politi-
cal culture that the trend was soon reversed.
When Washington in person first delivered to Congress what we
today call the State of the Union Message, critics promptly dubbed
it the Speech from the Throne. When the reply to this message
was prepared by the two houses and then sent to Washington’s
residence to be delivered by the Vice-President, it was pronounced
downright mimicking of British practice, which unquestionably it
was. A year earlier Patrick Henry, speaking in the Virginia Con-
vention that ratified the Constitution, had declared that the Con-
stitution “‘squinted toward monarchy.” Before Washington had
been President half a dozen weeks he received a letter from a
friend in Virginia who wrote that Henry’s phrase, “‘squints toward
monarchy,” was in every mouth." It was a dozen years later that
President Jefferson, a son of the Piedmont frontier and thoroughly
habituated to the American folkways, promptly ended the reign of
the “monocrats,”’ as he had dubbed the Federalists, and “put the
Ship of State on its Republican tack,” to use his own picturesque
phrasing. By then the trend had already set in that, in the milieu of
our own political mores, would transform the presidency into what
Grover Cleveland was long afterward to characterize as “peculiarly
13 See W. E. Binkley, President and Congress (1947), p. 37.
14 James Hart, The American Presidency in Action, 1789 (1948), p. 14.
10 * The Manin the White House
the people’s office.”
Washington soon needed advice—an advisory council. Every
colony had been provided with a governor’s council, and this organ
had been evolving into the upper house of the legislature, but with-
out losing all its executive functions. Elliott’s Debates on the
making and ratifying of the Constitution of the United States con-
tains nearly a dozen scattered references to the United States Sen-
ate as a “council of appointment,” or a body associated with the
president “to manage all our concerns with foreign nations.’’s
Indubitably the Senate is a legitimate child of the governor’s
council, and it carries to this day vestigial evidence of its ancestry.
Among these vestiges are the confirmation of presidential appoint-
ees and the ratification of treaties.
Quite naturally, President Washington turned first to the Senate
for his appropriate councilors. This was not strange at a time when
the upper house had only twenty-two senators, two states not hav-
ing yet ratified the Constitution. Washington made his first visit
to the Senate chamber with a set of propositions concerning a pro-
posed treaty with the Indians. What could be plainer than the
Constitution’s provision: “He shall have power, by and with the
advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two-
thirds of the Senators present concur”? Now Washington took
the chair of the Senate just as the governors customarily did when
conferring with their councils. Vice-President Adams read the first
proposition for the treaty and turning to the senators asked, “Do
you advise and consent, etc.?”” The question was greeted with stony
silence. Here was a momentous instant in the laboriously emerg-
ing institution of the presidency. Senator Maclay of Pennsylvania
finally broke the awkward silence by asking for some of the papers
pertaining to the matter and a little later urged that the matter of
‘5 Jonathan Elliot (ed.), Debates, Resolutions and Other Proceedings in Conven-
tion on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, (1827-46), 1, 47, 287, 306; m,
220, 221, 489, 493, 494, 496; v, 549.
The Presidency as an Institution * 11
the treaty be referred to a committee. Thereupon, according to
Maclay, Washington “‘started up in a violent fret and said, ‘This
defeats my every purpose in coming here.’ ” When Washington
left the Senate chamber that day, he is reported to have said that
he would be damned if he would ever come back there. Another
fork in the road to be taken had been determined. Treaties would
simply have to be negotiated by the president or his agent before-
hand and the draft submitted to the Senate for its consideration in
his absence as is done to this day.
In the first session of Congress the Senate confirmed all Wash-
ington’s appointees but one. Here was another constitutional
power suggesting the intention of the framers to make the Senate
a council for the president that was to sit with him while consider-
ing the nomination of an appointee. Washington’s one nominee
who was not confirmed was to have been collector of customs at
the port of Savannah, to which nominee the Georgia senators had
objected. The astonished President sent the Senate a message sug-
gesting that, in such cases, the Senate might ascertain the presi-
dent’s reason for the appointment. This was ignored, and the us-
age, euphemistically denominated ‘‘senatorial courtesy,” had be-
gun.” As a consequence it can be set down that usage has literally
reversed the Constitutional provision, so that it is the Senate that
virtually nominates and the president that gives consent. It was
now clear that, no matter what the framers of the Constitution
may have intended, the Senate simply would not serve as a coun-
cil advising the president. Usage is a sovereign that can reduce a
provision of the written Constitution with which it conflicts to
sheer dead letters.
Washington finally got his executive council or advisory body
scarcely by design but rather by accident. The Constitution, with
t6 James Hart, The American Presidency in Action, 1789 (1948), pp. 86-96.
17 Ibid., p. 123.
12 * The Man in the White House
apparently no suggestion of a council, authorized the president to
require, in writing, the opinion of the principal officer in each of
the executive departments upon any subject relating to the duties
of their respective departments, and Washington was doing this
as early as 1790. His first meeting with his department heads as a
consultive group occurred in the third year of his presidency in
order to consider what to do about the request of Congress for
papers relating to St. Clair’s disastrous defeat by the Indians in the
Northwest Territory. The President here needed advice on a per-
plexing issue that had arisen, and he resorted to the expedient of
calling his executive heads together. It is almost certain that he
had no idea whatever of starting a new institution. It is but one
more concrete illustration of the shrewd observations of the late
James Bryce that “historical development is wiser than the wisest
man” and ‘‘a succession of small improvements, each made con-
formably to existing conditions and habits, is more likely to suc-
ceed than a large scheme made all at once in what may be called
the spirit of conscious experiment.””* It is a significant fact, noted
by the late George Burton Adams, that the British Cabinet system,
every essential feature of which is pure usage, had matured so
shortly before 1787 that the framers of our Constitution were not
aware of its existence, and in fact the British Cabinet system was
half a century old before its nature was sufficiently recognized that
clear expositions of it as now understood were published.
There was certainly no prompt recognition that a new usage had
been contributed to the cluster constituting the presidency by
Washington’s informal conferring with his department heads col-
lectively. Gradually, however, the term cabinet crept into the vo-
cabulary of the newspapers and letters of the executive heads.”
By the end of Washington’s eight years the term was understood.
18 The American Commonwealth (Commonwealth ed., 1908), 11, 332.
‘9 An Outline Sketch of English Constitutional History (1918), p. 167.
20H. B. Learned, The President s Cabinet (1912), p. 155.
The Presidency as an Institution * 13
It appeared in Congressional debates in 1798. Marshall used it in
the Marbury decision in 1803.2: By the end of Jefferson’s presi-
dency in 1809 it was a recognized institution. President Jackson
was first to use the term cabinet in a presidential message. In 1907
it first appeared rather incidentally in a statute in the phrase, ‘‘the
heads of the Executive Departments who are members of the Pres-
ident’s cabinet.”
Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, could not
persuade his President to hold regular Cabinet meetings. When
they were held, a vote was taken on issues discussed, with Jefferson
having a single vote, but he had usually persuaded the Cabinet to
the point of unanimity.» Jackson largely ignored his executive
heads as counselors and turned instead to the coterie of cronies in
his famous “Kitchen Cabinet.” Some presidents have abided by
the majority vote of their cabinets, notably Pierce and Buchanan.
Lincoln was unquestionably the master of his Cabinet. To this day
we can say that the Cabinet is not yet a stabilized institution but
is still evolving. As recently as December 29th, 1953, Stewart Alsop
was observing that President Eisenhower “has now made the Na-
tional Security Council the chief instrument of decision on matters
of vital importance, that he has been presiding over it in person,
and that it has thus all but replaced the unwieldy cabinet reducing
the out-dated cabinet to a shadow.” During the first year of the
Eisenhower administration the National Security Council is said
to have won presidential approval of 305 major policy decisions.‘
Later Eisenhower did rather revive the Cabinet and convert it into
a policy-shaping organ.
Why is the president the chief of administration? Practically
all the reasons given by textbook or court opinion are not much
21 Marbury v. Madison, | Cranch 137 (U.S. 1803).
22 34 Statutes at Large, Chap. 1639, p. 993.
23 Francis A. Walker, Making of the Nation (1895), p. 91.
24 The Toledo Blade, Dec. 29, 1953.
14 + The Man inthe White House
more than ex-post-facto rationalizations of the fait accompli. The
Constitution is not specific on the matter, apparently because the
framers failed to recognize the distinct character of administrative
power—that is, the “management of men and materials in accom-
plishing the purposes of the state,” as Leonard D. White so aptly
put it. At any rate the Constitution is not clear as to administra-
tion, and the legislative and executive branches of the Federal
government throughout our history as a nation have competed for
the control of that function. They are still competing for it today.
The Eisenhower administration in the beginning even removed
key administrators apparently as a consequence of senatorial
pressure, and under the same kind of pressure made appointments
to positions where the appointee could embarrass and harass the
executive branch.
The question as to the presidential control of administration de-
pends on whether the president has the constitutional power to re-
move executive officers of his own volition. That question was
thoroughly debated in the first session of the First Congress. A
bill investing the president with this very power of removal, with-
out requiring senatorial consent, was considered then and dropped.
This disposal of the issue has been called a “legislative decision,”
because it amounted to an interpretation that the Constitution im-
plied the sole power of removal resided necessarily in the chief
executive; he could not “take care that the laws be faithfully ex-
ecuted”’ if the Senate, by sharing the removal power, could compel
him to retain subordinates he did not trust. A statute forbidding
the Senate to share in removal power might have been repealed.
An implication or a gentleman’s understanding seemed safer.
It was Andrew Jackson who first put to test the president’s pow-
er of removal as a means of control of administration. He even se-
lected the most difficult office in the Cabinet on which to make the
25 Leonard D. White, An Introduction to the Study of Public Administration
(1926), p. 2.
2 James Hart, The American Presidency in Action, 1789 (1948), p. 155 ff
The Presidency as an Institution * 15
test. In 1833 he had appointed William J. Duane Secretary of the
Treasury and advised him to remove the Federal deposits of money
from the Bank of the United States, the renewal of whose charter
he had just recently vetoed. Now Congress had by statute specifi-
cally vested in the secretary of the treasury exclusively the discre-
tion to remove deposits from the Bank. Duane, relying upon the
statute, refused to make the removal and stood firm despite Jack-
son’s patient but persistent attempts at persuasion. Then Jackson
removed Duane and appointed in his stead Roger B. Taney, who
obediently removed the deposits. Jackson justified his removal of
Duane by reasoning that “upon him [the President] has been de-
volved by the Constitution and the suffrages of the American
people the duty of superintending the operation of the Executive
Departments of the Government and seeing that the laws are faith-
fully executed.”» Half a century later President Hayes, even in
spite of a recently enacted Tenure of Office Act by which the Sen-
ate shared in removal power, defied the Senate by removing some
New York customs officers, among whom was a future president
of the United States.» And Grover Cleveland likewise removed a
district attorney in the face of a furious senatorial protest.» It was
only after President Wilson had removed a postmaster before the
expiration of his term of appointment that the question was finally
authoritatively decided in 1926 in the case of Myers v. United
States.°° The President has then the now unquestioned consti-
tutional power to remove appointive executive officers and is con-
sequently as much of a chief of administration as he has the com-
petence and resolute will to be. Neither constitutional prescription
nor statute has made him such, but rather over a century and a
quarter of usage fortified finally by court opinion.
A quarter of a century ago Professor Howard Lee McBain
27 James D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents (1927), p. 19.
z W. E. Binkley, Powers of the President (1937), pp. 167-71.
2° Ibid., pp. 174-82.
30 272 U. S. 52, 42 Sup. Ct. 21 (1926).
16 * The Man in the White House
denominated the president “Chief Legislator.” “The prime function
of the Executive,” he wrote, “is not executive at all. It is legisla-
tive.” “Rightly or wrongly,” he added, “the whole country looks
to him, praises or blames him, for what Congress does or does
not do, except of course, when both houses chance to be in control
of the opposite party.”*? Here is a statement of plain fact that
would have been incomprehensible in the early days under the
Constitution and indeed at almost any time before 1900.
It was President Theodore Roosevelt who established the first
promising organic connection of the presidency and the Congress
by means of White House conferences on pending legislation with
the then master of the House of Representatives, Speaker Joseph
G. Cannon.* The “‘dethronement” of the speaker in 1910 ended
all possibility of institutionalizing that kind of liaison. In 1913
Woodrow Wilson initiated what he conceived to be the prime min-
istry of the presidency, which he believed the Constitution invited
in the provision for the president to give Congress information of
the state of the Union, and to recommend measures for their con-
sideration.” Franklin Roosevelt would have already held confer-
ences with leaders of his party in Congress in order to see, among
other things, that the bill would be referred to hospitable com-
mittees. Moreover the message would probably have lying right
under it the draft of an appropriate bill with the last ¢ crossed and
i dotted.** Congress became accustomed to presidents’ submitting
a bill along with a message.
31 The Living Constitution (1927), p. 115.
32 Ibid., p. 131.
33 John Sherman, Recollections of Forty Years in House, Senate, and Cabinet
(1895), n, 1032.
3 L. W. Busbey, Uncle Joe Cannon (1927), pp. 217, 218.
35 Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (1907),
pp. 72, 73.
36 ““Congress’s Reason for Delay in Passing the President’s Bills,” United States
News and World Report (January, 1946).
The Presidency as an Institution * 17
So today “upon many of our most celebrated laws the presi-
dential imprint is clearly stamped. Each of these was drafted in
the President’s office, introduced and supported by his friends,
defended in committee by his aides, voted through by a party over
which every form of discipline and persuasion was exerted and
then made law by his signature.” Meanwhile the president may
utilize the White House breakfast with his chief supporters and
even obstructionists; the fireside chat to rally constituents; the
press conference to express his dismay at Congress’s “dragging its
feet’’; the ancient lure of patronage; the threat of veto to discour-
age shackling amendments.
Few usages have contributed more to making the presidency
what it is today than the national nominating convention. Viewed
from the galleries the convention looks as meaningless as a typical
sitting of the national House of Representatives. In either case the
significant action is invisible from the point of disadvantage in the
gallery. Of course the convention looks utterly irrational. Success-
ful institutions, however, are not products of reason and logic but
of chance and circumstances. The key to an understanding of a
national convention is that it is managed by professionals, politic-
ians who are experts in social co-operation. These experts have
one great objective, namely, manipulating the delegates so as to
pick a potential winner and thereby capture control of the prestige,
power, and patronage embodied in the presidency. In the strategy
of picking a winner the managers exercise an acumen and shrewd-
ness impossible for the rank and file of a party functioning indi-
vidually in a national party primary. Inevitably the candidate
nominated will be debtor to the powerful interests that swung the
nomination to him, no matter how much he may protest his free-
dom from commitments and usually “methinks he doth protest
too much.” A President who has no powerful economic, social or
party forces behind him rules with a palsied hand. Such are the
37 Clinton Rossiter, The American Presidency (1956), p. 15.
18 + The Man inthe White House
realities of presidential power. For us the significant thing is that
the nominating convention works, has worked for a century and a
quarter, and is a faithful expression of the genius of the American
people and of its folkways and mores. When we get a better nomi-
nating procedure, it will be one that emerges naturally just as the
convention did; it will never be the brainchild of an inventive genius.
No interpretation of the presidency would be adequate that
omitted the contributions of the great presidents to the making of
the office. If we may borrow a term from the geologist, let us say
that the administration of each of the great presidents has contrib-
uted its stratum of rich alluvial deposits. Washington’s peculiar
gift was in consequence of his superb character, which made its
contribution even before he was chosen President. We have com-
petent testimony to this fact in a letter written a year after the
Philadelphia convention by Pierce Butler, one of the delegates.
“Entre Nous,” he wrote, “I do not believe they [the executive
powers] would have been so great had not many of the members
cast their eyes toward George Washington [President of the Con-
vention], and shaped their ideas of the powers to be given the
President by their opinions of his virtue.’’* To a degree the office
is what it is because it was made for Washington. In office he gave
it a good start.
It was Thomas Jefferson, the third President, despite all his ac-
quired Eastern polish still a Piedmontese frontiersman at heart,
whose role it was to reorient the developing office of the presi-
dency away from foreign precedents toward its genuinely Ameri-
can character. Jefferson’s keen eye had appraised Europe as accu-
rately as any American of his day who had sojourned overseas,
but he saw little there to be imitated. Here was our first astute
American politician-statesman, a happy son of the American po-
litical mores, resolutely determined to make the presidency a re-
publican and an American institution.
38 Max Farrand, The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (1911), m, 301.
The Presidency as an Institution + 19
A generation later an upsurge of the American masses, “the
common man,” put Andrew Jackson in the White House. Speak-
ing in the then prevailing classical vogue, his partisans proclaimed
him a “tribune of the people.” Just as the ancient Roman tribune
had shouted his “veto” into the patrician Senate in defense of his
plebeian constituents, so President Jackson converted the presi-
dential veto into an instrument for the protection of the interest
of the common man. When Old Hickory retired, it was impossible
to turn the hands of the clock of history back and ever again make
the presidency what it had been before. His impress persists today.
Even more than Jackson, Lincoln won the hearts of common
folk—Lincoln, who casually touched his hat in return to an
officer’s salute but uncovered his head to the man in the ranks, as
Noah Brooks observed.** Woodrow Wilson set the modern and
apparently enduring pattern of legislative leadership. The 1920's
constituted an interregnum, a decade of arrested development of
the presidency. The Republicans as the spiritual heirs of the pre-
Civil War Whigs who had entrenched themselves in Congress
elected three typical Republican Presidents—Harding, Coolidge,
and Hoover. But the spell broke suddenly on March 4, 1933, when
Franklin Roosevelt seized the moment when the very disintegra-
tion of the nation seemed imminent to restore presidential leader-
ship. When he announced, “I am prepared under my constitution-
al duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the
midst of a stricken world may require,” it was apparent that an-
other Woodrow Wilson was at the helm. At the ensuing mid-term
election Republican congressmen appealed for re-election by insist-
ing that they had supported Roosevelt’s recovery legislation. In
the opinion of Clinton Rossiter only Washington and Jackson did
more than Franklin Roosevelt to raise the presidency “to its pre-
sent condition of strength, dignity and independence.”’”
39 See W. E. Binkley, American Political Parties: Their Natural History (1947),
p. 135.
4° Christian Gauss, Democracy Today: An Interpretation (1919), Appendix, p. 29.
41 The American Presidency (1956), p. 119.
20 * The Man in the White House
President Truman was determined that the Great Office would
not be suffered to decline while he was President. It is the judg-
ment of Rossiter that “Mr. Truman demonstrated a more clean-
cut philosophy of presidential power than any predecessor except
Woodrow Wilson.” No president did his “home work” more
faithfully, and none has been shrewder or more proficient in dele-
gating authority to subordinates. Consequently, despite having
dealt with one earth-rocking crises after another, he left the White
House fresh and chipper without the slightest suggestion of the
“hair shirt” Herbert Hoover said he wore there. “The Office he
handed over to Eisenhower was no less magnificent than the Office
he inherited from Roosevelt and this may well be considered a
remarkable achievement.”
The twenty years’ contribution of Roosevelt and Truman to the
institutionalizing of the presidency left Eisenhower no choice but
to accept and continue it. Thus he inherited a strong presidency.
By 1953 even Republicans expected him to seize the helm resolute-
ly and propose and promote policies, and he was far oftener criti-
cised for inaction than action. Building upon the already well-
developed White House staff he had inherited, Eisenhower ‘“‘has
done himself and the presidency a great service by carrying the
process of institutionalization at least a step and a half further.’
4 Ibid., p. 123.
43 Ibid., p. 125.
“ Ibid., p. 131.
Apprenticeship
for the Presidency
* IT WAS WHEN the New World was still young
[writes Niles Blair]that a youthful giant rode into Williamsburg.
He was only twenty-one and Governor Dinwiddie had sent for
him. Although he had been to Williamsburg before he was not
a familiar figure in the capital, for his home was on the Potomac.
Yet because he was so immensely tall, and because, even in a
country of fine horsemen, he stood out as a magnificent rider,
people must have gazed admiring, curious perhaps to know who
was this young centaur with the frank, cheerful face who rode
down the Duke of Gloucester Street.:
The Governor of colonial Virginia was sending young Washing-
ton on the eve of what would turn out to be the French and Indian
War upon a perilous mission far beyond the remotest settlements
of the Virginia frontier in order to warn the intruding French
away from territory well within the bounds of the Virginia Charter
grant. In mid-November, 1753, with six frontiersmen Washington
1 The James (1939), p. 109.
21
22 + The Man in the White House
struck out into the wilderness and reached his destination (the
present site of Pittsburgh) only to discover that the French had re-
tired to winter quarters at Venango sixty miles deeper in the win-
ter wilderness. Under the circumstances Washington might, with
propriety have returned to Williamsburg, but instead he pressed
on to Venango only to have the French commander there refuse
to receive his message but insist that Washington deliver it to his
superior, the commandant at Ft. Le Boeuf, a hundred miles still
farther, to which Washington pushed on through water-clogged
swampland. There Washington delivered Dinwiddie’s ultimatum,
which was courteously rejected. On his return trip the horses gave
out, and he, with Christopher Gist, returned on foot, was shot at
by a prowling Indian, and almost drowned amid ice floes of
the Allegheny River. His report, The Journal of George Washington,
when published by Governor Dinwiddie, created excitement on
both sides of the Atlantic. The predestined first President of the
United States had begun an incomparable apprenticeship for the
great office a generation before it was created.
A year later Governor Dinwiddie sent Washington with a small
force to anticipate the French in erecting a fort at the confluence
of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, but the French had
already erected Ft. Duquesne there. A year still later the twenty-
three-year-old colonel and commander-in-chief of the Virginia mi-
litia was assigned the defense of three hundred miles of frontier
with three hundred men, and here, according to John C. Fitzpatrick,
“Washington acquired the habit of thinking and acting for the
welfare of a people. . . .”? At twenty-five he was urging Virginia,
Maryland, and Pennsylvania legislatures to provide the troops to
capture Ft. Duquesne. At twenty-seven he was a member of the
Virginia House of Burgesses. Whoever is disposed to marvel at
Washington’s inexhaustible patience with and deference to the
2 “George Washington,” Dictionary of American Biography XIX, 512.
Apprenticeship for the Presidency * 23
Continental Congress while serving as commander-in-chief of the
Continental army should bear in mind that he had experienced
personally the perplexing role of the legislator not only in the
Virginia House of Burgesses but also in the very Congress to
which he was responsible.
After Washington’s twenty-seventh year there passed fifteen
years during which he reveled in his heart’s desire, the manage-
ment of Mt. Vernon and his other plantations, all of which was
done with an intelligence, enterprise, and efficiency rarely matched
in the Old Dominion. Like the other great planters he developed a
high sense of public responsibility, for, as Professor Max Farrand
put it, there were things the Virginia planters as public servants
would not do even in their own private interest. If, as Professor
Thomas J. Wertenbaker concluded, the Virginia dynasty of presi-
dents was a product of the tobacco plantation, here was but
another stage of Washington’s apprenticeship for the presidency.
The supervision of these large-scale enterprises provided training
in administration—the art of managing land, labor, and capital
profitably——and at this Washington excelled. “As landed proprie-
tor no less than as Commander-in-Chief he showed excellent
ability, the power of planning for a distant end, and a capacity for
taking infinite pains. Neither drought nor defeat could turn him
from a course that he discerned to be proper and right.”
As commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the Revolution,
Washington spent half a dozen distressing years patiently working
under the authority of the Continental Congress (a Congress ob-
sessed with a fear of the army) discretely avoiding every move that
might augment the prevailing public phobia of military authority.
Washington’s extraordinary deference to the civil authority exer-
cised by Congress revealed his shrewd comprehension of the polit-
ical mores of the American people. Even when Congress, in desper-
ate crises, twice granted him temporary powers of dictatorship,
3 Samuel Eliot Morison, By Land and By Sea (1953), p. 173.
24 * The Man inthe White House
he used them sparingly. The deftness with which he exposed the
Conway Cabal to supplant him and his magnanimity toward the
exposed conspirators was veritably Lincolnesque. It was under
the circumstances of these heartbreaking years dealing with
cantankerous congressmen, conspiring generals, and an indifferent
and fickle public that Washington perfected the high art of poli-
tics that made him the first statesman of the age. He completed
the apprenticeship that was to make him the first President of the
United States not so much by formal election as by the common
consent of a greatful people.
A dozen years after Washington’s first inauguration a veritable
revolution in the climate of American political opinion and power
brought to the presidency another great Virginia planter, Thomas
Jefferson. By this time the pattern of federal administration had
been firmly established thanks to Washington, the adept manager
of men and materials in achieving the purposes of the new nation-
al state. Thus a firmly established and efficiently functioning fed-
eral government was the unintended bequest of the Federalists to
the Jeffersonian Republicans. So Jefferson neither possessed nor
required the genius of Washington in management. It was his role
rather to provide the grand liaison between the national govern-
ment and the frustrated frontiersmen and other neglected elements
in American society and convince them that the national govern-
ment was, after all, their very own—not their enemy. Instead of
the adept administrator, this called for a kind of political evange-
lism capable of planting a political faith in the hearts of the people.
How did Jefferson acquire this peculiar art? How did he serve the
apprenticeship that was to prepare him too for a place among the
front-rank presidents of the United States?
It was peculiarly appropriate that the first evangel of our emerg-
ing national democracy should have been a product of the Virginia
Piedmont, the old colonial frontier.
[Jefferson] was the son of a western pioneer [wrote James A.
Woodburn] living in a hot-bed of radical democracy, amid natives
Apprenticeship for the Presidency * 25
in their buckskin breeches and hunting shirts and coonskin caps.
He was a man of education and eastern polish but he lived among
small western farmers in crude cabins and he was in sympathy
with their needs. ... What he did for democracy in Virginia was
never forgiven by the landed aristocracy of his native state.+
No sooner had Jefferson attained his majority than he was ap-
pointed a justice of the peace. In Virginia the justices of the peace
ofeach county collectively constituted the county governing board,
thus giving the young Jefferson a taste of public administration of
a sort. At twenty-six he was elected to the Virginia House of
Burgesses, where he became the intimate associate of Patrick
Henry the ardent leader of the irrepressible democracy of the back
counties and the terror of the tidewater aristocracy, a leader of
which he exposed as an embezzler of public funds. In 1774 Jefferson
prepared for the consideration of the Virginia Convention “A
Summary View of the Rights of British America,” which proved
too strong for the delegates. A year later he was a member of the
Second Continental Congress into whose lap fell the management
of the public affairs of the Union now at war. Within five days of
his arrival he was put on a committee to draft a “Declaration of
the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms.” At thirty-three his
masterly pen dashed off “at white heat” the burning phrases of the
Declaration of Independence, his imperishable contribution to the
American credo. Eighty-five years later President-elect Abraham
Lincoln was to declare at Independence Hall, “I have never had a
feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments em-
bodied in the Declaration of Independence.”’:
When Patrick Henry became Governor of Virginia in 1776,
Jefferson inherited his leadership of the Virginia democracy in the
legislature, where he proceeded systematically to break up the
aristocratic system by promoting statutes abolishing land-holding
4“Radicalism in American Politics,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, xm,
No. 2 (1926), 149.
5 Roy P. Basler (ed.), Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (1946), p. 577.
26 + The Man in the White House
in fee-tail and primogeniture and by disestablishing the Anglican
Church. As War Governor, succeeding Henry, though he slighted
no obligation, his term was a nightmare. for Jefferson was not of
the executive type, and the British invaded the state, which was
unprepared for successful defense. Back in Congress he drafted
thirty-some state papers, the greatest of which was the report on
government of the western territories that laid the groundwork
of the Northwest Ordinance and the pattern of government for
our territories ever since.
From 1785 to 1789 Jefferson was our minister to France, where
he served his country as a diligent and skillful diplomat while he
witnessed what turned out to be the prelude to the impending
French Revolution. Returning home President Washington
promptly appointed him our first Secretary of State, which office
he conducted with the skill and understanding of the experienced
diplomat. Soon he became the leading critic of Hamilton’s finan-
cial measures and his loose construction of the Constitution as
well as of the “monocrats,” the term he coined to characterize the
Federalists. By 1793 he had resigned and was back at Monticello
convinced that he had finally retired from public life. But he had
already become the ‘symbol of anti-Hamiltonianism’’ and as such
the rallying point of what was to become the Jeffersonian Republi-
can party, and by 1797 he was Vice-President. The four years he
presided over the Senate were but another stage of his apprentice-
ship. From that post he witnessed the Federalists commit party
suicide with their Alien and Sedition Acts savagely administered
by partisan Federalist judges upon hapless Jeffersonians, and by
1801 he was President.
Jefferson’s party constituted no disciplined phalanx such as the
Federalist combination of interests but just a loosely associated
aggregation of individualists extraordinarily touchy as to matters
of personal liberty. Here were the ardent patriots who had read
the new Constitution fresh from the Philadelphia Convention with
burning indignation when they could find no bill of rights in it.
Apprenticeship for the Presidency + 27
Not until they had been assured that very thing by amendments
could they be calmed sufficiently to get the Constitution ratified
by the necessary majority of the states. Jefferson’s peculiar ap-
prenticeship had prepared him precisely to be the only kind of
president for those ardent devotees of personal liberty. With the
flair of the adept political evangelist Jefferson struck a vibrant
note for his disciples when he declared, “I have sworn on the altar
of the living God eternal enmity against every form of tyranny
over the mind of man.”s
When Jefferson became President, he was prepared. “He was
too astute a party leader to attempt to force his will upon the
Republicans in Congress. He would suggest, he would advise; he
would cautiously express an opinion but he would never dictate.
Yet few Presidents have exercised a stronger directive influence
upon Congress than Thomas Jefferson during the greater part of
his administration.”””
The lasting testimony to the political evangelism of Jefferson is
the historical fact that he was to be the patron saint of every major
party in our history, excepting only the Federalist. When, in the
1820’s, his own party split into two branches, the Democratic
Republican, which evolved into the Jacksonian Democrats, and
the National Republicans, who were soon absorbed by the Whigs,
each branch insisted they were the only true Jeffersonians. The
patron saint of the new Republican party of the 1850’s was
Jefferson, frankly avowed as such in its first national party plat-
form in 1856. And Lincoln, who became that party’s first President,
was to proclaim again and again, “The principles of Jefferson are
the definitions and axioms of free society.’’
Andrew Jackson, aged twenty, had been reading law with his
companion John McNairy, and the two had been admitted to the
6 Letter to Benjamin Rush, Monticello, Sept. 23, 1800.
7 Allen Johnson, Jefferson and his Colleagues (1921), p. 32.
® Letter to H. L. Pierce and others, April 6, 1859, John Hay and John G.
Nicolay (eds.), Lincoln’s Complete Works (12 vols., New York, 1905), v, 126.
28 + The Man in the White House
practice of law when, in 1788, the legislature of North Carolina
elected McNairy Superior Judge of the extreme western district of
the state now part of Tennessee. The two journeyed on the first
wagon road to Nashville, then a remote stockaded village of log
cabins. McNairy appointed Jackson attorney general, as the pros-
ecuting attorney was then called in North Carolina, and Jackson,
like Lincoln later, began riding the circuit with the judge and prac-
ticing law. In 1791 Congress organized Tennessee as a territory,
and Jackson was appointed judge advocate of the Davison County
militia regiment. In 1796, when the Territory of Tennessee held
a constitutional convention preparatory to demanding admission
to the Union, Jackson sat as a delegate. It was a recognition of
professional standing that he was appointed a member of the
committee that drafted the constitution that Thomas Jefferson
was to pronounce the best of the state constitutions. Jackson was
elected, without opposition, as the one Tennessee member of
Congress in the national House of Representatives, where he took
his seat December 5, 1796. Within a year the Tennessee legislature
elected him to the United States Senate, but he soon resigned and
returned home because of financial difficulties due to the severe
depression of the mid-1790’s. He aspired to and obtained the
major-generalship of the militia of Tennessee, next to the gover-
norship the most important office in the state. In March, 1814,
having overcome a combination of obstacles, he thoroughly
defeated the Indians at Horseshoe Bend. In recognition of this
achievement he was commissioned a major general of the United
States.
In1815 with a motley and undisciplined aggregation of Tennessee
and Kentucky militiamen, Creoles, Negroes, and pirates he con-
fronted, before New Orleans, the hitherto invincible veterans of
Wellington’s Peninsular campaign. Passing down the tense lines
in the pitch darkness of one o’clock in the morning before the
battle and recognizing by voice and calling by name soldiers who
gathered about and spoke to him, the future President was practic-
ing the grand art of practical politics and all unconsciously serving
Apprenticeship for the Presidency * 29
well his apprenticeship for the presidency. The astounding victory
at New Orleans “‘created a president, a party, and a tradition.’
In 1821 President Monroe appointed Jackson Governor of the
Territory of Florida.
We have the testimony of Vice-President Thomas Jefferson,
while presiding over the Senate, that when Senator Jackson would
rise to speak, his rage would almost prevent his expressing himself.
But during the ensuing three decades he learned to control his
emotions so that by the time he became President, his “tantrums”
often consisted of sheer acting. Though he appeared to be self-
willed and impetuous, he reflected carefully before making a de-
cision. So'well had he prepared himself for the great responsibility
that in his cool, calculated judgment as to party strategy he per-
sistently outwitted his proud and confident Whig opponents such
as Clay and Webster. It would be difficult to point out a single
victory of theirs over Jackson on a major matter. Accepting se-
renely the popular conception that he had been cast for the role of
a tribune of the people, indecisiveness would have been an un-
pardonable defect in Jackson. It required a firm and resolute will
on the part of the recognized champion of the common man to
convince the old ruling elite that they were no longer in charge of
public affairs. Jackson’s whole adult life had been a preparation
for just such a decisive presidency.
It was certainly no accident that James K. Polk turned out to be
the ablest President in the twenty-four years between Jackson and
Lincoln. By the age of twenty-eight “Young Hickory”, as Polk has
been called, was in the Tennessee legislature, where he won prompt
recognition for his methodical ways and exceptional ability in de-
bate. Two years later he was almost the youngest member of the
national House of Representatives when his hero Andrew Jackson
°T. P. Abernathy, “Andrew Jackson,” Dictionary of American Biography, 1X,
529.
30 * The Man in the White House
had become President of the United States. Congressman Polk
was promptly recognized as an administration leader in the House.
In the battle against the arrogant Bank of the United States
Jackson turned to Polk, who was made chairman of the all im-
portant Ways and Means Committee. He became President
Jackson’s chief defender in his policy to remove the Federal
deposits and thereby crush the Bank. By the age of thirty-four
Polk was elevated to the eminence of Speaker of the House, an
office already evolving into a position second only to the presidency
of the United States in influence and power. No speaker of the
House has ever been more savagely abused and sniped at by parti-
san opposition, but so thoroughly had Polk prepared himself that
he was able to anticipate parliamentary difficulties before they
arose, and he was consequently never caught unprepared. In his
farewell address as Speaker he said: “It has been my duty to decide
more questions of parliamentary law and order, many of them of a
morecomplex and difficult character . . . than have been decided...
by all my predecessors from the formation of the Government.”
It is significant that, although Polk desired to remain in Con-
gress, his party drafted him to run for Governor of Tennessee. In
this office he acquitted himself with his accustomed efficiency.
Only a few weeks before Poik’s election to the presidency Andrew
Jackson wrote that “his capacity for business (is) great, and to the
extraordinary powers of labor, both mental and physical, he united
that tact and judgment which are requisite to the successful direc-
tion of such an office as that of Chief Magistrate of a free people.” !
No wonder the historian George Bancroft, who had been Polk’s
Secretary of the Navy, was to declare half a century later, “His
administration, viewed from the standpoint of results, was perhaps
the greatest in our history, certainly one of the greatest. He
10 Congressional Globe, 25th Cong., 3rd Sess., p. 252.
n Nashville Union, Aug. 13, 1844.
Apprenticeship for the Presidency * 31
succeeded because he insisted on being its center and in overruling
and guiding all his secretaries to act so as to produce unity and
harmony.”
Abraham Lincoln was given first place unanimously by the pan-
el of fifty-five historians polled by Professor Arthur Schlesinger,
Sr. to rank the presidents. What preparation had Lincoln for at-
taining that high eminence? He entered the presidency without a
trace of administrative experience such as had prepared Washing-
ton to set the presidency going. Even Jefferson, whose disciple
Lincoln repeatedly declared himself to be, had been Governor of
Virginia. Like Jefferson however Lincoln was to be another ex-
ponent of the maturing American democratic culture. By Lincoln’s
time the railways and even more the telegraph had made possible
the prompt dissemination of news and the consequent rapid for-
mulation of public opinion on a continental scale, and Lincoln
made the most of the opportunity these new media of commun-
ication afforded him.
If politics signifies primarily the determination of public policies,
then Lincoln was our politician par excellence and this provides
the clue to his pre-eminent rank among our presidents. From his
mid-teens to his early fifties his life was one continuous prepara-
tion for the peculiar kind of president he was to be. Lincoln
emerged into manhood in an Illinois community when “all Illinois
then seethed in politics.”!: He was twenty-three when he announced
his candidacy for the legislature in an ‘‘address to the people of
Sangamon County” setting forth his stand on public policies. He
lost the election, but the late Senator Beveridge, whose long polit-
ical experience qualified him to judge the matter, wrote: “We see
in the vagueness and dexterity of his first public utterance the
1? Letter to J. G. Wilson, Mar. 8, 1888. Quoted by J. G. Wilson, The Presidents
of the United States (1914), 1, 230.
13 A. J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln (1928), 1, 114.
32 * The Man inthe White House
characteristics of the natural politician, a type of which he was
to become, excepting only Jefferson, the supreme example. We
observe too, that cleverness and caution which distinguished his
every public maneuver and discomfitted the most skilful antago-
nists.” At the age of twenty-four he was appointed postmaster of
the tiny settlement of New Salem. This is a neglected landmark in
the political education of Lincoln, for he thus became the first to
receive and read the newspapers that arrived—the Sangamo
Journal, the Louisville Journal, The St. Louis Republican, and the
Cincinnati Gazette,!® and his tenacious memory seemed to retain
almost everything he read.
At the age of twenty-five Lincoln was elected to the first of four
terms in the lower house of the Illinois legislature and so apt was
he as a parliamentarian that at the age of twenty-seven he was
Whig floor leader and only the fact that the Whigs were in a mi-
nority prevented his being elected Speaker. It was customary, each
night after adjournment, for the lobby to be thronged for speech-
making and informal debate. The controversy over President
Jackson’s removal of Federal deposits from the Bank of the United
States was then raging. Beveridge believed that
the debate over it in the lobby more even than in the House,
the discussion of it in taverns and wherever men met, afforded
instruction in constitutional principles as thorough perhaps as
Lincoln could have received at any college or university. The
powers and duties of the President, the authority of Congress,
the nature and disposition of patronage—well nigh nearly every
subject with which he would have to deal one day was examined
with sense and learning.:
Lincoln set out to persuade the legislature to move the capital
from Vandaliato Springfield in hisown county. The art of legislation
14 A. J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln (1928), 1, 118.
15 Carl Sandburg, Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926), p. 102.
16 Abraham Lincoln (1928), p. 187.
Apprenticeship for the Presidency * 33
then even as now involved the practice of logrolling. Lincoln and
the “Long Nine,” as the Sangamon county delegation was then
called, traded votes and cast them with scarcely any other object-
ive than the removal of the capital. Lincoln’s triumph on this pro-
ject at the age of twenty-eight was due to his extraordinary legis-
lative craftsmanship and the fact that, as R. L. Wilson, one of his
colleagues, put it, “his practical common sense, his thorough
knowledge of human nature, then made him an over match for his
compeers and for any man that I have ever known.”
At the age of forty Lincoln took his seat for his single term in
the national House of Representatives and here experienced the
invaluable discipline of adversity. As Congressman he made almost
no impression on anybody in Washington, and what slight im-
pression he did make was unfavorable. As a regular party man
obedient to caucus decisions he joined in the concerted Whig crit-
icism of President Polk for provoking the Mexican War while his
constituents were ardently supporting the war. Back home he was
denounced as a “second Benedict Arnold” for having pled the
cause of the enemy. He had defied the ‘‘Sovereign’”’—the people—
the people in Illinois, of all places, where it was. an extraordinarily
jealous potentate. Lincoln thus learned his greatest lesson in poli-
tics. Henceforth this inveterate reader of newspapers would clair-
voyantly perceive dominant opinion, catch step with popular move-
ments, and march neither behind nor ahead of them. He would
express only emerging popular opinion and feeling, which he dis-
ciplined himself to register accurately.* “Never the apostle of a
cause,” wrote Beveridge, “he was to become the perfect interpre-
ter of public opinion, thought and feeling and so the instrument
of events.”
1 Paul M. Angle (ed.), The Lincoln Reader (1947), p. 84.
18 See Jesse Macy, Political Parties in the United States, 1846-1861 (1900),
pp. 248, 252, 253; A. J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln (1928), m, 143.
19 Abraham Lincoln (1928), 1, p. 107.
34 + The Man in the White House
In 1856 occurred Lincoln’s spectacular demonstration of matur-
ity in the art of politics. At Bloomington, Illinois, he addressed
the heterogeneous, even discordant aggregation of groups consti-
tuting the delegates to a convention of bitter opponents of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act that had repealed the Missouri Compromise
and thus opened the trans-Mississippi public domain to slavery.
In the convention were represented the elements destined soon to
constitute the then even unnamed Republican party. Resolved to
stir their passions, Lincoln knew he must yet hold them in restraint.
Hesitating Whigs needed to be convinced without alienating rad-
ical abolitionists. Germans must be conciliated without losing the
anti-alien Know-Nothings. “With the politician’s eye for vote get-
ting and for uniting incongruous elements of his party, he avoided
the language of the anti-slavery crusade and narrowed the issue to
the clear-cut doctrine of slavery in the territories.”
Once when President Lincoln, in the midst of his term, was
warned by one of his secretaries to be on his guard against a dele-
gation of wily politicians waiting to see him, he promptly said,
“Let them in. They won’t fool me.” The President who could
write the magisterial, chiding letter to General Hooker, command-
er of the Army of the Potomac, had acquired the easy mastery of
men, in the rough and tumble competition of the turbulent Illinois
frontier. Who else could have remained unquestionably master of
a Cabinet of cantankerous individualists at the very time that he
was outwitting cliques of intriguing senators and representatives
of his own party. So well had he served his apprenticeship that he
alone was ready to steer resolutely the ship of state on the most
tempestuous voyage of its history.
William McKinley’s experience in responsibility began at the
age of seventeen when he enlisted as a private in the Union army.
There he promptly attracted the attention of his colonel, the future
2J, G. Randall, “Abraham Lincoln,” Dictionary of American Biography,
xı, 248.
Apprenticeship for the Presidency * 35
President Rutherford B. Hayes, whose disciple McKinley prompt-
ly became. He rose by merit to the rank of captain and was mus-
tered out as a major. After studying at Meadville College and in
a law office and, for less than a year, at Albany Law School, he
began the practice of law at Canton, Ohio. At the age of twenty-
six he was elected county prosecutor, the local office that, above
all others, has provided the springboard for many a notable
political career. In 1876 when the coal mining firm of Rhodes and
Company (Mark Hanna’s firm) in the Massillon district imported
some laborers from Cleveland to break a strike, rioting broke out,
a mine was set on fire, and thirty-three strikers were jailed and
indicted. In the hysteria that followed no lawyer would take the
miner’s case, none until former prosecuting attorney William
McKinley volunteered to defend them and would not be dissuaded
by the protestations of his friends. As Thomas Beer put it, “Major
McKinley had the unbelievable stubbornness of the mild pliant
man.” The competent young attorney obtained the acquittal of
all the miners indicted except one, who served a short sentence—
an astonishing achievement with juries from a community wrought
up over the violence of the strikers. This episode is significant
indeed in McKinley’s preparation for the presidency, since he then
captured the lasting gratitude of a large segment of American
labor. McKinley was the first President during whose incumbency
labor, particularly organized labor, was cordially received at the
president’s office.
At thirty-three McKinley began a career of fourteen years in the
national House of Representatives. He entered Congress the day
his old colonel, Rutherford B. Hayes, was inaugurated President
of the United States. A protégé of Hayes, McKinley haunted the
White House as no other congressman and so became familiar
21 Hanna (1929), p. 79.
22 F, P. Weisenberger, “The Time of Mark Hanna’s First Acquaintance with
McKinley,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, xx1 (1935), 78.
23 Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (1929), 1, 552-53.
36 * The Man in the White House
with the presidency long before his term as President. In four years
McKinley earned by sheer merit the chairmanship of the most
important committee of the House, the Ways and Means Commit-
tee, and this was long before seniority was almost the sole deter-
minant of promotion. No other president had undertaken the re-
sponsibilities of the great office so expert in congressional legis-
lation, and the consequence was that one has to go back almost
acentury to President Jefferson to find the prototype of President
McKinley as the gentle but undoubted leader of Congress.*
Erudite Senator George F. Hoar expressed the opinion that no
other president, with the possible exception of Jackson, had ex-
ercised such influence over the Senate as McKinley.” Such were
the consequences of a fruitful apprenticeship.
McKinley had rapidly become expert in the art of politics in
county, congressional district, state, and national nominating con-
ventions, presiding over them from time to time. He was perman-
ent chairman of the Republican National Convention of 1892
when President Benjamin Harrison was nominated for a second
term and would very probably have been nominated himself had
he not insisted on Harrison’s renomination. His declination in-
creased his stature in the eyes of those who witnessed his resolute
renunciation of the proffered crown. l
In 1891 McKinley was elected to the first of two terms as Gover-
nor. The governor of Ohio did not then have the veto power, and
uninformed publicists have blamed McKinley for not preventing
certain legislation favorable to utilities. He did persuade the legis-
lature to levy the first Ohio tax on corporations in the face of their
determined opposition, and in a few years Ohio left the general
property tax entirely to local government. As a champion of labor
he urged the introduction of safety devices on railroads and trolley
24 See J. F. Rhodes, “The Presidential Office,” Scribners, Feb., 1903.
25 G. F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (1903), 1, 47.
Apprenticeship for the Presidency * 37
cars and arbitration in labor disputes. From the day of his inaugu-
ration McKinley had what it takes to be prepared for the office of
president.
Just graduated from Harvard, Theodore Roosevelt was told
that politics was so disreputable that it would “soil the linen of a
gentleman.” Unperturbed he promptly replied that he “intended
to be one of the governing class” no matter how crude the poli-
ticians were. In the fullness of time he was to teach new techniques
in the art of politics. Because a New York city boss needed a re-
spectable candidate Theodore was nominated and elected to the
state assembly at the age of twenty-four. He was a raw amateur
with almost everything to learn about politics. Long afterwards
he confessed to his intimate friend Jacob Riis his sudden disen-
chantment in the legislature.
I stood for my own opinion alone. ...I would listen to no argu-
ment, no advice. I took the isolated peak on every issue, and my
associates left me. When I looked around before the session was
well under way, I found myself alone. I was absolutely deserted.
The people didn’t understand. The men from Erie, from Suffolk,
from anywhere would not work with me. ‘He won’t listen to
anybody,’ they said and I would not....The things I wanted to
do I was powerless to accomplish. I looked the ground over,
made up my mind that there were several other excellent people
there with honest opinions of the right, even though they dif-
fered from me, I turned in to help them, and they turned to and
gave me a hand. And so we were able to get things done. We
did not agree in all things but we did in some, and on those we
pulled all together. That was my first lesson in real politics.
So very rapidly did the amateur politician become expert that
by his second year in the assembly, at the age of twenty-five, he
was floor leader of the Republicans, and only the fact that his party
was then in the minority prevented his being elected Speaker. At
26 Quoted by Lawrence F. Abbott, Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt (1919), p. 45.
38 + The Man in the White House
twenty-eight he led a forlorn hope as Republican candidate for
mayor of New York. Appointed by President Harrison a member
of the Civil Service Commission, the young reformer found the
spoils system too deeply rooted in the prevailing political mores
to be summarily eradicated, but this disillusionment too contri-
buted to his political education. Appointed police commissioner
of New York City, he took his duties so seriously that he became
the terror of indifferent patrolmen. Coming in contact with the
lowest levels of slum life he learned first hand of the vicious
alliance of graft, politics, and crime. At last he became aware of
poignant social problems on an extended scale, and his discoveries
started his education in social reform, of which he had hitherto
been so contemptuous.
When President McKinley, with understandable misgiving,
appointed Roosevelt Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he proved
to be a problem to his superior, Secretary John D. Long. What-
ever the merits of Roosevelt’s services he did acquire experience
as a Federal administrator. Returning from Cuba from the San
Juan Hill charge of the Rough Riders a thoroughly publicized
hero, he was promptly nominated for and elected Governor of
New York. Now thoroughly familiar with practical politics in this
superpolitical state he pushed reform as far as he could without
breaking with the state boss, United States Senator Thomas C.
Platt. It was a game of wits between two semipros, and historians
have not yet decided whether Governor or Senator was winner.
At any rate Senator Platt was glad to manipulate delegations in
the Republican National Convention of 1900 and manage to get
Roosevelt nominated for and, as he assumed, relegated to the
innocuous obscurity of the vice-president of the United States.
In dealing with the New York giants of business, finance, and
politics Governor Theodore Roosevelt developed the practice of
flexibility—of not insisting on the impossible—a preparation
indeed for the larger office of the presidency. As he expressed it in
an article published during his governorship, “Sometimes it is a
Apprenticeship for the Presidency + 39
sign of the highest statesmanship to temporize.”’” It is indicative
of his progress that he would have spurned such a practice twenty
years earlier. As Governor, instead of committing political suicide,
he did enough tight-rope walking to learn not to lose his balance.
As much could have been said of President Lincoln in the 1860’s.
Although Theodore Roosevelt ranks high as an administrator
in the presidency, he belongs rather with the evangelists in that
office—that is with Jefferson and Lincoln. He had a pronounced
flair for the dramatic, and he certainly succeeded in arousing the
public on very significant issues. As his biographer expressed it
“he possessed to an unusual degree the political asset of self
hypnosis.” Let him who chooses disdain that peculiar trait, but
it was an element of profound effectiveness in arousing the nation
from its lethargy to the necessity of long overdue reform. “His
flaws,” declared his biographer, “were on the surface; his values
were timeless.”°
Young Woodrow Wilson’s choice of a vocation was political
leadership, and so certain was he of it that he considered himself
a predestined and foreordained agent who was being “guided by
an intelligent power outside of himself.” “He had been carefully,
almost fearfully tutored by a perfectionist father in the mastery of
the symbols of human communication. The deliberately poised
phrase—the precisely pointed anecdote—the perfectly balanced
paragraph were arrows in his quiver of political weapons.”’* In
preparation for a public career young Woodrow painfully
disciplined himself for oratory, and to the end of his public career
he could influence crowds better than individuals or small groups.
27 Century, June, 1900.
23 H. F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt a Biography (1931), p. 80.
29H. F. Pringle, Dictionary of American Biography, xvu, 143.
3 Walter Lippmann, “Woodrow Wilson’s Approach to Politics,” New Republic,
Dec. 5, 1955, p. 15.
31 Jasper Shannon, “Woodrow Wilson as a Domestic Political Leader,” un-
published paper read at a round table of the Midwestern Conference of Political
Scientists at Marquette University, May 4, 1956.
40 + The Man in the White House
In his early twenties Wilson was captivated by Walter Bagehot’s
brilliant interpretation of the British Constitution, which was, in
due time, to provide the budding scholar with a pattern for an in-
terpretation of the American presidency. At the age of twenty-
three he published his first article, “Cabinet Government in the
United States.” He then held the American presidency in so little
esteem that, not until many years later, did he aspire to it. Wilson’s
doctoral disseration, Congressional Government, published in 1885,
was such a success that it struck the spark of ambition in him for
a big public career. “I do feel a very real regret,” he wrote his
fiancee, “that I have been shut out from my heart’s first—primary—
ambition and purpose which is to take an active, if possible a lead-
ing, part in public life, and strike out for myself, if I had the ability,
on a statesman’s career.” After graduation from Princeton he
studied law, was admitted to the bar, and started practice on the
then prevailing assumption that law provided the high road to a
political career.
By 1908 Wilson, now President of Princeton, was publishing his
matured conception of the president as “‘the unifying force in our
complex system, the leader both of his party and the nation.”%
Here he found in the president’s State of the Union and other
messages the constitutional authority for his functioning as a quasi
prime minister.* Although he had written in 1902, “I was born a
politician,” there is no evidence in his writings and speeches that
he had then any conception whatever of political machines, the
work of the ward heeler or of everyday practical politics.* These
were things to be learned later and outside of books.
Curiously enough Wilson owed his call to a political career to
an overtly avowed conservative social and economic philosophy
32 International Review, vi (Aug., 1879), 46-163.
33 R. S. Baker, Woodrow Wilson, Life and Letters (1927), 1, 229.
34 Constitutional Government in the United States (1907), p. 54.
35 Ibid., pp. 72, 73.
3 Arthur Link, Wilson: the Road to the White House (19417), p. 34.
Apprenticeship for the Presidency * 41
bordering on that of a reactionary. The very year of his publication
of Constitutional Government in the United States, he was public-
ly denouncing the whole program of government regulation of
business as “socialistic.”*” The following year he was declaring,
“J am a fierce partisan of the open shop and of everything that
makes for individual liberty.”’* It was such views along with his
eloquence in publicizing them that induced a coterie of conserv-
ative Wall Street Democrats to start grooming him for the presi-
dency.
The plan of the president-makers was to get Wilson first elected
Governor of New Jersey. He was pliable enough to assure the
New Jersey Democratic leader, James Smith, that, as Governor,
he would not “set about fighting or breaking down the Democrat-
ic organization and replacing it with one of (my) own,” but he
insisted on absolute freedom “‘in the matter of measures and men,”
and Smith accepted the terms, flattered with the role of president-
maker. Wilson’s acceptance of the nomination fully aware that
it was being managed by the Smith-Davis political machines
marked the transition from the academic to the practical poli-
tician. However, this alienated, for the time being, the Progressive
Democrats, who assumed that Wilson had become the captive of
the machine politicians.
The state convention nominated Wilson by a safe majority,
whereupon the nomination was made unanimous. The delegates
were preparing to disperse when it was announced that Wilson
had left Princeton and was on his way to address the convention.
In the midst of the address he declared, “I did not seek this nomi-
nation; it has come to me absolutely unsolicited with the conse-
quence that I shall enter the duties of the office of Governor, if
elected, with absolutely no pledge of any kind to prevent me
37 “Government and Business,” address before the Commercial Club of Chicago,
March 14, 1908. Quoted by Link, op. cit., p. 119.
38 Quoted by James Kerney, The Political Education of Woodrow Wilson (1926),
p. 34.
42 * The Man inthe White House
serving the people of the State with singleness of purpose.”** The
address closed with a burst of purple eloquence—an apostrophe
to the flag. The convention was electrified, delegates stood on the
chairs and shouted themselves hoarse, and the Progressives were
reassured. No veteran in politics could have done it better. Wood-
row Wilson was on his way.
It is evidence of his political dexterity that Woodrow Wilson
went through the gubernatorial campaign holding the support of
Progressives without alienating the party organization and the
machine politicians.*° But before the end of the campaign he had
professed and proclaimed a completely Progressive program: util-
ity regulations, direct party primaries, a corrupt practices act, and
workman’s compensation. “He seemed to catch public opinion as
by wireless.””"
After election and inauguration Governor Wilson pursued his
purpose of having the legislature enact the measures he had ad-
vocated in his campaign speeches. When Democratic Boss James
R. Nugent, lobbying against an administration measure, was
summoned to the Governor’s office, a heated altercation ensued
during which Nugent hurled an insulting insinuation—and was
promptly ordered out, to the glee of the Progressive Democrats.
Then the Governor broke precedent by meeting with and ad-
dressing the Democratic legislature caucus. He took advantage of
the opportunity to practice his cherished pattern of executive lead-
ership in legislation. Facing the caucus he alluded to the challenge
of the opposition to his right to interfere in legislative matters.
In a dramatic gesture he took from his pocket a copy of the Con-
stitution of New Jersey and read: “He [the Governor] shall com-
municate by message to the Legislature at the opening of each
3 Link, Wilson: the Road to the White House (1947), p. 167.
49 Ibid., p. 173.
“ C. E. Merriam, Four Political Leaders (1926), p. 48.
Apprenticeship for the Presidency + 43
session, and at such other times as he may deem necessary, the
condition of the State, and recommend such measures as he may
deem expedient.” He added, “I stand upon the provision of the
Constitution.”
The pending measures proposed by the Governor were then dis-
cussed in the caucus with the Governor taking an active part.
Thereafter he held daily conferences with members of his party
and called in opposition members of the legislature. “He’s a great
man,” declared one dumbfounded assemblyman. “He talked to us
as a father would.” When opposition to these practices arose, he
threatened to appeal directly to public opinion. He was accused
of being stiff and exclusive whereupon at a planned social meeting
he unbent, told stories and even danced the Virginia reel with one
of the Senators.
Wilson’s theory of the executive as a prime minister was now
emerging as a technique of practical politics eventually to culmi-
nate in the peculiar pattern of his presidential leadership in legis-
lation. The session of the New Jersey legislature closed with the
Governor’s program of measures all enacted. “The newspaper
men seemed dazed,” Wilson wrote to a friend. “I wrote the plat-
form, I had the measures formulated to my mind, I kept the pres-
sure of public opinion constantly on the Legislature, and the pro-
gram was carried out to the last detail.”’* As one reporter put it, the
Governor had “‘licked the gang to a frazzle.’’s It all seemed just
like a dress rehearsal for the first two years of Wilson’s presidency.
In the autumn of 1911 Wilson met Colonel E. M. House, who,
with George Harvey and others, was interested in promoting
Wilson’s candidacy for President. The association with House
turned out to be what Sir Horace Plunkett pronounced “the
2 H. J. Ford, Woodrow Wilson, The Man and his Work (1916), pp. 144-45.
43 David Lawrence, The True Story of Woodrow Wilson (1924), p. 48.
“ Quoted by Link, Wilson: the Road to the White House (1947), p. 274.
45 R, S. Baker, Woodrow Wilson, Life and Letters (1927), m, 127.
44 * The Man inthe White House
strangest and most fruitful personal alliance in human history.”
House was a liberal with a belief in government responsive to the
needs of all classes, and he and Wilson came to see eye to eye.
House helped resolve the mutual antipathy of Wilson and Bryan,
which reconciliation led to the breath-taking coup in the Balti-
more convention by which Bryan almost singlehanded threw the
nomination to Wilson after his candidacy had literally collapsed.
Wilson was learning the facts of life as to national politics and was
to enter the presidency better prepared than many a president with
ten times as many years of experience in practical politics.
Franklin Roosevelt was born amid books and may have rolled
about among them as a babe, which Doctor Oliver Wendell
Holmes considered so important. As a youth his intellectual pab-
ulum included Madison’s Notes on the Constitutional Convention
and the Federalist Papers, both of which he absorbed by repeated
reading. He was twenty-eight when a group of Dutchess County
politicians persuaded him to run for the New York State Senate.
He is said to have toured the three counties of the senatorial dis-
trict day by day canvassing every village, town and crossroad. It
was his ambition to call personally on every farmer. It is indicative
of his flair for politics that his most effective talking point was his
advocacy of a 96-quart standard barrel for apples—something the
farmers wanted. He became, with a single exception, the first
Democratic Senator elected in his district since the birth of the
Republican party fifty-six years earlier.
In the state Senate Roosevelt won promptly a statewide reputa-
tion by mobilizing reform Democratic senators and preventing the
election of Tammany’s choice for United States senator. Herein
he revealed “leadership, heterodoxy, a courage bordering on au-
dacity, adhesiveness and dramatic sense of timing.’ Made chair-
man of the Forest, Fish and Game Committee, he had the oppor-
tunity to give full play to his enthusiasm for conservation as he
4 E, M. House, Intimate Papers (1926-28), 1, 44.
4 John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect: a Profile in History (1950), p. 204.
Apprenticeship for the Presidency + 45
characteristically refused an appropriation for his own county be-
cause it did not need it. That he took a firm stand against the util-
ity lobby and just as firm a stand for farm relief were prophetic.
Setting up a temporary home in Albany, “the Roosevelt house
burst with politicians day and night.”
A delegate to the Baltimore Convention of 1912, Franklin
worked hard for the nomination of Wilson. Here he became ac-
quainted with Josephus Daniels, soon to be Wilson’s Secretary of
the Navy with Franklin his Assistant Secretary. When war was
declared in 1917, Roosevelt’s work became mainly procurement
contracts and labor relations. Invaluable for the future President
was the art of high politics Roosevelt learned from Josephus
Daniels, “a genius in handling recalcitrant Senators, and Con-
gressmen and wheedling appropriations through committees.”
In 1920 Franklin Roosevelt, while still Assistant Secretary of
the Navy, was nominated for Vice-President and made 800
speeches during the campaign. One year later he was stricken with
the ailment that crippled him for the remainder of his life. It ap-
pears that even this misfortune that befell him in his early forties
was a factor in his preparation for the presidency. While bedfast
he read widely, aided by a system of card-indexing, keeping alive
and expanding his already wide acquaintance with key men in his
party throughout the nation by means of systematic and large-
scale correspondence.
By 1929 Roosevelt was Governor of New York. An executive
budget had just been voted into the state Constitution, and Gov-
ernor Roosevelt promptly locked horns with the legislature, which
was bent upon watering down the Governor’s use of the budget
power. The Governor was sustained in this controversy by the
courts, whose decision helped ensure executive authority over state
administration—one of the main purposes of the executive budget.
48 John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect: a Profile in History (1950), p. 205.
49 Ibid., p. 212.
46 * The Man inthe White House
Before the end of his first term as Governor, Franklin Roosevelt
realized that farm aid was of extreme urgency. In his first annual
message to the legislature he declared that his ultimate goal was
that the farmer and his family be put on the same level of earn-
ing as his fellow citizens in the city. Three years later, campaign-
ing for the presidency at Topeka, Kansas, he was telling distressed
farmers, “I seek to give that portion of the crop consumed in the
United States a benefit equivalent to a tariff sufficient to give you
farmers an adequate price.”
Two years before he became President, Governor Roosevelt
was directing his State Conservation Commissioner, Henry
Morgenthau, to purchase and retire from cultivation tens of thou-
sands of acres of marginal land to be reforested.*: When he had
persuaded the people of New York to vote an amendment to the
state Constitution authorizing a bond issue to finance this, he re-
ceived a telegram from Governor Dern of Utah reading, “Hurrah
for trees.” As Governor Roosevelt acquired a reputation for
leadership in farm legislation his prestige as a potential president-
ial candidate grew apace. His failure to persuade the legislature
to pass legislation to protect bank depositors convinced him that
Congress must provide that protection.:
Throughout his four years as Governor, Roosevelt showed an
increasing flair for leadership. Never had a prospective president
a better opportunity for practice games in the policies he was to
establish as president. Campaigning for Governor in 1928 he was
telling audiences that old-age pensions were no more socialistic
than workman’s compensation and this at a time when they were
almost universally considered vicious. So he was to reap the bene-
fits later of a reputation for persistent promotion of social legis-
lation in the face of a hostile Republican legislature.** Likewise
50 Bernard Bellush, Franklin Roosevelt, Governor of New York (1955), p. 94.
51 Ibid, p. 94.
52 Ibid, p. 98.
53 Ibid, p. 125.
54 Ibid, p. 190.
Apprenticeship for the Presidency * 47
the legislature frustrated his efforts at labor legislation, but he
helped educate the public by his lucid presentation of the matter.
When inaugurated, President Roosevelt had already had three
years experience wrestling with the economic problems presented
by the Great Depression. Indeed, as the depression deepened,
Governor Roosevelt in August, 1931, signed the bill for an eight-
hour day and prevailing wages on all state highway contracts.
In his first inaugural address as Governor, Franklin Roosevelt
maintained that the state’s water power belonged to all the people,
and it was the duty of the legislature to see that the power was
transformed into usable electrical energy and distributed at the
lowest cost.** Yet his public power policy was so moderate as to
be persistently denounced by the Socialists under the leadership
of Norman Thomas. It was a culmination of Roosevelt’s policy
as Governor to sign, as President, the Norris Bill creating the
Tennessee Valley Authority.” He had struggled throughout his
four years as Governor to free the New York State Utility Com-
mission from the domination of utility corporations. It was a
sequel to this crusade when he signed the Wheeler-Rayburn Act
of 1935 with its broad powers over the gigantic electrical power
holding companies.
So thorough was Franklin Roosevelt’s apprenticeship that the
transition from the executive routine at Albany to that of the
White House was made with scarcely a break. As Governor he
had already
evolved most of the working techniques that were to be so use-
ful to him as President, and the executive routine of his day had
become fixed: how he arranged his appointments and so on in
the White House exactly duplicated the system he set up at
Albany. The later Fireside Chats grew naturally out of his
55 Ibid., p. 205.
5 Ibid., p. 209.
5 Ibid., p. 239.
48 * The Man inthe White House
innovation of direct radio talks to the New York electorate. In
Albany he customarily held a press conference twice a day; so
it was no great burden, in Washington, to do the same thing
twice a week. Also he learned something of the incisive role he
could play as a teacher, an educator, both to the public at large
and to his immediate political associates.*
Scarcely any other occupant of the White House has executed
the office cf President with a more confident touch than Harry
S. Truman. And this was in spite of the fact that he was compelled
to undertake the great responsibility on a moment’s notice, with-
out a trace of briefing by his predecessor, and with a more meager
apprenticeship than any predecessor who made a comparable
mark in the presidency. In 1956 Clinton Rossiter, than whom
there is no more competent authority on the American presidency,
after summarizing the record of the Truman administration ob-
served, “On the basis of this evidence I am ready to hazard an
opinion, to which I also did not come easily or lightly that Harry
S. Truman will eventually win a place as president, if not as a
hero, alongside Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.” =»
Fortunately from youth Harry Truman had read widely and
understandingly the history of his country so that he knew more
than most of his predecessors of the nature of the presidential
office. He served as a captain of artillery in World War I. At 38
he was elected as one of the three Jackson County, Missouri,
judges, a nonjudicial board that administered county government
and was twice re-elected, each time with enormously increasing
majorities. Irving Brandt, then editor of the St. Louis Star Times,
found Judge Truman to be the only Missouri official at a better-
government conference who could discuss administration problems
with the visiting experts. Eventually Truman was to say: “I had
charge of spending $60,000,000 for highways and public buildings
58 John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect: a Profile in History (1950), pp. 260-61.
58 The American Presidency (1956), p. 126.
Apprenticeship for the Presidency * 49
in Jackson County. Nobody ever found anything wrong with that,
and it wasn’t because they did not look hard enough.”
In 1934 he was one of three candidates for the Democratic nom-
ination for Senator from Missouri in the primary election. He
went stump speaking into 60 of Missouri’s 114 counties making
6 to 16 speeches a day and won the nomination by a margin of
44,000.*° Here was virtually a dress rehearsal for the whistle-stop
campaign of 1948 when he upset the confident expectations of the
pollsters, the gamblers, and the nation. If practical grass-roots
politics is an essential equipment of a president, Harry Truman
was prepared.
It was in the Senate that Harry Truman got the feel of national
affairs. In the midst of World War II he conceived the idea of a
special Senate committee to investigate war contracts. The Truman
Committee, as it was popularly denominated, became the most
famous committee of its time, veritably a household term on virtu-
ally everybody’s tongue. Moreover it was literally a product of
the man’s personality. Its reports were clear-cut and unequivocal:
the use of dollar-a-year men was not good for the defense program;
denying raw material for producing automobiles was the way to
persuade the motor industry to manufacture war planes; exor-
bitant war contracts ought to be renegotiated. And so the reports
went on. Some think the committee saved the nation billions,
and competent contemporary authority expressed the opinion
that, excepting only the president, Harry S. Truman through his
committee contributed more to the winning of the war than any
other civilian. Without the slightest preconceived design, the com-
mittee chairmanship turned out to be what led to the vice-presi-
dency and the White House.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower had had a less relevant experi-
ence for the presidency than any president since General Grant.
8° Harry S. Truman, Memoirs (1955), 1, 141.
ĉi Irving Brandt, “Harry S. Truman II,” New Republic, May 7, 1945.
50 + The Manin the White House
Most of his career had been outside the United States, and his
unfamiliarity with significant issues of American life was apparent
from the first weeks of his campaigning in 1952. “His only know-
ledge of government,” observed Richard Rovers, “was what he
had picked up as an Army lobbyist when Douglas MacArthur
was Army Chief of Staff and, later, when he himself was Chief of
Staff. ...” In the light of such a meager apprenticeship the wonder
is Rovere concluded, that President Eisenhower “has in general
appeared before the world as a not unworthy successor of those
few American Presidents whom the world has known and re-
spected.”*® Clinton Rossiter, writing in the same year as Rovere,
concluded, “Eisenhower already stands above Polk and Cleveland
and he has a reasonable chance to move up to Jefferson and
Theodore Roosevelt.’ That would have put Eisenhower then
among the first ten of the Schlesinger poll.»
© Richard H. Rovere, The Eisenhower Years (1956), pp. 368, 371.
$3 The American Presidency (1956), p. 435.
64 Concerning the Schlesinger poll, see pp. 81, 83, 85, 93.
Pressures on
the President
* A PRESIDENT. who had been inaugurated with
no adequate conception of what the office involved is reported to
have protested, after a few months, that he was “getting damned
tired of the pressures on him.” He should have known that the
very raison d'etre of the American presidency had become the re-
ception and management of the public pressures through which
the people conveyed their opinions and desires to their represen-
tative-in-chief. The most capable presidents have managed to ma-
nipulate the play of pressures and turn them to the promotion
of the general welfare while others have been frustrated by their
overwhelming force.
Only through this office [wrote Herring] is there any hope for
checking the minority forces that turn Congress to their will
and make a mockery of representative democracy. Conditions
being what they are in this country, the Chief Executive pro-
vides the only focal point about which policy can be developed
and resistance offered to the pressure groups demanding con-
sideration.:
No competent president today would think of evading this ob-
ligation.
1 E, P. Herring, “Prescription for Democracy,” Annals of the Academy of Pol.
and Soc. Sci., July, 1935, p. 142.
51
52 +» The Manin the White House
The perceptive realist in the presidential office knows that ex-
ecutive achievement will always be circumscribed by the means
available to the purpose. To be effective the president’s leadership
in legislation and administration will be influenced by the pres-
sures that impinge upon his office. He may become their slave as
did some pre-Civil War presidents, which evidently induced
Emerson to dip his pen in vitriol and write: “But the President
has paid dearly for his White House. It has commonly cost him all
his peace and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve, for
so short a time, so conspicuous an appearance before the world,
he is compelled to eat dirt before the real masters behind the
throne.”
The capable president may mobilize pressures, or play one
against another, or at times by emitting a clarion call awaken dor-
mant social forces and thereby mobilize public opinion behind
him as did Franklin Roosevelt in the “hundred days” of 1933.
That he will not accomplish the impossible is illustrated by the
failure of three successive presidents to get the Eighteenth Amend-
ment’s provisions enforced upon a public containing a dissident
minority apparently growing into an intransigent majority. Sooner
or later every president reaches Lincoln’s conclusion: “I claim not
to have controlled events but confess that events have controlled
me.”
It is axiomatic in the American system of separated powers that
the dominant combination of interests—what the late Associate
Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes denominated “‘the de facto supreme
power’’—-will, in any given period, stake its fortunes on that branch
of government on which it believes its security and the fulfillment
of its desires depend. Thus the creditor, financial, mercantile, and
planting interests that so largely framed the Constitution and came
in time to constitute the Federalist party relied very largely on the
presidency. The opposition to the Federalists, the Jeffersonian
2 E. Hertz, The Hidden Lincoln (1940), p. 265.
Pressures on the President * 53
Republicans, turned to Congress for the fulfillment of their pur-
poses and in the quarter of a century when they were in power
literally reduced the presidency to not much more than an agency
of Congress.
In the second quarter of the nineteenth century a new prepon-
derance of political power came with the vitalizing of the recently
enfranchised American masses, who elected Jackson and practical-
ly remade the presidency into the people’s office. Thereupon essen-
tially the same combination of interests that had constituted the
Federalist party now functioning as the Whig party entrenched
itself in Congress, from which position it bombarded the executive.
Today the Republican party with a similar group combination
seeks to strengthen Congress by reducing the presidential power
as by the Twenty-second Amendment and other proposed amend-
ments such as the projected Bricker Amendment. With the excep-
tion of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, both of whom lost favor
with their party’s leaders, the Republican presidents have general-
ly accepted the party’s theory of presidential subordination to
Congress. Every Democratic president elected in the last hundred
years has been a vigorous practitioner of presidential authority,
which the Democratic group combination apparently expects.
Let no one assume that President Washington because of his
monolithic prestige escaped pressures on the office. The fall of the
Bastille in 1789 was hailed by Americans, one and all, as signify-
ing the emancipation of the French people from autocracy. But
when, three years later, they imprisoned their King and Queen,
that was another matter so far as the conservative Federalists were
concerned. The mercurial American masses however gave way to
a hysterical French craze that swept the country. Mr. Jones and
Mr. Smith became Citizen Jones and Citizen Smith. The French
Tricolor and red liberty cap decorated taverns and coffee houses
where met the American Jacobin clubs that sprang up across the
nation.
For the first months of 1793 no ship, no news arrived from
54 + The Man inthe White House
France. April 3 a British packet beat into New York harbor bear-
ing the news that the French Republic had guillotined the King
and Queen and declared war on England and Spain. Swift couriers
bore the news to the national Capitol at Philadelphia and then on
to Mt. Vernon from whence Washington returned to Philadelphia
to counsel with his Cabinet on the issue of war or peace. The
problem was complicated by our Revolutionary treaty of alliance
with France by which we were pledged to defend France’s New
World possessions and even still more by the fanaticism of hyster-
ical pro-French Americans. These enthusiasts demanded a decla-
ration of war despite the Spanish and restless Indian foes on our
western border, the English on the North, and the lack of a navy
with which to defend French possessions in the Caribbean against
the overwhelming might of the British navy.
Under the circumstances President Washington did the inevit-
able and decided on peace proclaimed by the first presidential proc-
lamation of neutrality. In our day a proclamation of neutrality
is taken for granted as an incontestable exercise of presidential
prerogative. Not so in 1793, when the opposition denounced it as
a clear case of executive usurpation. Did not Congress have the
constitutional power to declare war and by inference then to deter-
mine peace? In Jefferson’s opinion, expressed in a letter to Madi-
son, Washington’s proclamation that the nation was at peace was
equivalent to declaring it would not go to war, which took on the
character of executive encroachment on the legislature. Moreover
had not the President wantonly set at naught our treaty of alliance
with France and thereby broken our plighted faith?
Washington stood firm on neutrality and may have been saved
from the mad rage of the Francophiles by one of those strokes of
fortune that from time to time tip the scales of history in a crisis.
Vice-President John Adams wrote that “ten thousand people in
the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag
Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the govern-
ment, or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution
Pressures on the President + 55
and against England.” In the midst of the tumult yellow fever
broke out in Philadelphia spreading death and panic until over
half the 43,000 inhabitants had fled the city or died. It was Adams’
opinion that the yellow fever, more than Washington’s prestige or
any strength of the government, prevented a revolution. Thus the
pressure of the Francophiles on President Washington was coun-
tered by an event. No president consults Congress before issuing
a neutrality proclamation.
Persisting in his policy of peace, Washington sent John Jay to
England to negotiate what turned out to be the ill-starred Jay’s
Treaty. Scarcely anyone was happy over it, but whatever advan-
tages to the United States it provided operated to the benefit of
northern interests, and the chambers of commerce of Philadelphia,
New York, and Boston supported the treaty. Not a single item in
it benefited southern planters and inland mixed farmers—in short,
the Francophiles who attacked the treaty with savage fury. Jay
was burned in effigy and Hamilton stoned in the street. Though
Washington reluctantly sent the treaty to the Senate, he wrote to
Alexander Hamilton, “At present the cry against the treaty is like
that against a mad dog, and everyone in a manner is running it
down....The string which is most played on because it strikes
with more force on the popular ear is the violation, as they term it,
of our engagements with France.”* He was misrepresented “in
such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied
to a Nero, a notorious defaulter—or even to a common pick-
pocket.”’
Clearly the war between France and England growing out of the
French Revolution had become the chief factor polarizing the
party division between Federalists and Republicans. Jay’s Treaty
3 Works (1950-56), x, 47, 48.
‘Worthington Chauncey Ford (ed.), Writings of George Washington (1889),
xi, 34. See also C. A. Beard, Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913),
Chap. X.
5 A. J. Beveridge, John Marshall (1928), n, 116.
56 * The Man inthe White House
had seemed so pro-British to France that the Directory broke off
diplomatic relations with the United States, refused to receive
C. C. Pinckney, whom Washington had sent there on a diplomatic
mission, and compelled him, by a threat of the French police, to
flee to Amsterdam. John Adams succeeded Washington as Presi-
dent and, indignant at the insult to Pinckney, called Congress into
session to take such action as, he said, “‘shall convince France and
the whole world that we are not a degraded people humiliated
under a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority.”’® But the
pro-French Republicans insisted that, if only Adams would send
a mission to France, all would be well. So Adams yielded and sent
to Paris John Marshall and Elbridge Gerry to join Pinckney as
envoys extraordinary to negotiate with the Directory. At Paris,
three secret agents of the Directory, henceforth diplomatically
designated as X, Y, and Z, met our envoys and declared that before
they could be received there must be an apology for Adams’ de-
nunciation of France, each director must be paid fifty thousand
dollars and tribute must be paid to France.
When Adams published the facts of this XYZ Affair, the Re-
publicans were stunned into silence. Every French flag was pulled
down from the coffee houses, the black cockade of our Revolution-
ary days replaced the red cockade, and an undeclared naval war
with France began. A Navy Department was created, and Wash-
ington was appointed to command the army to be raised. Hamilton
had been the power behind the Adams administration up to the
spring of 1799. He was infatuated with dreams of conquest in
which he would emulate the then rising Corsican corporal by lead-
ing an army that would capture New Orleans in co-operation with
the British Navy, march into Mexico City and, with the co-oper-
ation of the South American patriot, Miranda, liberate Spanish
provinces,
€J. D. Richardson (ed.), Messages and Papers of the Presidents (1927), 1,
235.
Pressures on the President + 57
The pressures of the Hamiltonian Federalists upon Adams for
war with France appeared irresistible, and a declaration of war,
when Congress would convene in December, seemed inevitable.
But Talleyrand, the French Foreign Minister, realizing that war
with the United States would give England another ally, let the
information leak to Adams that a new mission would be courte-
ously received. President Adams, confiding in no one but his wife,
made one of the most momentous decisions in the history of the
presidency. To the consternation of the now infuriated Hamilton-
ians he submitted to the Senate the nomination of a minister pleni-
potentiary to France. This wrecked the plans of the war party, set
the Hamiltonians to sabotaging the Adams administration, and
forecast the election of Thomas Jefferson and the demise of the
Federalist party. To the end of his long life John Adams cherished
the memory of how he had resisted and thwarted the pressures
of the warmongers.
Jefferson, the third President, brought upon himself, by the
Embargo Act, pressures that ultimately overwhelmed him though
not until the last few days of his presidency. His plan was to bring
Britain to her knees and thereby compel respect for our neutral
rights by withholding our agricultural products from her. The
Embargo Act, whose name his Federalist enemies spelled back-
ward and thus denominated the O Grab Me Act, forbade American
ships to sail to a foreign country unless the President suspended
the act. “The enforcement act passed to sustain the embargo was a
greater interference with the ordinary privileges of citizens than
would have been necessary in the exercise of war powers,” wrote
Henry James Ford. Britain was not even greatly inconvenienced by
the embargo, while American ships rotted in harbors, seamen
were umemployed, agriculture languished, warehouses were empty,
and economic distress gripped the nation. Jefferson confessed that
1 The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898), p. 132.
58 * The Man in the White House
the Federal government rocked under the resolutions of the New
England town meetings. On March 1, 1809, Congress, despite .
Jefferson’s protest, repealed the Embargo Act.
Jefferson’s successor, Madison, inherited from him the unsettled
question of neutral rights. Like Jefferson he too was so dedicated
to a policy of peace that an exasperated congressman once declared
in the House that “he could not be kicked into a fight.” However
grievances grew during his first term—especially the exasperation
of frontiersmen with the belligerency of the Indians incited by
British agents—all of which built up irresistible pressures upon
Madison for a declaration of war. By 1812 the time had arrived
for another presidential election. National nominating conventions
were as yet in the distant future, and presidential candidates were
nominated by the congressional caucuses of each party. Madison
was kept in uncertainty as to renomination for a second term, and
action of the Republican caucus was delayed until the pressure
upon Madison made certain that he would recommend a decla-
ration of war. There is no evidence of a bargain on the matter, but
Madison knew well enough that “No recommendation of war, no
chance for a second term.” How much this pressure motivated
him no one can say.
The first President to meet head-on a gigantic economic pres-
sure and not only overcome it but literally annihilate it was Andrew
Jackson. The pressure was that of the Bank of the United States,
and the secret of Jackson’s overwhelming victory over it was that
he was the first President to be elected by virtually direct, universal,
white-manhood suffrage of the American people plus his ability to
symbolize the Bank as a “monster” about to devour the American
people. The Bank had been chartered by the United States govern-
ment, which owned one-fifth of its stock, appointed one-fifth of
its directors, and used the Bank as a depository and dispenser of
Federal funds. The Bank had unquestionably performed valuable
services both to business and the government, but its president,
Pressures on the President * 59
Nicholas Biddle, was persuaded by Henry Clay, candidate for
President against Jackson in 1832, to ask Congress to recharter the
Bank four years before the expiration of its charter. Clay’s pur-
pose was to challenge if not fret Jackson into vetoing the rechart-
ering, which is exactly what Jackson did as soon as Congress
acted. Jackson’s veto message was a masterpiece of propaganda
mobilizing every popular prejudice against the Bank. After his re-
election Jackson had the Secretary of the Treasury gradually re-
move Federal deposits from the Bank, without which it was soon
unable to carry on. Jackson’s ability to counter a hitherto irresist-
ible pressure was a landmark in the history of the presidency. “The
severance of official connections between the national government
and the capitalist was one of the most important steps in Ameri-
can history. Thenceforth, the industrial interests were obliged to
act underground and by lobby.’’
One of the finest examples of a resolute presidential stand
against tremendous pressure is that of Zachary Taylor’s resistance
to Clay’s Compromise of 1850. The Mexican War had left a multi-
tude of perplexing issues in its wake. Clay proposed to admit Cali-
fornia as a free state while Taylor would have admitted it without
raising the extremely provocative issue of slavery knowing it would
be a free state in any case. Clay would have organized the other
territory obtained from Mexico without mentioning slavery know-
ing it was not adapted to slavery anyhow. Texas, which had been
an independent nation before its recent admission to the Union,
now claimed a preposterous western boundary far beyond its pres-
ent one. The expectation that the national debt of Texas would be
assumed by the United States following its admission was not ful-
filled, and holders of its depreciated securities thronged the lobbies
and galleries of Congress clamoring for assumption of this debt.
Here was probably the most immediate economic pressure upon
President Taylor. Clay’s Compromise would have satisfied these
8 Frederick Jackson Turner, The United States: 1830-1850 (1935), pp. 407-408.
60 * The Man in the White House
holders of the Texas Republic’s depreciated bonds by a payment
of $10,000,000 to Texas out of the national treasury on the pretext
of indemnifying the state for accepting what eventually became its
present western boundary. Clay would placate northern antislavery
opinion by abolishing the slave trade but not slavery itself in the
District of Columbia and would have given the slavery interests a
drastic fugitive slave law.
President Taylor had a thoroughly consistent plan of his own,
one designed to avoid if possible the slavery debate that Clay’s
Compromises provoked. Even before Congress had met, Taylor
had sent special messengers west to propose that the inhabitants of
New Mexico and California adopt Constitutions and apply to
Congress for admission, which California did. In his message to
Congress when it convened, President Taylor recommended that
California and New Mexico be admitted to the Union if they had
prepared constitutions providing governments republican in form.
Southerners filibustered against admitting two free states and in
July Alexander H. Stephens and Robert Tombs, in a stormy con-
ference with the President, wound up with a threat of secession.
To this pressure President Taylor is alleged to have told Stephens
and Tombs that he would hang those taken in rebellion ‘“‘with as
little mercy as he had hanged deserters and spies in Mexico.”®
Taylor was dead set against the introduction of two other contro-
versial issues in the Compromise Bill, the slave trade in the District
of Columbia and the fugitive slave bill because of the acrimonious
debates they would certainly provoke. Time was to prove him cor-
rect as to the latter item, for the Fugitive Slave Law by its utter
unreasonableness never for a single day after passage permitted
the slavery question to become quiescent. Taylor was set to veto
every part of the Compromise Bill when his sudden death ended
his counterpressure against the compromise and elevated to the
presidency Vice-President Fillmore, an avowed procompromise
Whig.
° H. A. Weed, Life of Thurlow Weed (1884), p. 117.
Pressures on the President * 61
There is just one instance in American history of a President
practically asking Congress for a declaration of war and not get-
ting it. Franklin Pierce had been elected President in 1852, with
what many Southerners considered an implicit pledge to acquire
Cuba. Then in February, 1854, the American Steamer Black
Warrior, on its regular New York-Mobile run, was seized by
Spanish authorities at Havana on a technicality. This seemed to
President Pierce the heaven-sent opportunity, and within fifteen
days he sent to Congress a message indicating he would use any
authority or means Congress might grant in order to vindicate
national honor. The thinly veiled objective of the annexation of
Cuba with a consequent expansion of slavery was not missed by
millions of Northerners already aroused by the pending Kansas-
Nebraska Bill permitting slavery extension into free territories,
and the ensuing surge of public indignation stopped the plan dead
in its tracks.°
No president was more adept at dealing with pressures than
Lincoln, and they confronted him months before his inauguration.
As far as the popular vote was concerned he was a minority Presi-
dent having received slightly less than 40 per cent of it. The Re-
publican party, upon which his power and prestige depended, was
an extraordinarily heterogeneous aggregation of interest groups
held together by a single issue—that slavery must be absolutely
excluded from the territories. As the southern states were one by
one passing ordinances of secession in the months before Lincoln’s
inauguration, there bore upon the President-elect a persistent
pressure to agree to the Crittenden Compromise with its vital pro-
posal to revive the Missouri Compromise line repealed seven years
earlier at the insistence of slavery interests. This would have re-
quired a repudiation of the only issue that held the Republican
party together and would have compelled Lincoln to be inaugu-
rated virtually minus a party. Lincoln countered the pressure for
the Crittenden Compromise with an inflexible determination to
10 See Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union 1, 349.
62 + The Maninthe White House
prevent the fatal dispersion of his party following. “Prevent as far
as possible,” he wrote a Republican congressman, “any of our
friends from demoralizing themselves and our cause by entertain-
ing propositions for compromise on slavery extension. There is no
possible compromise upon it but puts us under again and leaves
all our work to do over . . . on that point hold firm, as with a chain
of steel.” »
Lincoln demonstrated consummate political skill in countering
the pressures to take the construction of his cabinet out of his
hands even before his inauguration. His purpose was, as his secre-
taries John Hay and John Nicolay expressed it, to “combine the
experience of Seward, the integrity of Chase, the popularity of
Cameron; to hold the West with Bates, attract New England with
Wells, please the Whigs through Smith and convince the Demo-
crats through Blair.”!? But before he had settled the matter, Lincoln
had to deal with the conservative or Seward wing that would have
none of Chase and his kind. On the other hand the radical, Chase-
and-Sumner, abolitionist wing of the party would rule out con-
servative Seward and his kind. “But Lincoln intended, come what
would, to be master in his own house. He meant to rule by a bal-
ance of forces, in which he would hold pivotal authority. From the
outset he had been determined, if possible, to have both Seward
and Chase in his Cabinet and give the direction to neither.» Two
days before the inauguration a crisis had come. Seward had pre-
sented an ultimatum: If Blair, Wells, and Chase went in—and he
especially objected to Chase—he would go out. “There are differ-
ences between myself and Chase which make it impossible for us
to act in harmony.” That night a deputation of Seward men called
on Lincoln to protest against Chase in the Cabinet. Lincoln lis-
tened patiently, but at the end drew a paper from a drawer and
n G. H. Putnam and A. B. Lapsby (eds.), Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln
(1888-96), v, 196.
12 Quoted by Carl Sandburg, Lincoln: the War Years (1939), 1, 153.
13 Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln (1951), 1, 452-53.
Pressures on the President * 63
explained that it contained both his careful choice of Cabinet
members and an alternative list.
Then he exploded his stick of dynamite. Mere mortals cannot
have everything they like, he moralized. ‘This being the case,
gentlemen, how would it do for us to agree on a change like
this? How would it do for Mr. Chase to take the Treasury, and
to offer the State Department to Mr. William L. Dayton?’ He
added that he would make Seward minister to Great Britain.
And he bowed the stupefied delegation from the room."
This simply meant—no Chase, no Seward. It broke the deadlock,
and he had both in his Cabinet.
No one should be puzzled as to why Lincoln appeared to be
letting things drift for two months after his inaugural address
declaring his purpose to “‘take care, as the Constitution itself
expressly enjoins me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully
executed in all the states.” Let it never be forgotten that Lincoln
had been elected by a minority party, that had given him only
39.91 per cent of the total popular vote, that a radical element of
his party was even rejoicing that secession was at long last bearing
the “curse of slavery” out of the Union, and even the Republican
party oracle, Horace Greeley, editor of the Tribune, the very organ
of the Republican party, was but publicizing a widespread public
sentiment in his admonition to the seceding states, ‘‘Erring Sisters
depart in peace.” In the prevailing confusion of opinion Lincoln
could perceive no consensus for decisive action for the simple
reason that none existed.
It was the Confederate government itself that gave Lincoln the
public pressure required for decisive action by its gigantic miscal-
culation as to the reaction of public opinion that it would provoke
throughout the loyal states by the firing on Ft. Sumter. It was the
latent though deep-seated reverence for the Union, symbolized
by the nation’s flag that had been shot at, that created an
14 Ibid., p. 454.
64 + The Man in the White House
instantaneous and almost universal demand, outside the
Confederacy, for presidential action. Equipped with an over-
whelming popular mandate, or pressure, Lincoln acted promptly
to mobilize the armed strength of the nation to overcome resistance
to national authority. No longer was Lincoln sustained merely by
his Republican party, but, for the time being, party lines practical-
ly disappeared and northern opposition to the forcible assertion of
Federal authority was insignificant in the summer and autumn of
1861. With his unexcelled capacity for utilizing social forces
Lincoln employed the now imperative pressures for maintaining
nationwide Federal authority. Any earlier attempt to that end
would have been made with a palsied executive hand.
Never was Lincoln’s capacity for manipulating pressures and
maintaining his mastery by playing one pressure against another
demonstrated better than in the Cabinet crisis of December, 1862.
It was a few days after Fredericksburg, the bloodiest of all the
disasters of the Union army, when a caucus of Republican con-
gressmen summoned by the radical (abolitionist) Senator Sumner
appointed a committee of seven radicals to call on the President
and demand a change of policies and Cabinet, particularly the
dismissal of Seward. It looked for the moment as if Lincoln might
have to surrender to Congress the constitutional privilege of deter-
mining his own counselors as the price of congressional co-
operation in winning the war, for they were demanding that his
Cabinet be reorganized to their satisfaction. Lincoln courteously
asked the committee to return at an appointed time for another
conference. When Seward heard of the demand of the committee,
he sent the President his resignation. Now Lincoln knew that it was
his Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, who was the mar-
plot, a persistent informer of alleged dissension in the Cabinet.»
When, at the appointed time, the committee returned, they un-
expectedly found themselves compelled to resume their complaints
15 See Lincoln’s summary of Chase’s conduct in John G. Nicolay and John Hay,
Abraham Lincoln: a History (1890), vin, 317.
Pressures on the President + 65
in the presence of the Cabinet. Under the circumstances the dis-
tressed Chase felt compelled to eat his own words of talebearing
and admit there was no Cabinet dissension. Furthermore, now
completely discredited before President, Cabinet, and the caucus
committee, the humiliated Secretary of the Treasury reluctantly
decided to offer his own resignation.
This was precisely what Lincoln was maneuvering for. With
the resignations of both Seward and Chase in his pocket he chose
to accept neither, since each had a valuable personal following
representing two wings of the Republican party, neither of which
Lincoln could spare. “This,” said he, “cuts the Gordian knot.”
Lincoln had rescued the very presidency from an extremely dan-
gerous encroachment of congressmen. By a single shrewd stroke,
scheduling the caucus committee to meet in the presence of his
Cabinet, he had preserved his mastery of his own Cabinet, avoided
the loss of the support of the followers of his two principal Cabinet
members, and counteracted the design of congressional encroach-
ment upon the presidency. The escape was nevertheless a narrow
one. Lincoln’s then intimate friend Senator Orville Browning had
informed him that the radical strategy had been to surround him
with a Cabinet of radicals with Chase as the premier. To this in-
formation Lincoln replied with emphasis that he was master, and
that they would not be permitted to do it.* It is Samuel Elliott
Morison’s opinion that “in the Cabinet crisis of December, 1862,
only Lincoln’s astuteness saved him from becoming a mere Premier
instead of a President.”
It was when confronted with a complex of clashing pressures
that Lincoln utilized his incomparable artistry in resolving the
problem by inventing a policy formula. The Emancipation Procla-
mation was just such a formula. His sense of timing was uncanny.
He resolutely refused to be premature in meeting the issue. Thus
16 H, Browning, Diary of Orville Hicks Browning (1925-1933), 1, 64.
17 Oxford History of the United States (1927), 1, 254.
66 * The Man in the White House
he told his friend Swett, “I can see emancipation coming; whoever
can wait for it will see it; whoever stands in its way will be run
over.” When a delegation of church leaders brought him a
memorial for emancipation adopted by a great meeting in Chicago,
he parried with the question whether it might not be as ineffective
as the Pope’s bull against the comet. How could he free slaves in
regions where he couldn’t even enforce the Constitution? They
never knew that he had the draft of what they wanted lying on his
desk and was waiting for the right moment to issue it.
Devising the peculiar formula of the Emancipation Proclama-
tion called for a careful calculation of profits and losses among
the potential supporters of the Lincoln administration by basing
every item of the formula on the paramount purpose of the preser-
vation of the Union. Horace Greeley in his famous ‘“‘Prayer of
Twenty Million” presented a demand that the President positively
commit himself at once to universal emancipation. It disregarded
the effect on the row of border states all holding slaves but still
loyal to the Union and supporting Federal authority with its militia
and volunteer regiments. These military forces from the border
states must not be provoked into throwing down their arms in
protest against fighting to free their own slaves.
When General Lee’s attempt to invade northern states was pre-
vented by his repulse at Antietam Lincoln decided that the
opportune moment had arrived, and he issued his preliminary
proclamation (September 22, 1862) warning “That on the Ist day
of January A. D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any state
or designated part of a state the people whereof shall then be in
rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforth, and
forever free.”!9 This warning passed unheeded and on the following
January | the Proclamation of Emancipation was issued with the
areas in rebellion to which it applied specifically designated. Close
18 E, Hertz, The Hidden Lincoln (1940), p. 298.
19 U.S. Statutes at Large, Xi, 1268.
Pressures on the President + 67
inspection of the Proclamation is required to get the formula by
which Lincoln placated the pressures playing upon him without
penalizing any of his slaveholding supporters. At last he made a
grand gesture in response to the pressures of the abolitionists and
while they were not satisfied with his cautious methods they were
for the moment silenced. The slaveholding border states suffered
no loss of a slave, and since the Proclamation applied only to areas
beyond the Union armies it may not have then freed a single slave.
But evidently President Lincoln had in mind especially the effect
of the Proclamation on Europe, particularly England. The latter
appeared to be teetering on the verge of recognizing the independ-
ence of the Confederacy, which would have been a severe blow to
Lincoln’s administration. But after the Proclamation was issued,
the intense antislavery sentiment of British labor prevented any
recognition of the independence of the Confederacy the British
ministry may have contemplated. Lincoln had dealt a major stroke
of international politics. The Proclamation had “lifted the Civil
War to the dignity of a crusade.”
What Lincoln might have been able to do with the post-Civil
War revolt against executive power no one can say. His successor,
Andrew Johnson, had little if any of Lincoln’s skill in countering
pressures on the presidency, and consequently, despite his resolute
courage, Johnson was overwhelmed by the pressures. It is custom-
ary to consider President Johnson as, by and large, the victim of
rather aimless postwar prejudices. But the ideologies mobilized
against policies he promoted in the public interest were little more
than propaganda devices utilized by resolute economic interest
groups in order to achieve their objectives. Johnson never was a
Republican but had been selected by Lincoln as the vice-presiden-
tial candidate in order to have a southern state represented on the
Union party ticket. As a Jacksonian Democrat, Johnson through-
out his career was an uncompromising champion of the underdog,
20 §. E. Morison and H. S. Commager, The Growth of the American Republic
(1937), 1, 590.
68 + The Manin the White House
a perilous role even for the ablest president. As an East Tennessee
Congressman he had introduced the first Homestead Bill as early
as 1845. It was designed to give every homeless citizen a farm from
the public lands.
The first Homestead Act to become law was signed by Lincoln
in 1862. Three years later President Johnson saw with growing
indignation that this law was being perverted by the greed of the
railroads, mining companies, and the land speculators, all deter-
mined to grab the national domain. He voted two acts of Congress
in order to prevent this and thereby alienated powerful economic
interests. Johnson’s first message to Congress (December, 1865)
indicated his aversion to protective tariffs. This alienated interests
that had assumed that the Civil War had been waged to overthrow
the chief enemy of protectionism—cotton capitalism—and now
Johnson seemed to be championing free trade.
More alarming still to powerful interests was Johnson’s state-
mentin 1867 that an aristocracy of the South based on $3,000,000,000
invested in Negroes, who were a productive class, had disappeared
and in their place the political control of the country was being
assumed by an aristocracy based om nearly $3,000,000,000 in the
national debt. The bonds had been purchased at such a discount
with a high rate of interest being paid in gold, which was at a pre-
mium over the circulating currency, that Johnson seemed to sug-
gest a kind of repudiation, which created a wave of hysteria. He
infuriated the promoters of western railroads by his adamant re-
sistance to any more grants of government land that he would
reserve for actual homestead settlers. Twenty-five years before the
Sherman Antitrust Act Johnson recommended that Congress
utilize its interstate commerce power to check the emerging ra-
pacious monopolies of the post-Civil War epoch.
It was Johnson’s misfortune to have entered the presidency
without the backing of any powerful interests, and unlike Lincoln
he provoked the wrath of the most powerful interests in the nation.
Pressures on the President + 69
These interests were able to obscure the economic issues and turn
against Johnson the torrent of passions aroused by the Civil War.
Included in the combination of pressures that induced the
Senate to come within a single vote of removing Johnson from the
presidency were the bondholders, the banks, the protectionists,
the monopolistic corporations, and the railroad promoters, all
„imperiled by the president’s veto power, which in this case was
wielded by an avowed Jacksonian Democrat.
Pressures piled up against President Hayes from the day of his
inauguration so that he never experienced the customary presi-
dential honeymoon. Fortunately he was expert in the art of poli-
tics, resolutely stood his ground, and won a signal victory. Only
once since the Civil War has the Senate refused to confirm a presi-
dent’s nomination of a Cabinet officer. But the overconfident sen-
atorial oligarchy that had come within a single vote of removing
President Johnson and had held President Grant in the hollow of
its hand started out to hold up Hayes’ entire Cabinet list despite
the fact that, as the late Professor John W. Burgess was to declare
in 1916, “Taken all together, it was the strongest body of men,
each best fitted for the place assigned to him that ever sat around
the council table of a President of the United States.”
Hayes was the first President since the spoils system had been
established to be wholeheartedly committed to civil service reform,
and this was enough to make him persona non grata to the ruling
clique of the Senate—Conkling, Platt, Cameron, Blaine, et al.
Promptly upon receiving Hayes’ Cabinet nominees, the Senate
went into executive session and, departing from its time-honored
usage of not challenging the president’s choice of his official family
referred the list to committees for investigation. They made no
exception to John Sherman, himself a Senator, and senators were
usually confirmed promptly with the idea that a colleague required
2! The Administration of President Hayes (1916), p. 65.
2C, S. Williams, Hayes (1914), n, 25.
70 + The Man in the White House
no investigation. Each of the senators mentioned above had been
urging his own choice of a Cabinet member upon Hayes, who was
now to be disciplined for ignoring their recommendations. But the
unprecedented conduct of the Senate fairly took the breath of the
public, who assumed that some or even all of the list were to be
rejected. The President was promptly deluged with mail urging
him to stand firm, which Hayes would have done in any case.
With the rising tide of criticism the Senate leaders sought in
vain to combine with southern senators against Hayes.” Soon the
insurgent senators were being bombarded with telegrams from
party men, political clubs, and chambers of commerce demanding
confirmation. Newspaper opinion almost unanimously supported
the President. Within seventy hours of receiving the nominations
the Senate had been overwhelmed by the tide of public opinion
and was impelled to confirm Hayes’ Cabinet appointees with al-
most unanimity. Hayes was shrewd enough to stand his ground
and wait until the pressure of the spoilsmen upon him had been
countered by enlightened public opinion in support of him.*
Few presidents have ignored pressures to the extent that Cleve-
land did or paid as heavy a penalty for it. A striking example was
his annual message to Congress of December, 1887, all of which
was devoted to an emphatic demand upon Congress for the re-
vision of the tariff. He had been shrewdly advised not to stir up a
hornet’s nest, but he was obstinate in his determination to do what
was “right,” a dangerous enough guide for a president in a world
where even good men cannot agree on what is “right.” Raising the
tariff issue just then provided a golden opportunity for the pro-
tected interests to utilize the emotion-evoking issue to stir the pre-
judices of voters, and the consequence was the defeat of Cleveland
for re-election and the election of a Republican Congress that
passed the McKinley Tariff of 1890—the most extreme protec-
tionist measure in our history to this date.
23 R. B. Hayes, Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes (1922), m, 427, Mar.
14, 1877.
24 Ibid., i, 28.
Pressures on the President * 71
In the maneuvering of the various interests in constructing the
McKinley Tariff the duty of two cents a pound on raw sugar was
removed, and it was given instead to the producers of raw sugar
at nome. This incidentally produced a disastrous effect on Ameri-
can owners of Hawaiian sugar plantations and mills occasioning
a loss estimated by the Minister of the United States to the primi-
tive Hawaiian kingdom of $12,000,000 a year. In the midst of the
crisis of the American sugar interest the Hawaiian Queen
Liliuokalani gave vent to her intense hatred of missionaries and
foreigners generally by initiating a policy of exclusion of them and
revoking the constitution of 1887, which had given generous con-
cessions to foreigners, wrung from her predecessor. The upshot
was a revolt against her, managed mostly by Americans aided by
American marines from a warship conveniently near at hand. The
American flag was raised, and a mission sent to Washington,
which was cordially received by President Harrison, who prompt-
ly sent a treaty of annexation to the Senate, which however took
no action on it.
Soon after Cleveland became President again he withdrew the
treaty. When the emissary sent by Cleveland to investigate the
Hawaiian revolution reported to him, the President asked the pro-
visional government to step down and restore the Queen, which
was refused on the ground that President Cleveland had no au-
thority to interfere in the internal affairs of Hawaii, What com-
pletely staggered Cleveland in the project was Queen Liliuokalani’s
avowed determination promptly after her expected restoration to
behead as traitors the leaders of the revolution that had dethroned
her—Sanford B. Dole among them. This was too much even for
Cleveland, and when the provisional government with Dole as
President declared its independence, Cleveland made an about-
face, to the consternation of the idealists who had been applaud-
ing his courage, and he cordially greeted the new nation.”
25 See Harry Thourston Peck, Twenty Years of the Republic (1906), pp. 333, 334.
72 * The Man inthe White House
There were tremendous emotion-packed social forces or pres-
sures that handicapped Cleveland in the Hawaiian episode as well
as in many other issues, such, for example, as his determination
to eliminate frauds in the granting of pensions to Union army
veterans. Wavers of the “bloody shirt” kept branding the Demo-
cratic party with the charge of treason and Copperheadism. Vet-
erans of the Union army, numbering then far more than a million,
were reminded in every party campaign that Cleveland had “hired
a substitute” to escape military service. President Cleveland’s
determination to eliminate fraudulent pension claims by vetoing
unwarranted special pension bills was used against him. It was
his misfortune to order the return to southern states of Confeder-
ate flags captured by Union army regiments and in the custody of
the Federal government only to discover that he lacked authority
for such an executive order. But the crowning charge solemnly
iterated and reiterated throughout the land was that Cleveland
had gone fishing on Decoration Day. These things were taken
seriously by a majority of the veterans and of their families,
distributed widely enough among many congressional districts to
hold balances of voting power. When Cleveland’s determination
to reinstate Queen Liliuokalani would have brought down the
American flag that the revolutionists had raised in Hawaii with the
later approval of President Harrison, who had been one of William
T. Sherman’s generals in the March through Georgia, there was
heard again and again the ringing order of Secretary of the
Treasury John A. Dix given on the eve of the Civil War, “If any
man attempts to haul down the American flag shoot him on the
spot.” Of such stuff are made the pressures that sometimes deter-
mine momentous issues.
President McKinley seemed to perceive intuitively the equi-
librium of social forces, and like Eisenhower he was adept at
allaying the strife of conflicting interests. Henry Adams, certainly
no devotee of McKinley, observed:
Mr. McKinley brought to the problem of American Govern-
ment a solution. . . .which seemed to be at least practical and
Pressures on the President * 73
American. He undertook to pool interests in a general trust into
which every interest should be taken more or less at its own val-
uation, and whose mass should, under his management, create
efficiency. He achieved very remarkable results.
Contrary to a persistent popular impression President McKinley
could resist a pressure with adamantine resolution. Promptly
following inauguration he appointed H. C. Evans Commissioner
of Pensions. Evans promptly incurred the wrath of the pension
attorneys by reforming abuses, exposing frauds and administering
the office with the strictest integrity. The office had seldom if ever
known so clean and upright an administration. The Union veter-
ans’ organization, one of the most notable pressure groups in
American history, joined in attacking Evans and demanded his re-
moval. “Enormous political pressure was brought to bear to secure
this end but President McKinley resisted it like a man. He could
not be moved and he gave unflinching support to Evans despite
the clamor of venal claimants and maligners. The same pressure
was applied to President Theodore Roosevelt. He withstood it for
a while and then yielded,” by appointing a Commissioner of Pen-
sions more acceptable to the Grand Army of the Republic and the
pension agents.
In the spring of 1898 President McKinley was subject to the
most formidable aggregation of pressures for war that ever forced
the hand of a peace-loving president. When he was inaugurated in
1897 an insurrection of the rural peons and urban working class
was raging in Cuba. Driven to distraction by low wages and un-
employment, they had revolted against the Spanish ruling class.
Romantic-minded citizens of the United States translated the re-
bellion in terms of our own Revolutionary War with the insurgent
leader Maximo Gomez cast in the role of George Washington.
Two New York journalists, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph
2 The Education of Henry Adams (1931), pp. 373-74.
2 Harry Thurston Peck, Twenty Years of the Republic (1906), p. 674.
74 * The Man in the White House
Pulitzer, plunged into a titanic competition for circulation of their
respective newspapers. They took advantage of the Cuban civil
war to fan the accelerating war frenzy of our citizens with fantastic
tales of Spanish atrocities alleged to have been perpetrated upon
hapless Cubans. An emotional explosion followed the publication,
by Hearst’s New York Journal (February 8), of a lurid translation
of a letter stolen from the Havana Post Office by an insurgent spy.
It had been written by the Spanish Minister to the United States,
Enrique Dupuy de Lome, and contained disparaging comments
about President McKinley pronouncing him, among other things,
a “common politician.” One week later the U. S. battleship Maine,
which had been sent to Havana on a friendly visit, was sunk by an
external explosion with the loss of 260 officers and men. Who was
responsible for the explosion was never discovered, but it inflamed
still more the public feelings against Spain.
Next the Pope, with the best of intentions, committed an error
in dealing with the United States. He made an appeal to both
Spain and the United States not to defile Easter time by an out-
break of war between two Christian nations. When the Catholic
Archbishop Ireland went to Washington to plead for peace, many
Protestant pastors were aroused. The American Protective Associ-
ation, an anti-Catholic organization numbering millions, became
agitated more than ever. “You have no idea,” wrote the Presi-
dent’s brother Abner, “of the pressure on William from religious
peoples ....’”*—-pressures for war, of course.
President McKinley meanwhile was pursuing a policy of diplo-
matic restraint that had the Spanish government, early in April, at
the point of granting Cuba autonomy, independence, or even ces-
sion to the United States if only given a little time to prepare the
Spanish people for the new policy. “War came in spite of the com-
plete success of American diplomacy, and primarily because the
American people wanted to have a war.”» A new generation of
28 Thomas Beer, Hanna (1929), p. 194.
29 John D. Hicks, The American Nation (1941), 1, 312.
Pressures on the President * 75
Americans had been brought up on a romantic interpretation of
the Civil War, nurtured on elementary history textbooks illustrated
with stirring battle scenes. The consequence was an irresistible
demand for a crusade to rescue an oppressed people. Let it be
remembered that the Constitution vests in Congress the power to
declare war, and that it is merely a custom to wait for the presi-
dent’s recommendation of a declaration of war. If McKinley had
not placed the matter at the discretion of Congress, it would
almost certainly have acted anyhow. McKinley might well have
repeated Lincoln’s words, “I claim not to have controlled events
but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”
President Woodrow Wilson demonstrated expert manipulation
of social forces during his first administration when he was man-
aging the translation of the “New Freedom” into one of the most
consistent programs of legislation in our history. There is no more
striking example of his technique than the way he countered the
lobbyists, busy sabotaging the pending Underwood tariff bill. The
measure had passed the House and gone to the Senate, where
customarily tariff bills were rewritten to the heart’s content of
protected interests by the sinister pressures of well-heeled lobby-
ists. Wilson knew of the lobby activities, but he could not have
known what was later revealed by an investigating committee. For
example, the chief page of the House was employed by a lobbyist
of the National Association of Manufacturers to haunt the cloak
rooms and report conversations heard there and on the floor of
the House. There was revealed evidence that the N. A. M. con-
trolled the appointment of certain congressional committees, and
a friendly congressman had permitted the N. A. M. the use of a
room in the Capitol.
President Wilson countered the pressures of the tariff lobbyists
with a statement to the press. “‘It is of serious interest to the coun-
try,” he said, “that the people at large should have no lobby and
30 John F. Kennedy, “To Keep the Lobbyist Within Bounds,” New York Times
Magazine Feb. 19, 1956, pp. 40, 42.
76 * The Man in the White House
be voiceless in these matters, while great bodies of astute men seek
to create an artificial opinion and to overcome the interests of the
public for their private profit.... The government ought to be
relieved from this intolerable burden.” Wilson’s blast broke the
back of the lobby, and consideration of the bill proceeded with the
result that for the first time since the administration of James K.
Polk the tariff was given a systematic revision by a Democratic
Congress.
In the intuitive calculation of pressures and the manipulation of
them to establish policies that he deemed to be in the public inter-
est, Franklin Roosevelt stands high among the presidents. Thus he
mobilized the pressures of the farmers in the mid-1930’s to get
Congress to establish for the rehabilitation of agriculture the Agri-
cultural Adjustment Administration, the Farm Credit Administra-
tion, and the Farm Mortgage Corporation. Thus labor got the
Wagner Labor Relations Act, Wages and Hours Act, Unemploy-
ment Insurance, Low Cost Housing, and Social Security. Those
on relief got the distribution of surplus food through stamps, Old
Age Insurance, and Old Age Assistance. Youth for the first time in
history got special attention with employment provided by the
National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation
Corps. The adeptness of President Roosevelt in managing social
pressures to these ends led one American scholar to declare that
the President had “practically written a handbook on what every
young President should know.”»!
The play of pressures upon a president who has not learned the
game in the rough and tumble of party politics from the precinct
up is downright baffling. For example, there was the tug of war for
and against a bill H. R. 8002 recommended by the Hoover Com-
mission that would have limited the validity of appropriations to a
year at a time instead of setting no time limit. It was assumed that
Congress would thereby be able to scrutinize expenditures more
31 A Comment of T. V. Smith in a University of Chicago Round Tabie, Sunday
noon, Jan. 5, 1936.
Pressures on the President * 77
effectively and thus recover some of its lost control of finance.
The Commission claimed the reform would save three billion dol-
lars a year. This impressed President Eisenhower. He came out
strongly for the bill, and it passed the Senate unanimously.
But when the bill reached the House Committee on Appropria-
tions, it encountered the furious opposition of two veteran com-
mittee watchdogs of finance, Representatives Clarence Cannon of
Missouri and John Taber of New York. Under questioning at a
closed hearing of the committee, Secretary of Defense Charles
Wilson was led to admit that the bill “‘might endanger the national
security.” Here was a Cabinet member in secret criticizing an ad-
ministration bill. At this point ex-President Hoover dropped in at
the White House determined to rescue the measure and so im-
pressed President Eisenhower that he ordered prepared for his
signature a letter to the House supporting the bill.
Even before the letter was signed John Taber got an appoint-
ment with the President and argued vigorously against the bill,
maintaining that it would waste money instead of saving it and
besides the procedure was unworkable. Thereupon the President
admitted that this was “an entirely new point of view.” At this
turn of events Representative Clarence Brown, a sponsor of the
bill and a member of the Hoover Commission that had proposed
it, became indignant and called up ex-President Hoover in New
York, who promptly telephoned the White House, following which
Press Secretary James Hagerty issued a statement that the Presi-
dent was all-out for the bill. It was now Cannon and Taber’s turn,
and they promptly released the closed-session committee criticism
of the bill by Defense Secretary Wilson who then felt impelled to
deny what seemed to be the plain meaning of his words before the
Committee.” The bill never became law.
Then there was the bill to provide Federal aid for school con-
struction and designed to carry out President Eisenhower’s rec-
ommendation. In a Cabinet meeting the bill was opposed by
32 Stewart Alsop, Toledo Blade, August 7, 1957.
78 * The Man in the White House
Secretaries Humphrey and Benson, who argued that it would
mean Federal control of education, but Vice-President Nixon
supported the bill. It was, of course, a special concern of Secretary
Marion B. Folsom of the Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare, who saw the President privately and urged him to come
out with a strong statement before the House voted. But Senator
Knowland, Senate minority leader, breakfasted with the President
and berated the measure. Supporters of the administration bill in
the House waited for word from the White House, but none came
and it lost by 3 votes. Veteran politician presidents such as the
two Roosevelts or President Truman take such pressures in stride
and with a smile, but it is otherwise with the less expert.
33 “The Presidency: Can any one man do the job?” United States News and
World Report, Nov. 22, 1957, pp. 50-72.
The Influence
of Nominating Methods
* THE ADMINISTRATION of Andrew Jackson
constitutes a well-known landmark in the evolution of the presi-
dency. Verily a new Pharaoh reigned in the land, one that knew
not Joseph. The “rich, the well born and the wise” had been in
charge of the Federal government for a long generation, employ-
ing methods perfectly acceptable to them for choosing the chief
magistrate. The very fact that the methods they used had invari-
ably elevated to the presidency a particular type is indicative of the
intimate relation between the method of nominating and electing
the president and the kind of person put in the White House.
What kind of president would have been produced if the origi-
nal method of electing the president by the exercise of the
independent individual judgment of the presidential electors had
persisted even for a season after Washington’s retirement? The
framers of the Constitution, of course, dreading as they did the
possibility of national political parties, thought to avoid partisan
conflict by creating for each presidential election an ad hoc assem-
bly of notables, or rather assemblies, a separate one for each state,
who would cast their ballots for the president. If their votes were so
dispersed among many candidates as to prevent anyone receiving
a majority, then the House of Representatives would be limited to
voting for the highest five candidates (later changed to the highest
79
so + The Man inthe White House
three) in electing the president. Presumably the framers of the
Constitution assumed that the electors would be selected from the
landed and urban gentry and that their judgment would be accept-
able to the complaisant lesser folk. One might speculate as to how
many of our later presidents might have not been considered in-
eligible by such an elite functioning as the Electoral College.
The plans of the framers, of course, miscarried completely as to
the Electoral College. The lesser folk and even some of the rural
gentry promptly aligned themselves against the Hamiltonian fi-
nancial program, and soon political parties emerged, very infor-
mal indeed at first, the Jeffersonian Republicans against the Ham-
iltonian Federalists. The biggest stake of national party politics
promptly became the presidency with the prestige and power in-
herent in the office. With almost incredible clairvoyance Hamilton
had once remarked to a friend that the time will “assuredly come
when every vital question of state will be merged in the question,
‘Who will be the next President?’ ™:
No sooner had political parties on a national scale emerged
than there began a generation-long fumbling trial-and-error
search for a way of getting presidential candidates nominated.
For two or three decades no stabilized method developed, but con-
centration on a party candidate was characterized by a disconcert-
ing informality. In 1796, with Washington now determined to re-
tire, some sort of understanding appears to have been reached as
to candidates probably by somewhat informal congressional cau-
cuses—that is, two joint conferences of party members of both
Houses, one a caucus of Federalists, the other of Republicans. At
any rate Federalist presidential electors voted for Adams while
Republicans voted for Jefferson, and Adams won by a margin of
three electoral votes. For the quarter of a century following, the
Jeffersonians employed the congressional caucus while the rapidly
vanishing Federalists made abortive ventures with another method
1 John C. Hamilton, History of the Republic of the United States of America as
Traced in the Writings of Alexander Hamilton (1850-51), m1, 346.
The Influence of Nominating Methods * 81
with secret national conclaves of party leaders not to be confused
with the later national delegate nominating conventions.
The congressional caucus was a congenial organ to the old rul-
ing class. The late Professor Edward M. Sait considered it “from
almost every standpoint superior to the delegate convention that
succeeded it,”? and John C. Calhoun more than a hundred years
ago expressed a similar opinion.* Certainly the caucus confined
its nominations to men of experience in public affairs so that its
product, the first six presidents, has been called the statesman
group of presidents. The jury of fifty-five historians polled by A.
M. Schlesinger, Sr. did not rate one of the caucus-nominated pres-
idents below average. Washington and Jefferson were rated “great”
and John Adams “near great.” No equal period of convention-
nominated presidents reveals a comparable succession of well-
qualified presidents.
Whatever may have been its merits, the congressional caucus as
a presidential nominating institution had run its course by the
1820’s. Though it had served satisfactorily the quasi aristocracy
of the fathers, it was pounced upon and demolished by belligerent
Jacksonian Democracy. William H. Crawford, the last caucus
nominee, was discredited by the very method of his nomination.
A chaotic interval of groping for a new method of nominating
presidents followed during which presidential nominations were
made by state legislatures, state legislative caucuses, state delegate
conventions, and even large mass meetings in some states.‘
The genesis and evolution of the national nominating conven-
tion is another example of the natural history of democratic insti-
tutions. Here is an institution absolutely indigenous to the Ameri-
can political soil—there is nothing whatever alien about it. Its
persistence on a national scale, with only insignificant modifica-
tions, for more than a century and a quarter demonstrates its
2 American Political Parties (1939), p. 313.
3 Works (1851), vi, 249.
4M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Party System (1910), p. 16.
82 + The Man in the White House
adaptation to the political folkways of our unique political society.
The convention has influenced profoundly the nature of the Amer-
ican presidency and in a sense has reshaped it.
Somewhere in the heart of Pennsylvania a century and a half
ago some Jeffersonian Republican, perplexed with the problem of
getting the party ticket of county officers nominated, must have
suggested to his fellow partisans, “Why not have the Republicans
in each township select some delegates to a county meeting?” The
suggestion was acted upon, and it proved to be just what was
needed. Before long nomination by delegate conventions was an
established institution in the counties of the middle Atlantic states.
Soon congressional district conventions were nominating candi-
dates for Congress, and state delegate conventions state party tick-
ets. An established procedure based on practical experience had
emerged for nominating state and local party tickets.
When the congressional caucus as a means of nominating presi-
dential candidates folded up in the 1820’s, something had to fill
the vacuum created. This was no great problem for a people en-
dowed with a gift for improvising social devices. What was more
natural than for the local and state delegate conventions to make
the transition into the national nominating convention? However
this had to await the wide use of the steamboat for coastal and
river travel. This came in time to make possible the Anti-Masonic
party’s national convention at Baltimore in 1831. Being a new
party the Anti-Masons could not possibly have relied on a con-
gressional caucus.
Three months after the Anti-Masonic convention at Baltimore,
the National Republicans, soon to be incorporated in the emerg-
ing new Whig party, held a national convention in the same city
and nominated Henry Clay. It should be noted that this conven-
tion, like our national conventions today, already had committees
on credentials, on permanent organization, and on an address to
the people, later to be designated the committee on resolutions.
How could this national convention, the very first one of a major
The Influence of Nominating Methods + 83
party, have these essential committees? The answer is that these
earliest national conventions did not at all start from scratch but
simply adopted the party folkways and usages already found in
the county, congressional district, and state nominating conven-
tions. The whole convention’s system with its delegates selected in
the precincts by caucuses satisfied the democratic aspirations of
the recently enfranchised masses. The system represented a shift
in political power from the old self-appointed elite to the people.
Indeed it was the growing power of the West and of hitherto large-
ly inarticulate urban lower-income groups that had doomed the
congressional caucus. Henceforth these new elements had to be
considered in nominating presidential candidates.
Consequent upon the national conventions and the national
committees that soon appeared, the major parties got organized
on a national scale, with a hierarchy of committees, national,
state, county, and precinct. Even local as well as state and con-
gressional elections became competitions related to the party ef-
fort to elect the president. The professional politician as a conse-
quence of the Jacksonian revolution had snatched the party reins
from the landed and urban gentry who had held the mastery
during the first generation under the Constitution. The Convention
signalized the conversion of the president from a quasi-congres-
sional agent into a popular agent, a “tribune of the people,” to use
the favorite phrase of Jacksonian Democracy, based on the ex-
ecutive veto. Thus the intention of the framers to make the
executive a check on Congress was restored after an epoch of near
desuetude of the veto. But instead of the expectation that the veto
would check the anticipated democracy of the legislature, the pres-
idency itself had been converted into an organ of democracy.
The shift of political power from the old elite to the newly en-
franchised masses profoundly changed the quality of the presidents
for two or three decades. Of the eight presidents following Jackson,
the first of the convention-nominated presidents, only James K.
Polk was ranked “near great” and Van Buren as the only “average”
84 +» The Manin the White House
by the panel of historians.» The remaining six were “below
average,” even considerably below. Franklin Pierce may have
been the weakest willed of all the presidents. At any rate his loyal
friend and campaign biographer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, expressed
his deep concern over Pierce’s election with the poignant exclama-
tion, “Frank, I pity you—Indeed I do, from the bottom of my
heart.’’* Pierce should probably be rated a failure as president.
A high physical vitality characterized the presidents of this pre-
Civil War era so that when Lincoln was inaugurated there were
five living ex-presidents, the greatest number at any one time in
our history and this despite the fact that two of the eight had died
in office. The last years of these five former presidents reflect the
low prestige of the presidency in mid-nineteenth century. John
Tyler died in January, 1862, after service in the provisional
Confederate Congress and just before he would have taken his seat
as an elected member of the Confederate House of Representatives.
Martin Van Buren died six months later, despondent over the
disasters of the Union army during the Peninsular campaign.
Lincoln’s high prestige was largely a posthumous phenomenon.
“Never,” wrote Claude Bowers, ‘has the Presidency meant less
than during these years [the 1860’s].”’? The contempt for the presi-
dency was revealed during the summer (1865) in outrageous in-
sults to the three former Presidents then living in retirement.
Buchanan, an old man in his beautiful country home of Wheatland
at Lancaster, was the object of constant assaults in the press, and
the publication of his “Vindication” overwhelmed him with abuse.
Then, on Lincoln’s death, Fillmore, hovering about the sickbed of
his wife and ignorant of the request that private houses be draped,
hung no crepe, and awoke one morning to find his house smeared
with ink. At the same time the venerable Franklin Pierce, speaking
ata memorial meeting, was interrupted with a yell, ““Where is your
flag?” and with scorn the old man flung back his answer, “It is not
5 Polled by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., in 1945.
ê See Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (1947), 1, 41.
1 The Tragic Era (1929), p. 12.
The Influence of Nominating Methods * 85
necessary for me to show my devotion to the stars and stripes by
any special exhibition.” Shortly the drive against the presidency
was to culminate in the miserable fiasco of the impeachment of
President Andrew Johnson. A Tocqueville or a Bryce who might
have commented on politics in the United States in the 1860's
could fairly have observed that the presidency had come to be
held in very contempt.
The mid-century decline in the average quality of the presidents
was doubtless due to the electoral revolt of the masses against the
statesman type of chief executive drawn from the ruling gentry.
The convention, far from being the cause of the decline, was mere-
ly the organ through whom the little people sought to nominate
candidates drawn from their own ranks. Intellect had become
somewhat suspect in this era of the rise of the common man. Even
the Whigs, the heirs of the defunct Federalist party of “the rich,
the well born, and the wise,” won presidential elections only when
they nominated military heroes—General William Henry Harrison
and Zachary Taylor—figures fascinating to the masses.
The nomination of Lincoln at Chicago in 1860 marked a turning
point in the general quality of presidents selected by means of the
Convention. Of the thirteen presidents following that date as judged
by the fifty-five historians only three were rated “below average” —
Grant, Harding, and Coolidge. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin
Roosevelt were adjudged “great,” while Theodore Roosevelt and
Grover Cleveland were considered “near great.” Johnson, Hayes,
Arthur, Harrison, McKinley, and Hoover were all rated “average.’’*
There has long been a tendency to accept uncritically James
Bryce’s contrast between the “natural selection” of prime min-
isters and the “artificial selection” of our presidents. The disparag-
ing term “artificial” reflects, of course, on our nominating con-
ventions. The two methods of “selection” are products of the po-
litical mores of two quite different peoples, and it cannot be
8 Because of his brief incumbancy Garfield was not judged nor was Truman,
who had only recently succeeded to the presidency at the time of the judging.
86 + The Man in the White House
demonstrated that either one is more natural than the other or in
any way superior to the other. Each has from time to time brought
forth conspicuous misfits. The late Harold J. Laski, in an article
prepared for English readers, wrote that
if we make a numerical comparison between great American
Presidents between Washington and Franklin Roosevelt and
great Prime Ministers between the younger Pitt and Mr.
Churchill the advantage is as much on the American as on the
British side. . . .Most people would agree that, between 1789
and 1945, the great Prime Ministers were Pitt, Peel, possibly
Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, Lloyd George, and Churchill
... -In the same period in the United States, it would be now
generally agreed that Washington, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson,
Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin
Roosevelt were quite certainly Bryce’s ‘front rank’ whatever the
criterion by which he made the choice.’
According to Laski then the score would be even, “artificial
selection” turning up seven “great” presidents in the century and a
half while “natural selection” brought forth seven “great” prime
ministers. Furthermore Laski dismissed the customary criticism
of the American system for failing to elevate to the presidency
such remarkable men as Clay, Webster, and Calhoun with the
shrewd observation that
in each case their failure is explicable in terms of defects of char-
acter that, on the whole, is a tribute to the delegates who de-
cided against them. .... Nor is it without significance that if
‘artificial selection’ in the United States excluded Clay, Calhoun
and Webster, what Bryce calls ‘natural selection’ in Great Brit-
ain also excluded Lord Randolph Churchill and the great Irish
leader Parnell from the influence that should have been theirs.
And if men of such poor capacity as Franklin Pierce and War-
ren Harding became Presidents, Great Britain has little reason
to be proud of Prime Ministers like Lord Goderich and Neville
Chamberlain.
° “The American Presidency,” Parliamentary Affairs, 11, No. 1 (Winter, 1949), 18.
10 Ibid., p. 19.
The Influence of Nominating Methods * 87
Unquestionably chance and circumstance play their parts in either
system in determining who is to be the head of the national gov-
ernment.
Appropriating the matured usages of the state and local dele-
gate conventions, the national nominating convention emerged
full fledged over a century and a quarter ago without any state or
national legislation, and so absolutely is the national nominating
convention when in session a product of sheer custom and usage
that its procedure and conduct cannot to this day be controlled by
any state or national legislation. Only a constitutional amendment
could give legislative power to regulate its sessions or even provide
for national primaries for nominating presidential candidates.
The stability of the convention as an institution throughout
its history is impressive. Disregarding such modern extraneous
and unessential gadgets as radio, television, and newsreel cameras,
it might be said that the more it changes the more it is the same
thing. The maneuvering of factions and personal followings dur-
ing the convention, the mass psychology, the deals and under-
standings between leaders, the play of patronage and pressure
groups have persisted from the very beginning. It was at Baltimore
in 1844 that the Democratic convention wrangled for two days
over the seating of contested delegations from New York and
wound up by seating both with half a vote for each delegate. It
was in the same convention that ex-President Van Buren in eight
ballots could not quite reach the then required two-thirds majority
necessary for nomination, whereupon the convention nominated
James K. Polk the first of all the “dark horses.” So dark indeed
was this “horse” that when the first telegraph line just constructed
bore from Baltimore to Washington the first news telegram, con-
veying the news that Polk had been nominated, Democrats in the
capital went about shouting “Hurrah for Polk,” only pausing now
and then to inquire, “Who the hell is Polk?” Dark-horse Polk
turned out to be ablest President between Jackson and Lincoln.
Bryce rated him as insignificant as Pierce, but that judgment was
88 » The Man inthe White House
made before the publication of Polk’s Diaries in 1910 revealed his
quite superior ability.
Criticism of the convention, which breaks out quadrenially,
concentrates upon its irrationality rather than on its product. The
less he knows of the social drives, the seemingly blind forces that
shape institutions, the more certain is the naive novice that he can
blueprint a better one. In practice he would inevitably experience
what the philosopher John Locke did when he prepared as the
constitution for the proprietary colony of the Carolinas an elabo-
rate thirteenth-century feudal system, only to see the tough back-
woods settlers serenely ignore it as a bit of constitutional romanc-
ing. Those who would suddenly supplant the deep-rooted conven-
tion system for nominating presidential candidates had better
ponder Paul David’s profound observation: “Almost any change
in the nominating procedure is likely to have some effect upon the
distribution of power in the social order.” In other words the
forces of American political society functioning through the na-
tional convention sifts out a different kind of prospective presi-
dent than a revamped convention or a national nominating primary
would. Moreover the consequences of a shift to a different meth-
od of nominating candidates would be unpredictable and might
turn out to be as striking as the consequence that resulted from
the change from the congressional caucus to the convention meth-
od of nomination a century and a quarter ago.
Power politics provided the dynamics of every hotly contested
nomination by a convention with patronage providing most of the
leverage. Lincoln’s nomination in 1860 would have been imposs-
ible without his managers’ trading for state delegations by the
offer of Cabinet posts despite Lincoln having forbidden such
traffic. It was patronage, state patronage, that enabled the Eisen-
hower managers in the convention of 1952 to break the grip of the
u Paul David, Malcolm Moos, and Ralph Goodman, Presidential Nominating
Politics (1954), 1, 194.
The Influence of Nominating Methods = 89
“Old Guard” and ensure the general’s nomination. Twenty years
of Democratic presidents had left the Republican “Old Guard”
absolutely bereft of federal patronage. It was the twenty some Re-
publican governors who were equipped with state patronage,
which they employed in managing their state delegations for
Eisenhower, and, as Doris Fleeson put it, “They spared neither
the carrot nor the goad.”
The Pennsylvania delegation became the key to the nomination,
and the managers of both Taft and Eisenhower sought to dazzle
Governor Fine with prospects of a Cabinet appointment, an am-
bassadorship, or even the vice-presidency. They offered him the
chance to be ‘“‘Kingmaker” by making the nominating speech.
Senator Duff, an ardent Eisenhower man but no friend of the
Governor, was said to have been persuaded to promise to the
Governor his own potential Federal patronage to get the Gover-
nor to deliver the Pennsylvania delegates for Eisenhower. But the
most effective use of patronage for Eisenhower was made by Gov-
ernor Dewey, who informed the New York delegates at their first
caucus that he would be Governor for two and a half years more
and that he had a long memory. Then he called their attention to
the state jobs allocated to each delegate’s district and to the fact
that there could be new appointees two days after his return to
Albany. No wonder one television close-up of the convention re-
vealed Governor Dewey announcing the New York delegation’s
95-1 vote for the Eisenhower ‘‘Fair Play” amendment to the rules.
Let no one assume that a change to the national nominating pri-
mary would do anything to the play of power politics except to
change the way it would be employed and very possibly for the
worse. Power will be used when the stakes are as high as they al-
ways are in choosing a president.
There are certain important minorities interested in the protec-
tion of civil rights that would lose a powerful leverage they now
possess in the convention system if a change were made to the na-
tional nominating primary. The same advantage would be lost if a
90 + The Man in the White House
change were made to a rigidly instructed delegate convention as
has been proposed. These minorities are largely concentrated in
the large cities of pivotal states where they can, when aroused, use
the balance of power of their collective ballots to swing decisive
majorities of electoral votes and thereby determine presidential
elections. National conventions are therefore compelled to calcu-
late the effect of the attitude of the Jewish, Negro, Catholic, and
other religious and ethnic groups and select their candidates with
respect to it. Thus it was the delegates from states where such
minorities are potent and capable of shifting balances of electoral
powers who compelled the Democratic conventions of 1948 and
1952 to recognize civil rights in their platforms. It was such dele-
gates who sought to require a “loyalty pledge” of the delegates in
the hope of thereby preventing another states’ rights or Dixiecrat
defection in 1952. In fact, the national nominating convention
seems indispensable in choosing the type of candidate required as
long as the Electoral College continues.
What would the substitution of a direct national nominating
presidential primary do to the presidency? The convention has al-
ways had the obligation, seldom shirked, of finding a candidate
with wide voter appeal—that is, a potential winner. It can and
does, with rare exceptions, act with a collective intelligence by no
kind of miracle possible for millions of party voters acting inde-
pendently in the seclusion of the millions of polling booths of a
national primary. Contrast the simplicity of the voter’s function of
deciding between the two major candidates for president in the
general election with that of deciding among several possibilities
whom to vote for as the party candidate in a primary election.
A national primary [observed Paul David] would disregard the
necessity for sectional, factional, and group compromises that
are the price of union [but] the convention environment puts
emphasis upon the process of compromise and adjustment
through face-to-face negotiation. It brings representatives of
every section and group together in one place where they are
The Influence of Nominating Methods » 91
required to think about the problems of the party from the
national point of view.
The primary, on the other hand, permits no opportunity for bal-
ancing of the interests and sections so necessary in selecting a
potential chief executive of a multigroup society organized in a
federal republic. The primary by making impossible the opportu-
nity for elements of the party—the factions, sectional, economic,
ethnic, and other kinds—to arrive at a negotiated consensus on
platform and candidate would almost certainly, on occasion, prove
disruptive of the party. In short the convention provides oppor-
tunity for the maximum of integration of which the loose federa-
tion of local parties constituting our national parties is capable.
If, under nation-wide presidential primaries, the indispensable
collective party intelligence appears at all, it could be only by un-
dersurface management. To be effective among millions of voters
of a party this management would have to be well heeled indeed,
and the good angels so necessary may be at hand in the oil multi-
millionaires fabulously enriched by the legal depletion deductions
of 27 1/2 per cent before calculating Federal taxes. Here is an
emerging new power group eager to play the role of twentieth-
century American Warwicks. Instead of long since dethroned
King Cotton or tottering King Corn the national nominating pri-
maries might be the means of enthroning King Oil. But these same
forces so easily concealed in the primary are, when operating in
the convention, uncovered and tagged by shrewd news columnists,
and their major moves are publicized almost as soon as they are
made.
One thing is indisputable, a primary can never draft a candi-
date, which the convention sometimes does, and has thereby of-
fered the electorate some superior candidates, for example Charles
Evans Hughes in 1916 and Adlai Stevenson in 1952. If the national
primary were established, “fate may then sometimes decree that only
12 Ibid., p. 203.
92 * The Man in the White House
the most egregious self seekers and political charlatans shall be
on the ballot as the choice to which the electorate must address
itself.” By no means could the national primary frame the party
platform, and a denatured national convention absolutely neces-
sary for that sole purpose would be preposterous. Moreover the
platform must precede the nomination of the candidate, who
should be such a one as could consistently run on that platform.
Nor would the primary be likely to nominate a suitable running
mate for the presidential candidate. In short, as Sidney Hyman
comments on the convention,“If it were abolished, the conver-
sations it makes possible between trans-continental interests, the
common language it gives to them, the common means of self pro-
tection, with which it arms them, the compromises it imposes upon
them would come to an end. A Babel would rise on the debris.”
Edward S. Corwin and Louis W. Koenig express an even more
vigorous condemnation, observing:
Indeed the national primary instead of being a democratic de-
vice would be anti-democratic, because it would limit candi-
dates to those few who could command the big money required
for the campaign. Equally serious is the prospect that the na-
tional primary would have a devastating impact on party co-
hesion. The primary would serve to organize rivalry and strife
between party personages on a national scale. The consequence
might well be splits within parties that could not be healed with-
in a single presidential term.
In the convention the factions come face to face and have the op-
portunity to arrive at some understanding on differences, which
they usually do. The primary would lack utterly such an institu-
tional device for composing differences.
Nor should the quadrennial competition for presidential nomi-
nations between senators and state governors be overlooked. The
13 Paul David, [bid., p. 200.
14 The American President (1954), p. 165.
15 The Presidency Today (1956), p. 109.
The Influence of Nominating Methods + 93
national nominating primary would almost certainly tip the scales
heavily in favor of the senators, who have an advantage over gov-
ernors in getting the attention of the nation. The evidence is over-
whelming that the Senate provides no adequate apprenticeship for
the presidency while a governorship has provided it repeatedly.
Returning to the verdicts of the jury of historians, not one of the
six “great” presidents had served a full term in the Senate.» Nor
had one of the four “‘near great” ever sat in the Senate. The former
senators cluster near the foot of the class. Three of the eleven
“average” presidents, three of the six “below average” presidents,
and one of the two “‘failures” had been senators. Half of the
“great” presidents had been state governors, three-fourths of the
“near great,” and five of the eleven “average” presidents had been
governors. There was only one governor among the eight presi-
dents rated still lower. Meanwhile the American people might
ponder well before changing the nominating process to a method
that could give senators the edge in the competition.
What if we had selected our presidents through national nomi-
nating primaries instead of the convention during the last hundred
years? Would it have given us better presidents? Of course we can
never know, but some shrewd speculation based on historical data
can be ventured. To begin with, we could not have had Lincoln,
because a party primary in 1860 would have almost certainly nom-
inated the less competent but nationally famous Senator William
H. Seward instead of the then not-so-well-known frontier lawyer
Lincoln, but a primary would have renominated Lincoln in 1864.
Since General Grant’s name was on every tongue a party primary
would have done precisely what the convention did in 1868 and
1872. Indeed the chances appear rather strong that primaries
would have done just what the conventions did in the nomination
of Grant (twice), Cleveland (twice), McKinley (twice), Theodore
16 Jackson had served a few months as an appointed Senator from Tennessee
before resigning.
94 * The Man inthe White House
Roosevelt (1904), Taft (1908), Wilson (second term), Coolidge,
Hoover (twice), Franklin Roosevelt (four times), Truman (1948),
and Eisenhower (twice). This generalization is based on the as-
sumption that the competition of the primary election did not, in
any case, engender enough strife to upset the expected result.
A Republican party primary in 1876 would quite probably have
nominated the magnetic but tarnished Senator James G. Blaine
instead of the courageous and incorruptible Governor Rutherford
B. Hayes, who could scarcely have competed successfully against
Blaine in a primary. In 1880 either Blaine or the incompetent ex-
president Grant would probably have been chosen by a primary
instead of Garfield, who was certainly superior to either. In 1888 it
might have been John Sherman with more than thirty years service
as Congressman, Senator, and Cabinet member instead of Senator
Benjamin Harrison. In 1912 it could easily have been the some-
what erratic Champ Clark instead of the much abler Woodrow
Wilson. In 1920 it would have been General Leonard Wood or
Governor Frank Lowden instead of Warren Harding. A peculiar
set of circumstances that may never recur upset the normal func-
tioning of the Republican convention in 1920. The three chief con-
tenders, Wood, Lowden and Senator Johnson, were each strong
enough to cancel out each other by creating a three-way deadlock,
and since a Republican victory seemed certain in 1920, neither
contender would give in. Since “any Republican could win” in
1920, a clique of Senators manipulated the nomination to one of
their own number, Warren Harding, whom they considered pli-
able enough that the clique could dominate him as President.
The nomination of Harding seems to be the single instance out
of twenty-four conventions that nominated candidates who be-
came president in which the convention unquestionably did worse
than primaries at corresponding dates might have done, which
looks almost like the proverbial exception to a general rule. Ac-
cording to our estimate, in eighteen out of twenty-four conven-
tions that nominated future presidents a primary would have done
The Influence of Nominating Methods + 95
no better than a convention because it probably would have done
exactly what the convention did. Discount all this as specula-
tion as you please, the strong suspicion remains that the conven-
tion is as satisfactory in performing its function as any human
institution can hope to be. No English scholar since James Bryce
is more competent to judge our institutions objectively than Pro-
fessor Denis W. Brogan, in whose opinion our national conven-
tions provide “the maximum integration that the party system is
capable of” and “they decide which candidates are available and
then which of the available candidates is most available,” a sifting
process that a national primary could never even hope to do.
Finally Brogan found that “the Convention system works, works
as well, in its own sphere, as Congress does in its” and “‘no really
effective substitute has ever been suggested.” Y
17 Politics in America (1954), pp. 232, 234.
The Presidency as Molded
by the Campaign and Election
* THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION is
essentially a battle between the managers of the two major parties
to capture the presidency with all its prestige, patronage, and
power. Because the stakes are so enormous, the very nature of the
presidential office is inevitably profoundly affected by this quad-
rennial competition. No matter what the Constitution provides
with respect to the president, it is his virtually direct election by a
nationwide electorate, contrary to the intention of the framers of
the Constitution that has so largely converted the presidency into
what it has become. What if the first plan of the framers to have
the president elected by Congress and rejected just before adjourn-
ment had stuck? He might have become little more than the com-
plaisant agent of Congress. What if the presidential electors had
continued to vote their individual judgment? He could never have
become the free choice of the national electorate. “How the Presi-
dent is elected does much to determine the ground rules under
which the social struggle proceeds in the political arena. The elec-
toral vote system established by the founding fathers seen in this
perspective, shaped up as little less than an act of political
genius.”
1E, S. Corwin and L. W. Koenig, The Presidency Today (1956), pp. 129-30.
96
Presidency as Molded by Campaign, Election » 97
As Lincoln expressed it when responding to a serenade follow-
ing his re-election in 1864, “The struggle of the election is but
human nature practically applied to the facts of the case.”? By and
large the presidential election is an emotional rather more than a
rational experience of the electorate but withal an exhilarating and
wholesome one at that. One wonders how else the electorate as a
whole could be made so acutely aware of the very existence of our
national state, which most of the time is ignored when it is not
casually just taken for granted. “I know of nothing grander,” de-
clared Walt Whitman, “better exercise, better digestion, more
positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human
kind, than a well-contested national election.’
But what does a presidential election do to the winning candi-
date? That depends on candidate and circumstances. There have
been presidents elected who entered the office on inauguration day
almost utterly innocent of what the election signified and what
was expected of them— Ulysses S. Grant, for example. At the op-
posite extreme was Lincoln, the consummate politician, the invet-
erate reader of newspapers, clairvoyant discerner of public senti-
ment, and gauger of social forces. Lincoln was acutely aware of
every component element of the group combination that had
elected him. Unless he could hold intact that unstable combina-
tion, he could become as impotent as President John Tyler had
been fifteen years earlier, when the Whig party that had elected
him Vice-President turned against him as President and, in caucus,
literally read him out of the party. What can be more futile than
a president without a party? Perhaps it is the president oblivious
to the elements that elected him or unaware of how to utilize them
in order to govern with vigor.
The Republican party that elected Lincoln in 1860 was as in-
congruous an aggregation of economic and social groups as a
? Roy P. Basler (ed.), Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (1946),
p. 764.
3 Complete Prose Works (1914), p. 218.
98 + The Man in the White House
political issue—opposition to slavery in the territories in this case
—had ever brought together. Laborers and farmers, mainly of the
older native stock along with the Free-Soil Democrats, constituted
the core of the new Republican party. It had swallowed almost
in toto the northern Know-Nothing movement when the party had
collapsed, but because of this antialien element the Republicans
held only tenuously a contingent of recent German immigrants,
whom it dared not alienate. Included also in the combination were
radical Abolitionists, whom Lincoln abhorred, fanatical Prohibi-
tionists, and some novel cults of that strange era of social ferment,
even vegetarians among others. Lincoln’s paramount purpose as
President-elect was to keep this combination from disintegrating
before his inauguration no less than afterward and all in the midst
of a harassing spread of southern secession and defiance of Fed-
eral authority. These were the circumstances resulting from the
election of 1860 and determining what President Lincoln might
and might not do in March, 1861.
Before his election Lincoln had expressed to Leonard Swett, one
of his campaign managers, his theory “that the pressure of the
campaign was an external force coercing the party into unity.”
On election day that particular integrating force completely van-
ished. Now there remained but a single proposition on which every
last Republican agreed, “Keep slavery out of the territories.” As
secession spread, Republican leaders came under the most intense
pressure to consent to the restoration of the Missouri Compro-
mise, which had been repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of
1854. This would have obliterated the one proposition that held
intact the Republican party combination. Lincoln was adamant
on this issue and wrote to a Republican congressman before his
inauguration: “Prevent as far as possible any of our friends from
demoralizing themselves and our cause by entertaining proposi-
tions for compromise on slavery extension. There is no possible
compromise on it but which puts us under again and leaves all our
4 Leonard Swett to W. H. Herndon, in E. Hertz, The Hidden Lincoln (1940),
p. 297.
Presidency as Molded by Campaign, Election * 99
work to do over again...on the point hold firm, as with a chain
of steel.”
It was the campaign of 1860 that created the crisis of 1861 and
the set of circumstances that affected the presidency more pro-
foundly than any provision of statute or Constitution. By inflex-
ible adhesion to the one great cohesive issue of exclusion of slav-
ery from the territories Lincoln held his party intact. Had he not
done so, his oath “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitu-
tion” and “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”
throughout the entire nation would have been not much more
than a symbolic gesture. The collapse of his following would have
created a confusion bordering on anarchy, and he knew it. With
no mandate to move at once against the Southern defiers of Fede-
ral authority Lincoln immediately after inauguration merely ac-
cepted and maintained the status quo bequeathed by Buchanan,
who had himself resolved to defend Sumter if it were attacked.
When the attack on Sumter came, the mandate given Lincoln by
his party to keep slavery out of the territories was succeeded by
the broader mandate of an electrified bipartisan northern public
opinion to preserve the Union and enforce the supreme law of the
land throughout its length and breadth.
Two generations before Lincoin’s election Jefferson, the third
President, had manifested the profound influence of a presidential
election in shaping the presidency. During the campaign of 1800
this ardent agrarian prudently took in sail and toned down his
strictures of 1782 against “the mobs of great cities who add just
so much to the support of pure government, as sores to the strength
of the human body.” “I had in mind,” he explained during the
campaign, “the manufacturers [manual workers] of the old coun-
try, at the present time, with whom the want of food and clothing
necessary to sustain life, had begotten a depravity of morals.’
5G. H. Putnam and A. B. Lapsby (eds.), Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln
(1888-96), v, 196.
6 Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), p. 302.
7 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Ford edition), (1892-99), m, 269.
100 + The Man in the White House
The laborers of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore
were worth luring away from their Federalist employers into the
Jeffersonian party. Thus as early as 1800 a presidential candidate
was taking cognizance of the fact that an urban minority had
better be placated.
In this election of 1800 the Republicans had aimed to elect
Jefferson President and Burr Vice-President, but under the original
system provided by the framers of the Constitution for casting the
ballots of the presidential electors a tie between them had resulted.
This tie required election of the president by the House of Repre-
sentatives with each state delegation casting one vote. Moreover
this election was by a “lame duck” Federalist House of Repre-
sentatives elected in the midst of the hysterical anti-French reac-
tion of 1798 following the revelation of the XYZ Affair. Federalist
leaders promptly set about planning to elect Burr President but
were frustrated by his firm refusal to support Federalist plans if
elected. He would serve only as a Republican President and, as a
Tammany partisan, presumably would replace every last Federal-
ist appointee with a deserving Republican.
Finding Burr to be an inflexible partisan Republican, Federal-
ist leaders turned to sound out Jefferson through an intermediary.
They hoped for assurances that Jefferson would maintain the Fed-
eralist fiscal system, adhere to the existing policy of neutrality,
preserve and gradually increase the navy, and continue in office all
Federalists except in the major departments. General Samuel
Smith, acting as an intermediary for Senator Bayard, sounded out
Jefferson on these matters apparently without his suspecting the
purpose. Smith reported back to Bayard that Jefferson’s views
were in accord with Bayard’s, whereupon the prolonged impasse
in the balloting of the House of Representatives for president was
broken by some Federalists absenting themselves or casting blank
ballots. Ten states supported Jefferson to eight for Burr, and Jeff-
erson was declared elected President.
Due to the peculiar nature of Jefferson’s election he entered
the presidency under circumstances requiring extraordinary caution
Presidency as Molded by Campaign, Election * 101
on his part, and his conduct reveals that he knew it. The electoral
college vote as between Republicans and Federalists had been
close: Jefferson 73, Adams 65. Only twice has the electoral vote
since then been closer. One can detect the consequent circumspec-
tion of the practiced and astute politician in Jefferson’s administra-
tion. An irreconcilable minority could have rendered the govern-
ment virtually impotent, and Jefferson had just such a minority in
the potentially intransigent New England Federalists. Indubitably
the election of 1800 had decisively circumscribed Jefferson’s dis-
cretion. No wonder his first inaugural contained the ingratiating
sentiment, incomprehensible to his partisan supporters, “We are
all Federalists, we are all Republicans.” He was to confide to a
correspondent that the conciliatory tone of the inaugural was de-
signed to lure back the Republicans who had been stampeded to
the Federalists by the anti-French hysteria of 1798. In accordance
with the tacit understanding that the Federalists assumed they had
with Jefferson, he made no wholesale removals from office and
filled vacancies as they occurred with his faithful followers, but
erelong he was to inquire, “How are vacancies to be obtained?
Those by death are few, by resignation none.» However let no
one be too astonished to learn that this practical-politician Presi-
dent saw fit to make a federal supervisor out of James Linn, the
former Congressman who had cast the deciding vote in 1801 shift-
ing the New Jersey delegation of the House of Representatives
from Burr to Jefferson and thereby ensuring Jefferson’s election as
President.°
President Jefferson was never averse to rewarding the elements
in his constituency that gave vigor to the presidential arm. Believ-
ing that Hamilton had used the branches of the Bank of the United
States as Federalist party patronage Jefferson expressed himself as
“decidedly in favor of making all banks Republican by sharing
ë Quoted by H. J. Ford, The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898), p. 139.
® Henry Adams, John Randolph (1882), pp. 52, 53.
102 * The Man in the White House
deposits among them in proportion to the disposition they show.’’
The “midnight judges” authorized by the recent lame-duck Fed-
eralist Congress and appointed by President Adams had their of-
fices jerked from under their feet by the new Congress’ repeal of
the legislation creating the judgeships. Imprisoned victims of the
despised Sedition Law were pardoned, and Congress appropriated
money to repay their fines. The erstwhile Whisky rebels rejoiced to
see the hated excise tax repealed. Though retrenchment was Re-
publican dogma, money was appropriated to build the Cumber-
land Road into the Ohio Valley, where Republicans thrived and
Federalists were virtually nonexistent. Millions were gladly pro-
vided to pay for the purchase of Louisiana, to be inhabited in due
time, it was assumed quite correctly, by almost none but Jefferson-
ians. For Jefferson “steered the ship of state by the headlands and
not the stars.” Let the amateur politician longing for a handbook
on “What Every Young President Should Know” give his days
and nights to the study of the art of politics as practiced by our
first master politician to occupy that office.
Andrew Jackson was extraordinarily sensitive to public opinion.
It is no exaggeration to say that public opinion created what came
to be known as the Jacksonian movement, and such an extraordi-
nary opportunist was Jackson that, up to the time he became Pres-
ident, he had not contributed a single item to what came to be
known as Jacksonian Democracy. Once a candidate for the presi-
dency, however, Jackson, aided by professional politicians who
knew how to exploit his prestige as a soldier, soon demonstrated
dexterity in a vigilant search for issues that would attract and
cement the elements of a Jacksonian following.
Jackson became the first President to participate vigorously in
managing his own campaign for election to the presidency, as he
did also in the one for his re-election in 1832. Thus, when Senator
10 Beard and Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (1927), 1, 384. Italics mine,
W.E.B.
v Ibid., p. 386.
Presidency as Molded by Campaign, Election * 103
Clay deliberately challenged Jackson with the passage of the bill to
recharter the Bank of the United States, he vetoed it with a blister-
ing message that practically ensured his re-election. Jackson’s
Veto Message is the best illustration to that date of how presiden-
tial campaigns were reshaping the presidency. Twenty-one years
earlier Congressman Clay had torn to shreds the very idea of the
Bank in his speech opposing rechartering the first Bank of the
United States. Jackson chose to embarrass his opponent for the
presidency, Clay, by incorporating in his Veto Message of 1832
the arguments of Clay’s anti-Bank speeches of 1811. The Veto
Message was expertly utilized to make a mass appeal against the
Bank. Taking advantage of the universal pioneer phobia of mon-
opolies Jackson’s veto argued that the Bank was a monopoly un-
necessary, inexpedient, unconstitutional, and injurious to the
country. It was so phrased as to arouse the prejudice of state
banks against the “monster” Bank as well as the poor against the
rich. It did not miss the opportunity to stir the prevailing prejudice
against the foreign stockholders of the Bank, mainly English, who
received profits of the Bank in the dividends declared and thereby
drained metallic money out of the country. In order to get a cam-
paign document at public expense a Democratic congressman
moved the printing of 16,000 copies of the Veto Message, and it
carried. The incomprehensibly obtuse Whig leaders printed still
more copies for distribution. The veto was a major factor in Jack-
son’s re-election.
Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign for a second and his only elec-
tive term in 1904 is abundantly illustrative of what the campaign
can do to the presidency even when the incumbent is a “strong”
president. Quite frankly Theodore Roosevelt’s biographer H. F.
Pringle entitles the chapter on the campaign, “Trimming Sail.”
No matter how deftly and unobtrusively it may be done, this in-
dispensable trimming of sail is one of the factors that, through the
virtually direct popular election of the president, effects a contin-
uous reshaping of the presidency. Nor is this just a unique char-
acteristic of our own office of chief executive. It is an essential
104. * The Man inthe White House
feature of systems of self-government everywhere. In parliamen-
tary governments the required trimming of sails is a function of
the premier, whose office is thereby continuously reshaped.
As the campaign of 1904 drew near, President Roosevelt was
confronted with the explosive issue of the tariff, which was then
dividing the Republican party into revisionists and standpatters.
Three years earlier President McKinley had virtually promised
leadership in revising the tariff. “I do not want to promise the
impossible,” wrote President Roosevelt, “and I have to recognize
a tendency in the majority to ‘stand pat’ while in a large and
fervent minority there is a growing insistence upon a reduction of
duties.: “J doubt whether it would be best to make a reduction
in the year preceding election,” he confided to J. B. Bishop." A
million veterans of the Union army were living then, and their
chief organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, demanded
more liberal pensions, and Roosevelt responded with an executive
order granting pensions to all Union veterans between the ages of
sixty-two and seventy whether disabled or not. This was done
despite the fact that the Pension Act of 1890 limited payments to
disability." Such was the potential power of the veterans that the
illegal order was not challenged in the courts.
Even had Roosevelt been willing to shape all his policies in def-
erence to expediency (wrote Pringle}, it would have been suicidal
to have done so. The President must serve two masters. He must
convince the voters that their rights and desires are paramount.
He must reassure potential campaign contributors that his pro-
gram does not threaten business interests. Early in 1903, with
Election Day still distant enough to make it feasible, Roosevelt
continued to press his trust-control measures. He was tortured
by pondering on their effects, but—to his credit—he did go on."
2 H. F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, a Biography (1931), p. 353.
'3 Ibid., p. 342.
14 Ibid., p. 345.
15 Ibid., p. 340.
Presidency as Molded by Campaign, Election * 105
However he was busy during the year before the 1904 election
tempering his belligerent attitude toward greedy corporations. He
offered to appoint Henry C. Frick of the United States Steel Cor-
poration to the Isthmian Canal Commission. He sent a draft of his
third annual message to James Stillman, president of the National
City Bank, and promised to change passages pertaining to the
currency question. He invited J. P. Morgan to the White House
with the coy comment, “I should like very much to see you to talk
over certain financial matters,” he wrote. Even J. D. Archbold,
vice-president of Standard Oil, who avowed he had “read every
book he (Roosevelt) ever wrote” was invited to the White House.
But once the election was over the Bureau of Corporations began
investigating the petroleum industry. “Darkest Abyssinia,” snorted
Archbold, “never saw anything like the course of treatment we re-
ceived at the hands of the administration following Mr. Roosevelt’s
election in 1904.’’ Full sail again, no more trimming. If this be
cynicism, make the most of it, but here is what presidential elec-
tions can do to the presidency. They have done it. They still do it.
The reversal of the earlier economic and social philosophy of
Woodrow Wilson that prepared him precisely for the presidency
in 1913 amounted to an indubitable about-face. The statement of
the late Charles A. Beard that he “turned his coat inside out to get
into the White House” is even a plausible exaggeration. Bryan’s
program had been anathema to him. President Theodore Roose-
velt was blamed for the panic of 1907. Wilson “expressed vig-
orously his opposition to the tendency of the times to regulate
business by governmental commissions” and was condemning it
as “socialistic.” In short, he was asking the Democratic party to
return to “‘the conservative principles which it once represented.”
Wilson’s conservatism is what induced George Harvey, the
emissary of a group of New York financiers, to visit him at Prince-
ton University, where he was President, and get what he thought
16 Jbid., p. 350-51.
'7R.S. Baker, Woodrow Wilson, Life and Letters (1927), m, 185.
106 « The Man inthe White House
was a gentleman’s understanding preliminary to the launching of a
campaign to elect Wilson Governor of New Jersey as a stepping
stone to the presidency of the United States.
The ideological transformation Wilson experienced in the fol-
lowing two short years may have been almost unconscious. No
matter how naive he had been during the ferment of progressive
ideas, he rapidly developed a clairvoyance with respect to emerg-
ing popular opinion. He seemed to “catch public opinion by wire-
less.” Even before Wilson plunged into the campaign of 1912
Louis D. Brandeis had proposed to him that he make the resto-
ration of economic competition his main issue. The idea was not
new to the candidate, but he lacked the clear understanding of the
problem and the pertinent information with which Brandeis was
loaded.'* As a consequence in his first major campaign speech in
1912 Wilson forecast what was to become his legislative program
amounting to a war on monopoly. Brandeis provided him with
live ammunition in the large quantity of social data accumulated
by Brandeis’ researches.” The candidate also blasted away at the
protective tariff, thus portending the Underwood Tariff revision.
By the end of September the erstwhile condemner of government
commissions was ready to accept Brandeis’ proposal of an indus-
trial commission to ensure competition through regulation of busi-
ness enterprise to be actually realized soon in the Federal Trade
Commission.” Early in October the candidate who three years
earlier had declared himself to be “a fierce partisan of the open
shop” was promising safeguards to labor to be realized even-
tually in the Clayton Act specifically exempting labor from the
antitrust laws so far as statute could do it. For the first time in
history the speeches of a presidential candidate came close to de-
veloping in the very midst of the campaign the blueprint of a spe-
cific legislative program.
18 C, E. Merriam, Four Political Leaders (1926), p. 48.
1 Arthur S. Link, Wilson: the Road to the White House (1947), pp. 488-89.
2 Ibid., p. 493.
2 Ibid., p. 509.
2 Ibid., p. 127.
Presidency as Molded by Campaign, Election * 107
Since the advent of practically universal white manhood suffrage
coincident with the election of Andrew Jackson revolutionized the
presidency by making it pre-eminently the people’s office, every
“great” president has had to be more or less an opportunist. The
art of political opportunism consists largely in discovering emerg-
ing popular demands for public policies and converting them into
plausible and persuasive rationalizations of the public interest.
In this art it is not clear as to which of the two Presidents Roosevelt
was the more apt. Certainly Franklin Roosevelt proved adept at
playing the breaks at almost every opportunity, and fate gave him
plenty of them. In 1932 he became the Democratic candidate for
President against hapless President Hoover, in whose administra-
tion the market crash of 1929 had ushered in the worst depression
in our history. Hoover was the first President to assume leader-
ship in Federal action in dealing with a depression, but the efforts
proved inadequate—too little and too late, at any rate, so it then
seemed to most of the electorate in 1932.
The thumbnail platform Franklin Roosevelt dashed off for the
1932 Democratic convention was ‘synthesized overnight out of
opportunism.” It exploited the advantage of the “outs” and con-
stituted a summation of reactions to red-hot current sore spots.
Thus it promised unemployment relief, labor legislation, old-age
insurance under state laws, farm relief, conservation of natural
resources, public power, regulation of holding companies, security
exchanges, and utility rates, reciprocal trade agreements, a bal-
anced budget, sound currency, and repeal of the Eighteenth Amend-
ment. Fortunately Franklin Roosevelt had grown up economically
loose footed and in contrast with Herbert Hoover was unaffiliated
with any major economic group. Neither agriculture, business,
nor labor had tagged Roosevelt. His economic outlook, if he had
any, was rather that of the Hyde Park country squire with its tra-
ditional contempt for millionaires, “money changers,” and ‘‘eco-
nomic royalists.” This may even have provided a somewhat judicial
objectiveness with which to deal with the temporarily paralyzed
and thoroughly bewildered economic interests of the early 1930’s.
108 * The Man in the White House
Franklin Roosevelt’s inveterate opportunism inspired his ap-
propriation of the phrase the “forgotten man,” who was now to
be remembered. It was an infuriating stroke, a challenge to the
Republican formula of nurturing business as a sovereign remedy
for the disease of poverty. The “forgotten man” was a formula
with which to capture the attention of the unemployed worker, the
impoverished farmer and the harassed consumer. A deliberate and
successful bid was made for the ‘‘Hoovercrats,”’ who had deserted
the Democratic party in 1928. Roosevelt’s campaign addresses
offered fairly specific benefits for each element in the new group
combination he was building. Farmers demoralized by thirty-five-
cent wheat learned of a “Domestic Allotment Plan” designed to
strike a balance between demand and supply of farm produce. The
unemployed were promised direct Federal relief when local relief
resources ran out. Labor exchanges, that is Federal employment
agencies, vetoed by Hoover, were to be established and public
works expanded. Business was to be bolstered by more generous
loans by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Reminiscent of
the first Roosevelt were plans for reforestations and erosion- and
flood-control. Consumers heard of the possibility of breaking rigid
and excessive electric power rates in the proposed conversion of
Muscle Shoals into a yardstick for determining the cost of produc-
ing power while “forgotten men” were cheered by the plan to con-
vert the Tennessee Valley into a model of a happier way of life.
Stock-market victims heard with satisfaction the promise of rigid
regulations. Handicapped by infirmity though he was, Franklin
Roosevelt toured the country with the most vigorous campaign
ever carried out by a successful presidential candidate.
If the balanced budget and sound currency promises of the
Democratic party and candidate are excepted, Franklin Roose-
velt’s first administration represented almost as neat a translation
of a campaign program into public policies as that of the first
campaign and term of Woodrow Wilson. With the exceptions
just noted every item in the summary of platform planks and can-
didate’s promises was enacted into law. With the banks of the
country closed at the moment of Roosevelt’s inauguration it is no
Presidency as Molded by Campaign, Election * 109
exaggeration to say that the national economy touched the bottom
of the trough of the depression on inauguration day. With his flair
for the dramatic the President seized the opportunity through apt
use of biblical phrases and the promise of “action and action now”
to inspire a despairing people with his own infectious confidence.
So captivating was it at the time that ere long one nationally known
businessman, resenting some criticism of the President, asserted
that he had voted for Herbert Hoover but hoped God would for-
give him for it, and he believed that Franklin D. Roosevelt was the
greatest leader since Jesus Christ.
The flood of legislation of the “hundred days” that ushered in
Roosevelt’s presidency was, by and large, a fulfillment of the
promises of the preceding campaign. Thus it fell to the lot of the
new Congress to enact banking legislation authorizing retroactive-
ly the closing and reopening of the banks directed by the President
and Secretary of the Treasury under color of uncertainly appli-
cable earlier legislation. By enacting the Economy Statute a
dazed Congress acceded to the President’s request for authority to
reduce sharply department budgets and cut Federal salaries and
veterans’ pensions and benefit payments, thereby carrying out a
plank in the Democratic platform persistently promised by Roose-
velt during the campaign as essential to recovery. To carry out
a project proposed by the President during the campaign Congress
authorized the Civilian Conservation Corps, which soon had a
quarter million unmarried young men at work, a number later
doubled. Whether sound or not, the Roosevelt policies were large-
ly consequences of campaign exigencies.
A president can miscalculate as to the mandate of an election as
did Franklin Roosevelt following his overwhelming re-election in
1936. It induced a cockiness revealed in his inaugural address and
his belligerent address on the State of the Union in January, 1937
—“I have only just begun to fight.” Here he proposed a still more
elaborate reform program and sweeping administrative reorgani-
zation. Most of all had he been frustrated by the fact that, in the
23 John T. Flynn, “Other People’s Money,” New Republic, December 11, 1935.
24 Carl Swisher, American Constitutional Development (1954), p. 299 n.
110 * The Man in the White House
face of what he considered the popular mandates of his election
in 1932 and 1936, the Supreme Court had struck down a dozen
major New Deal statutes. Brooding over what to do with the
Supreme Court following the election of 1936 when he carried
every state but two, Roosevelt seized the bull by the horns only to
be thrown. His proposal to appoint an extra member of the Su-
preme Court for every sitting member of the Court who would not
voluntarily retire with full pay at the age of seventy provoked a
prolonged debate and defeat of the proposal. An unfortunate
aftermath of the so-called Court-Packing Bill was the reception of
the administrative reorganization bill, which conservatives smeared
with the epithet the Dictator Bill and which passed only in a
watered-down form. Thus the election of 1936 left its lesson so
that never again is a president likely to read as much into an over-
whelming re-election majority.
The campaigns of 1952 and 1956 linked the presidency to bus-
iness as almost never before. Early in the 1952 campaign it began
to appear that unless General Eisenhower could break the solid
South, his election might be quite in doubt. Long before his nomi-
nation he had expressed his belief that Federal authority over off-
shore oil deposits rightfully belonged to and should be transferred
to the states, all unaware of Supreme Court decisions holding that
the Federal government had a paramount interest in them. So,
when speaking in Texas and Louisiana, the eager candidate went
the limit on the issue. In his excitement the general was denounc-
ing President Truman’s veto of the bills quitclaiming Federal title
to the offshore oil land as a “shoddy deal” and a “grab,” terms
impossible to reconcile with the pertinent Supreme Court decisions.
The big-city press of Texas promptly came out for Eisenhower and
oil men; ranchers and real estate interests began contributing
heavily to Republican campaign funds. Governor Shivers of Texas
obtained an opinion of his Attorney General that Texas voters
might scratch out Democratic candidate Stevenson’s name and
write in Eisenhower’s on the Democratic ticket. Candidate Eisen-
hower may not have known that the 27 1/2 per cent depletion
Presidency as Molded by Campaign, Election * 111
allowance to oil companies before computing their Federal taxes
was creating a fabulously wealthy group of oil magnates capable
of financing campaigns of their favorite candidates. The expecta-
tions of the oil interests were promptly satisfied by the new admin-
istration’s legislation transferring offshore jurisdiction to the states.
Not in a long generation had business come out of a campaign so
fortified to influence the presidency. One consequence was a Cabi-
net decidedly unbalanced as among the interests constituting
American society by its preponderance of representatives of big
business, a bias epitomized by a catch phrase, “Eight millionaires
and a plumber.”
In the midst of a speech delivered in the closing days of the 1952
campaign General Eisenhower, acting on the suggestion of a
speech-writer, astonished the nation with a pledge to “forego the
diversions of politics and ...concentrate on the job of ending the
Korean War. That job requires a personal trip to Korea. I shall
make that trip. I shall go to Korea.’ The startling declaration
was probably the most telling single stroke of any campaign in a
long time. Its electoral effect was incalculable. Seldom had a can-
didate made a more specific commitment. It was, in due time,
faithfully executed and in one way or another the shooting was
stopped. Eisenhower was irrevocably pledged to a policy of peace.
General Eisenhower’s accidental discovery of the unsuspected
potency of the peace issue in the campaign of 1952 led eventually
to an unfortunate new trend in the presidency, a reduction of the
freedom of the commander-in-chief in the free exercise of the dis-
cretionary power vested in him by the Constitution. President
Truman had taken pride in maintaining that power unimpaired.
When the North Korean army made its surprise invasion of South
Korea in the summer of 1950, President Truman had to act
promptly if at all. His order to General MacArthur to use Ameri-
can armed forces in resistance to North Korean forces was given
as Commander-in-Chief and in compliance with obligations agreed
25 See James Reston, “Korea is Now Eisenhower’s Most Telling Issue,” New
York Times, Nov. 2, 1952, Sect. 4, p. E3.
12 + The Man in the White House
to by Article 43 of the Charter of the United Nations. This obliga-
tion was in consequence of our ratification of the Covenant by the
treaty power, and treaties are of course a part of the supreme law
of the land as the Constitution declares. In the heat of the cam-
paign of 1952 it became a part of Republican strategy to disregard
the legal basis of Truman’s action in Korea and to brand him as a
warmonger.
It was evident enough that the criticism, during the 1952 cam-
paign, of Truman’s prompt use of American armed forces in Korea
had done something to the presidency when President Eisenhower
in January; 1956, asked Congress for emergency authority to use
armed forces to protect Formosa. This amounted to a request for
Congress to authorize the President to exercise a power already
vested in the president by the Constitution and that had been ex-
ercised promptly by presidents ever since McKinley had suddenly
sent troops into China to protect American citizens against the
Boxer rebels in 1900. President Eisenhower’s request for permis-
sion to exercise a constitutional power already vested in him was a
new departure creating a precedent that would make it difficult
for future presidents to act as freely as circumstances might make
absolutely necessary. Of course the Republican party campaign
strategy of critizing Truman as a warmonger in 1952 had made
President Eisenhower’s request practically necessary in 1956. In
1957 he was seeking congressional sanction in advance of possible
armed intervention in the Middle East, but failed to obtain it.
The campaign of 1956 again revealed what a presidential elec-
tion can do in determining a trend in the presidency. Since Presi-
dent-elect Eisenhower had gone to Korea and had brought about
an apparently stable armistice, the Republican party leaders as-
sumed credit for the “peace” and made the most of the issue in
the 1956 campaign. It proved overwhelmingly effective. So im-
pressed was a vast segment of the voters, especially mothers, that
pre-election interviewers of voters such as Samuel Lubell and the
Presidency as Molded by Campaign, Election * 113
Alsop brothers heard again and again the monotonously reiter-
ated refrain “Eisenhower stopped the war in Korea” and “Demo-
crats always get us into wars.” So when, within a week of the
election of 1956, war broke out in the Near East with Israel’s in-
vasion of Egypt, President Eisenhower reassured a nervous nation
that he would not use our armed forces without calling Congress
into special session, thus more securely than ever fastening upon
the commander-in-chief the extraconstitutional limitation upon
his freedom of action deemed so essential by the framers of the
Constitution. Verily the presidential campaign does persistently
shape and reshape the presidency.
The President
as Party Leader
* THE PARTY LEADERSHIP now expected
of the president is an example of nothing else than pure and simple
custom. The Founding Fathers anticipated nothing of the sort,
and the very idea would have been abhorrent to them. In their
minds political parties, especially on a national scale, represented
pure poison to the body politic. The provision for the election of
the president by presidential electors, each one exercising his per-
sonal judgment and without knowing which of his two ballots
might help elect a president or which a vice-president, was deliber-
ately designed to discourage the development of national parties.
The term party brought vividly to the minds of the Founding
Fathers the only example of such a thing they knew of on a
national scale, the contemporary personal following of English
politicians, the most notorious of which had been the servile,
patronage-hungry partisans of George III, the “King’s Friends”
as they had been denominated, the party sustaining the English
ministry whose arbitrary policies had driven the colonists to revolt.
President Washington could never have understood, in his day,
the turn of events that were eventually to make every president the
titular and often the actual chieftain of his party. It never even
occurred to Washington that the Federalists were anything else
114
The President as Party Leader * 115
than loyal supporters of decent government—and not at all a polit-
ical party. Otherwise he never would have included in his Farewell
Address:
Let me... warn you in the most solemn manner against the
baleful effects of the spirit of party generally ...It serves always
to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public adminis-
tration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies
and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against
another; foments occasional riot and insurrection.’
Washington’s immediate successor, John Adams, was just as
antipathetic to political parties as our first President. “There is
nothing I dread so much as the division of the Republic into two
great parties, each under its leader,” he lamented. “This, in my
humble opinion, is to be feared as the greatest evil under our Con-
stitution.”? His son John Quincy Adams, who was elected Presi-
dent a quarter of a century later, would not even then recognize
the fait accompli of political parties. Thurlow Weed, a contempo-
rary professional politician, was to declare, “Mr. Adams during
his administration failed to cherish, strengthen, or even recognize
the party to which he owed his election; nor, as far as I am in-
formed, with the great power he possessed did he make a single
influential friend.’’> John Quincy Adams would not, even if he
could, create a majority coalition as President for “like George
Washington he did not believe in political parties, or in ‘sections,
the essential realities of American politics—and they did not be-
lieve in him.”* Adams removed no enemy from office, not even his
Postmaster General, who was busy distributing patronage against
him. He even prevented his supporters from copying the damaging
public record of a court-martial decision on six militiamen Andrew
1 Jas. D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents (1927), 1, 218.
2 Quoted by W. M. West, History of the American People (1918), p. 333 n.
3 Quoted by E. M. Carroll, Origins of the Whig Party (1925), p. 13.
* Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (1956), p. 55.
16 * The Man inthe White House
Jackson had executed for fear it would be construed as “‘a measure
of hostility against General Jackson.”* Since Jackson was the
opposing presidential candidate, such abstinence represented the
very antithesis of presidential leadership of his party.
Thomas Jefferson was the first President to assume and practice
leadership of his party in that office. He was already the unques-
tioned symbol as well as manager of the group combination con-
stituting his Republican party. Jefferson’s distant and quite criti-
cal cousin, Chief Justice John Marshall, with clairvoyant prescience
predicted accurately what was to be the pattern of Jefferson’s
party leadership while President.
Mr. Jefferson appears to me to be a man who will embody him-
self with the House of Representatives. By weakening the office
of President he will increase his personal power. He will dimin-
ish his [the President’s] responsibility, sap the fundamental prin-
ciples of government, and become the leader of the party which
is about to constitute the majority of the legislature.’
It was precisely this party leadership of the President that consti-
tuted the innovation so obnoxious to Marshall and Federalists
generally as what they conceived to be a perversion of sound
government.
When the first Congress in Jefferson’s administration was or-
ganized, not only the Speaker but the chairman of every committee
was a personal lieutenant of President Jefferson. Ostensibly the
House had freely chosen its officers and selected its chairmen of
committees, but Jefferson’s wishes confidentially conveyed had de-
termined this official personnel as certainly as if the President had
publicly nominated them. The time would come when such things
would occasion no lifting of eyebrows, but in 1801 it was a con-
sequence of what Federalists considered perfidious intrigue.
Jefferson busied himself writing letters to likely Republican
5J. Q. Adams, Memoirs (1874-79), vu, 275.
® Hamilton (H. C. Lodge, ed.), Works (1885), vi, 501-503, quoted by A. J.
Beveridge, Life of John Marshall (1916), 1, 537.
The President as Party Leader * 117
leaders encouraging them to run for Congress whenever a com-
petent leader retired. When John Randolph, at the President’s
behest, was deposed from chairmanship of the Ways and Means
Committee for refusing to move an appropriation of $2,000,000
desired by Jefferson for the purchase of Florida, Jefferson en-
couraged another Republican to run for Randolph’s seat in the
next congressional election, the earliest attempt at a presidential
purge—an unsuccessful one at that. Young Senator John Quincy
Adams observed, “His whole system of administration seems
founded on the principle of carrying through the legislative meas-
ures by personal and official influences.’’’ It is no mean tribute to
the political genius of Thomas Jefferson that this system worked
with almost infallible efficiency.
Precedent-smashing President Jefferson did not confine himself
to private conferences and letters in exercising his mastery of the
party. He worked also through the congressional party caucus,
sometimes meeting with it, and was alleged to have presided over
some of its sessions. On the floor of the House his personal repre-
sentative was at hand to hold wavering partisans in line. Nor was
Jefferson as free from utilizing patronage for party purposes as has
usually been assumed. Thus he was not averse to suggesting ‘‘a
judicious distribution of favors” to the Bank of the United States
in order “‘to engage the individuals who belonged to them in sup-
port of the administration.’’» Incredible as it may seem, Jefferson
removed a larger percentage of civil servants for purposes of pa-
tronage than did Andrew Jackson, who is the reputed founder of
the spoils system in the Federal government.
Freedom from any hard and fast social philosophy permitted
Andrew Jackson a flexibility as to policies promoted that was to
put him in the front rank of American political leaders. Instead of
7 Memoirs (1874-79), 1, 403.
s Washington, Federalist, Feb. 21, 1802, cited by R. V. Harlow, The History
of Legislative Methods in the Period before 1825 (1917), p. 188.
9 Quoted by Henry Jones Ford, The Rise and Growth of American Politics
(1898), p. 131.
118 + The Man in the White House
initiating what came to be denominated Jacksonian Democracy,
the already developing movement by and large appropriated the
general as its symbol and leader. As W. E. Dodd put it, Jackson
could, “by intuition, scent the course the public mind would take
particularly in the West.» Thus he followed when he seemed to
lead. No doubt Jackson convinced himself, as he did his followers,
that he was guided always by eternal principles of justice. Instead
he was, like the ablest political leaders, more or less unconsciously
a pragmatic opportunist.
President Jackson gathered about him a coterie of devoted and
expert politicians who persistently sought the centripetal issues to
hold intact the Democratic group combination. When Jackson
saw impending in Congress a gigantic log-rolling appropriation
bill for local improvements at Federal expense, such as for rivers,
harbors, canals, and turnpikes, he let out a blast against such in-
ternal improvements. This was his veto of the bill for the twenty-
mile improvement of the Maysville road in Kentucky selected for
veto by Secretary of State Van Buren at the President’s request
because it was in such a strong Democratic district that the Con-
gressman could not be defeated by the veto. By and large the re-
gions of Jackson’s strength did not need improvements, but the
veto did enrage the Whigs pretty generally. Jackson’s veto of the
act to recharter the Bank of the United States raised to ecstasy the
underdog elements so evident in the Jacksonian following. Jack-
son was crushing the “Monster,” the money power. Incidentally
it won to Jackson the powerful state banks, which hated the Bank
of the United States because of its power to check their bank-
notes issues by presenting the notes for redemption in specie thus
curbing inflation, so popular in the money-starved pioneer com-
munities. Jackson’s order of removal of all Federal deposits from
the Bank of the United States, which ruined it, bound most of the
elements of Jacksonian Democracy together more securely than
ever. He planned it that way.
10 Expansion and Conflict (1915), p. 37.
The President as Party Leader * 119
Senator Henry Clay persuaded the Senate to pass a resolution
censuring the President for ordering the removal of Federal de-
posits from the Bank of the United States, and the Resolution of
Censure was entered on the Senate Journal. Against this action
jackson formally protested and asked to have his protest entered
on the Senate Journal, but the Senate refused. Thereupon Senator
Thomas H. Benton declared he would not rest until the censure
was “expunged” from the journal. At this point President Jackson,
as party chieftain, set to work. Under his relentless pressure and
that of his partisans one state legislature after another forced the
resignation of senators who had voted for the censure resolution.
As new senators were chosen in their stead, Jackson men gradually
gained control of the Senate.” Four years after passage of the Res-
olution of Censure the Jackson senators were strong enough to
pass a resolution providing for the formal and ostentatious ex-
punging of the Resolution of Censure from the Senate Journal.
The party chieftain had a narrow escape on his last great move:
of party leadership. He was confronted with a party revolt against
his determination to impose on the Democratic Convention of
1836 the nomination of his personal favorite, Vice-President Van
Buren, as the candidate to succeed himself. So far as service to
their chieftain and the Democratic party was concerned Senators
Thomas H. Benton and Henry Lawson White, Secretary of the
Treasury Roger B. Taney, and House Speaker James K. Polk had
claims superior to Van Buren. The seriousness of the revolt be-
came evident enough when the legislature of Jackson’s own Tenn-
essee nominated White for President and eventually cast its elector-
al vote for him. The revolt spread to other states, but Jackson
would not yield on his choice of Van Buren for President. He
dictated not only the nomination of Van Buren by the convention
but also of Richard M. Johnson as the candidate for Vice-Presi-
dent. The choice of Johnson was an almost incomprehensible act
1 Henry A. Wise, Seven Decades of the Union (1871), p. 137.
12 Senate Journal, Dec. 20, 1837. i
120 + The Man inthe White House
of defiance to the insurgents, since Johnson openly acknowledged
a Negro mistress and was alleged to have tried to have his two
Paris-educated octoroon daughters introduced into society. That
Jackson could get away with the dictation of nominees for both
offices by the Democratic Convention in the face of a determined
opposition was a demonstration of presidential party chieftain-
ship scarcely matched anywhere else in the history of the presi-
dency."
James K. Polk was such a thoroughgoing party man as to be-
come the first President to give official recognition of political
parties, in this case in his inaugural address. Young Hickory, as
Polk came to be called, was as much a regular party politician as
Old Hickory himself. He had been a faithful Jacksonian Democrat
as Speaker of the national House of Representatives and as Gov-
ernor of Tennessee. As President he took complete charge of his
administration, and even Andrew Jackson was to discover that
Polk as President made his own decisions. He prepared a form
letter for prospective Cabinet members, which stated that “the
principles and policies of the administration were to be found in
the Democratic platform” and that each Cabinet member was ex-
pected to devote his time and energy to the administration and not
be a candidate to succeed him. Polk had committed himself to
serve but a single term. As the historian Schouler put it, “What
Polk went for he fetched.’
Polk began his administration confronted with a serious party
division. The annexation of Texas, just before his inauguration,
had aroused the Van Buren Free-Soil Democrats, who assumed it
was a plot of the proslavery Democrats for more slave states. Like
a genuine party chieftain Polk was determined to end the intra-
party rivalry, which explains his requirement that Cabinet
13 See H. A. Wise, Seven Decades of the Union (1871), pp. 153-56; Marquis
James, The Life of Andrew Jackson (1938), pp. 694-95.
4 J.D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents (1927), tv, 382.
15 James Schouler, History of the United States Under the Constitution (1880-
1913), 1v, 498.
The President as Party Leader * 121
members retire if they became aspirants for the presidency. The
Cabinet had been shrewdly constructed to represent sections and
party factions.
Polk’s election signified the triumph of exuberant pioneer ex-
pansionism, and, as it turned out, he became territorially the
greatest expansionist of all the presidents. It was Polk’s confident
expectation that he could settle the boundary dispute with Mexico
and acquire by peaceful negotiation the territory later practically
conquered. But when he asked Congress for an appropriation to
carry on the negotiations, an antislavery Democratic Congressman
from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, moved his famous rider to the
appropriation bill that any territory acquired through the appro-
priation must be freesoil. Although the Wilmot Proviso was de-
feated, the friction it created ended only at Appomattox nineteen
years later.
It is indicative of President Polk’s role as a genuine party chief-
tain that he regarded antislavery David Wilmot’s “Proviso” a
“mischievous and foolish amendment” at the same time that he
considered proslavery Calhoun the “most mischievous man in the
Senate.” He opposed the extremists on each wing of the party;
they “would destroy the union.” He would have extended the
Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. Siding with neither wing
of his party, he was disliked by both and was charged alternately
with autocracy and weakness.'*
Consistent party man though Polk was, he utterly despised the
spoils system. The pressure of Congressmen to get offices for con-
stituents led him “to distrust the disinterestedness and honesty of
all mankind.” However, this was an era of the triumphant spoils
system, and Polk could not serenely brush it aside. As it turned
out, somewhat more than three hundred removals were made.
Even such an ardent Whig as Daniel Webster, recognizing Polk's
18 See E. I. McCormac, “James K. Polk,” Dictionary of American Biography,
xv, 38.
€" Diary (1910), 1, 278.
122 * The Man inthe White House
devotion to his party, was nevertheless to admit that he appeared
“to make rather good selections from among his own friends.’”®
No president entered the great office more adept in the high
art of party politics than Abraham Lincoln. To most contempo-
raries his nomination and election must have looked like a major
accident of American history. Between election and inauguration
he had effectively exercised party leadership by his inflexible de-
termination not to give up the one issue that held the Republican
group combination together—opposition to the spread of slavery
into the territories. To this end he persuaded Republican senators
and representatives in Congress not to agree to the Crittenden
Compromise, which, among other things, would have revived the
repealed Missouri Compromise thereby approving slavery exten-
sion in territory south of 36 degrees and 30 minutes north latitude.
Thus he was enabled to begin his administration without the other-
wise inevitable disintegration of the party that had elected him.
To most Republicans in 1861 it must have seemed a miscarriage
of the logic of events that such a national statesman as Senator
William H. Seward with a long generation of public service in
state and national politics had not been nominated and elected
President instead of the still relatively unknown and ungainly
frontier politician Lincoln. When only a month after his election
Lincoln offered Seward the headship of his Cabinet, the Senator
may have jumped to the conclusion that the leadership of the Re-
publican administration and party was within his grasp. A scant
month after Lincoln’s inauguration Seward, in his strange memo-
randum entitled “Thoughts for the President’s Consideration,”
was to propose among other things that Lincoln virtually abdicate
his presidential powers to his Secretary of State. We have already
seen that just before the inauguration Seward had even assumed
that he might dictate the composition of Lincoln’s Cabinet. A
deputation from Seward met the President-elect and declared that
'® Frederick J. Turner, The United States, 1830-1850 (1935), p. 539.
The President as Party Leader * 123
Seward would not serve with Chase, only to be floored with
Lincoin’s counterproposal to leave both Seward and Chase out of
his Cabinet. Thus early did Lincoln demonstrate that he and he
only was the Republican party chieftain. When the Lincoln ad-
ministration was but three months old Seward was to write to his
wife, “Lincoln is the best of us.”
The firing on Ft. Sumter required a sudden reorientation of
party policy and never has a party chieftain made a more prompt
and thorough transition to the leadership of a new party align-
ment. No longer was the paramount issue to be the exclusion of
slavery from the territories by congressional legislation but instead
the preservation of the Union and the enforced maintenance of
Federal authority throughout its length and breadth. Slavery was
now a secondary matter and on this point Lincoln was just as ada-
mant as he had been on exclusion of slavery from the territories
before Sumter. If he could save the Union by freeing none of the
slaves, he would do it; if by freeing all the slaves, he would do that;
if by freeing some and leaving some in slavery, he would do it that
way, which is just what the Emancipation Proclamation eventual-
ly declared.
Indeed, after Sumter, the very composition of the Republican
party began to change as some War Democrats came over to it,
and it consequently adopted the name of the Union party. Lincoln
readily accepted the prevailing party usages, and patronage was
dispensed to Unionists, not just to Republicans. Appointments,
especially the postmasterships, were dispensed with a view to
cementing party organization in the states, cities, counties, and
precincts. After distributing the post offices to persistent parti-
sans, Lincoln turned to the creation of captaincies, colonelcies, and
brigadier-generalships to cement the new Union party combina-
tion. His friend Whitney said Lincoln even made colonels and
brigadier generals of politicians to keep them out of the Demo-
cratic party. Illinois Republican newspapers complained that forty
1° Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (1952), p. 254.
124 + The Man inthe White House
out of seventy Illinois regiments had Democratic colonels and
other Republican papers protested there was only one Republican
among six major generals appointed by President Lincoln and that
he appointed eighty Democrats among a total of one hundred and
ten brigadier generals.» Leonard Swett explained that “in the
close calculation of attaching the factions to him he counted upon
the abstract attraction of his friends as an element to be offset
against some gift with which he might appease his enemies.”» So
supremely important to Lincoln was the preservation of the Union
that this great end justified his utilizing patronage as the party
chieftain saw fit.
Lincoln’s Cabinet had itself been a masterpiece of the politi-
cian’s art constructed to cement party factions and geographical
regions of party strength marred only by two members appointed
to pay off convention pledges for the support of state delegations
contrary to Lincoln’s instructions. The key members of the Cabinet
were Seward, recognized leader of the Conservative Republicans,
and Chase, darling of the antislavery wing. It has been related
elsewhere how, in 1862, a delegation of Republican senators and
representatives, incited by Secretary Chase’s talebearing of Cabi-
net discord, confronted Lincoln with a demand that he get rid of
Seward. It will be recalled that Lincoln serenely invited them to
return for a later conference. When at the appointed time they re-
turned, they were astonished to find they were to meet with the
Cabinet. Under the circumstances Chase denied reports of dis-
sension, and by the daring coup Lincoln saved his Cabinet intact
and demonstrated again who was party chieftain.
President Lincoln maintained a continuous interest in state poli-
tics, particularly the election of what came to be called the “war
governors,” that is Republican or Union party state governors.
The most notable of these contests was the Ohio gubernatorial
20 Carl Sandburg, Lincoln: the War Years (1939), 1, 334.
2t Letter to Herndon in E. Hertz, The Hidden Lincoln (1940), p. 299.
The President as Party Leader + 125
campaign of 1863 between Unionist John Brough and the Demo-
cratic candidate, the notorious Copperhead Clement L. Vallandig-
ham. Lincoln hung around the Washington telegraph office the
night of the Ohio election waiting for returns, more anxious, he
admitted than when he had been a candidate himself in 1860.
About ten o’clock Lincoln telegraphed to Columbus: ‘Where is
John Brough?’ He was in the telegraph office came the answer.
‘Brough, what is your majority now?’ wired Lincoln. ‘Over
30,000.’ At midnight Brough reported ‘over 50,000’; at five
o’clock in the morning ‘over 100,000’. ‘Glory to God in the
highest,’ wired Lincoln, ‘Ohio has saved the nation’.
Lincoln had no hesitation about asking generals in the field to
furlough soldiers to go home to vote in close election of those
states that had not authorized their soldiers to cast ballots in the
field. Many states at that time had October elections for state
officers and November balloting for the presidential and congres-
sional elections. In 1864 the re-election of Lincoln was in such
doubt that in August Lincoln himself was convinced he would not
be re-elected, but the capture of Mobile Bay by Admiral Farragut
and the fall of Atlanta to Sherman’s army raised the hopes of the
Union party. Lincoln, in a letter sent to General Sherman by spec-
ial messenger, suggested “Anything you can safely do to let her
[Indiana’s] soldiers or any part of them, go home to vote at the
state election will be greatly in point. They need not remain for
the presidential election, but may return to you at once.” Not only
did Sherman grant wholesale furloughs to Indiana troups, but two
of his generals, Blair and Logan, returned home and made cam-
paign speeches. Union party victories in the October state elections
indicated Lincoln’s re-election in November.
After Lincoln it is necessary to by-pass seven presidents until
one reaches in William McKinley the next indisputable presiden-
tial party chief. In the light of the evidence it seems absurd that it is
necessary to show that McKinley always kept National Chairman
22 Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (1952), p. 399.
126 * The Man inthe White House
Mark Hanna aware—sometimes painfully aware—that he was
subordinate to the party chieftain McKinley. McKinley’s private
secretary, George B. Cortelyou, who had a high opinion of Hanna’s
political competence, considered McKinley an abler politician
than Hanna.” Herbert Croly in his laudatory biography of Hanna,
published the year before he founded the New Republic, wrote,
“McKinley was the master, Mr. Hanna was only the able and
trusted Prime Minister.”** There is also the testimony of Elihu
Root, McKinley’s Secretary of War, that “Hanna was a strong
and vigorous man, but McKinley was the controlling spirit of the
two.”’s But it took the urbane John Hay to express himself bluntly
on the matter only two weeks before McKinley’s first election as
President: “There are idiots who think Mark Hanna will run
him.”
In the spring of 1900, preceding the campaign for McKinley’s
re-election, McKinley seems to have acted deliberately so as to
make Hanna’s subordinate relationship emphatically evident.
Hanna waited impatiently for the President’s indication that he
wanted him to conduct the 1900 campaign. So worried was Hanna
that late in April he had a heart attack while writing in his office
and fainted away, and his intimate friends attributed the attack to
his distress because of the President’s prolonged silence. His pres-
tige was at stake.” A little later Hanna was elated when McKinley
asked him to accept management of his campaign for re-election.
In the Republican National Convention of 1900 McKinley
showed Hanna again that he was but the party chieftain’s lieuten-
ant. Senators Platt of New York and Quay of Pennsylvania with
their respective state delegations in their vest pockets decided to
embarrass Hanna by nominating Governor Theodore Roosevelt
23 Herbert Croly, Marcus Alonzo Hanna (1913), p. 365.
21 Ibid., p. 365.
26 Charles S. Olcutt, The Life of William McKinley (1916), 11, 347.
26 In a letter to Henry Adams, Oct. 20, 1896. Quoted by Tyler Dennett, John Hay
(1933), p. 178.
27 Croly, Marcus Alonzo Hanna (1913), p. 329.
The President as Party Leader * 127
of New York as McKinley’s running mate. Hanna had his own
ideas as to a proper vice-presidential candidate and moreover had
a strong aversion to that “damned cowboy,” as he once put it, and
wanted no likelihood of his getting into the White House. Thus
challenged, Hanna decided to fight and would almost certainly
have been overwhelmed by the prevailing pro-Roosevelt enthusi-
sam, had not Charles Dawes telephoned from the convention at
Philadelphia to the White House. He bore the President’s reply
back to Hanna, “The President’s close friend must not undertake
to commit the Administration to any candidate. ... The Admin-
istration wants the choice of the Convention and the President’s
friend must not dictate to the Convention.” The chief had spoken,
the lieutenant obeyed as usual.
Perhaps the most striking instance of McKinley’s mastery of
party politics, particularly as related to National Chairman Hanna,
occurred in the midst of the campaign of 1900. On August 3,
Hanna wrote a letter to President McKinley conveying the in-
formation that the New York State Republican Chairman was
concerned over the transfer of work from the Brooklyn Navy Yard
to that in Boston, thereby creating labor unemployment and loss
to Brooklyn merchants. Also one Sergeant Dugan at Iowa Island
on the Hudson was employing Democrats, and he contemptuous-
ly threw aside a protesting letter from a Republican member of
Congress. Among other things McKinley’s reply contained the
statement:
It would not be right and I am sure you would not have the
[Navy] Department employ men at the Navy Yard who are not
needed, nor would you have work done there which could be
done at some other Navy Yard in the country....If elected I
have to live with the administration for four years. I do not
want to feel that any improper or questionable methods have
been employed to reach the place, and you must continue, as
28 Charles G. Dawes, A Journal of the McKinley Years (1950), pp. 232, 233.
128 + The Man in the White House
you always have done, to stand against unreasonable exactions,
which are so common at a time like this.
After reading the President’s letter Hanna threw it on the floor in
exasperation, but once again it had been demonstrated that Presi-
dent McKinley was as certainly the party chieftain as any presi-
dent since Andrew Jackson.”
Mark Hanna was the Republican National Chairman when
Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency upon the death
of McKinley. Despite his misgivings about Roosevelt in 1900 Sen-
ator Hanna became as loyal a supporter of the Roosevelt admin-
istration as he had been of McKinley’s. Nevertheless President
Roosevelt was suspicious of his party chairman as revealed in a
letter to young Theodore, “Senator Hanna has been intoxicated
by the thought that he could be nominated himself or at least dic-
tate the nomination.” All the available evidence indicates that
Hanna never aspired to the presidency and was in fact failing in
health at this time. He died only a year later.
The issue was brought to a crisis by Senator Hanna’s Ohio col-
league Senator Foraker, seeking to provoke a break between
Hanna and the President. One month before the 1903 Ohio Re-
publican Convention Foraker gave out a news statement intimat-
ing that Hanna’s friends were planning to oppose a resolution in
the state convention endorsing Roosevelt as the Republican candi-
date in 1904. Now Hanna as National Chairman thought it im-
proper to be usurping the function of the national convention of
the following year and accordingly sent the President a telegram
saying that since the issue had been forced upon him, he would
have to oppose such a resolution. This confronted the President
with a dilemma. Theodore Roosevelt had a habit of resolving
crises with lightning-like strokes perfectly timed, and he now dealt
Hanna a brutal blow. His telegram in reply to Hanna after saying
29 See the letters in Herbert Croly, Marcus Alonzo Hanna (1913), pp. 329, 330.
30 H. F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, a Biography (1931), p. 347.
The President as Party Leader * 129
that he had nothing whatever to do in raising the issue, continued,
“Inasmuch as it had been raised, of course, those who favor my
administration and my nomination will favor indorsing both and
those who do not will oppose.” A national chairman must always
seek to promote party unit, and Hanna had no choice but to wire
the President, “I shall not oppose the indorsement of your admin-
istration and candidacy by our State Convention.» Just as in
McKinley’s administration National Chairman Hanna had once
more been subordinated by the party chieftain, but in this case by
a battle ax instead of with the unfailing courtesy of President
McKinley.
When the 1904 Republican National Convention met, President
Roosevelt’s handpicked choice for temporary chairman was his
Secretary of War, Elihu Root, who according to custom made the
keynote speech, directed by the President to emphasize a dozen
specified issues. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the President’s
former Harvard history professor, was planted as Roosevelt’s
choice for the strategic chairmanship of the Committee on Reso-
lutions and “drafted the platform under orders from the White
House.”*? Roosevelt chose as National Chairman to manage his
campaign George B. Cortelyou, his Secretary of Commerce and
Labor in which department a Bureau of Corporations had been
established to investigate the oil, packing, tobacco, steel, and
other industries and furnish material for prosecution under the
antitrust laws. The Democratic convention fell into the hands of
conservative leaders who ignored the twice-defeated Bryan and
nominated a colorless conservative candidate, Judge Alton B.
Parker of New York.
Parker remained quiescent at his home until late in the cam-
paign, when he went on a short speaking tour and began attacking
“Cortelyouism,” and on November 3 he committed the faux pas
31 For the telegrams, see Croly, Marcus Alonzo Hanna (1913), pp. 425, 426.
32H. F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, a Biography (1931), p. 353.
130 + The Man in the White House
of describing the contributions of corporations to the Republican
campaign as “blackmail” and intimated that they were made in
return for silence concerning damaging information gathered by
the Bureau of Corporations. This gave President Roosevelt an
opportunity for a characteristic lightning stroke. Denying that
corporation contributions had been ‘“‘extorted,” not that they had
been made, he declared, “Mr. Parker’s accusation against Mr.
Cortelyou and me are monstrous. If true they would brand both
of us forever with infamy, and inasmuch as they are false, heavy
must be the condemnation of the man making them.” Challenged
to furnish proof, Parker refused to divulge the source of the in-
formation given him in confidence. Not until eight years later did
a congressional committee ferret out the fact that 72 1/2 per cent
of the contributions to the 1904 Republican campaign had been
made by corporations, but President Roosevelt could scarcely
have known this. He had turned Parker’s charges to his own ad-
vantage, and Parker, having shot his bolt, carried no state outside
of the South.
Four years later President Roosevelt virtually handpicked
William Howard Taft as his successor. He used the Federal
machine with its patronage to pack the National Nominating
Convention. Of 125 Federal officeholders who were delegates, 97
were for Taft. The Taft forces controlled nearly all the southern
delegates. The President ‘“‘dictated the Platform.”* His intimate
friend Senator Lodge made the principal address as permanent
Chairman. The President deluged Taft with letters and suggestions
throughout the campaign. Bryan was again the Democratic candi-
date. Early in the campaign it was discovered that Charles N.
Haskell, the Treasurer of the Democratic National Committee,
was connected with the Standard Oil Company, whereupon he
resigned. In an epistolary controversy with Bryan over Haskell,
33 New York World, Nov. 2, 4, 1904.
3 H. F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, a Biography (1931), p. 502.
The President as Party Leader * 131
the President caught Bryan at a disadvantage. So active did the
President become in the campaign that candidate Taft became
relatively inconspicuous. President Roosevelt had busied himself
as if he were Taft’s campaign manager.
Five years before his inauguration as President, Woodrow
Wilson had pointed out the growing popular tendency to recognize
the president ‘“‘as the unifying force in our complex system, the
leader both of his party and the nation.”*» Wilson was an avowed
party man. It could hardly have been otherwise in such a devotee
of parliamentary government—one who read into the Constitu-
tion’s provisions for the State of the Union and other presiden-
tial messages the invitation to the president to assume a premier-
ship. “He must be the leader of his party. He is the party’s choice
and is responsible for carrying out the party platform. He there-
fore should have a large influence in determining legislation.”
The President “cannot escape being the leader of his party except
by incapacity and lack of personal force because he is at once the
choice of the party and the nation.’’* So the president carries a
mandate from his party which consists of a majority of the nation.
Within the party councils he can control its program through his
position as leader and through his personal force.
Soon after his election in 1912 Wilson received a letter from A.
Mitchell Palmer, soon to be appointed Attorney General, suggest-
ing that he promote an amendment to the Constitution carrying
out the Democratic platform plank favoring a single term for the
president. This brought a vigorous refusal from the President-
elect, who was certain that the president ought not to be hampered
by the denial of the strength derived from possible re-election.
Here was one more opportunity to assert that the president ‘‘is
expected by the nation to be the leader of his party as well as the
35 Constitutional Government in the United States (1907), p. 54.
36 bid., pp. 60-61.
37 Ihid., p. 67.
38 Ibid., p. 69.
132. * The Man in the White House
chief executive officer of the government and the country will take
no excuses. . .” One must not overlook the refrain of “‘party,
party, party” in Wilson’s expositions of his conception of the pres-
ident’s proper role. His first fourteen months in the presidency
were a demonstration of this role as he put on the statute books
the Underwood Tariff, the Federal Reserve Act, the Clayton Act,
and the Federal Trade Commission Act. Fortunately for his theory
of party government this first Congress was young, political pa-
tronage only partly distributed, and the Democratic majority,
after many years of Republican administrations, obedient to the
kind of party discipline Wilson believed in.
The party leadership of President Wilson was nowhere better
demonstrated than in the Underwood Tariff Act. The Ways and
Means Committee, busy framing a bill weeks before inauguration,
had put a complete draft in Wilson’s hands when he had been in
office only three weeks and found him ready to support it with all
the influence of the presidency.» The caucus was consulted about
nearly everything, and after thorough discussion there the mem-
bership went to the floor of the House prepared for united action.
Without closure or even a motion to limit debate the bill passed
the House without material change and by a large majority. The
President’s astute leadership was evident also in the Senate.
Promptly after his address to Congress he appeared in the Presi-
dent’s Room just off the Senate Chamber to confer with the
Finance Committee on the tariff bill. The bill was hotly argued
in the Senate Democratic Caucus, and on July 7 it declared the
bill to be a party measure and urged the duty of all Democrats
to support it. In the opinion of Professor Frank W. Taussig,
“President Wilson had quietly assumed leadership and secured
a hold on his associates which astonished friend and enemy.’
3 H, J. Ford, Woodrow Wilson, the Man and His Work (1916), p. 182.
490. W. Underwood, Drifting Sands of Party Politics (1931), p. 171. G. R.
Brown, The Leadership of Congress (1922), pp. 185-86.
41 Quoted by H. J. Ford, Woodrow Wilson, the Man and His Work (1916), p. 185.
The President as Party Leader * 133
One of Wilson’s former Princeton students, David Lawrence,
believed that Wilson’s ill-fated appeal of October, 1918, for the
election of a Democratic Congress at the ensuing mid-term elec-
tion was but a natural consequence of his cherished theory of party
responsibility. The would-be “prime minister” appealed to the
country for a national vote of confidence. The “solemn refer-
endum” on the Treaty of Versailles, especially the Covenant of the
League of Nations asked for in the presidential election of 1920,
reflected a similar pattern. Twice during his presidency Wilson
considered resigning, in the fashion of a British prime minister, if
Congress rejected major administration measures, the repeal of
the exemption of American vessels from Panama Canal tolls and
the McLemore Resolution warning American citizens against
traveling on armed vessels of belligerents, but he was sustained on
both of these issues.
Franklin Roosevelt entered the presidency the most adept poli-
tician of his time. He was a consummate artist in the game of
party politics, confessedly in the role of a “quarterback” calling
the plays and taking advantage of the breaks as they became ap-
parent. During the “hundred days”? when legislation to deal with
the economic crisis was pending, congressmen who came to the
President anxious as to the “loaves and fishes” were dismissed
with the coyly whispered information, “We haven’t got to patron-
age yet.” That could wait till these same congressmen had earned
the right to patronage by their votes for administration bills.
Such was the Spartan discipline of the Roosevelt party organiza-
tion that a congressman’s sharing of patronage might depend on
his answer to the question, “What was your preconvention po-
sition on the Roosevelt candidacy?’’** Democratic National Chair-
man James A. Farley is said to have kept a list of “eligible” appli-
cants for jobs, each bearing the cryptic initials F. R. B. C. (for
® The True Story of Woodrow Wilson (1924), p. 319.
# E, P. Herring, “The First Session of the 73rd Congress,” American Political
Science Review, xxvii, No. 1 (1934), 82.
134 * The Man in the White House
Roosevelt before Chicago). Roosevelt unhesitatingly accepted the
fact that his name was magic among the city machines since his
prestige enabled them to elect their local candidates. They did not
care much about the New Deal “but needed Roosevelt who was to
them ‘the resurrection and the life.’ ’’** Nor was Franklin Roose-
velt a whit more critical than Lincoln had been as to such means
to the ends sought.
Party chieftain Roosevelt was human enough to be misled by
his overwhelming re-election of 1936, when his opponent Landon
received only eight electoral votes. It stimulated the pride that
preceded a fall, in this case the failure to get Congress to reconsti-
tute the Supreme Court. In bitterness over this failure he planned
the abortive purge of 1938, the plan to pressure the Democratic
primaries to vote down the renomination of selected senators and
representatives whose opposition to the Court Bill had incurred
the President’s wrath.
James Farley, Democratic National Chairman, relates that in
January, 1938, the President’s secretary, James Roosevelt, tele-
phoned to him saying that candidates for the Senate would file for
the Democratic primary in Illinois the following day and the Presi-
dent wanted a statement of the National Chairman on the attitude
of the party organization on the nominees. Farley promptly pre-
pared and telephoned to James a two-hundred-word statement,
the essence of which was that the Democratic National Organ-
ization “has absolutely no concern with the primary or conven-
tion struggles for these nominations.” The statement closed with
the following two sentences: ““These nominations are entirely the
affair of the States or the Congressional districts, and however
these early battles may result the National Committee will be be-
hind the candidates the people themselves choose. This goes for
every State and every Congressional district.” Ten minutes later
44 Edward J. Flynn, Yow re the Boss (1947), p. 146.
The President as Party Leader + 135
James telephoned back to Farley, “Father has struck out the last
two sentences.” Ten years later Farley stated in his autobiography
concerning the episode, “An albatross not of my own shooting,
was hung around my neck. From that time on I knew no political
peace. I have the copy of the statement before me now, the one
from which I struck the two sentences by order of the White
House.”’** There was no doubt as to the party chieftainship of Pres-
ident Roosevelt no matter how imprudent the attempted purge
turned out to be. With a single exception the incumbents Roose-
velt attempted to purge were re-elected.
“In 1948 I was in a position to control the nomination,” wrote
Truman in his Memoirs.** “When I made up my mind to run those
in the party who turned against me could do nothing to prevent
it.” It certainly did not look like that a week before the delegates
assembled at Philadelphia for the Democratic Convention of 1948.
An aggressive clique of Democrats, including sons of Franklin
Roosevelt, Americans for Democratic Action, some senators and
representatives, both northern and southern, big-city Democratic
bosses, and even some Democratic governors and state chairmen
combined to “dump Truman.” This rebellion collapsed when both
General Eisenhower and Associate Justice W. O. Douglas refused
to be their candidate. The late Grove Patterson, then editor of the
Toledo Blade, reported an interview he had with President Truman
at the White House in the midst of the turmoil the day preceding
his renomination. “I had never before seen such an example of
faith, serenity, and atomic belligerency in any one human being,”
wrote Patterson. “Pil give these Republicans the toughest fight
they were ever up against,” he said. “Pll go into every town of
over ten thousand people in America. Pll do so-and-so and so-
and-so and so-and-so,” which turned out to be precisely what he
48 Jim Farley's Story, the Roosevelt Years (1948), pp. 120-21.
461955, m, 186.
136 + The Man inthe White House
did, as Patterson put it. “And the thing that made the situation
fantastic,” continued Patterson, “was that apparently not a man,
woman or child in the United States believed he could do it.” J.
Howard McGrath was the Democratic Chairman, of course, but
the party chieftain was President Truman himself.
In President Truman’s acceptance speech delivered to the con-
vention at 2 A. M. following his nomination, he seized the initia-
tive and put the Republicans on the defensive by one of the bold-
est coups in party history. In the midst of his address he said: “My
duty as President requires that I use every means within my power
to get the laws enacted the people need in such important matters
and I am therefore calling the Congress back into session on the
26th of July.” He had pointed out that the Republican platform
advocated the very laws he wanted. This was the famous Republi-
can eightieth Congress—the “do-nothing Congress”? as Truman
denominated it—and it met in boiling wrath and did nothing some
more. Clark Clifford, the President’s legal counselor, who had
helped him reach the decision to call the special session of Con-
gress, said: “We’ve got our backs on our 1-yard line with a minute
to play; it has to be razzle dazzle.”
And razzle-dazzle it was throughout the campaign, which the
chieftain kept always on the offensive. Such slam-bang speeches
by a President of the United States shocked some Democrats al-
most as much as the Republicans. He blazed away at every Re-
publican head that showed itself. Republican policies were worse
than wrong, they were dishonest and vicious. If midwest farmers
helped to elect a Republican Congress, they would have only them-
selves to blame for the consequences. The election of Dewey
would mean a depression if not an atomic war, and all declared in
one-syllable words that the have-nots could understand, and they
outnumbered the haves. “Old Doc Truman was Roosevelt with-
out kid gloves and the golden voice. It was barehanded Harry call-
ing a spade a bulldozer .... The guy was just too busy to attend
The President as Party Leader * 137
his own funeral.” ~” His few feeble advisers were horrified, but the
party chieftain was in charge and knew exactly what he was doing.
Not many presidents have begun their administration so very
much an amateur in party politics as was Dwight D. Eisenhower
in 1953. Packing his Cabinet with businessmen instead of making
it representative of a balanced cross section of the outstanding
interests of the nation revealed the romantic amateur in the art
of politics. He could not have known of such an axiom as that ex-
pressed by V. O. Key, “Men with the minds of tradesmen do not
become statesmen,” * or the even more pungent observation of the
elder Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, “The business man dealing
with a large political question is really a painful sight.’ The
unexpected consequence however was the fact that President
Eisenhower was never obsequious to these business tycoons but
from the very beginning of his administration was the master of
his Cabinet. Even at the pre-inauguration meeting of his Cabinet,
held January 12, 1952, when the President brought up the question
of trade between the East and the West involving even some com-
modities of military value and Charles Wilson demurred with the
comment, “ I don’t like to sell fire arms to the Indians,” the Presi-
dent-elect retorted almost sharply, “Charlie, I am talking common
sense.”’*° Four years later President Eisenhower was reported to be
very sharp and short-tempered with Charles Wilson over his de-
lays in shaping a Defense Department budget and over leaks of
information.*!
Throughout the Eisenhower administration the Secretary of the
Treasury, George M. Humphrey, was reputed to be the Presi-
dent’s strong man of the Cabinet, the member in whom the Presi-
dent especially confided. Less than two months after his inaugu-
ration President Eisenhower decided to ask Congress for stand-
47 Grove Patterson, Toledo Blade, November 3, 1948.
48 Southern Politics (1949), p. 27.
4° Quoted by Malcolm Moos, The Republicans (1956), p. 390.
50 Robert J. Donovan, Eisenhower: The Inside Story (1956), pp. 10-11.
51 “Washington Whispers,” United States News and World Report, December
21, .1956.
138 + The Man in the White House
by credit controls as a safeguard against inflation. Secretary of the
Treasury Humphrey emphatically objected to the controls. But
the President persisted in the demand, declaring that he wanted to
show that the administration was interested in the “‘little fellow.”
He was irked by the persistent charge that his was a ‘‘business
man’s administration.” *? Here were early indications of the budding
party chieftain. Four years later when the 4-H Club (Humphrey,
H. Hoover, Jr., Hollister, and Rowland Hughes) wanted the
Mutual Assistance program continued with no great increase of
expenditures, the President, ignoring their advice, went ahead and
asked Congress for an increase of more than 55 per cent over the
previous year for that purpose—that is, countering Russia’s drive
for influence in Asia. In January, 1955, at a joint meeting of the
Cabinet and congressional leaders, the President “ribbed”
Humphrey for stating positively that a tax cut was possible and
cautioned him that a heavy reduction of expenditures was not in
sight. Three months later Humphrey was urging a tax cut to
stimulate business and produce a Treasury surplus, but the Presi-
dent insisted he would have to see a surplus in black and white
before he would consent to tax reduction.“ The President fre-
quently rejected outright the tax proposals of Humphrey.*
Early in 1954 Eisenhower apparently woke up to his respon-
sibility as party leader. He became eager to get Congress to enact a
program on which a Republican Congress could be elected, a po-
litical “umbrella,” as he called it, for Republican Congressmen
who would support it. He told congressional leaders that the time
had arrived when the Republican Administration must face up to
its responsibilities. Again, mindful of the “little fellow,” he was
insistent upon housing legislation, maintaining that it would fulfill
one of the basic needs of the people. In the face of conservative
52 R. J. Donovan, Eisenhower: The Inside Story (1956), pp. 34, 35.
53 Ibid., p. 314.
54 Ibid., pp. 353-54.
55 Ibid., pp. 224-25.
The President as Party Leader * 139
opposition he refused to hold it back.* At conference after con-
ference with congressional leaders the President urged passage of
the pending program. A Republican leader at one of these con-
ferences ventured a protest against the President
pushing an independent Congress too far. This remark stung
Eisenhower. He shot back that he had no pride of authorship in
the program. In the drafting of it, he said, he had sought every
possible bit of legislative advice. He was intent solely on doing
what was good for the country. He said that so far he had been
fighting quietly under cover. But if he had to, he asserted, he
would carry it into the open.”
Disregarding controversies as to the validity or wisdom of his
policies, it cannot be denied that, by the end of his first term,
President Eisenhower was rapidly maturing as a practitioner of
the art of party leadership. In the beginning he was weak, for
example, when he cut out the tribute to General Marshall upon
the advice of Governor Kohler in his campaign speech at Madison
in 1952. Early in his administration, frustrations led to emotional
outbursts of the President, but by 1956 perplexing problems
were dealt with calmly. In the campaign for re-election National
Chairman Leonard Hall and Presidential Assistant Sherman
Adams were listened to, of course, but the decisions as to strategy
and tactics were Eisenhower’s, and no one took issue with him
about them. By this time the President was better informed as
a consequence of his habit of reading the newspapers. He was
making the transition from the vague and undefinable theories
with which he had been obsessed, such as “‘free enterprise” and
“states rights,” over to deep convictions growing out of four years
of experience with stern realities. His economic adviser had even
persuaded him to stop referring to the TVA as “creeping social-
ism.” In the presidency Eisenhower had taken “the most difficult
86 Thid., p. 224.
57 Tbid., p. 230.
140 * The Man inthe White House
cram course in the world” and was making the grade. As an Eisen-
hower intimate put it, “the fact is Ike has grown up.”
Indicative of an early grasp of the role of presidential party
leadership was Eisenhower’s New Republicanism with its moder-
ate program, a deliberate attempt to transform the party into a
genuine major party, even the majority party. He had been Presi-
dent only a few months when he expressed privately his exaspera-
tion over the opposition of the National Association of Manufac-
turers and the United States Chamber of Commerce to continuing
the excess-profits tax. He protested that they did not realize that
his middle-of-the-road course was the only way they could have a
share of influence in the government. If a Republican administra-
tion was to succeed, he maintained, they would have to make con-
cessions. Lodge and Benson reassured the President with the in-
formation that no stand taken by the National Association of
Manufacturers or the United States Chamber of Commerce could
do him much harm. Thus the amateur politician was learning the
facts of political life. The new President quite early concluded
that the New Deal represented permanent reforms responsive to
the dominant forces of American politics, and he decided even to
extend it. Every item of its program was incorporated in that of
the New Republicanism. Eisenhower was resolutely determined to
utilize the Federal government to maintain a continuous expand-
ing prosperity despite the persistent protests of Secretary Hum-
phrey. The President took a stand on civil rights that, in 1956, was
designed to induce a movement of Negro voters back to the party
of their Great Emancipator. Though it failed in its purpose the
intent exemplified the traditional role of the president as party
chieftain.
5 The two quotations are from Joseph and Stewart Alsop’s column, “Eisen-
hower Today Different From Man Elected in 1952,” Toledo Blade, Nov. 10, 1956.
The second quotation however is not a statement of either of the Alsops.
5 See R. J. Donovan, Eisenhower: The Inside Story (1956), p. 61.
The President as Party Leader * 141
By the campaign of 1956 the party chieftain had so maneuvered
as to leave the Democrats scarcely one effective issue.*° Even his
veto of the Gas Bill, which would have transferred control of the
price of gas at the well from the Federal Power Commission to the
state utility agencies, was a master political stroke comparable to
Jackson’s veto of the rechartering of the Bank of the United States
in 1832. Eisenhower’s veto was due to the attempt at bribery of a
senator by the agent of an oil company. The veto gratified, for the
time being, the consumers of gas at the same time that it held out
to the gas-producers the clear implication that the President would
sign another such bill if re-elected. The consumers and producers
were both to be comforted, the consumers at once, the producers
eventually—quite a coup for an election year.
Eisenhower even excelled Franklin Roosevelt in utilizing per-
sonal charm, incidentally without arousing the intense animosity
that developed toward Roosevelt. Even Roosevelt’s fireside chat
was appropriated by Eisenhower and rendered more effective by
television. A majority of the voters were deeply impressed by Pres-
ident Eisenhower’s apparent sincerity, his high ethical standards,
his dignity, his ability to compose conflicting opinions by his search
for areas of agreement, his organization of the executive branch,
as well as the prestige he had brought to the White House from
the very day of his first inauguration. President Eisenhower man-
aged to restore the morale of the dispirited Republican party and
make it once again a serious competitor in the battles of the two-
party system, for the time being at any rate. That was no mean
achievement for the party chieftain in the White House.»
€ See Ernest K. Lindley, “Ike’s Blue Print,” Newsweek, June 18, 1956.
* VII
The President
and Congress
* MUSTERED OUT after four years of service in
the Union army Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes was back home
in Boston. Presently he went out to call on his old philosopher
friend at Concord. Emerson’s conversation flowed on smoothly as
he aired his transcendental abstractions of life and death, con-
science and duty. The veteran of many a bitterly contested battle
left convinced that Emerson was out of touch with reality. Battle
experience had made Captain Holmes a stark realist who would
henceforth translate life in terms of struggle. In 1872 Lord Justice
Brett, under the Criminal Law Amendment of 1871, sentenced the
London gas-stokers’ leaders to prison for a year for merely pre-
paring to strike.' Thereupon the act was condemned by some as
class legislation, which criticism induced Holmes to expound his
theory of legislation in a brief but illuminating article published in
the American Law Review, of which he was now editor.
“The more powerful interests must be more or less reflected in
legislation ... The objection to class legislation is not that it favors
1 See G. D. H. Cole and Raymond Postgate, The British Common People, 1746-
1938 (1939), pp. 353-54.
142
The President and Congress +* 143
a class, but either that it fails to benefit the legislators, or that
it is dangerous to them because a competing class has gained
in power, or that it transcends the limits of self-preference
which are imposed by sympathy .... But it is no sufficient con-
demnation of legislation that it favors one class at the expense
of another; for much or all legislation does that; and none the
less when the bona fide object is the greatest good of the greatest
number ....If the welfare of the living majority is paramount, it
can only be on the ground that the majority have the power in
their hands. The fact is that legislation in this country, as well as
elsewhere, is empirical. It is necessarily made a means by which
a body, having the power, put burdens which are disagreeable to
them on the shoulders of somebody else.?
When Holmes in the same article wrote that “whatever body
[legislature] may possess the supreme power for the moment is
certain to have interests inconsistent with others which have com-
peted unsuccessfully,” it sounds like a comment on American
labor’s serious set-back in the congressional elections of 1946. His
observation on British labor legislation of the 1870's that “the
more powerful interests must be more or less reflected in legisla-
tion” would be just as applicable to the Taft-Hartley Act three-
quarters of a century later. When the farm bloc induced Congress
to establish a permanent policy of parity prices by which citizens,
first as taxpayers, support the price of farm products by keeping
them off the market even if the government must destroy valuable
food supplies (potatoes for example) in order that these citizens,
in the second place as consumers, may be compelled to pay higher
prices—there can be no doubt that legislation is “necessarily made
a means by which a body having the power puts burdens disagree-
able to them on the shoulders of somebody else.”
Such then is how the Congress functions in the stage to which
civilization has thus far advanced. Of course, the social structure
2 “The Gas-Stokers’ Strike,” American Law Review, vit (1873), 583-84.
144 * The Man inthe White House
of the United States is fundamental] in the dynamics of congres-
sional law-making, and the constantly shifting strength of the
competing interests results in ever-changing points of equilibrium
among them and consequently different kinds of legislation. One
of our concerns here and now is the question as to how accurately
the congress, through its structure and habits, registers these bal-
ances of the competing forces of American society. Herein we may
find fundamental causes of the recurring clashes between president
and Congress.
The persistent usage requiring a representative in Congress to
be a resident of the district that elects him makes him extraordi-
narily obsequious to his constituents, except in the “safe” or prac-
tically one-party districts, where he will almost certainly reflect the
prevailing social philosophy of the dominant interests. The reason
is that the American member of Congress when defeated cannot,
like the English member of Parliament, seek election in another
district. When there is a near balance of parties in an American
congressional district, the representative’s function tends to be-
come quasi-judicial as he weighs the claims of competing interests.
Thus he must seek to discover points of equilibrium when con-
fronted with controversial issues on pending legislation. This
signifies that the congressman’s legislative function is the trans-
lation of dominant public opinion into public policy, but as John
Dickinson observed, “The only opinion, the only will, which exists
is the opinion, the will, of special groups.... The task of govern-
ment and hence of democracy as a form of government, is not to
express an imaginary popular will, but to effect adjustments among
the various special wills and purposes which at any given time
are pressing for realization.”’* The congressman’s calculation as to
the point of equilibrium or the balance of forces in his district con-
stitutes his bid for re-election, which is an essential feature of the
3 See Harvey Walker, “Who Makes the Laws,” State Government, xi (1939).
4*Democratic Realities and Democratic Dogma,” American Political Science
Review, xxiv (1930), 291.
The President and Congress * 145
representative process as established by American usage. But there
are 435 representatives and 96 senators, each one presumably en-
grossed with his own problem of satisfying the dominant interests
of his constituency, while it remains for the president to seek for
common denominators of national policy in the jigsaw puzzle of
these 531 constituencies.
The problem of the president in dealing with Congress is com-
plicated by the fact that the House of Representatives is so con-
stituted that rural population not only has more than its propor-
tionate share of representatives in Congress, but also because, as a
consequence of the use of seniority in determining committee
chairmen, the representatives from predominantly rural districts
almost monopolize the chairmanships of the House committees.
This is because rural constituencies are in the habit of re-electing
their representatives repeatedly until they have attained high sen-
iority. Thus urban constituencies not only fail to get their proper
number of Congressmen, but those they do elect largely fail to
attain the positions of power in the organization of the House that
control important legislation because of an urban propensity to
shift from one party to another. One exasperated critic has declared,
with pardonable exaggeration, that we have a “rotten borough
Congress.”’s
The House of Representatives was established originally on the
plan that representation should be approximately proportionate
to population. The failure to maintain that principle is due in the
first place to the delay of state legislatures in remapping congres-
sional districts after a decennial reapportionment of congressmen
among the states. In many populous states the rural population,
though a minority, can dominate the state legislature and there-
by maintain an antiquated distribution of congressmen. For ex-
ample, Ohio was redistricted in 1913 for representation in Con-
gress on the basis of the census of 1910, after which date by 1950
the population had concentrated intensively in a few urban
5 See J. A. Durham, “Congress, the Constitution and Crosskey,” Indiana Law
Journal, xxix (Spring, 1954).
146 + The Man in the White House
counties. This left two-thirds of Ohio’s congressional districts with
less than the national average of population per representative,
and sparsely populated districts were of course predominantly
rural districts. But in the second place when a state legislature
remaps its congressional districts, it is likely to crowd the urban
population in a relatively few districts and distribute the rural
population in more than its proportionate share of the districts.
When the Ohio legislature at long last, following the 1950 census,
redistricted, it gave the rural 15th district 226,341 inhabitants and
the urban (Columbus) 12th district 503,410.
If urban population suffers from the mapping of their vast pop-
ulation in fewer than their fair share of congressional districts,
even far more is it penalized by the rule of seniority in determining
the leadership in the House of Representatives. The sovereignty in
the House of Representatives is concentrated emphatically in the
speaker, the Rules Committee, the majority floor leader, and the
chairmen of important standing committees. Long continuous
service in Congress is an almost absolute prerequisite for occu-
pancy of these places of power. Obviously this all signifies that
these masters of the House represent the “safe” or practically one-
party districts, which are by no means confined to the Democratic
party and the solid South. An examination of the occupants of the
top seventy-six positions of the Republican organization in the
Eightieth Congress revealed an average previous tenure of 14 1/2
years. Such a tenure spanned the entire epoch of the New Deal
despite its near total eclipse of Republican power. The control of
legislation was thus transferred to those who generally represented
the ideology of the 1920’s and were in a sense an incarnation of a
cultural lag. Moreover these seventy-six Republican congressmen,
with rare exceptions, represented predominantly agrarian districts.
Their constituencies were intensely property- and production-
conscious and consequently provided ready allies of business,
ê Congressional Directory, 83rd Cong., 2nd Sess., pp. 113, 114.
The President and Congress * 147
industrial management, and finance. The election of 1946 brought
some new Republicans to Congress from urban-industrial districts,
but their lack of seniority relegated them to unimportant com-
mittees, despite the fact that these Republican congressmen were
morein step with the cultural trend. Indeed urban districts manifest
aless stable party tendency, change congressmen more frequently,
and thus fail to attain commanding positions of power in Congress.
As a consequence whenever the president urges upon Congress
controversial measures in behalf of the distinctly consumer-con-
scious urban masses, such, for example, as rent or price control or
housing legislation, he plays the game with Congress against
heavily loaded dice.’
Though based on French experience the following observations
of Emile Giraud are just as pertinent to the United States. He con-
cluded that the legislature must be directed by the executive, the
organ with “unity of thought,” “capacity to acquire a view of the
whole,” and “possessing, by virtue of its participation in adminis-
trative and diplomatic activities, adequate information.” “A feeble
executive means a feeble state, one which fulfills badly its function
of protecting the individual against political, economic, and social
forces which, without the state, tend to swallow him up.’ The
principle is easily stated, but just how the executive is to “‘direct”’
the legislature or how the two great organs of government are to
be integrated for the smooth and efficient functioning of govern-
mentisa problem not yet solved by any nation—not even by Britain.
The evidence is conclusive that the fathers of the Constitution
were far less fanatical devotees of the dogma of separated powers
than their great grandchildren. The framers did not specifically
prescribe the separation of powers in the Constitution but merely
7 For the data on Republican congressmen in the Eightieth Congress and fresh-
men Republicans I am indebted to Mr. Dwaine Marvick, when a graduate student
of Columbia University, who constructed several tables revealing, among other
things, the generalizations above.
8 Quoted by E. S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers (1957), p. 486.
148 + The Man inthe White House
implied it and then specifically modified it by the contrary prin-
ciple of checks and balances, which commingles instead of sep-
arating powers. The courts have been compelled to resort to none-
too-certain principles of jurisprudence in giving their judgments as
to whether one or another branch of the government may “‘consti-
tutionally” exercise a disputed power. Certainly the framers did
not forbid the heads of the executive departments appearing in or
even having permanent seats in the houses, although the Consti-
tution does forbid their being members. The records of the first
several Congresses provide incontrovertible evidence of the fram-
ers’ assumption that the department heads would provide the initi-
ative in legislation. At any rate eighteen delegates of the Constitu-
tional Convention later sat unprotesting in the First Congress as
one outstanding legislative problem after another was referred for
study and report to the heads of executive departments. Congress
had Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, in his assumed
role of the “prime minister,” prepare and send to the House of
Representatives the famous Reports on which were based the
monumental statutes of the Hamiltonian legislative program. Evi-
dently these framers who sat in Congress thought it not improper
that Hamilton use, as he did, his personal influence to persuade
Congress to support these measures. So smoothly did this legisla-
tive-executive arrangement work that, to the Federalists, who were
by and large the framers of the Constitution and who put it in op-
eration, the relation of Congress to the executive must have seemed
to have been properly, firmly, and permanently established.
For better or for worse the Federalist adjustment proved to be
transient. It was indeed but the first of many different adjustments
of Congress to the executive that had come about as a conse-
quence of the play of the forces of American society upon the
national government. It can be set down as a fundamental principle
that whether Congress or the executive is dominant in the govern-
ment depends upon which of the two, in a given period, is the more
adequate medium of governmental control for the dominant inter-
ests of the nation. The Federalist group combination had been so
The President and Congress * 149
harassed by the “omnipotent” agrarians who dominated state
legislatures during the 1780’s that they had vested strong executive
powers in the presidency and then fortified those powers by the
usage of executive initiative in legislation, that is, initiative of the
heads of the executive departments, especially Secretary of the
Treasury Hamilton. Their opponents, the Anti-Federalists who
had at first opposed the ratification of the Constitution, were in-
furiated by the Hamiltonian practices and policies, rallied under
Jefferson, captured the Federal government, and turned the Fed-
eralists out in 1801. These Jeffersonians had found the state legis-
latures satisfactory organs for their purposes, and they conse-
quently made the national legislature their peculiar organ by
terminating its dependence upon the heads of the executive de-
partments. They established instead a system of congressional
committees to take the place of the executive departments in pro-
posing and considering legislation, thereby setting a pattern that
persists to this day. Under the later Jeffersonian presidents, Mad-
ison and Monroe, the presidency gradually declined to an organ
of relative insignificance in the Federal government.
It was the awakening of the American masses in the 1820's,
their revolt against what they considered the failure of a govern-
ment dominated by the rural and urban gentry entrenched in
Congress to satisfy their needs, and their consequent turning with
passionate devotion to a party messiah in Andrew Jackson that
ended the hegemony of Congress. Jackson proclaimed himself a
“tribune of the people” and, through the veto power and his lead-
ership in legislation, made the presidency practically a third branch
of the legislature. A new dominant interest, that of the “common
man,” had found the presidency to be the most convenient organ
for achieving its desires, and it has ever since turned to the presi-
dency for redress of grievances whenever stirred by a conviction of
crisis. Thus Jackson, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts have been
pre-eminently “tribunes of the people” and have brought to bear
upon Congress the pressures of public opinion crystallized by
presidential leadership.
150 + The Man in the White House
When “‘the people” captured the presidency under Jackson and
made the office peculiarly their own, it brought an about-face in
the old group combination that had once been the Federalist party
but which now constituted the Whig party. The president as a
popular leader—‘‘demagogue” was the favorite Whig epithet—
was now considered a potential dictator who ought consequently
to be held rigorously subordinated to Congress. The present Re-
publican party inherited the Whig attitude toward the presidency.
For more than a century now Congress has been the chief reliance
of the industrial-finance-transportation complex of interests. Their
conception of the proper relation of president to Congress was
only too frankly expressed when, in the midst of the presidential
campaign of 1864, the majority leaders of the two houses of Con-
gress of Lincoln’s own party in the notorious Wade-Davis Mani-
festo declared that “the authority of Congress is paramount.”
It is significant that Theodore Roosevelt, the only other Republi-
can President notable for vigorous executive leadership, had no
happier time than Lincoln in dealing with the high command of
his party and finally felt impelled to lead the Bull Moose secession
from the party. The Republican party consists of a group combi-
nation historically intolerant of executive leadership. It is scarcely
improper to designate the Republican party as virtually a congres-
sional party. The late Senator John Sherman knew thoroughly the
genius of his Republican party when he advised President-elect
Benjamin Harrison to “‘have no policy distinct from that of his
party and that is better represented in Congress than in the
Executive.’
The Republican dogma of congressional supremacy over the ex-
ecutive is almost certain eventually to decline in practice, however
much it may be proclaimed in theory. It was indeed a Republican
president, Theodore Roosevelt, who gave the first marked impetus
in this century to the practice of the legislative leadership of the
? Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate, and Cabinet (1895), 1 1032.
The President and Congress * 151
president. “A good executive under present conditions of Ameri-
can life,” he wrote in his Autobiography, “must take an active
interest in getting the right kind of legislation in addition to per-
forming his executive duties with an eye single to the public wel-
fare.” Reminiscent of the Federalist liaison between the executive
and Congress is the contemporary comment of Senator Dolliver
of Iowa in the fifth year of the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt:
“There are at least five acts of legislation, all of them referring to
this and similar questions, that were put through Congress in the
last five years practically without change, as they came from the
office of the Attorney General of the United States.” Shortly after-
ward it was admitted on the floor of the House that the pending
Food and Drug Act originated in a similar manner,
It was President Wilson who gave the first great demonstration
in this century of executive leadership in legislation. As a student
of politics he had become fascinated with the parliamentary sys-
tem, and he thought the Constitution provided both an oppor-
tunity and an invitation to introduce it in the national government
in the clause that authorized the president to give Congress
information on the state of the union and make recommendations
for their consideration. So pronounced was Wilson’s revolution
that by 1917 a perceptive commentator could observe that “outside
of Washington the old suspicion of executive power is dead, and
popular sentiment has become so entirely uninterested in the
process of politics as to ask only for substantial results.
The mental pattern of the parliamentary system can be seen
between the lines of Wilson’s ill-fated appeal for the election of a
Democratic Congress in 1918. Even the election of 1920 was a
“solemn referendum” on the Covenant of the League of Nations.
10 Cong. Rec., 79th Cong., 2nd Sess., Vol. 92 (April 5 and June 5, 1906). See
E. S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers (1957), p. 268.
1 New Republic, Sept. 29, 1917.
152 +» The Man inthe White House
Wilson set the pattern of legislative leadership for his chief disciple,
President Franklin Roosevelt, no matter how very different the
ways of the latter may have been.
In the full. tide of the reaction against Wilson’ s leadership,
candidate Warren G. Harding mortgaged his presidential leader-
ship by pledging himself to be a “constitutional” president, only
to find himself shackled in office when he sought to carry out party
pledges. When he appeared before the Senate to urge his erstwhile
colleagues not to ignore the budget estimates but to keep appro-
priations within the income, the address was condemned as execu-
tive participation in debate and “veto by argument.” No matter
how reluctant Calvin Coolidge was to assume legislative leader-
ship, such had been the effect of Theodore Roosevelt and Wood-
row Wilson on the presidency that he admitted it to be “the busi-
ness of the President as party leader to do the best he can to see
that the party platform purposes are translated into legislative and
administrative action.”™!? Coolidge even went as far in recognizing
the legislative role of the president as to draw up legislation to
apply the unexpended balance of the Deficiency Appropriation
Bill of July 3, 1926, to the prosecution of litigation to cancel the
Fall-Sinclair-Doheny oil leases.: It was as an ex-President how-
ever that Coolidge expressed his most notable recognition of the
president’s appropriate function with respect to Congress when he
declared, “It is because in their hours of timidity the Congress
becomes subservient to the importunities of organized minorities
that the President comes more and more to stand as the champion
of the rights of the whole country."
According to Robert Luce, President Hoover “sent drafts of
several important proposals to the Capitol to be introduced by
2 Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge (1929), pp. 231, 232.
13 House Journal, 69th Cong. 2nd Series, p. 194.
14 “The President Lives Under a Multitude of Eyes,” The American Magazine,
cviii (1929), 146.
The President and Congress * 153
leaders’’» despite the fact that later as an ex-President he declared
the “militant safeguard of liberty” to be “‘legislative independ-
ence” and that “the weakening of the legislative arm does lead to
encroachment by the executive upon the legislative and judicial
functions, and inevitably that encroachment is upon individual
liberty.’
The twentieth-century trend toward presidential leadership in
legislation was greatly accelerated in the 1930’s by the concurrence
of a poignant crisis with the accession to the presidency of a genius
in the translation of current social forces into outstanding public
policies. The studies of Lawrence H. Chamberlain indicate that
almost half (eight out of nineteen) of the notable Federal statutes
of nearly three-quarters of a century (1873-1940) that were mainly
due to presidential leadership fall within the presidency of Frank-
lin Roosevelt. As a further striking evidence of President Roose-
velt’s leadership in legislation Chamberlain found that of the
thirty-five great statutes since the 1870’s due predominantly to
congressional initiative only two fell within the long presidency of
Franklin Roosevelt, constituting one-sixth of the period.”
President Truman was far less systematic than his immediate
predecessor in promoting legislation, failing even to keep his own
majority party organization in the Seventh-ninth Congress in-
formed as to his plans. However Congress had by this time become
so accustomed to looking to the executive for legislative initiation
that during the Republican Eightieth Congress even Senator Homer
Ferguson of Michigan, an outstanding Republican leader, uttered
a mildly critical comment concerning President Truman because he
had let his dissatisfaction with certain pending legislation leak out
of the White House instead of sending a message and a bill embody-
ing just what he wanted.'* Nothing can bring into bolder relief the
'S Legislative Problems (1935), p. 260.
16 The Challenge to Liberty (1934), pp. 125, 126.
17 The President, Congress, and Legislation (1946), pp. 450-51.
18 “What Is Your Congress Doing,” University of Chicago Round Table, No.
483, p. 4 (1947).
154 + The Man in the White House
present generation’s trend toward executive initiative in legis-
lation than a Republican Senator’s complaint that a Demo-
cratic President had failed to send a prepared bill to a Repub-
lican Congress. When President Truman sent Congress a pro-
posal for certain legislation in the summer of 1948, a critical
commentator remarked, “If President Roosevelt had recom-
mended that legislation a bill would have been found lying
right under the message.”
Inch by inch then we seem to be resuming somewhat the original
pattern of executive initiative in legislation with which the Fed-
eralists under Hamilton’s leadership started off the government in
1789. Evidently we are coming in full cycle. At any rate over half
the bills dropped in the congressional hoppers are said to originate
in the executive departments" so that “much legislation is tailor-
made in the departments and sent to the Speaker or appropriate
committee chairman for introduction in the House.”? Many of
these measures are prepared in compliance with requests of con-
gressional committees, which is suggestive at least of the practice
of the First Congress asking the departments for reports on pro-
jects. Before administration measures are transmitted from depart-
ment to congressional committee, they are routed through the
Legislative Reference Division of the Bureau of the Budget to
determine whether they conform with the President’s general pro-
gram. Many congressional committees regularly refer bills to the
department affected and report favorably only if the matter is
approved by that department. Of course it is the routine and non-
controversial measures by and large that can be handled by this
procedure. This trend may be temporarily checked when Congress
and president belong to opposing parties, a situation that might
suspend but not reverse a trend so pronounced as to represent
a whoiesome developing usage.
19 George B. Galloway, Congress at the Crossroads (1947), p. 150.
20 Ibid., p. 6.
The President and Congress * 155
It is in the enactment of such major matters of legislation as
social security, civil rights, or labor laws affecting, as they do,
powerful interest groups and sections of the nation, that the
stresses and strains inherent in the American social structure
become apparent. It is obviously erroneous to attribute the result-
ing clashes and deadlocks of president and Congress mainly to
party differences, since Congressional votes on such measures
often manifest a tendency to ignore party affiliation. The enact-
ment of Roosevelt New Deal legislation was stopped dead in its
tracks in 1938 by the “unholy alliance,” as it was called, of southern
Democrats with Republicans. President Truman’s program for
domestic legislation encountered the same obstinate combination,
and it is significant that the Republican Congress that countered
Truman’s legislative program in 1947 served only to emphasize an
executive-legislative deadlock already nine years old—nine years
of Democratic presidents and Congresses. Twentieth-century
Republican presidents, as a rule, have been rather less happy than
Democratic presidents in getting Congress to enact their programs.
The clash of president and Congress is intensified by the striking
differences between the ways in which pressures play upon the
Congress on the one hand and upon the president on the other.
For example, important elements such as labor, racial, and certain
other groups are peculiarly weak in urging their desires upon
Congress. Consequently they quite naturally and properly seek to
exert a leverage on the government through their voting strength
as balances of power in presidential elections. Indeed, here is a
counterbalance against the immense advantage the interests of
property and production hold in Congress due to the under-
representation of urban voters and to the fact that the practice of
seniority in determining control of the House of Representatives
also reduces considerably the fair share of power of the urban
voters. Such is the predominance of rural constituencies that the
majority of congressmen can ignore the desires of the urban
masses with impunity, while the president does so only at his peril.
156 « The Manin the White House
When the city voters are aroused on issues that affect them, a pres-
idential candidate who does not pledge himself to heed their de-
mands can scarcely hope for election. More and more presidential
campaigns are becoming competitions in bidding for the city vote,
and election returns reveal the reason. In 1944 Governor Dewey
appealed strongly, though in vain, for the metropolitan vote. His
half-million majority in up-state New York was more than can-
celled by President Roosevelt’s majority of three quarters of a mil-
lion in New York City. And it was simply because the metropoli-
tan majorities of President Roosevelt in half a dozen other key
states with big electoral votes wiped out Dewey’s majorities in the
rest of those states that Roosevelt was elected for a fourth term.
Thus a new president almost inevitably enters office pledged to
issues and owing his election to elements that are inhospitable to
the dominant groups in an overwhelming majority of the congres-
sional districts. This explains why a leading Republican Congress-
man declared in 1945 that all the recent Republican candidates—
Landon, Willkie, and Dewey—have been “too New Dealish.”’ The
presidency has become almost an “urban institution.” That
Dwight D. Eisenhower became aware of this fact is indicated by
his campaign speeches as well as by his addresses to Congress.
Republicans who have not learned that social forces and not presi-
dential fiat, by and large, determine administration policies can
never understand the resemblance of the Truman and Eisenhower
legislative programs. Each was bidding for the support of the same
electorate.
In the nature of the case then the president, whether Democrat
or Republican, normally comes face to face with a predominantly
rural and hence potentially hostile Congress. The so-called presi-
dential honeymoon turns out, in due time, to have been little
better than an armistice. At any rate this has been the experience
21 See J. A. Durham, “Congress, the Constitution and Crosskey,” Indiana Law
Journal, xxix (Spring, 1954), 355-366.
The President and Congress + 157
of every president in this century. The persistent growth of cities
underrepresented in Congress will certainly not reduce the ten-
dency of Congress to clash with presidents. A potential factor in
intensifying this conflict has been the almost unnoticed restoration
of the near dictatorship of the speaker of the House. It is to be
doubted whether Joe Martin in the Eightieth Congress was, in
effect, any less a czar, that is, master of the House, than was
“Czar” Joe Cannon in the heyday of his speakership. Joe Martin
did not need to appoint and be Chairman of the omnipotent Rules
Committee as Joseph G. Cannon had been when Martin could,
through the power of recognition, block any move of that commit-
tee not to his liking. Martin was indeed, in effect, as one commen-
tator put it, “ex-officio chairman of the Rules Committee.” State-
ments of Speaker Rayburn carry the authority of a latter-day czar,
although now it is the genial voice of Sam instead of the gruff bark
of Joseph G.
No party member can play the maverick with impunity when
the speaker can casually call his attention to the fact that the party
congressional campaign fund is at the speaker’s disposal to fi-
nance generously a rival candidate against the intransigent mem-
ber at the next party nominating primary.” Republican party
discipline approached an all-time high in the Eightieth Congress.
For example, it was no accident that there were only three Repub-
lican votes against and 236 Republican votes for the controversial
Wolcott Housing Bill or that, on the motion to recommit the
Knutson Tax Bill, every one of the 236 Republican votes cast was
in the negative. Speaker Cannon could have done no better. There
is something to be said for a system like this. It is even an approach
againto party government in the House such as enabled President
Theodore Roosevelt to deal understandingly with Speaker Cannon
as the responsible spokesman of the House majority. The Republi-
can majority could not in the 1948 election dodge responsibility
» Peter Edson, “Half a Dozen Men Run Show in Boss Ridden House,” Syn-
dicated Column, Lima News, June 15, 1948.
158 * The Man inthe White House
for its record in the Eightieth Congress, and the electorate passed
decisive judgment on the Congress thus disciplined. And time will
tell whether some president with qualities of leadership can again
effect a workable organic relationship with such a House as
Theodore Roosevelt did under similar circumstances.
Formal changes in the mechanics of our government may amel-
iorate but can never solve the problem of conflict between pres-
ident and Congress. Least of all can it be solved by adopting
a parliamentary system. What many an American enthusiast for
such a solution overlooks is the fact that the essential features of
the British system consist of a set of usages: the appeal to the
country, the resignation of a ministry on an adverse vote, the
monarch asking the leader of the victorious party to form a
ministry—these are mere English political habits institutionalized
by long usage. There are those who seem to believe that we might,
by constitutional amendment and formal statute, make legally
compulsory in America a set of British governmental usages. Our
own peculiar system evolved naturally without conscious planning
as indeed did the British parliamentary system. And ‘“‘the concept
of checks and balances can never lack meaning for government
in a society of divergent interests.”
We will undoubtedly be compelled to develop some better
American procedures and habits to displace some unsatisfactory
ones. Ever since the Civil War we have from time to time toyed
with the plan of seating Cabinet members in Congress oblivious
of the fact that legislation is done in the committees. But reliance
upon organizational changes alone has proved pretty futile in the
past. The overthrow of Czar Cannon in 1910 was hailed as a great
reform, but who today can say that Congress was markedly im-
proved by the Revolution of 1910? Joe Martin’s and Sam Rayburn’s
firm grip on the House brought us back to “where we came in”
in the first decade of the century and demonstrates the persistence
23 E, P. Herring, Presidential Leadership (1940), p. 14.
The President and Congress * 159
of deep-seated tendencies with respect to American speakers that
were rooted originally in the experience of colonial legislatures.
The La Follette-Monroney Act “reforming” the committee system
of Congress was not in effect six months before profound dis-
appointment was being expressed over how much Congress was
still like Congress. It was a scholar-Congressman who expressed
a philosopher’s judgment upon this event: “It is those who mag-
nify gadgets and seek to cure the grudges that attend their mal-
functioning who will be disappointed at any and every reorganiza-
tion of Congress.” »
Nor need it be assumed that we are in the clutches of inexorable
fate. Improvements must be persistently sought with the under-
standing always that this is no age of miracles. State legislatures
must be put under the persistent pressure of an enlightened public
opinion to remap congressional districts, give urban population
their fair share of congressmen, and thereby remove the suggestion
of rotten boroughs in rural constituencies. As the urban pressures
approached the point of explosion, the legislature of Illinois in
1947 redistricted congressional constituencies near the end of half
a century without change. The electorate in evenly balanced
congressional districts where the two-party system functions most
healthily may yet become cognizant of how seniority reduces their
share in the councils of the nation to little more than a shadow
and become insistent that this further distortion of representative
power be corrected. The gross injustice due to seniority will ulti-
mately doom it, but the present difficulty is that no feasible
substitute is in sight. Election of chairmen by the committees
would doubtless precipitate demoralizing contests. Public opinion
would scarcely support a return to the method in use before the
introduction of seniority in 1910, that is, appointment of chairmen
by the speaker of the House. However, this would restore a
4T. V. Smith, “Review of Congress at the Crossroads,” Saturday Review of
Literature, xx1x (1946), 12.
160 * The Man inthe White House
semblance of party government to the House and provide an
opportunity for the electorate to pass stern judgment on the party
in the majority, which could scarcely dodge responsibility for sins
of commission and omission.
Since cutting Gordian knots is out of the question, why not
encourage the emerging concept of a legislative-executive council
or Cabinet? Professor Corwin suggests that the president so con-
struct his Cabinet as to contain leading members of the two
houses, to which would be added from time to time heads of
departments and chairmen of independent commissions as issues
pertaining to these agencies needed to be dealt with.” Such a
Cabinet, observed Corwin, “would comprise men whose political
fortunes were not identical with his, who could bring presidential
whim under an independent scrutiny which today is lacking and
yet who by putting the stamp of approval upon his proposals
would be able to facilitate their enactment into law.” Here is a
definite proposal to institutionalize what has hitherto been merely
a matter of haphazard improvisation. The structure and formal
provisions would be far less important than the usages that would
develop in its actual operation. And this is as unpredictable as
human conduct. “For most of the things that can be called evils,”
observed the late Justice Holmes, “the main remedy is for us to
grow more civilized.” This of course will afford little satisfaction
to impetuous souls like the radical abolitionist Theodore Parker.
When some one assured him that God in his own good time would
end slavery, Parker remarked, “The trouble is God isn’t in any
hurry and I am.”
25 The President: Office and Powers (1957), p. 297.
* VIII
The President
as Chief Legislator
* WHERE CAN ONE FIND a finer example
of the natural history of our political institutions than the way
in which the dynamic forces of American society have transformed
the chief executive of the written Constitution into the chief
legislator of our unwritten constitution? Apparently the framers
of the former expected the president to be most of all a co-
ordinator of the political organs of the federal government, and
itis by no means certain that they intended him to be even the
administrative chief: In picturesque metaphor the late Samuel P.
Orth probably came close to recovering the conception of the
Founding Fathers as to what the president was intended to be:
“The Fathers’ idea of leadership [of the President] was modest,”
Orth wrote. “It was the leadership of an orchestra, every member,
including the conductor, bound to follow the music, the principal
duty of the leader being to insure tempo and harmony, not too
fast, not too slow and all together.’”?
Certainly the contrast is striking between the prescriptions for
the presidency in our fundamental instrument and the functioning
reality of the great office in mid-twentieth century. No matter
1 See Frank J. Goodnow, Comparative Administrative Law (1893), 1, Chap. 1.
2 “Presidential Leadership,” Yale Review, April, 1921, p. 454.
161
162 + The Man in the White House
what misconceptions the typical American citizen may have picked
up in his secondary-school study of government, in due course,
when a voter, he seems to sense intuitively the patent realities of
the legislative function of the president, as his conduct at the ballot
box almost always reveals. In fact the citizen, as a voter, scarcely
shows any consciousness whatever of the president’s executive
function, but instead manifests a quadrennial concern as to the
legislation the presidential candidates, if elected, may promote or
prevent. “Popular demand for the appearance of the President
in lesser parts leaves him little time to star as Chief Executive,”
observed Professor McBain. “Politics has transformed his minor
into his major role.’’
What will the presidential candidate, if elected, do about taxes,
farm support, the welfare of labor, and all the other issues that
constitute the subjects of congressional legislation? What can he
induce Congress to do or keep it from doing? Look at the
dominant issues of presidential campaigns over the decades. In
1884, 1888, and 1892 it was the tariff; in 1896 and 1900, the
currency and insular expansion; in 1912, a progressive versus a
conservative program; in 1932, depression relief; in 1936, the New
Deal policies; in 1940, isolationism versus national defense prep-
aration; in 1948, farm support; in 1952, “creeping socialism,” state
rights, “Korea, Corruption, and Communism’’; and in 1956,
“Peace and Prosperity”—but seldom if ever what kind of execu-
tive the candidate is or may turn out to be.
Even in the midst of the administration of President McKinley
Henry Jones Ford perceived “‘that the only power which can end
party duplicity and define issues in such a way that public opinion
can pass upon them decisively is that which emanates from presi-
dential authority. It is the rule of our politics that no vexed
question is settled except by executive policy.”’* Then he proceeded
to point out that even presidents repudiated by their parties—
3 Howard Lee McBain, The Living Constitution (1927), p. 115.
4 The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898), p. 284.
The President as Chief Legislator * 163
Tyler, Johnson and Cleveland—furnished the issues on which
party action turned.
The twentieth-century version of the president as chief legislator
was consequent upon a revolution as marked in the transform-
ation it effected as the Jeffersonian and the Jacksonian revolutions.
The latter-nineteenth-century conception of the presidency that
the current one displaced was concisely epitomized in the Wade-
Davis Manifesto of 1864 in which the Republican majority leaders
of the House and Senate respectively published a furious blast
at President Lincoln for his pocket veto of a Reconstruction Bill.
He must understand . . . that the authority of Congress is para-
mount,” declared the irate congressional leaders, “and must be
respected; that the whole body of Union men in Congress will
not submit to be impeached by him of rash and unconstitutional
legislation, and if he wishes our support [Lincoln was a candi-
date for re-election then] he must confine himself to his execu-
tive duties—to obey and execute, not to make the laws.*
As a consequence of the prevailing Republican dogma of presi-
dential subordination to Congress, the typical latter-nineteenth-
century presidential message to Congress was so perfunctory that
James Bryce in the 1880’s observed: “The expression of his [the
President’s] wishes conveyed to Congress in messages has not
necessarily any more effect on Congress than an article in a
prominent party newspaper.’’® Presidential messages then tended
to be innocuous scissors-and-paste assemblages of departmental
reports to the president constituting poorly integrated miscellanies.
Customarily, within Congress, various parts of the message were
assigned to appropriate committees, where they were likely to be
pigeonholed.
When, in the very midst of this era, President Cleveland con-
fined his message of December, 1887, to an earnest plea for tariff
ë Quoted by Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (1890), 1x, 125-27.
€ American Commonwealth (Commonwealth Edition, 1908), 1, 230.
164 * The Man inthe White House
reduction, such a partisan uproar resulted that Cleveland failed to
be re-elected, the Democrats lost both houses of Congress, and
the new Congress drastically revised the tariff upward instead of
downward, as Cleveland had urged. Once when a friendly critic
asked President Theodore Roosevelt the reason for the inter-
minably long melange of topics constituting his messages, he got
the reply, “Are you aware also of the extreme unwisdom of irritat-
ing Congress by fixing the details of a bill concerning which they
are very sensitive instead of laying down a general policy?”
Despite his professed precaution as to specific demands in his
messages, President Theodore Roosevelt was a pioneer in initia-
ting the twentieth-century trend of presidential leadership in legis-
lation, and in fact he “gave the presidency an organic connection
with Congress.’ “In theory,” wrote Roosevelt years after re-
tiring from the presidency, “the Executive has nothing to do
with legislation. In practice, as things now are, the Executive 1s
or ought to be peculiarly representative of the people as a whole.’’
With the perceptive eye of the practiced politician, President
Roosevelt saw the then well-nigh omnipotent Speaker of the
House, Joseph Cannon, as a medium through whom he might
exercise his legislative leadership of the House if not of Congress,
since, in those days, even the Senate could be bent repeatedly to
the will of Speaker Cannon.'*
No sooner had Joseph Cannon been elected Speaker than Presi-
dent Roosevelt asked him to call at the White House, and their
conferences became frequent. Thanks to Roosevelt’s own ex-
perience as a legislator, he and Cannon came to a working under-
standing of their respective roles in lawmaking.
7 J. B. Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and His Times (1920), 1, 233.
8S. E. Morison, Oxford History of the United States (1927), 1, 449.
® Autobiography (1913), p. 292.
10 See Blair Bolles, Tyrant from Illinois (1951), pp. 76, 77.
The President as Chief Legislator * 165
We did not always agree [admitted Cannon years later], in fact
we more often disagreed but seldom on principle and usually
as to practical methods. Roosevelt had the outlook of the
Executive and the ambition to do things. I had the more con-
fined outlook of the legislator who had to consider ways of
meeting the expenditures of new departments and expansions
in government."
Since the chairmen of the committees conferred with the
Speaker, his office was a clearinghouse of majority opinion to be
relayed to the President, who conferred with Speakér Cannon on
all important proposed legislation throughout his administration.
“He was a good sportsman,” said Cannon, “‘and accepted what he
could get so long as legislation conformed even in part to his
recommendations.”? Cannon no doubt idealized the relationship
somewhat, but here was the earliest attempt to systematize the
function of the chief legislator.
Sometimes President Theodore Roosevelt could resort to auda-
cious strategems not at all free from considerable guile in ac-
complishing a legislative objective. Thus in February, 1903, the
Elkins Bill forbidding rebates by the railroads was passed without
difficulty. But the President was pushing a bill to establish a new
Department of Commerce and Labor containing a Bureau of
Corporations *“‘to investigate the operations and conduct of inter-
state corporations.” This proposed bureau alarmed big business,
and John D. Archbold, who had become the presiding genius of
the Standard Oil Company, wrote to a Pennsylvania congressman
in opposition to the bureau. Getting wind of this, Roosevelt con-
veyed to Washington correspondents that he understood six
senators had received telegrams from John D. Rockefeller against
any antitrust legislation. This proved to be a bombshell, as it was
intended, and while none of the six senators was ever identified,
1 L. W. Busbey, Uncle Joe Cannon (1927), pp. 217, 218.
_ 1 Ibid., p. 219. See G. R. Brown, The Leadership of Congress (1922), pp. 122,
123, 127.
166 * The Man inthe White House
the public reaction was effective. “I got the bill through by publish-
ing those telegrams and concentrating public attention on the bill,”
said the President somewhat later.
President Roosevelt’s immediate successor, Taft, had none of
the Roosevelt flair for dramatizing presidential leadership. Taft
did however astonish conservatives and the constitutional purists
by collaborating with his Attorney General, Wickersham, in pre-
paring the draft of the first corporation tax bill, which he sent to
Congress along with a message. This was resented as an encroach-
ment upon the legislative function of Congress. And somewhat
later Attorney General Wickersham submitted to Congress a bill
to extend the authority of the Interstate Commerce Commission,
which evolved into the Mann-Elkins Act.
In contrast with President Theodore Roosevelt, whose legis-
lative leadership was that of pragmatic opportunism, Woodrow
Wilson brought to the presidency the matured theory of a would-
be prime minister.* It was Woodrow Wilson’s great contribution
to the presidency to have made the provision of the Constitution
for the presidential message to Congress the basis of dynamic
legislative leadership. The extraordinary significance of the State
of the Union Message today owes much to the imagination and
initiative of the only political scientist to have become Chief
Magistrate of the United States. He literally dramatized the presi-
dential message to Congress.
Woodrow Wilson’s dogma of presidential initiative in legis-
lation, based on the message to Congress, had been maturing
during the long generation since the publication of his first article.”
One president after another, as the years passed, failed to measure
13H. F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, a Biography (1931), p. 341.
14 See H. M. Bowman, “Congress and the Supreme Court,” Political Science
Quarterly, March, 1910, p. 20.
15 36 Stat., 539.
16 Art. 2, sec. 3.
17 See Woodrow Wilson, “Cabinet Government in the United States,” Inter-
national Review, vi (August, 1879), 46-163.
The President as Chief Legislator * 167
up to Woodrow Wilson’s hopes until Theodore Roosevelt, con-
cerning whom he wrote, “We must admit that he is an aggressive
leader. He led Congress—he was not driven by Congress.”
Essential to Wilson’s dogma was his conviction that the president
must be a party man “who has the personality and initiative to
enforce his views upon the people and upon Congress.’”* Persistent
in the pattern of Wilson’s conception of the presidency is the
analogy of the prime ministry he read into the Constitution’s
provision for the presidential message to Congress. As he con-
ceived it, the president as party leader and quasi prime minister
should resign if one of his major legislative proposals to Congress
was voted down. Thus he would have resigned if the repeal of the
exemption of American vessels from payment of Panama Canal
tolls, contrary to a treaty agreement, had been defeated when
voted on in the early days of his presidency. “In case of failure
in this matter,” he had declared, “I shall go to the country, after
my resignation is tendered, and ask whether America is to stand
before the world as a nation that violates its contracts as mere
matters of convenience, upon a basis of .expediency.”
The custom of President Wilson to appear dramatically before
Congress in person on major proposals for legislation instead of
simply following the century-old custom of sending a written
message to be read by a clerk was in keeping with his formula of
the prime ministry. Under his dynamic leadership the first con-
sistent revision of the tariff since the administration of President
Polk was achieved after an effective co-ordination of the parts
played by president and congressional committees and a Wilsonian
blast at the tariff lobbyists, which sent them scurrying.” The
grist of the congressional mill became the most consistent since
the Hamiltonian program of the first years under the Constitution
—a program put through the First Congress by one who also
18 Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (1907), p. 65.
19 David Lawrence, The True Story of Woodrow Wilson (1924), pp. 310, 311.
20 Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson, Life and Letters (1927-33), Iv, 123, 124.
168 * The Man in the White House
insisted on being considered the prime minister. In addition to the
Underwood Tariff there were such statutory landmarks as the
Federal Reserve Banking Act, the Clayton Act, and the Federal
Trade Commission Act.
So cordial was the relation of President to his party organiza-
tion in his first Congress that the considerable opposition to the
Federal Reserve Act was overcome, and on the final vote every
Democratic Senator voted for the bill. Here was a perfect ful-
fillment of the Wilson dream of party government under the
leadership of a prime minister. Herein was his realization of the
full possibility of the Constitution’s provision for the presidential
message. Circumstances provided the opportunity, but whatever
hopes Wilson may have had of institutionalizing this peculiar
pattern of presidential leadership were doomed to disappointment.
The three Republican presidents between Woodrow Wilson and
Franklin Roosevelt made no contribution to the trend toward the
chief legislatorship that Theodore Roosevelt had initiated.
Franklin Roosevelt revived the Wilsonian pattern of presidential
leadership in legislation. “Without leadership, alert and sensitive
to change, we are all bogged up or lose our way,” he said only
a week after his first election.2? Not in a dozen years had such a
note been struck by a president. Two months later he was the
honor guest at the annual dinner of the Harvard Club of New
York City. Former President of Harvard A. Lawrence Lowell,
an outstanding political scientist under whose tuition the Presi-
dent-elect had studied, was the principal speaker. Discoursing on
the presidency, Lowell turned to Roosevelt to say that the most
important principle for the chief executive is that he must always
take and hold the initiative in his dealings with Congress and with
his Cabinet and generally with the public. He declared that if
Roosevelt would always apply this principle, there would be little
doubt of his success.”
21 Ibid., 174 ff.
22 New York Times, Nov. 13, 1932, Sec. 8, p. 1.
23 Louis B. Wehle, Hidden Threads of History (1953), p. 134.
The President as Chief Legislator * 169
The crisis of March, 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was in-
augurated, provided the greatest opportunity since the Civil War
for exploiting the peculiar political aptitudes and talents of
Franklin Roosevelt. Thus he reassured a perplexed and almost
despairing people: “In every dark hour of our national life a
leadership of frankness and vigor has met with understanding and
support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”
Then followed the “hundred days’ during which President
Roosevelt, avoiding clashes, collaborated with amateur congress-
men who, without executive leadership, would have been be-
wildered by the gargantuan crisis. Confronted by an undisciplined
Congress and an inchoate public sentiment, the President never-
theless managed to control the situation. “By great fortune,”
wrote Pendleton Herring, “‘a skilful politician was in the White
House who knew how to handle the public and how to negotiate
with Congress. The President was able to outmaneuver his
opponents and to compromise when a clear cut victory was im-
possible. His leadership supplied the unifying force.’
After the “hundred days,” leadership became more systematic.
Former legislator Roosevelt knew that lawmaking is a tedious
process, that committee hearings are required for groups con-
cerned about pending legislation to be heard. Congressmen must
estimate the strength of conflicting constituent interests on bills
and calculate the balance of social forces on pending measures.
In time President Roosevelt developed a procedure of his own for
promoting legislation. Preliminary studies of a proposed piece of
legislation were made by outstanding specialists in the field.
Meanwhile information was disseminated to inform the public
and bring constituent pressure to bear on legislators. Roosevelt
took pains to have administration bills assigned to favorable com-
mittees when possible, and seldom did one reach a hostile
24 Franklin D. Roosevelt, On Our Way (1934), pp. 255-56.
25 “The First Session of the 73rd Congress,” American Political Science Review,
xxvili, No. 1 (1934), 82.
170 * The Man in the White House
committee. When, in the committee stage, hearings were held,
the specialists were ready with answers to the questions pro-
pounded. A prepared bill usually accompanied the message pro-
posing the legislation.»
Congress was surely listening to a disciple of Woodrow Wilson
when, in his second State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt
was saying, “Out of these friendly contacts we are fortunately
building a strong and permanent tie between the legislative and
executive branches of the government. The letter of the Consti-
tution wisely declared a separation, but the impulse of a common
purpose declares a union.” Such was the theory implemented
frequently by a 9:45 meeting by the Secretary of State, the Budget
Director, the Senate majority leader, and the Speaker of the
House. “In practice,” as E. P. Herring observed of the President,
“he evolved a ‘master ministry’ of congressional leaders, cabinet
officers, and executive officials working through the White
House,” No doctrinaire President, Roosevelt frankly avowed he
employed the play-by-play tactics of the football quarterback.
Pliable though President Roosevelt might have been as to
means employed, he was, in his first term, inflexible as to his
“must” legislation. The confusion in Congress early in 1935 led to
a rumor that the President was in poor health and his leadership
seriously impaired, but by the time Congress had adjourned even
so critical a commentator as Charles A. Beard concluded that
the victory of the President was complete all along the line .. .
After the democratic processes of debate and confusion were
given free rein, leadership emerged in the end. When results
26 See ‘Congress’ Reasons for Delay in Passing the President’s Bills,” United
States News and World Report, Jan. 18, 1946. The “Delay” iu tiie title refers to
events in the administration of President Truman, who was less systematic in pro-
moting his measures.
27 F, D. Roosevelt, On Our Way (1934), p. 204.
28 “The Second Session of the 73rd Congress,” American Political Science Re-
view, XXVIII, No. 5 (1934), 854.
The President as Chief Legislator * 171
were surveyed at the conclusion of the discussion and uproar,
it could be truly said that seldom, if ever, in the long history
of Congress had so many striking and vital measures been
spread upon the law books in a single session.”
How far have we gone since the day when a president sat down
at his desk and scribbled out his longhand messages to Congress?
The elaborate organization of the Executive Office of the President
has now practically institutionalized the preparation of the mess-
ages or addresses on the state of the Union, the budget, and the
Economic Report. Let us take President Truman’s State of the
Union Message to the Eighty-first Congress. As early as the pre-
ceding July the Budget Bureau had received from various agencies
the replies to its requests for the budget estimates for suggested
items of legislation. The Legislative Reference Division of the,
Budget Bureau then prepared from the replies a tentative list of
eighty-three items of possible legislation, divided into those con-
sidered certain to be recommended and those less certain. Then
teams of experts from the White House staff, the Federal agencies,
and the Budget Bureau began long-range drafting of tentative
legislation and preparing supporting data and arguments. Mean-
while White House staff members sorted out and analyzed the
proposed items of legislation and began work on the State of the
Union Message. As tentative drafts were completed they were
circulated among Cabinet members and other top officials.
President Truman himself laid down the outline of the message
before a word was written. The message evolved through several
drafts under the supervision of the President’s legal counselor and
his personal legislative assistant and then went back to the Presi-
dent for comments. President Truman went over the final drafts,
sentence by sentence, determining final choice of words and of
emphasis. Twenty-five of the eighty-three legislative items gathered
2 “The Labors of Congress,” Current History, Oct., 1935, p. 64.
172 + The Man in the White House
by the Legislative Service of the Budget Bureau appeared in the
finished draft of the State of the Union Message.
President Eisenhower’s third State of the Union Message illus-
trates the perennial search for recommendations of legislation that
would represent the translation of the aspirations of our complex
society into public policies. The list was impressive: higher min-
imum wages, lower tariffs, reduced draft calls, higher Federal
salaries, more irrigation dams, flexible farm price supports, sub-
sidies for medical schools and for health insurance, Taft-Hartley
Law changes, relaxing immigration restrictions, votes for eighteen-
year-olds, aid for public schools, more public housing, and aid for
small-scale farmers.” The demands of an interest group lurked in
every item.
Concerning almost any recent president’s legislative program,
would it not be appropriate to recall former Congressmen-Profes-
sor T. V. Smith’s “principle of plain politics” that “nobody is to
get nothing; nobody is to get everything; everybody is to get some-
thing.’’»? And if, in the practical application of this broad and
generous formula, the president hopes to fortify the group combi-
nation constituting the majority that elected him with a weather
eye on the next election, so much the better. The grist of the legis-
lative mill depends upon the competition of our political parties
for the good will of the elements of American society with com-
petent presidents as chief engineers of the process. By and large
the better a shrewd State of the Union Message exemplifies the
application of the formula, the better for the nation.
The power that the Constitution vests in the president ‘‘on
extraordinary occasions [to] convene both houses or either of
them” is exclusively his power. Congress in recess cannot of its
3 Stephen K. Bailey and Howard D. Samuel, Congress at Work (1952), pp.
84, 85.
31 “What Eisenhower Wants for Everybody in 1955,” United States News and
World Report, Jan. 21, 1955, pp. 28-29.
32 “The Political Way of Life.” Address delivered at Santa Barbara, California,
September 16, 1948.
The President as Chief Legislator * 173
own volition convene itself, as much as Congressmen from time
to time have wished that they might. The president can convene
Congress when it does not want to meet, as President Truman
certainly did with the Eightieth Congress in the summer of 1948.
A resolute president cannot be pressured into convening Con-
gress. President Johnson was under just such pressure during the
eight months in 1865 between his assuming the presidency follow-
ing the assassination of Lincoln and the convening of Congress
in the regular session required by the Constitution in December of
that year. During those eight months President Johnson was pro-
ceeding with reconstruction under the lenient terms initiated by
Lincoln.
Meanwhile the congressional leaders who had resisted Lincoln’s
generous policy were determined to compel Johnson to impose
severe terms for restoration of the governments of the states of
the late Confederacy. “Is there no way to arrest the insane course
of the President in reorganization?” inquired savage old Thaddeus
Stevens. “If something is not done the President will be crowned
King before Congress meets,” declared Senator Sumner.* As a
precaution against Johnson ever again exercising his power not
to call a special session, Congress at its next session passed a law
“for the meeting of the Fortieth and all succeeding Congresses
immediately after the adjournment of the next preceding one.”
By this legislative stratagem Congress remained in continuous
session throughout the remaining three years of Johnson’s pres-
idency.
Congress was not in session when the attack on Ft. Sumter con-
fronted Lincoln with the problem of armed resistance to Federal
authority. The experience of presidents who called special sessions
of Congress at the beginning of their administration had generally
been disastrous. Half a century later President Taft, and still later
33 Johnson Papers, quoted by E. P. Oberholtzer, History of the United States
Since the Civil War (1917-37), 1, 41.
34 U. S. Statutes at Large, xiv, 378.
174 * The Man inthe White House
President Hoover, called special sessions early in their adminis-
trations to revise the tariff. In both instances it started intraparty
strife that seriously impaired presidential prestige. In Lincoln’s
time a special session in May was regarded as symbolic of political
disaster, and Secretary of State Seward warned Lincoln particular-
ly against that month.* There was then no telegraph line to
California to notify congressmen there of a special session, and
they could not have traveled quickly to Washington after receiving
notice of the call. As it turned out Lincoln set July 4, eleven weeks
after the fall of Sumter, as the date of the special session. Mean-
while Lincoln had a free hand and exercised half a dozen powers
that the Constitution vests in Congress. Lincoln’s and Johnson’s
delays in convening Congress underscored the extraordinary
power inherent in the president’s exclusive discretion as to
whether or not to call special sessions.
The threat of a special session has been used by a resolute
president to bring a sitting but dilatory Congress back under his
legislative leadership. Thus President Wilson warned his first Con-
gress, which was planning to postpone action on the Federal
Reserve Bank to a later session, that if they adjourned without
action on the bill, he would promptly convene Congress in special
session, which threat produced the desired effect.»
President Truman’s calling the Eightieth Congress with its Re-
publican majority into special session in the summer of 1948 and
urging it to enact into law some of the just adopted Republican
platform pledges shows how the power to convene a special
session can be used as an instrument of party strategy by a presi-
dent who has the audacity to do it. In his speech of acceptance
delivered to the Democratic convention that had just nominated
him, Truman reviewed the measures he had recommended to this
Eightieth Congress only to have them rejected. Now the recently
adjourned Republican convention had pledged the party to the
35 James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress (1884-86), 11, 55.
38 J, P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson as I Knew Him (1921), p. 170.
The President as Chief Legislator + 175
enactment of some of the very measures their own party had
turned down in the recent session. In the midst of his acceptance
speech, as we have seen, President Truman with unprecedented
guile announced he would call Congress into special session and
urge it to enact the measures the Republican platform advocated.
The power to call special sessions has been used by other presi-
dents to their detriment and even to that of the public. But a
president equipped with a shrewd understanding of party strategy
and endowed with imagination, sufficient self-assurance, and a
sense of timing—-when to and when not to—can utilize his dis-
cretionary power to call special sessions as a potent instrument
of his legislative leadership.
The veto power has developed into a potential instrument of the
president’s leadership in legislation. It had been the unrestrained
conduct of the popular branch of the omnipotent state legislatures
of the 1780’s that, by and large, had brought together the framers
of the Constitution of the United States. Might not the popular
branch of a national legislature, Congress itself, also run riot?
So the framers adopted the executive veto, lifting the provision
from the Constitution of Massachusetts, which contributed so
largely to the content of the national constitution. The first half
dozen presidents used the veto power sparingly, mainly to strike
down legislation they considered unconstitutional.
A change came with the inauguration of Andrew Jackson, the
first President to have been elected by virtually universal white
manhood suffrage. Thus fortified by what he considered the man-
date of the American people, Jackson initiated the practice of the
president deliberately passing his independent judgment as to the
wisdom, not just the constitutionality, of acts of Congress. Thus
he set the trend that, as already noted, has converted the president
into a potential, when not actual, one-man third house of the
national legislature. Let those who fret over whether what Jackson
did was right and proper be reminded that the forces in American
society that shape and reshape our unwritten constitution, like the
176 * The Man inthe White House
mills of the gods, grind slowly but grind exceeding small—and
care not a whit for such ethical abstractions.
Jackson’s veto of the legislation rechartering the Bank of the
United States, for example, was based upon the assumption that
it was bad legislation. The Whigs denounced this as executive
usurpation of the legislative power of Congress. The Jacksonians
defended it as “the tribunative voice of the people speaking again
through their executive.” It was during the debate preliminary
to the most important mid-nineteenth-century legislation that the
supreme significance of the veto power became evident. It was an
open secret that President Zachary Taylor was determined to veto
the legislation that he dubbed the Omnibus Bill and that consti-
tuted the heart of the Compromise of 1850, but his sudden death
brought to the presidency Vice-President Fillmore, who repre-
sented the Clay faction of the Whig party and was known to be
ready to sign the bill, which he did as soon as it was enacted.
Nor should it be overlooked that the veto is also a positive
instrument of the legislative leadership of the president. It can
be a potential and ever-present threat to pending bills when White
House leaks let the president’s resolute opinion of them become
known-—unless a two-thirds majority to pass them over his veto
is known to exist. The president’s known views in opposition to
pending bills can become the means of bargaining between presi-
dent and Congress for other legislation, “an instrument to be
propitiated by timely and obvious surrenders,” as Professor
Herman Finer put it.
The President’s veto power has become extraordinarily im-
portant during the present generation, President Franklin
Roosevelt having vetoed almost as many acts of Congress as all
his predecessors. This recent development can be attributed to
the fact that the President and Congress came to represent rather
two different constituencies, two opposing sets of electoral power.
Organized labor, for example, is weak in Congress because its
37 Levi Woodbury, Writing (1852), 1, 571.
The President as Chief Legislator * 177
voting strength tends to be concentrated in relatively few constit-
uencies. Not only labor but certain ethnic and religious groups
also are largely concentrated in great metropolitan centers where
they can, when so disposed, swing the weight of their voting power
in great pivotal states in such a way as to determine which presi-
dential candidate gets a majority in the Electoral College.
Congress on the contrary is heavily weighted with members so
distributed in more sparsely settled districts as to overrepresent
agrarian, suburban, middle-class interests with property-conscious
and entrepreneurial biases. Considerably more than a majority of
representatives in Congress represent districts with no city of as
many as 50,000 inhabitants. During the Franklin Roosevelt and
Harry Truman administrations it is scarcely an exaggeration to
say that the president came to be peculiarly the champion of the
consumer-conscious urban voters, whose interest they protected
more than once with the weapon of the veto and whose votes kept
the Democratic party in power until the magic of the formula was
broken by the glamor of a candidate who had just doffed a five-
star uniform.
The tug-of-war between the congressional and presidential con-
stituencies is illustrated by the Taft-Hartley legislation. The bill
was overwhelmingly favored by both houses, 320 to 79 in the
House of Representatives and 54 to 17 in the Senate. Two months
before its passage Democratic leaders, including National Chair-
man Ed Flynn, were already urging the President to veto. So was
the Executive Committee of the American Federation of Labor,
while the C.I.O. was holding rallies to that end in a dozen cities.
By June 18 the White House announced the receipt of 157,000
letters, 460,000 cards, and 23,000 telegrams, most of them urging
veto. The Democratic National Committee announced that a poll
showed Democratic party officers favoring the veto 2 to 1. Presi-
dent Truman vetoed the Taft-Hartley Act, which was promptly
passed over his veto, and one year later he was elected to another
term after a campaign in which he made the Taft-Hartley Act an
issue. But such is the congressional constituency in contrast with
178 * The Man in the White House
the presidential that neither Truman nor Eisenhower, who also
was elected pledged to revision of the act, was able to get a single
amendment made by Congress.®
In the hundred and forty years before the organization of the
Executive Office of the President, a president might prepare a veto
message in person or ask a Cabinet member to do it. Thus Presi-
dent Johnson asked Secretary of War Stanton to prepare the veto
of the Tenure of Office Act in 1867. The establishment of the
Executive Office in 1939 literally led to the institutionalizing of the
preparation of veto messages. For example, in 1950, Congress
passed an act designed to clarify uncertainties in the Federal
Trade Commission’s duties as affected by a Supreme Court
decision.” This Basing-Point Bill, as it was called, would have
legalized certain price-fixing practices in the cement industry ob-
noxious to small business and consumer interests. When the
Bureau of the Budget received the engrossed bill from the Presi-
dent it turned it over to its Division of Legislative Reference for
scrutiny by the staff. The Bureau functions like a congressional
committee and holds hearings to get the consensuses of the inter-
ests affected by the legislation. In this case it prepared a tentative
veto, which President Truman used after the Democratic National
Chairman had polled the constituencies of the Truman adminis-
tration’s strength.
Senators who had been unsuccessful in opposing the bill re-
sorted to the White House to urge veto. President Truman’s
decision to veto the bill signified a choice of the left instead of the
right. Had Truman signed the bili, he would have risked alienating
the very base of his political power—labor, farmers, and small
business. He would thereby have repudiated his own supporters
and given aid and comfort to his bitter enemies, the Dixiecrats.
It remains for some researcher eventually to ascertain what per-
centage of vetoes of the last quarter of a century has been
38 See Bailey and Samuel, Congress at Work (1952), pp. 435-38.
39 Federal Trade Commission v. Cement Institute. 333 U. S. 683 (1948).
The President as Chief Legislator * 179
determined by similar political calculation.’ In that period, at
any rate, the vetoes from time to time reflected the clash of the
haves with the have-nots of the urban masses with the agrarians
and their largely suburban allies.
To a degree impossible to measure objectively the legislative
leadership of the president is a consequence of the usage that has
made him the titular, and when he has the capacity and aptitude
also the actual, leader of his party. Thomas Jefferson initiated the
usage of seeing to it at the very beginning of his presidency that
a Jefferson man was chairman of every Congressional committee.
No president has ever exceeded Jefferson’s feat of putting the
extraordinarily drastic Embargo Act through Congress in one
day, December 22, 1807. Jefferson, who might be said to have
been the first national politician to attain the presidency, was al-
ready accustomed to using the press to achieve his purposes and
continued that practice as President. During his administration
appeared the first newspaper recognized as an adminstration
organ, a practice not uncommon with presidents in the generation
before the Civil War.
President Jackson held the House of Representatives in the
hollow of his hand from the very beginning of his presidency, and
insurgent Democratic senators were picked off one by one as their
terms expired, and Jackson managed replacement by faithful
partisans, which eventually gave him also a Jackson Senate. The
erudite Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts expressed the
opinion that no president except possibly Jackson had such
influence over the Senate as McKinley,” and another Senator,
Shelby M. Cullom of Illinois, wrote: “We have never had a Presi-
dent who had more influence with Congress than McKinley.” No
one can doubt the actual party leadership of Theodore Roosevelt
or his use of it in getting legislation he desired. President Wilson’s
49See Earl Latham, The Group Basis of Politics: A Study of Basing Point
Legislation (1952), Chap. vi.
“| Autobiography of Seventy Years (1903), u, 47.
180 * The Man in the White House
effective party leadership was a corollary of his conception of the
president as a prime minister who was implicitly head of the party
in power. Franklin Roosevelt’s party leadership as an effective
instrument of legislation is unparalleled in our party history. The
president who in this century isolates himself from Congress and
party leadership may have the experience of a Coolidge, whose
biographer wrote, ““Congress has devoted itself to bloodying the
President’s nose, boxing his ears, and otherwise maltreating
him.”
The judicious distribution of patronage among the party faith-
ful was long a potent factor in the legislative leadership of the
president. At the peak of the spoils system in 1864 President
Lincoln could send Charles A. Dana on a mission to win the
support of two obdurate congressmen whose votes were necessary
to get Nevada admitted to the Union in order to have the pending
Thirteenth Amendment ratified by the one more state still neces-
sary. “Whatever promise you make to them I will do,” declared
Lincoln, and it turned out eventually just as Lincoln had planned
it. President Cleveland, in 1893, resolutely set out to obtain
repeal of the Silver Purchasing Act, which was exhausting the
“gold reserve” of the Treasury. When a Senator told the President
that hell would freeze over before the Purchasing Act would be
repealed, he got the President’s prompt reply, “Then Hell will
freeze over in exactly twenty-four hours.” Cleveland knew because
he had dispensed the necessary patronage to that end.“ There-
upon the prolonged filibustering against the repeal came to a
sudden end.
President Wilson suspended distribution of patronage during
the extra session of his first term until his remarkable legislative
program had been enacted into law. During the hundred days of
emergency relief legislation President Franklin Roosevelt would
42 Claude M. Fuess, Calvin Coolidge (1940), p. 342.
43 C, A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War (1898), pp. 174 ff.
4 Harry Thurston Peck, Twenty Years of the Republic (1906), p. 349. James
Ford Rhodes, History of the United States (1893-1922), vm, 403; Historical
Essays (1909), p. 224.
The President as Chief Legislator * 181
now and then put off an importunate congressman with the
excuse, “We haven’t got to patronage yet.” The result of this coy-
ness led Pendleton Herring to the conclusion: “The session in-
dicated that the consummation of a national program is greatly
aided by transmuting, through patronage, the localisms of our
politics into support of the Chief Executive.” Patronage is a
means by which a president may, when it is available, persuade
congressmen to risk the displeasure of important constituent inter-
ests by strengthening his position among influential and “‘deserv-
ing” party leaders at home.
The Federal patronage available to the president has been
declining ever since the Pendleton Civil Service Act became law
in 1883 and with extraordinarily accelerated speed in recent years.
Nor is this decline altogether regretted by congressmen who feel
more than formerly the burden of participating in its distribution.
They are increasingly aware of the president’s power through
patronage to coerce, cajole, and seduce them to support his pro-
gram of legislation. The first critical shortage of patronage upon
the succession of a president of one party to that of another party
was experienced by President Eisenhower. So scarce indeed was
the unclassified personnel subject to patronage that only a meager
number was available for the faithful who had been waiting
twenty long years for “the day.”
The Eisenhower administration’s reduction of the payroll ten
per cent even cut out about as many positions without as within
the classified service. Only a strong president with the flair of a
Roosevelt can utilize the patronage still available to his own
advantage. Due to Eisenhower’s inexperience in the game of party
politics Congressmen sometimes turned patronage accorded them
against the administration, one Senator even managing to plant
a personal partisan in the State Department, where he was able to
embarrass if not harass the administration.
45 “The First Session of the 73rd Congress,” American Political Science Review
xxvii, No. 1 (1934), 82, 83.
182 * The Man in the White House
In the absence of adequate patronage as an instrument of
managing passage of party measures, the Eisenhower adminis-
tration turned to other devices. Thus in 1955 even a Democratic
Congress was prevented by the administration from passing a
twenty-dollar individual tax reduction despite its extreme attrac-
tiveness to members of both parties representing close districts.
The trick was turned by mobilizing political and business forces
back in the districts to support the administration’s pressure on
wavering congressmen. It was believed at the time that such
tactics would assure almost solid Republican party support on
most administration measures except reciprocal trade.+
Technology itself seems to be conspiring to publicize the presi-
dent more and more at the expense of Congress to the frequent
frustration of our national legislators. In our day the presi-
dent’s power in shaping policy and getting policy translated
into statutes is chiefly the power of publicity rather than the
power invested in him by the letter of the Constitution. “His
slightest utterance is headline news,” wrote Howard Lee McBain
long before televised broadcasting had become commonplace and
had enabled the president to speak to the people of the nation face
to face. Governor Franklin Roosevelt invented the fireside chat
which he carried with him to the White House. During the “hun-
dred days” with which his exceptional leadership was ushered
in it is said that he had only to glance at the microphone in the
presence of a delegation of protesting congressmen to have them
drop the matter. They dreaded the flood of letters from constit-
uents that every fireside chat had been bringing.
Today the president has only to make the request that the
nation’s broadcasting systems be cleared to catch the ear of a
listening nation. Every top member of the administration likewise
has access to the broadcasting channels at will. President Truman
and Eisenhower in turn adopted and adapted the fireside chat with
the enhanced advantage of television.
48 Newsweek, March 28, 1955, p. 19.
The President as Chief Legislator * 183
Congress is always at a disadvantage in its competition for
public attention because of its very plurality when pitted against
the incomparable singularity of the president. When President
Truman broadcast his reason for the veto of the Taft-Hartley Act,
Senator Taft followed with his broadcasted reply, but Mr. Re-
publican could never quite be Mr. Congress and could speak only
for a fraction of the legislative branch even if a major part.
Franklin Roosevelt converted the press conference into a power-
ful instrument to which Congress had no comparable counter-
instrument. Now that the performance is televised to be viewed by
the nation, a disconcerted Congress has more reason than ever
for frustration with the president’s opportunity to make the give
and take with the news correspondents extraordinarily effective
in his role as chief legislator.
Most significant today is the routinizing and even institutional-
izing of the legislative leadership of the president. To prepare his
plan of taxation and expenditures for submission to the consider-
ation of Congress he has the Budget Bureau, which includes a
well-staffed Office of Legislative Reference providing a clearing-
house for every executive agency’s recommendation of legislation
enroute to Congress and which office may even prepare his veto
messages. White House counsels safeguard his legislative program
against constitutional pitfalls. The Council of Economic Advisers
and his personal economic adviser provide expert advice on his
proposals for keeping the economy on an even keel. The National
Security Council performs its appropriate purpose in formulating
the president’s domestic and foreign policies. Every unit of this
elaborate apparatus plays its intended part of program-making for
the chief legislator, and not a trace of it existed during the presi-
dency of Woodrow Wilson.”
It is a far cry from that day long ago when President Lincoln
called together his cabinet to present them with the fait accompli
of the finished draft of the Emancipation Proclamation and say,
47 See E. S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers (1957), pp. 299-305.
184 * The Man in the White House
“I have got you together to hear what I have written down. I do
not wish your advice about the main matter, for that I have deter-
mined for myself.” Nothing could be more different than the
Eisenhower way. He has come to treat his cabinet as an instru-
ment for collective policy-making, and it is appropriately equipped
with a secretariat. This new departure with respect to the cabinet
is but part of the process of institutionalizing the policy-deter-
mining function of the president. It first stood out in all its
astonishing possibilities when the critical illness of President
Eisenhower caused scarcely a tremor in the functioning of the
government. Fortunately “Congress had adjourned. The President
had acted on all bills, requiring his attention. The Big Four
Foreign Ministers’ meeting was still nearly a month away. Many
high officials had just got off on vacation. Preparation of the
messages to be submitted to Congress in January was in the early
stages.” Assistant President Sherman Adams could not perform
a single official act of the President, “but by telephone from Den-
ver to Washington he could suggest, ‘It is the President’s wish that
... or ‘The President hopes you will . . . and so forth.’ °! What
may happen if a president falls ill in a crisis of the Cold War no
one can say.
48 Robert J. Donovan, Eisenhower: The Inside Story (1956), p. 370.
+ Ibid., p. 370.
The Chief
Executive
* NO DISTINCT executive organ, on a continental
scale, was created when, in 1775, the responsibility for conducting
the collective concerns of the thirteen Revolutionary states
suddenly fell into the lap of the rather astonished Second Conti-
nental Congress, which had convened in May, 1775, for no such
purpose. By sheer necessity the Congress assumed charge of the
war and the other common concerns of the thirteen colonies still
in uncertain transition into states. In so far as any semblance of
the executive function was provided for at all, it was at first per-
formed by ad hoc executive committees, a new one for each res-
olution or purpose until there were more than a hundred of them.
The extraordinarily able John Adams is said to have served on
ninety of these executive committees. Here, in embryo, was what,
in due time, evolved into the national executive of the United
States. Decade by decade usage, statute, even the personality of
energetic presidents have conspired to concentrate executive
responsibility at a precise point until President Truman could
epitomize the culmination of the trend by the motto on his desk,
“The buck stops here.”
Within a month of the convening of the Second Continental
Congress the transition of some of the executive committees into
185
186 * The Man inthe White House
permanent boards had begun. The first of these, a Board of War
and Ordinance, was appointed with John Adams at its head.: In
December, 1776, Congress appointed a committee “to prepare a
plan for the better conducting the executive business of Congress,
by boards composed of persons, not members of Congress.”? By
1778 the Treasury Office of Accounts had evolved out of the
Finance Committee of Congress, and a similar transition resulted
in several other boards. Then in 1781 Congress carried this evolu-
tion from committees to boards one step further to the establish-
ment of four executive departments: Foreign Affairs, War,
Finance, and the Marine. The framers of the Constitution event-
ually crowned this evolving executive system by the creation of the
chief executive. The President and the First Congress under the
Constitution enacted statutes re-establishing the first three of the
four executive departments initiated by Congress under the
Articles of Confederation—Foreign Affairs (soon to be renamed
Department of State), War, and Treasury.
A fundamental purpose of the framers of the Constitution was
the replacing of the feeble system of the Confederation with a
vigorous government provided with an adequate executive. The
imposing list of powers delegated to Congress in the eighteen
clauses of the eighth section of Article One of the Constitution
might have been but a futile gesture with only the shadowy execu-
tive provided by the Continental Congress. Hamilton expressed
the consensus of the framers when he wrote in Article 70 of the
Federalist,
Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition
of good government. It is essential to the protection of the
1 George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the
Continent (1885), tv, 425.
2 Journal of the Continental Congress, vi, 1041.
The Chief Executive * 187
community against foreign attacks. It is not less essential to the
steady administration of the laws. ...A feeble Executive implies
a feeble execution of the government. A feeble executive is but
another phrase for bad execution; and a government ill executed,
whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad gov-
ernment.
There epitomized is the philosophy of the Founding Fathers of
the Constitution with respect to the executive, a conceptual pat-
tern certainly not less valid in the atomic age than in the in-
fancy of the republic.
“He shall take care that the laws-be faithfully executed”: is the
characteristic economy of phrase with which the Constitution
makes the president the chief executive of the United States. Let
it be noted that the president is not directed literally to enforce
the law himself. No president has ever done this, although Andrew
Jackson may have been preparing to do so just before the Nulli-
fication impasse of 1832 was resolved by Clay’s Compromise
of 1833. The chief executive’s responsibility is, of course, to see
to it that the execution is done by those invested with that re-
sponsibility. The president’s authority for seeing to the faithful
execution of the laws derives from five sources: first, those powers
conferred directly by the second article of the Constitution, which
concerns the executive; second, the specific executive powers
created by acts of Congress and vested in the president; third, the
discretionary powers vested by statute in the numerous executive
agencies of the national government; fourth, the power to enforce
criminal statutes; fifth, the nondiscretionary or ministerial duties
vested in the executive agencies concerning the performance of
which the office has no choice and which it is the duty of the
president to have faithfully performed.+
The executive powers enumerated in the preceding paragraph
are all based squarely on specific authorization by the supreme
3 Art. 2, sec. 3.
4E. S. Corwin (ed.) The Constitution of the United States: Analysis and In-
terpretation (1953), pp. 475-76.
188 * The Man in the White House
law of the land, that is, upon the Constitution, treaties, and
Federal statutes. But does the president possess still other execu-
tive powers than these? Can it be that the president has executive
powers inherent in the very nature of his office, in short, preroga-
tive power, such as an English monarch possesses? Alexander
Hamilton evidently thought so and expounded it over the pen
name, “‘Pacificus,” in a controversy that arose in 1793 concerning
President Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality in the war
that had broken out between England and France. American
citizens, sympathetic with France, even Jefferson and Madison,
condemned the Proclamation as a violation of the Treaty of
Alliance with France made during the Revolutionary War and
moreover as a usurpation by the President of the legislative power
of Congress to declare war.
Hamilton plunged into the constitutional controversy, making
much of the argument that the Constitution is quite specific and
detailed as to the powers of Congress, limiting them specifically
to the “legislative powers herein granted,’’> whereas it vests the
executive power, without qualification, in the president by the
sweeping clause, ““The executive power shall be vested in a Presi-
dent of the United States of America.’ “The general doctrine
of our Constitution then is,” Harnilton argued, “that the executive
power is vested in the President, subjected only to the exceptions
which are expressed in the instrument.” Hamilton also pointed
out that the president’s oath of office pledges him to “execute the
office” not just “the law.”
Half a century after Hamilton’s investing the president with
prerogative power through constitutional exegesis, a keen expo-
nent of the dogma of state rights, Able P. Upshur, President Tyler’s
Secretary of State, made a similar observation as to presidential
5 Art. 1, sec. 1, clause Ł.
6 Art. 3, sec. 1, clause 1.
7 Alexander Hamilton, Works (Lodge, ed., 1885), Iv, 142-44.
The Chief Executive * 189
power with the difference that he deplored what Hamilton ap-
proved in the vagueness of the Constitution:
The most defective part of the Constitution beyond all question
[wrote Upshur] is that which relates to the executive depart-
ment. It is impossible to read that instrument without being
forcibly struck with the loose and unguarded terms in which the
powers and duties of the President are pointed out. So far as
the Legislature is concerned, the limitations of the Constitution
are perhaps as precise and strict as they could be safely made;
but in regard to the Executive, the Convention seems to have
studiously selected such loose and general expressions as would
enable the President, by implications and construction either to
neglect his duties or to enlarge his powers.*
More than a century after Hamilton’s broad interpretation of
executive power, President Theodore Roosevelt, apparently un-
aware of Hamilton’s views on the matter, expounded his ‘“‘steward-
ship theory of the executive power” of the president by his “‘insist-
ence upon the theory that the executive power was limited only by
specific restrictions appearing in the Constitution or imposed by
Congress under its constitutional powers....1 declined to adopt
the view that what was imperatively necessary for the Nation
could not be done by the President unless he could find some
specific authorization to do it.’
The loose interpretations of presidential power by Alexander
Hamilton and Theodore Roosevelt may be dismissed as merely
expressions of personal opinion rather than authoritative exposi-
tions of the law of the land. The courts have never accepted quite
so much. In 1916 former President William Howard Taft, then a
professor of law at Yale University, attempted to express the then
prevailing judicial consensus on the scope of the executive power
of the president. “The true view of the Executive functions,” he
wrote, “is that the President can exercise no power which cannot
be fairly and reasonably traced to some specific grant of power
8 A Brief Enquiry into the True Nature and Character of Our Federal Government,
(1840), pp. 116.
° Autobiography (1913), p. 389.
199 * The Man in the White House
or justly implied and included within such grant as proper and
necessary.””* However this did not express Taft’s final interpre-
tation, because ten years later in the Myers case he found implied
power of the executive in the opening clause of the third article of
the Constitution, “The executive power shall be vested in a Pres-
ident of the United States,” the very clause from which Hamilton
had derived presidential prerogative as early as 1793.
A full decade before Theodore Roosevelt publicized his steward-
ship theory of the presidency, he had already given a demonstra-
tion of it. In May, 1902, the accumulated grievances of the anthra-
cite miners of Pennsylvania culminated in what turned out to
be a historic strike. Roosevelt could have dismissed the matter
as none of his responsibility until the Governor of Pennsylvania
would ask for federal troops to restore order. But before the strike
was a month old, he had sent his Commissioner of Labor to
investigate and make recommendations, which neither side would
accept. The East depended on anthracite coal for heating pur-
poses, and if the strike continued into the autumn and winter,
intense suffering would result.
Roosevelt got the operators and labor leaders together in a
White House conference, where the conduct of the leading opera-
tor was so Offensive that the President said later, “If it wasn’t for
the high office I hold I would have taken him by the seat of his
breeches and the nape of the neck and chucked him out the
window.” Roosevelt was seriously considering sending the army
to seize the mines and under it have the miners get out the coal,
when he broke the impasse by sending Secretary of War Elihu
Root to confer with the New York financial giant, J. P. Morgan,
under whose influence the operators agreed to arbitrate. But in
order to protect the miners’ rights, Roosevelt saw to it that the
arbitration board included a Catholic bishop and a union official,
whom he palmed off as an “eminent sociologist,” which the
agreement to arbitrate had required.
10 Our Chief Magistrate and his Powers, (1916), pp. 139-40.
The Chief Executive * 191
The “‘stewardship theory” of the presidency proved “prophetic
of developments in a field Theodore Roosevelt had staked out for
its application—that of industrial relations.” Nothing so drastic
as Roosevelt’s methods in 1902 have been used since, but in the
next forty-five years there were 26 instances in which a president
intervened in a similar way in industrial crises by other than a
purely police capacity, that is instead in an extralegal and extra-
constitutional manner, which is the essential nature of the steward-
ship theory of the presidency.'’? The stewardship of the presidency
must now be considered an established usage of the office.
In 1936 the Supreme Court of the United States decided a case
in which it sanctioned an area of executive power inhering in the
office of the president. Congress had, by joint resolution, author-
ized the President to lay an embargo on the sale of arms and
munitions to two South American republics, Bolivia and Para-
guay, then at war with each other, if he found that such an em-
bargo might contribute to the restoration of peace between them.
The act prescribed fine and imprisonment for violators of the
President’s proclamation. President Franklin Roosevelt, in ac-
cordance with the resolution, issued a proclamation laying such an
embargo, which a corporation violated by selling machine guns to
Bolivia. When prosecuted, the corporation contended that the
delegation of authority by Congress to the president had given
him “unfettered discretion” and that the delegation was con-
trolled by no standard, which the courts had only recently insisted
upon in congressional delegation of its power. This defense was
rejected by the Supreme Court. Speaking through Justice Suther-
land the majority declared that “‘the investment of the federal
government with powers of external sovereignty did not depend
upon affirmative grants of the Constitution.” As a sovereign
nation the United States possesses, with respect to foreign re-
lations, all the powers other sovereign nations enjoy, and this
power is not dependent on delegations by the clauses of the
n E, S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers (1957), p. 153.
12 Tbid., pp. 408-409.
192 + The Man in the White House
Constitution. In brief here is an area of inherent national power.
Justice Sutherland quoted the dictum of Representative John
Marshall uttered in a debate in Congress, March 7, 1800. “The
President is the sole organ of the nation in its external relations
and its sole representative with foreign nations.” This meant
that, in delegating the power of the joint resolution of Congress
concerned in the case being considered by the Court, Congress
needed to prescribe no standard as it must in the domestic field of
specified powers of Congress. In the field of foreign relations not
only Congress but even the president has inherent powers." In one
area then the prerogative dogma of Hamilton had been judicially
vindicated.
As a general rule only Congress can authorize or create the
offices and agencies available to the president in seeing to the
faithful execution of the law. Until late in the nineteenth century
it had been generally assumed that there could be no exception
to this rule. But in 1889 there occurred a dramatic episode that
determined the matter otherwise. Stephen J. Field, whom Lincoln
had appointed an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, had
developed a capacity for survival in the turbulent days of the
California gold rush, having acquired, among other accomplish-
ments, the subtle art of shooting from the pocket. He had prompt-
ly accepted challenges to duels only to have challengers withdraw
on second thought. In 1888, Justice Field in the face of a threat
of assassination decided a case against Althea Hill, who had filed
a will found to be a forgery. For outrageous misconduct in court,
she and her attorney, David S. Terry, who soon afterward married
her, were held for contempt by Justice Field. Terry declared he
would shoot Field if he returned to California for his next session
of circuit court. Thereupon President Benjamin Harrison acting
through his Attorney General, detailed a United States deputy
marshall, Neagle, to accompany and protect Justice Field, to the
13 Annals, 6th Cong., col. 613.
11 U, S. v. Curtis-Wright Export Corp., 299 U. S. 304 (1936).
The Chief Executive * 193
utter disgust of the latter, who was accustomed to taking care
of himself.
Upon Field’s return to California on circuit court duty, Terry
made a murderous attack upon him, but Marshall Neagle was
quicker on the trigger and killed Terry. Neagle was arrested at
once by a California sheriff and charged with murder. The Cal-
ifornia prosecutor argued before the court that, since no act
of Congress had authorized the President to appoint Neagle, he
was not an officer but merely a private citizen and therefore
guilty of murder. When the case, on appeal, reached the Supreme
Court of the United States, it was decided that the president, in
the exercise of his obligation “to take care that the laws be faith-
fully executed” may, without statutory authorization, appoint an
officer to protect the life of a Federal judge.'* Thus the president’s
duty is not restricted to “the enforcement of Acts of Congress or
of treaties of the United States according to their express terms,”
but includes “‘the rights and obligations growing out of the Consti-
tution itself, our international relations and all the protection
implied by the nature of the government under the Constitution.”
That much authority of the president then inheres in the very
nature of the office of chief executive. Hamilton would have
applauded the decision of the case in re Neagle.
Let no one assume from the outcome of the Neagle case that
the president is not limited by statute law. During the undeclared
war with France in 1798-1799 Congress enacted a Nonintercourse
Act authorizing the seizure of American vessels sailing to France
or its dependencies. President Adams directed the captains of
armed vessels “to be vigilant that vessels really American but
covered by Danish or other paper bound to or from French ports
be intercepted. Under these orders the Flying Fish, a Danish
vessel, was captured bound from France while the law had author-
ized interception only of vessels sailing to France. The naval
captain was sued by the owners of the captured vessel for damages
*® In re Neagle, 135 U. S. 1 (1890).
194 * The Manin the White House
and plead in defense that he was acting under orders of the Presi-
dent. In due course the Supreme Court of the United States had
to answer the question: “Will the orders of the President mis-
construing the Act of Congress release from damages the officer
obeying them.” The Court decided unanimously that “the in-
structions cannot... legalize an act which without the instructions
would have been a plain trespass.”'* This principle that the pres-
ident cannot legalize what is otherwise a violation of law is just
as valid today as it was a century and a half ago when Marshall
gave the decision of the Court. In fact, Justice Thomas C. Clark
based his opinion against the legality of President Truman’s
“seizure” of the steel mills in 1951 on the very decision of Little
v. Barreme” just quoted.
Even a more striking decision emphasizing the fact that the
president, in his capacity of commander-in-chief, cannot legalize
what is not already legal is that of U. S. v. Lee. In the midst of the
Civil War, Congress had ordered confiscated the estate of General
Robert E. Lee, the present site of Arlington Cemetery, for failure
to pay taxes due on it. After General Lee’s death his heirs took
legal steps to recover the property. Their action took the form
of ejection of the military stationed with troops on the estate
under orders of the President. The Attorney General of the United
States found himself unable to prevent the ejection of the officers
despite the fact that they were there under orders of the Com-
mander-in-Chief. The Attorney General endeavored to prevent
suit on the ground that the sovereign cannot be sued without its
consent. The Supreme Court however chose to consider the action
as one against persons. “No man in this country is so high that
he is set above the law,” said the Court. “No officer may set that
Law at defiance with impunity. All officers of the government
from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law and are
bound to obey it.” The Attorney General failed also because of
16 Little v. Barreme, 2 Cranch 170 (1804).
17 343 U. S. 579, 660, 661.
18 U, S. v. Lee (1882).
The Chief Executive * 195
the constitutional provision, which the act of Congress authoriz-
ing the confiscation explicitly recognized, namely that “no attain-
der of treason shall work corruption of blood except during the
life of the person attained.”* The decision of the Court signified
once more that not even the President himself acting in his capac-
ity of commander-in-chief can authorize anyone, in this case an
army captain, illegally to occupy private property without the
person so directed being subject to penalty for trespass.
In 1952 President Truman, in order to avert a threatened strike
of steelworkers, which he believed would interfere with national
defense in the midst of the Korean War, issued an executive order
to the Secretary of Commerce to seize and operate most of the
steel mills of the country. He did this upon the advice of the
Attorney General under the assumption that the Constitution and
the laws had vested such powers in the president. The President
reported his action to Congress conceding at the same time that
it had the power to supersede his executive order. In the legal
maneuvering that followed, the issue reached the Supreme Court
of the United States, which decided by a vote of 6 to 3 against the
legality of the President’s order. Justice Black, who delivered the
opinion of the Court, reasoned that no statute authorized the
President to take possession of the property. In framing the Taft-
Hartley Act Congress had refused to authorize such action. Such
authority, the Court held, could not be derived from the aggregate
of the president’s executive powers nor his powers as commander-
in-chief. The powers the President here sought to exercise in law-
making the Constitution vests in Congress alone.
So far as emergency powers of the president are concerned the
Supreme Court decision in the steel-seizure case induced about as
much controversy as conviction. The so-called ‘emergency
power” of the President apparently constitutes a field of authority
he may exercise unless Congress limits it by legislation. Now
19 Art. 3, sec. 3, clause 2.
20 343 U.S. 579.
196 * The Man in the White House
Congress had, by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1946, prescribed a pro-
cedure that President Truman by-passed. In the opinion of Pro-
fessor Robert Dishman, “Considering the bullheadedness of both
sides and the cumbersome administrative machinery which had
been set up to handle the stabilization and mobilization problems,
I believe that a strike was inevitable and that therefore nothing
would have been gained by invoking the Taft-Hartley Act.”
Professor Glendon Schubert was convinced that the majority
opinion of the Court did not at all challenge Truman’s declaration
of emergency when he seized the steel mills in 1952 but simply
ignored this fact of emergency, which led Schubert to conclude,
“In any event that opinion of the Court is sui generis.”?? Whether
the steel-seizure decision represents finality or not, Professor
Corwin observed that it was “unquestionably contradicted by a
long succession of presidential pioneering in territory eventually
occupied by Congress.” The area remains vast in which the
president may act in order “to take care that the laws be faith-
fully executed” and to perform his duties as commander-in-chief.
The “convenient vagueness” of the Constitution has required
judicial clarification in scores of court decisions on the executive
powers of the president. Some of the prescriptions of the Consti-
tution, however, are so clear as to be self-explanatory. Certainly
no one but the president can “grant reprieves and pardons for
offenses against the United States.” He cannot delegate to any-
one else his function as commander-in-chief. It is only he who
“shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers and com-
mission all officers of the United States.”*> He alone can veto acts
of Congress. It is when the Constitution vests in the president the
duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed and when
acts of Congress create and vest in him specific duties that he may
2 E, S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers (1957), p. 410.
22 The Presidency and the Courts (1957), p. 357 n.
23 The President: Office and Powers (1957), p. 155.
24 Art. 2, sec. 2, clause 1.
25 Art. 2, sec. 3.
The Chief Executive * 197
exercise his authority as chief executive through an appropriate
department whose act, if performed within the law, then becomes
the president’s act.» Moreover the president may not, without
statutory authority, delegate a discretionary duty so that it will
not be his act but that of another.”
But if the acts of public officials who directly enforce the law
are legally the president’s acts, how can he be assured that they
are such dependable subordinates that he is willing to be held
responsible for their acts? The First Congress wrestled with this
very problem in a long debate. It came down to the question as to
whether the Constitution intended that the Senate, which by pre-
cise prescription shared in appointing, would by implication share
likewise in the removal power of officials? No action was taken by
Congress on the question then, and that very inaction “produced
the net result that the President alone has the power to remove at
pleasure all superior officers, at least until Congress positively
undertook to regulate their tenure.”» The assumption underlying
this conclusion is, as noted above, that the president cannot logi-
cally be held responsible for the acts of his appointees unless he
has the sole power to remove them.
The first great test of the power of the president to remove his
appointees occurred in 1832 when President Andrew Jackson
removed Secretary of the Treasury William J. Duane because he
would not comply with the President’s policy of removing Federal
deposits from the Bank of the United States. By removing Duane,
Jackson raised the question as to whether this could be legally
done in the face of the statute”? that vested discretion solely in the
secretary of the treasury. Jackson stood his ground on the removal
in the face of an unprecedented uproar in the Senate and argued
“that the entire executive power is vested in the President,” that
the power to remove those officers who are to aid him in the
26 Wilcox v. Jackson ex. dem. McConnel, 13 Peters, 498 (1839).
27 Williams v. U. S., 1 Howard, 290, 297 (1843).
z James Hart, The American Presidency in Action, 1789 (1948), p. 247.
2 U. S. Statutes at Large, m, p. 274.
198 + The Man in the White House
execution of the laws is an incident to that power, and that the
secretary of the treasury was no exception. Not until nearly a
century later was the question judicially settled. President Wilson
had removed a postmaster before the end of the four-year term
for which he had been appointed under a statute of 1876 that had
made removal specifically subject to the consent of the Senate,
which President Wilson did not even pretend to seek. Ultimately
the question of the legality of the removal reached the Supreme
Court, which sustained the President’s action, and since then the
absolute power of the president to remove executive appointees
has not been judicially challenged.” Nor need the president give
any reason whatever for the removal of such an official.”
Under his power to see to the enforcement of the law the presi-
dent must inevitably interpret law preliminary to its enforcement.
It cannot be maintained that the courts only have this power, for
they cannot accept jurisdiction until a live case involving a
question of law is brought before them by someone who insists
he has been hurt by enforcement of the law. Nor is this presiden-
tial interpretation of law confined to executive orders and ordi-
nances, that is, executive regulations or rules authorized or re-
quired by statute and having the force of law. In addition there
are such matters as the order of the Attorney General in the
Neagle case directing a United States marshal to accompany and
protect the life of a threatened Justice of the Supreme Court. The
30 Myers v. U.S., 272 U.S. 52 (1926).
31 It should be noted that when Congress creates an agency to which it, under
proper regulation, delegates quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial authority in order
to carry out a congressional rather than an executive function, Congress may
constitutionally restrict the removal power of the president to certain offenses.
Thus when President Franklin Roosevelt removed William E. Humphrey from the
Federal Trade Commission, the removal was held to be illegal by a unanimous
Supreme Court. In the act creating the commission Congress had confined the
President’s power of removal to “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in
office,” none of which was assigned by the President as the reason for Humphrey’s
removal. Humphrey’s Executors v. U. S., 295 U. S. at 602 (1935).
The Chief Executive + 199
marshal in that mission “got his man.” Though no law had
authorized the appointment of the marshal, the “order?” was
nevertheless held by the Supreme Court to be “‘a law of the land.”
But long before that the Attorney General had to decide that the
appointment was constitutional.
In seeing to the enforcement of the laws the president is not at
all limited to employing ordinary personnel of the judicial and
executive branches, but may also employ armed forces. The first
large-scale challenge of Federal authority was made in 1794 by
the whisky rebels of western Pennsylvania, who rioted against
collection of the whisky excise. Resistance collapsed when Presi-
dent Washington mobilized and ordered against them 15,000 state
militia, which Congress had authorized him to call into Federal
service for such a purpose by legislation under the power granted
it by the Constitution.
If one of the whisky rebels of 1794 could have reappeared in the
midst of the Little Rock desegregation crises of 1957, he would
inevitably have wondered what had happened in the intervening
163 years to unsettle the matter apparently so decisively deter-
mined then in western Pennsylvania. Washington had taken de-
cisive action in sending the ‘‘federalized”’ militia against the defiers
of court orders—that is, the whisky rebels. There had been tarring
and feathering then of Federal marshals who attempted to serve
court writs on persons refusing to pay the whisky excise. In 1957
the Federal District Court in Arkansas had approved the Little
Rock school board’s program of gradual integration “‘with all
deliberate speed” as the United States Supreme Court had direct-
ed May 31, 1955, and the District Court enjoined all persons from
interfering. Nevertheless Governor Orval Faubus called out the
Arkansas state militia or National Guard ostensibly to preserve
order, but two days later under the Governor’s order the militia
was deliberately preventing integration. When the Federal judge,
32 Art. 1, sec. 8, clause 15.
200 * The Man in the White House
sitting in the district, granted an injunction against interference
with integration, Governor Faubus withdrew the National Guard,
and rioting against integration broke out in Little Rock. President
Eisenhower, following the statutory provision in force since the
Whisky Rebellion, issued the required proclamation commanding
all persons obstructing justice to cease and desist and disperse.
When the mob defied the President’s proclamation, he ordered
Federal troops into Little Rock and federalized the Arkansas
National Guard, which deprived Governor Faubus of command
of it. In calling the militia into Federal service no less than in
ordering Federal armed forces to Little Rock the President was
but following in the footsteps of Washington in 1794 and Lincoln
in 1861 when Federal authority had been obstructed.
In 1808 Jefferson issued a proclamation ordering all officers
having authority civil or military who shall be found in the vicinity
of an unruly combination resisting enforcement of the Embargo
Act to assist in suppressing the combination “‘by all means in their
power, by force of arms and otherwise.” What Jefferson ordered
would have constituted a posse comitatus, based upon common
law by which a sheriff might summon the inhabitants of a county
to suppress disorder and enforce law. It was a striking comment-
tary of the late Henry Jones Ford on Jefferson’s about-face on
utilizing Federal power when his administration instead of
Washington’s or Adams’ was employing it that “the enforcement
act passed to sustain the embargo was a greater interference with
the ordinary privileges of citizens than would have been necessary
in the exercise of war powers.”
Specific statutory authorization of utilizing private citizens in
the chief executive’s “taking care that the laws be faithfully
executed” was incorporated in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
33 “Federal Aid in Domestic Disturbances,” S. Coc. 209, 59th Cong., 2nd Sess.,
p. 51 (1907).
4 The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898), p. 132.
35 U, S. Statutes at Large, 1x, 453 ff.
The Chief Executive * 201
The Federal commissioners appointed to apprehend fugitive
slaves were authorized “to summon and call to their aid the
bystanders, or a posse comitatus of the proper county when nec-
essary to ensure faithful observance of the clause of the Constitu-
tion referred to, in conformity with the provisions of this act.”
It was under his duty to take care that the laws be faithfully
executed that Lincoln, in 1861, employed Jefferson’s conception of
the posse comitatus by issuing his call for 75,000 state militia
under the authority of the Act of 1795 for calling the militia into
the Federal service. As Lincoln conceived it, the entire Union
army constituted a gigantic posse comitatus summoned to suppress
combinations obstructing the enforcement of Federal law. It was
an augmented police force, and those who are puzzled because
no declaration of war was ever made in 1861 need to be reminded
that police are not expected to “declare war” in exercising their
duties.
The Constitution provides that the United States shall protect
each state ‘‘on application of the legislature, or of the executive
(when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic
violence.” The long and harrowing economic depression of the
1870’s led, in time, to railroad strikes so widespread and violent
that nine governors called upon President Hayes for assistance.
The use of Federal troops for suppressing internal disorder, other
than resistance to Federal authority, was then unprecedented.
President Hayes proceeded with his characteristic circumspection
and, in consultation with his exceptionally competent Cabinet,
arrived at judgmenis that established permanent precedents for
similar later episodes. Among these precedents were the con-
clusions that the president can, when necessary, declare martial
law, can insist upon formal constitutional requests from the state
for Federal military aid, can issue proclamations in accordance
with Federal statutes, and can make judicious use of troops under
36 Art. 4, sec. 4.
202 + The Man in the White House
Federal authority to preserve order and protect property but not
to break the strike.”
In 1894 President Cleveland introduced a new pattern of the use
of the military in civil disorder, in this instance, using Federal
troops ostensibly to maintain the mail service and ensure free flow
of interstate commerce but actually to restrain strikers seeking to
force arbitration in a dispute with employers. The American
Railway Union, acting in sympathy with striking Pullman-car
workers, refused to handle trains that included Pullman cars,
which action practically tied up passenger traffic in the United
States. Without waiting for any application from the state legis-
lature or the state executive of Illinois, as the Constitution re-
quires in cases of domestic violence, and in the face of the vig-
orous protests of Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois, Presi-
dent Cleveland dispatched Federal troops to Chicago.
The actions of the President which were really the actions of
his Attorney General Richard Olney fas Professor Rossiter
correctly observed] were ill conceived, disconnected and thor-
oughly effective in breaking the strike.... At every point in the
course of the strike and its suppression the wishes of the rail-
road officials who acted through the General Managers Associ-
ation, found support in the federal government’s action. Like
Hayes, Cleveland intervened to restore public order. Unlike
Hayes he accomplished this by judicially and physically break-
ing the strike.”
Whatever the merit or demerit of Cleveland’s action in the
Pullman strike, the issue was eventually resolved by a United
States Supreme Court decision that “the entire strength of the
nation may be used to enforce, in any part of the land, the
full and free exercise of all national powers. The strong arm
of national government may be put forth to brush aside all
37 See Clinton L. Rossiter, “The President and Labor Disputes,” The Presidency
in Transition (The Journal of Politics), February, 1949, p. 97.
3 Ibid., p. 98.
The Chief Executive * 203
obstructions.” No president since Cleveland has used the military
in effect to break a strike, but they all have instead returned to the
practice initiated by Hayes. In the anthracite coal strike of 1902
President Theodore Roosevelt resolutely refused the demand of
the operators that he follow Cleveland in using troops to break
the strike. On the contrary, after months of deadlock, Roosevelt
was ready, if the operators had remained obdurate against arbi-
tration, to use troops to seize and operate the mines in order to
supply the fuel needed in the approaching winter. In 1907 Presi-
dent Theodore Roosevelt forced an unwilling Governor, who had
deceived him into dispatching troops to Goldfield, Nevada, into
policing his own state.
By mid-twentieth century the President’s role in labor contro- -
versies that constituted national emergencies had evolved into an
amalgam of legal authority plus sheer usage based upon the
accumulating prestige of the presidency. In the Neagle case
Justice Miller had declared that there is a “peace of the United
States” which is the basis of some of the president’s unenumerated
powers. This might justify a presidential title of “Protector of
the Peace.”’* In his hectic first year as President just after World
War II, Harry Truman spent unnumbered hours “writing labor
messages to Congress, sponsoring labor management conferences,
appointing emergency fact finding boards, sending personal pleas
to strike bound union leaders, seeking injunctions from Judge
Goldsborough, and seizing plants and whole industries threatened
or paralyzed by work stoppages.”’*? No wonder President Truman
was led to say that “‘the principal power that the President has
is to bring people in and try to persuade them to do what they
ought to do without persuasion. That’s what I spend most of my
time doing. That’s what the powers of the President amount to.”
3° In re Debs, 158 U. S. 564 (1895).
4° In re Neagle, 135 U. S., 1, 69 (1890).
4! Rossiter, “The President and Labor Disputes,” The Presidency in Transition,
February, 1949, p. 94.
+ Ibid.
*8New York Herald Tribune, May 7, 1948, p. 16.
204 + The Man in the White House
Let it be noted that the president not only has the authority
to enforce a law but also the discretion not to enforce it. When
he chooses not to enforce a law, that settles the matter. No power
under heaven could compel President Truman to apply sanctions
of the Taft-Hartley Act to strikers when he decided not to do
so, and the rage of his political foes against him for failing to
do so was just so much wasted energy. Impeachment of the presi-
dent has been out of the question since the folly of the Radical
Republicans in 1868 in turning it against President Johnson. In
any case, it is difficult to frame articles of impeachment sufficient
to convict any president of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes
and misdemeanors’’** on the basis of his failure to execute his
power as chief executive.
Even when the president is ready and eager to enforce the law,
he may be frustrated by the inadequate means of enforcement
provided by an indifferent Congress. For example, why had the
consumers’ interest in adequate enforcement of antimonopoly
legislation never been quite satisfied? The answer is contained in
the Report of the Attorney General of the United States for 1938,
in which he reveals:
It is a well known fact that the anti-trust laws have been
ineffective in preventing combinations in restraint of trade...
From 1914 to 1923, during which our system of mass pro-
duction and vast corporative enterprise may almost be said
to have come of age, the average of attorneys in the Anti
Trust Division was only 18. With such a personnel regardless
of what the formula of the law might have been, no practical
results were possible.
This condition was typical of the understaffing of other agencies.
So handicapped was the Food and Drug Administration by
its meager field force that its objective became “A maximum
44 U, S. Constitution, Art. 2, sec. 4.
The Chief Executive * 205
of enforcement with a minimum of resistance.”** Congressional
jealousy of the presidency is fortified by strong constituent
interests in the districts, which exert their influence to prevent
maintenance of effective administrative apparatus for uniform
enforcement of laws regulating business. Thus it can be said
that, with respect to some matters, the power of the chief ex-
ecutive may be but the shadow of his authority. In no case can
the hand of the chief executive be stronger than the forces in
society that give him whatever support he may possess.
45 E, P. Herring, Public Administration and the Public Interest (1936), Chap. rv.
Implementing
the Presidency
* SOMEWHAT MORE than a century ago
President James K. Polk could “faithfully execute the office of
President of the United States” at the same time that he was
managing two or three of the executive departments whose heads
had fled from the sweltering summer heat of Washington. Of
course this extraordinarily faithful Chief Executive was expending
his physical reserves so rapidly that he was to have the shortest
ex-presidency of any incumbent of the office—only three months,
to be specific. His immediate successor, Zachary Taylor, is said to
have managed with two assistants and a few clerks. That presi-
dents in mid-nineteenth century could get along in this manner
underscores the overwhelming growth of presidential responsi-
bilities in the last century.
As late as the 1880’s President Cleveland is said to have an-
swered all White House telephone calls in person, not so arduous
a burden in a city that may have had no more than a few score
specimens of that novel gadget. President McKinley was able
to maintain contact with the entire executive pyramid with the
aid of eight or ten persons, and a small secretarial staff took
care of all his personal and official correspondence. On January
1, 1958 that group of immediate presidential staff, the White
House Office, had a personnel of 398 busy people.
206
Implementing the Presidency * 207
The framers of the Constitution seem to have introduced some-
what casually into the fundamental instrument the injunction that
the president “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
There is no clear indication as to just how they expected him to
get this done. The first session of the First Congress ran headlong
into the question in the debate as to whether, the Senate, since it
shared in the appointment of executive officers, would by impli-
cation likewise share in the removal of these officers. They solved
the problem for the time being by inaction, assuming it to be self-
evident that the president would not be able to “take care that
the laws be faithfully executed” unless he had the unhampered
power to remove subordinates. This congressional inaction has
been designated the Legislative Decision of 1789, and it had in-
deed, tentatively at least, the force of a Supreme Court decision
on the question.'
There followed more than a century characterized, by and large,
by makeshifts to carry out executive functions devised by those
presidents who concerned themselves more than ordinarily with
law enforcement. Meanwhile the functions of the Federal govern-
ment administered through agencies created by Congress for their
execution grew from Washington’s administration on. Nearly half
a century ago Woodrow Wilson wrote, ““Men of ordinary physique
and discretion cannot be Presidents and live, if the strain be not
somehow relieved. We shall be obliged to be picking our chief
magistrates from among wise and prudent athletes—a small
class.” And this was written before the burgeoning of agencies
consequent upon two world wars and the Great Depression of the
1930’s. It was indeed the fantastic expansion of Federal functions
in a single generation that initiated a trend toward disintegration
of the executive function, the administration of the Federal
government, and thrust the problem of reform of the executive
upon the attention of presidents, administrators, and scholars.
Thus an observer of Franklin Roosevelt was to remark, “It is a
1 See James Hart, The American Presidency in Action, 1789 (1948), pp. 190-214.
208 * The Man inthe White House
mystery to me how each morning he selects the few things he can
do from the thousands he should do.” The time had arrived when
something would have to be done to prevent the president from
becoming so overwhelmed that he might decline into little more
than a titular chief of state.
As agencies multiplied over the years, the president was be-
coming overwhelmed with the signing of papers and making
decisions without the pertinent information on which to base his
judgments. Presently it began to be suspected that the manage-
ment of Federal finance might provide the key to a more efficient
executive. Before Harding’s administration, the Federal budget,
if it could be called that, was prepared by the Treasury Depart-
ment, which was then permitted merely to receive, index, and
transmit to Congress a compilation of whatever estimates it had
received from the numerous agencies of the government, and one
clerk was kept busy doing nothing else. This compilation was
designated simply the Treasury Book of Estimates. Franklin
McVeagh, President Taft’s Secretary of the Treasury, had pro-
posed an executive budget to Congress, and the President appoint-
ed the Commission on Economy and Efficiency to study the
problem. The commission concluded that no improvement of any
consequence in government was possible without an executive
budget. But when President Taft had the departments prepare
estimates that were submitted to Congress, that jealous body
resented the infringement on its prerogatives, and that ended that.
It was the rather sudden increase of the national debt by about
2300 per cent as a consequence of World War I that induced
Congress to make an about-face on a budget system. A nation
long accustomed to a Federal debt hovering around a billion
dollars was confronted with a debt of over twenty-four billion.
In 1921 President Harding signed the Budget and Accounting Act,
which charged the president with the preparation of a complete
budget of estimated revenues and expenditures for the consider-
ation of Congress. The agency created for this purpose was the
Bureau of the Budget, housed in the Treasury for eighteen years
Implementing the Presidency + 209
after which it became the most important element of the Executive
Office of the President.’
By a stroke of good fortune President Harding appointed
Charles A. Dawes, a Chicago banker, as the first Director of the
Budget. This extraordinary extrovert made it impossible for the
public to ignore the Bureau of the Budget. The first meeting of
personnel dealing with the budget estimates, numbering some
hundreds of persons, was treated to a dramatic demonstration by
the Director falling not far short of a vaudeville performance.
Seated on the stage behind the Director were the members of the
Harding Cabinet. It must have been breath-taking to see the
mercurial Director Dawes rush over in front of the dignified
Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, and shaking his
menacing index finger in the face of the head of the Cabinet,
declare, ‘‘Mr. Secretary of State, you must economize,” and so on
down the line of notables, Herbert Hoover and the rest of them.
Tearing into the wing of the stage the Director emerged with a
bundle of brooms and announced the bargain price when pur-
chased in quantity. Then disappearing again he came back with a
single broom announcing the extravagant price paid for it by a
thriftless agency. Such spectacular histrionics could not be ignored
by the elated newsmen present and in less than twenty-four hours
practically every literate American knew that there was a function-
ing Bureau of the Budget. The emergence of the bureau turned
out to be the first notable step in the evolution of what was in due
time to become the Executive Office of the President.
It is a historic truism that in every major crisis the people of
the United States have a tendency to turn to the president almost
as children to a father. In a crisis of the war to preserve the
Union there was the marching song “We are coming, Father
Abraham, three hundred thousand more.” Fortunately an able
leader has usually but not always appeared when needed. Appar-
ently it began finally to dawn on the public consciousness that
2 See Harold D. Smith, The Management of Your Government (1945), Chap. v.
210 + The Man in the White House
Federal administration had become too vast and complicated to
depend solely on the fortuitous concurrence of exceptional presi-
dential leadership with each major crisis. Institutionalizing the
presidency had been long overdue when in the nick of time just
before the dawn of the Atomic Age the Executive Office of the
President was established.
The President’s Cabinet never manifested any tendency toward
institutionalizing the presidency, and in the last generation it
suffered a marked decline. The custom of many presidents of
calling on the members in turn at the Cabinet meetings elicited
a miscellany of unrelated episodes of the members of a group each
engrossed with the matters of his own department and unprepared
to give the matters collective consideration. The resulting nature
of the meetings created an atmosphere of boredom. The Cabinet
persisted by sheer usage. Curiously enough it afforded opportu-
nities for informal transaction of interdepartmental business while
members were gathering or leaving. Cynicism developed, and
members were likely to resent Cabinet meetings as a waste of
time.‘ Less than three weeks before the Armistice of November
11, 1918, Wilson’s Secretary of the Interior, Franklin K. Lane,
recorded in his “Notes on Cabinet Meetings,” that “For some
weeks we have spent our time at Cabinet Meetings largely in tell-
ing stories.”’* By 1938 George Graham declared that the Cabinet’s
“contribution to government at present seems to be nil and that
it is a bleeding and anemic patient.’’
The decline of the Cabinet was accelerated by a tendency of
presidents, in constructing their Cabinets, to ignore the funda-
mental distinction between the administrator and the technician
3 It is a curious fact that a proposal for reform of the presidency was made when
Washington had been President only four and a half months. Clinton Rossiter,
“The American Presidency,” Yale Review, xxxvu (1948), 631.
* ArthurW. MacMahon and John D. Millett, Federal Administrators (1939), p. 5.
5 The Letters of F. K. Lane (1922), p. 293.
ê “Reorganization—A Question of Executive Institutions,” American Political
Science Review, xxxii (1938), 712.
Implementing the Presidency * 211
and to appoint specialists of a kind as department heads illus-
trated strikingly by the Eisenhower Cabinet. Such a cabinet con-
trasts strikingly with those of the great days of strong Cabinets
such as that of President Hayes, of which the late John W. Bur-
gess in 1916 wrote, “Taken altogether, it was the strongest body
of men, each best fitted for the place assigned to him, that ever
sat around the council-table of the President of the United
States.” Theodore Roosevelt’s Cabinet was such that James
Bryce declared that he had “never in any country seen a more
eager and efficient set of public servants.’’* In those earlier Cab-
inets the heads of the executive departments were usually ex-
perienced politicians who had learned the art of mediating be-
tween Congress, the public, and the specialists in their depart-
ments. When a president appoints a Cabinet whose members
know only what they think ought to be done instead of how to
get it done in the inevitable political milieu, no wonder the presi-
dent looks elsewhere for advisers who can tell him how to go
about getting his policies enacted into law and administered ef-
ficiently.
Faint foreshadowing of the institutionalizing of the executive
have appeared from time to time in such informal manifestations
as the Kitchen Cabinet, Tennis Cabinet, Inner Circle, Men be-
hind the Throne, or even Presidential Cronies. Franklin Roosevelt
had gathered about him such an advisory group even before his
first inauguration. Rexford Tugwell, A. A. Berle, Jr., Samuel
Rosenman, Hugh Johnson, and others came in time to be called
the Brain Trust, which drove to fits of rage devotees of the
status quo.” Soon it was being denounced as a palace guard,
and the mystery surrounding its extralegal character, the youth-
fulness of its members and their academic connections induced
a deafening uproar of anti-intellectualism. Yet this informal group
7 The Administration of President Hayes (1916), p. 65.
8 Quoted by W. D. Lewis, The Life of Theodore Roosevelt (1919), p. 258.
® See Raymond Moley, After Seven Years (1939), p. 55.
212 * The Man in the White House
foreshadowed, vaguely, at least, the future Executive Office of
the President and may well have been its matrix.
The Office of the Executive, as is usually the case with new
institutions, was the child of crisis and circumstance rather than
of deliberate design. The setting of its origin was the Great
Depression of the 1930’s. The inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt
in 1933 brought to the presidency an inveterate pragmatist in
politics at the very moment that the depression had become most
critical. Under his energetic leadership, as he boldly, if somewhat
erratically, attacked the pressing problems produced by the de-
pression, new governmental agencies proliferated—the National
Recovery Administration, the National Youth Administration,
the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Agricultural Adjustment
Administration, the Resettlement Administration—to name a few
of them. To co-ordinate this maze of multiplying agencies, the
President, in his first year, set up an Executive Council, whose
functions were soon taken over by a newly created National
Emergency Council, which performed temporarily a useful func-
tion in broad executive planning and co-ordinating of the func-
tions of the ever-increasing alphabetical agencies. However when
this council failed to live up to expectations, the President created
in 1934 the Committee on Administrative Management consisting
of Louis Brownlow as Chairman, Charles Edward Merriam, and
Luther Gulick to study the whole problem of over-all manage-
ment and to make recommendations.
The report of this Brownlow Committee, as it came to be called,
and the legislation consequent upon it constitute one of the land-
marks in the evolution of the presidency. The committee, with
its highly competent staff, made a study that was searching and
thorough. Recognizing the overwhelming burden of the chief
executive, the committee epitomized its problem in a four-word
statement, “The President needs help.” Its outstanding recom-
mendation for the president was a White House staff “to assist
him in obtaining quickly and without delay all pertinent
Implementing the Presidency * 213
information possessed by any executive department so as to guide
him in making his responsible decisions” and then “‘to assist him
in seeing to it that every administrative department and agency
is promptly informed of his decision along with his directive.”
This staff was to be no place for an extrovert, but its personnel
was to remain in the background. “They should be possessed of
high competence, great physical vigor and a passion for anonym-
ity. ° The committee envisaged the flow upward through the staff
of pertinent information from subordinates on which the presi-
dent could base his decisions and the flow downward of the results
of these decisions through the White House staff as directives to
the appropriate executive agency. Thus might the president at long
last be equipped with the apparatus to fulfill his constitutional
duty “‘to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
The White House Office was the paramount contribution of the
Brownlow Committee to the institutionalizing and implementing
of the presidency, but the committee’s recommendations covered
almost the whole range of the larger emerging Executive Office
of the President. “What I am placing before you,” declared
President Roosevelt in presenting the committee’s recommen-
dations to Congress, “is not the request for more power, but for
the tools of management and the authority to distribute the work
so that the President can effectively discharge those powers which
the Constitution now places upon him. Unless we are prepared to
abandon this part of the Constitution, we must equip the Presi-
dency with authority commensurate with his responsibilities under
the Constitution.”
Unfortunately the recommendations of the Brownlow Com-
mittee were thrown into the lap of Congress just when its blood
was up over the President’s drastic proposal for reform of the
Supreme Court—the Court-Packing Bill, as his enemies called it.
10 See report of the President's Committee on Administrative Management,
United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1937, p. 5.
n Ibid., p. V.
214 * The Man inthe White House
The bill to carry out the recommendations of the Brownlow
Committee was promptly dubbed the Dictator Bill, a spurious
term persistently publicized by antiadministration newspapers
throughout the nation, and the issue was thereby sadly confused
by irrelevant controversy. There was consequently some watering
down of the matured judgments of the committee. However it was
under the authority vested in the president by the resulting Re-
organization Act of 1937 that President Franklin Roosevelt issued
the famous Executive Order Number 8248 allocating the agencies
constituting the Executive Office of the President. Concerning
the new arrangement Leonard D. White declared, “There can
be no doubt that they came just in time to avert a dangerous
break down at the top of the Federal System.” In a few years
it came to be recognized that the Executive Office was a decisive
factor in the effective management of our part in World War II.
It should be noted that the Executive Office of the President is
but one of the many agencies of the vast executive branch of the
national government.
President Roosevelt’s Executive Order Number 8248 and later
ones all prescribing the organization of the Executive Office of
the President have determined its present setup. Most immedi-
ately important for the president’s day-to-day performance of
his duties is his staff, the White House Office, which must not be
confused with the larger Executive Office of the President of
which the staff is only a component part. The personnel of the
White House Office in 1957 included among others an Assistant
to the President and several assistant assistants, several adminis-
trative assistants, numerous special assistants, an economic ad-
visor, a military aide, a naval aide and a physician to the Presi-
dent, a personal secretary to the President and one to his wife,
and a chief usher—with a total personnel of 398. This staff
provides the medium through which flows inward from the vast
executive network information and outward to their appropriate
12 An Introduction to the Study of Public Administration (1948), p. 62.
Implementing the Presidency * 215
destinations directives from the President. The staff is somewhat
analogous to the human brain, which receives stimuli conveyed
along the channels of the nervous system on the basis of which
it sends outward the motor impulses that determine human action.
The Executive Office of the President includes the Bureau of
the Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers, the National
Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Office
of Defense Mobilization. The gradual development that, after a
long generation, culminated in the Executive Office of the Presi-
dent had begun as an economy project to which, in time, was
added the goal of efficiency in administration. When the office
was at last formally established, the objective had become “‘to save
the Presidency from paralysis and inattention .. . to rescue not
merely administration but the Presidency itself from the babel and
bedlam of the modern state.” It is to be noted that within a
single year there had been reorganizations of Congress, the Na-
tional Judiciary, and the National Executive.
Even as late as 1948, when the Executive Office of the President
was several years old, Professor Rossiter could still quite correctly
report “that the American Presidency is almost out of hand and
that its limits as a one-man job have been reached if not over-
passed.” Fortunately President Eisenhower’s habits as a general
contributed to systematizing and toning up the White House
Office. Its staff became more than ever the clearinghouse for
policy matters. Sherman Adams, Assistant in Chief to the Presi-
dent, would be in and out of the President’s private office half a
dozen times a day. An assembly of upper staff officers in Adams’
office every morning at 8:30 reduced the President’s work for the
day to essentials, sharpening up issues for discussion with the
President. Nearly everything went to him with a one-page synopsis
on top besides which he was given oral briefings.
13 Clinton Rossiter, “The Constitutional Significance of the Executive Office
of the President,” American Political Science Review, xu, No. 6 (Dec. 1949), 1212.
1 “The American Presidency,” Yale Review, xxxvii (1948), 619.
216 * The Man in the White House
President Eisenhower required precise recommendations from
department and agency heads. His closest staff officers after Sher-
man Adams were Press Secretary Hagerty and Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, Chief of the Central
Intelligence Agency. These could even waken the President at
night on a matter of national crisis, which was almost done when
the news of Stalin’s death came in.» President Eisenhower shaped
the staff to handle his backbreaking job. It gave him time to
talk with congressmen and make contacts with civic groups, even
to receive a Thanksgiving turkey presented by the National
Turkey Growers Association and have the presentation recorded
for nationwide telecasting as indeed it ought to be. “For the first
time in history the White House is becoming a self operating
institution—more of an institution than a man.’’* Let the person
who would object to this institutionalizing of the presidency figure
out how else to make the job tolerable to mortal man.
Under President Eisenhower the White House Office underwent
a marked reorganization. Roosevelt and Truman had treated the
White House Office as a group of informal senior assistants,
each with direct access to and operating through the person of the
president. But with the advent of General Eisenhower the in-
formal group took on the character of an organized agency with
the Assistant to the President cast in the role of Chief of Staff.”
Sherman Adams consequently presided over an organization with
documents moving from one level to another within the White
House Office. Adams had “a greater impact on the Presidency
during the Eisenhower disability than that of any elective of-
ficial.» It was due to the smoothly functioning staff that
15 Charles J. Murphy, “Eisenhower’s White House,” Fortune, July, 1953, p. 77.
16“The Way Ike Runs His Job,” United States News and World Report,
December 31, 1954, pp. 31-33. See also in the same periodical, “A Day in the
Life of the President,” March 14, 1958, pp. 35-42.
17 See J. R. Steelman and H. K. Kreager, “The Executive Office as Adminis-
trative Coordinator,” Law and Contemporary Problems, Autumn, 1956 (Duke
University Law School).
18 E, S. Corwin and L. W. Koenig, The Presidency Today (1956), p. 116.
Implementing the Presidency * 217
President Eisenhower’s illnesses caused no such breaks in the con-
tinuity of executive functions as occurred in earlier cases of presi-
dential indisposition.
Whenever Sherman Adams spoke, it was assumed that it repre-
sented President Eisenhower’s views on a matter. Adams had
attempted to grasp Eisenhower’s views before backing him as the
convention nominee in 1952. As the President’s assistant he
acquainted himself with his chief’s views on many problems. He
attended Cabinet meetings, National Security Council meetings,
and all important staff conferences and came to learn how
Eisenhower’s mind worked in detail. Adams was a practical poli-
tician and had to break down the prejudices against politicians
held by the businessmen with whom Eisenhower packed his
Cabinet and he was said to have succeeded in this. When depart-
ment heads differed with Adams, he talked it over until
unanimous consent was obtained if possible, and differences had
to yield before the President was told that a decision had been
reached. A recalcitrant Cabinet member might be asked to take
his objections to the President. The staff worked quite as planned
even if it apparently gave the President rather too much oppor-
tunity to neglect the initiative in administration policies.
The peculiar structure and functioning of the Eisenhower staff
were eminently satisfactory to him. The evidence is overwhelming
that President Eisenhower was bored by the operational side of
government, and he made no effort to conceal it. In this he con-
trasted with Truman, to whom every phase of government was
interesting. Eisenhower may have been just about the least inter-
ested in newspapers of any president since Lincoln, who was an
avid and purposeful reader of them. Eisenhower frequently aston-
ished a news conference with the statement “J never heard of that”
concerning a matter of common knowledge to the public. Con-
tributing to this strange phenomenon was his rule that he wanted
19 See the “Presidency: Can One Man Do The Job,” U. S. News and World
Report, November 22, i957, pp. 50-72.
218 * The Man in the White House
a part in the administrative process only when the unanimity
mentioned above had been attained. This limited his function to
ratification or veto of the relatively few matters on which
unanimity could be arrived at. Quite understandably a study of
the Eisenhower methods by the London Economist led to the con-
clusion: “Amid the mechanical apparatus, the presidency is in-
sulated from information and pressures which stimulate imagi-
nation, feed inspiration, foster insight, and develop sensitivity.”
Any budget for the ensuing year, whether that of a family, a
municipality, or a nation, inevitably includes what the budget-
maker believes should be the work program of the next year.
More and more the president’s budget is looked forward to by
the public as a revelation of the administration’s legislative pro-
gram, and incidentally it constitutes his bid for electoral favor no
matter how vehemently the arguments for its adoption may be
couched in conventional terms of the national welfare. So that
branch of the bureau designated the Office of Budget Review re-
ceives the estimates and supervises and prepares the budget itself
in accordance with the presidential program. This office then is the
technical agency for preparation of the president’s detailed appeal
to the Congress and the nation.
Because the budget inevitably involves the president’s legislative
program, it is logical that an Office of Legislative Reference
should be located in the Bureau of the Budget. It is one more
indication of the unplanned nature of emerging political insti-
tutions that the earliest forecast of the idea of this Office of
Legislative Reference appears in a letter of Chairman Martin B.
Madden, of the just-then-created House Appropriations Com-
mittee, to Budget Director Dawes in 1921, a month before
Harding presented the very first presidential budget to Congress.
Madden suggested central clearance of proposed legislation
through the Budget Bureau.» Here was an observation that
20See Richard H. Rovere, The Eisenhower Years (1956), pp. 353-57.
21 See Richard E. Neustadt, “Presidency and Legislation, The Growth of Central
Clearance,” American Political Science Review, xvui, No. 3 (Sept., 1954), 643.
Implementing the Presidency * 219
apparently prompted the earliest presidential effort to assert
central, that is presidential, control over the views of any Federal
agency on pending legislation. However, the clearance required
by Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover was only of charges on the
Treasury. It was President Franklin Roosevelt’s contribution to
the development of central clearance to extend it to all agency
proposals for legislation. So rapid was the spread of the area of
executive clearance that, as early as 1939, the Legislative Refer-
ence Office of the Budget Bureau processed 2448 pending public
bills.
As organized today the Legislative Reference Office co-ordi-
nates and clears for conforming with the program of the president
all recommendations of Federal agencies on proposed legislation,
enrolled bills, and executive orders. Even when a congressional
committee requests from any administrative agency information
and advice on proposed legislation, the response of the agency
must be routed through the Legislative Reference Office back to
the Congressional committee. The day is long past when a presi-
dent hesitates to assume positive leadership in legislation. Indeed
the machinery is so set up that the executive can scarcely avoid
exercising this function. Even more notable is the fact that Con-
gress has adjusted itself to this species of executive leadership. The
President is now formally and literally the spokesman of the ad-
ministration. Congress tends to be confused by the diverse advice
by the experts of the administrative agencies. Functioning through
the Legislative Reference Office the president can resolve this
confusion at the same time that he can temper the sharp pressures
of the lobbies and, if politically expert enough, he can serve as
the organ for the expression of national consensuses.
There is another function of the Budget Bureau that marks the
far cry from the middle period of our history when the president
took the question of a presidential veto to his Cabinet and after
due deliberation asked some member to prepare the veto message.
2 Ibid., p. 653.
220 * The Man in the White House
Since 1938 the Budget Bureau has been the advisory agency of the
President as to the signing or vetoing of bills passed by Congress.
The value of this newly institutionalized veto function can be ap-
preciated when the constitutional ten days permitted the president
for considering this matter is recalled. A Budget Bureau circular of
1939 gave absolute priority to presidential requests for informa-
tion on enacted bills, and any Budget Bureau recommendation
against the president’s signing a bill was to be accompanied by a
draft of a tentative veto message or a memorandum of disapproval
in case of a possible pocket veto. For example, the Bureau of the
Budget obtained facsimile copies of the Taft-Hartley Bill before it
reached the engrossed stage and transmitted them to administra-
tive agencies and commissions concerned with the matter of the
bill. Two of the agencies claimed no concern and made no recom-
mendation; two pointed out defects but made no recommenda-
tions; one recommended that the President sign it; two refrained
from recommendations because their representatives were partici-
pating in White House conferences on the bill; the Departments of
Labor and of the Interior and the National Labor Relations Board
advised veto, which advice the Bureau of the Budget forwarded to
the President with its approval and recommendation.
President Truman consulted his cabinet members, and those
most concerned with labor legislation advised veto. The White
House staff with others were completing analyses, and when Presi-
dent Truman returned from an official trip to Canada, a leather
brief case on his desk contained a complete analysis of the act.
Veto was favored by a majority of the Cabinet, administration
leaders in Congress, and the most influential members of the
Democratic National Committee and leaders of organized labor.
For forty-eight hours the President was closeted with his Counsel,
Clark Clifford, Presidential Assistant Charles Murphy, and his
Press Secretary, Charles Ross, writing the veto message that, 5500
words in length, was sent to the House on June 20. The Taft-Hart-
ley Act was promptly passed over the President’s veto by the
two houses, but the reaction against it undoubtedly contributed
Implementing the Presidency + 221
somewhat to Truman’s unanticipated election for a second term
a year later.» At any rate, of the members of the House defeated
for reelection that year all but four had voted to override that
veto. ,
The Republican Eightieth Congress, asking the Budget Bureau
for information on pending bills, was thereby sounding out the
Truman administration’s views on pending legislation. Regardless
of party the practice increasingly took hold, providing a growing
opportunity for the presidential views to be conveyed to Congress
on important bills nearing the committee report stage. Thereby
the president finds it possible consistently to make his signature or
veto an instrument for shaping administration policies. Before
inauguration day, 1953, most of President Eisenhower’s Cabinet
members designate were being briefed by the Budget Bureau on
their work, with the clearance function of the Legislative Refer-
ence Office receiving due emphasis. Thanks to this apprenticeship
the transition on this matter from the Truman to the Eisenhower
administration was made smoothly. The procedure of reference.
had become stabilized. “Here is the oldest, toughest organism in
the presidential orbit,” declared Neustadt. “The making of the
budget is still the prime general-purpose-decision-and-action
forcing process yet institutionalized in the executive.”
World War II provided the seedbed of one of the important
agencies of the Office of the Executive, the Council of Economic
Advisers. As never before that war had required wholesale con-
version of our industrial system to the production of the vast
apparatus of modern warfare. When victory finally seemed near
at hand, public opinion became engrossed with the problem of
industrial reconversion to peacetime production. It was almost
universally assumed that the interval of reconversion would entail
a gigantic total of unemployment of unpredictable millions.
23 Stephen K. Bailey and Howard D. Samuel, Congress at Work (1952), pp.
437-39.
24 Richard E. Neustadt, “Presidency and Legislation, The Growth of Central
Clearance,” Amer. Pol. Sci. Rev., xLvii, No. 3 (Sept., 1954), 669.
222 +» The Man in the White House
Gradually there developed a demand for legislation designed to
control employment, which culminated in the Employment Act of
1946. The purpose of the act was, through the Federal budget and
other means to be recommended by the President, to aim at a
balancing of the total public and private national investment with
the total public and private national spending to the end that
near full employment might be maintained. This would involve
a countercyclical stepping-up at one stage and at another stage
a deliberate cutting-down of government projects and spending.
Since the initiative in this plan was vested in the President, he
required expert economic advice on which to base his recommen-
dations to Congress. For this purpose the Employment Act of
1946 created the Council of Economic Advisers to consist of three
economists and made it a component agency of the Executive
Office of the President. It is indicative of the potentialities of this
council that President Eisenhower, apparently on the advice of
business interests, at first considered abolishing the Council of
Economic Advisers but soon recognized its importance and came
to rely heavily upon its advice.
The genealogy of the Council of Economic Advisers appears
to have been first the Office of War Mobilization, which was
created in 1943 in order to co-ordinate all agencies that played
a part in total mobilization in World War II and was to be chris-
tened a year later as the Office of War Mobilization and Recon-
version. Functionally this was a forerunner of the Council of
Economic Advisers of the Employment Act of 1946.% Thus a
development that had started as an informal group, if not a clique,
of advisers of the President had evolved through makeshift ad hoc
agencies created by executive orders and had culminated in a
permanent agency created by Congress, invested with statutory
functions and located in the Executive Office of the President.
That the president needed competent economic advisers had been
evident ever since President Roosevelt’s erroneous prediction
25 E, G. Nourse, Economics in the Public Service (1953), p. 65.
Implementing the Presidency + 223
of continuous prosperity in 1936 on the very eve of the recession
of the late 1930’s. Informal groups had been providing most of
the President’s economic advice, and Congress in 1946 wanted to
make sure that no longer would the source of such important in-
formation for the president come from secret sources and smack
of palace intrigue. Hence Congress created the council and in-
vested it with statutory authority. While designed to limit the
president’s freedom in seeking information, its very creation was
an unconscious congressional confirmation and further institu-
tionalizing of presidential leadership in legislation to maintain
economic stability—then a novel conception of Federal responsi-
bility.
In 1947 Congress created the National Security Council, now
consisting of an ex-officio personnel: The president, vice-president,
secretary of state, secretary of defense, director for mutual secur-
ity, and director of the Office of Defense Mobilization. This
council’s function is to assess and appraise the objectives, commit-
ments, and risks of the United States in respect to actual and
potential military power in the interest of national security. This
council is and will be what circumstances and the personal quali-
ties of the incumbent of the presidential office make it. Global
tensions gave it exceptional importance in the Eisenhower ad-
ministration. The president’s Cabinet, which had been declining
in significance for more than a generation, continued this trend
for a while under President Eisenhower, who sensed the extraordi-
nary potentialities of the Security Council and presided over its
frequent regular and special meetings. How important Eisenhower
considered this agency was indicated by the statement of one of
his associates: “It is apparent that he has done his homework
when you see him preside over National Security Council Meet-
ings.”
Institutionalize the presidency however much, the fact still
26 “The Presidency: Too Big For One Man?” U. S. News and World Report,
November 22, 1957, pp. 57.
224 » The Man in the White House
stands that the president himself is indispensable. There are things
extraordinarily significant the staff can never do. Professor
Richard Neustadt has pointed out that, three days after President
Eisenhower’s heart attack, Cairo announced its deal for arms
with the Czechs, which upset the entire power balance in the
Middle East. American diplomacy was not caught by surprise,
but under the circumstances of an incapacitated President nothing
but futile protests and indecisive conferences took place. The
circumstances called for decisive action by the one person with
constitutional authority to give the orders. Some have speculated
that a Truman might have ordered the Sixth Fleet to the Aegean
to prevent shipment of Czech arms by sea or air. No one can say
what Eisenhower might have done. This is but a sample of a set
of circumstances that reveals the stark limitations of the staff and
the absolute indispensability of the president to make decisions
no one else on earth has the authority to make and execute.”
27 See “The Presidency at Mid-Century,” Law and Contemporary Problems,
Autumn, 1956 (Duke University Law School), pp. 615-16.
I am indebted for some of the material in this chapter to Professor Lester G.
Seligman’s paper, “Informal Organization, Presidential Leadership, and Insti-
tutionalization: A Case Study,” read at a panel discussion at the annual American
Political Science Association meeting in Chicago, 1954.
The Commander-
in-Chief
* IN MAKING the President commander-in-chief
of the armed forces of the nation, the framers of the Constitution
were following precisely the model to which they had turned with
one accord for the presidential office, that of the state governor,
whom twelve of the thirteen state constitutions had made com-
mander-in-chief of the state’s military forces. Incidentally, in one
sense at least, the Revolutionary state governors were by no means
mere ciphers, as they assumed paramount leadership whenever
British invasion of their states required mobilization of the state’s
militia. The placing of the supreme authority over the military in
the hands of the chief civilian officer of the nation was in accord
with the current development of English constitutional history
and, as it turned out, of English-speaking peoples everywhere.
More than a century before Premier George Clemenceau declared
that “war is too important a business to be entrusted to the
soldiers.” That very idea had been planted securely in the consti-
tutions of the American Revolutionary states and then carried
over into the Constitution of the United States.
The Constitution of the United States prescribes succinctly:
“The President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and
Navy of the United States and of the militia of the several states
225
226 +» The Man in the White House
when called into the active service of the United States.” A mis-
conception as to the nature of the commander-in-chiefship has
somehow crept into the prevailing pattern of our thinking. It is
not at all an extra office in addition to that of chief executive.
The function of commander-in-chiefship is simply one of the
means to the fundamental purpose of the presidency, that is,
seeing to the execution of the law. “Presidents have been wont
to assert the title (Commander-in-Chief) to eke out a paucity
of statutory power,” observed Charles Fairman. He continued,
“But the President does not, in the English phrase, ‘wear two
hats.’ Being Commander-in-Chief is merely one of the incidents
inseparable from his office.”
Did investing the president with the commander-in-chiefship
mean that he might assume command of the army in the field?
“Did the framers expect or intend the President to do this?”
asked the late Charles A. Beard and then proceeded to answer
his question. “I am of the opinion that many of them did. Of this
I am fairly sure.” Beard then proceeded to cite the statement of
Luther Martin, who was a delegate in the Constitutional Conven-
tion at Philadelphia. Concerning the debates there Martin said,
“It was wished to be so far restrained that he should not command
in person but this could not be obtained. Hamilton and Patterson
likewise proposed the same restraint but it was not adopted.’
Since it was universally taken for granted that General Washing-
ton, who was presiding over the Convention’s deliberations,
would be the first President of the United States, it might have
seemed not quite courteous to have inserted such a restriction in
the Constitution.
President Washington was present at the mobilization of the
15,000 militiamen he sent against the whisky rebels of western
Pennsylvania in 1794, but he did not lead them in the field.
1 Art. 2, sec. 2, clause 1.
?“The President as Commander-in-Chief” in Robert S. Rankin (ed.), The
Presidency in Transition, Journal of Politics, x1, 1949, p. 145.
3C. A. Beard, The Republic (1944), p. 101.
The Commander-in-Chief + 227
Joseph Story in his Commentaries on the Constitution, published
almost half a century later, thought “it would be dangerous to
let him command in person without any restraint as he might
make bad use of it.’ President Jackson’s intimate adviser, Martin
Van Buren, reveals that Jackson yearned to lead in person the
35,000 troops he was prepared to summon to march against the
South Carolina nullificationists in 1833 before the impasse was
composed by Clay’s Compromise Tariff.»
During actual or even expected war the president may delegate
command of the nation’s armed forces to one person. Thus, in
1798, when preparations were being made for an expected war
with France, President Adams appointed Washington lieutenant
general and Commander-in-Chief of the army being raised. Lin-
coln’s Attorney General, Bates, contended that “no general-in-
chief should be selected but that Lincoln should exercise his
constitutional prerogative as Commander-in-Chief and assume
personal direction of operations in the field.” Lincoln appointed
one commander after another over the Army of the Potomac until
he discovered Grant’s superior ability and appointed him general-
in-chief of the Union armies. Lincoln’s fatherly letter to General
Hooker when, with due diffidence, he appointed him to the com-
mand of the Army of the Potomac in 1863 reveals the command-
er-in-chiefship at high tide. The letter leaves no doubt that Lincoln
was no mere titular Commander-in-Chief. (See the copy of this
letter at end of this chapter.)
No matter what authority Adams and Lincoln delegated to the
sole commander of the nation’s armed forces, these presidents
were still commanders-in-chief. Lincoln in 1862 issued an order
for a general advance against Richmond by the forces under
General McClellan. President Wilson in 1918 decided against
merging American armed forces in France with those of the Allies
4 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (3 vols., Boston, 1883),
Sec. 1492.
5 Martin Van Buren, Autobiography (John F. Fitzpatrick, ed., 1920), p. 544.
228 + The Man inthe White House
on the Western Front and maintained instead an independent
American command. President Truman in 1945 made the mo-
mentous decision to order dropping the atomic bombs on Hiro-
shima and Nagasaki. Not just by constitutional delegation alone
but also by the fundamental principles of international law does
the president possess all the military power inhering in any su-
preme commander of a nation. “He may invade the hostile coun-
try and subject it to the sovereignty and authority of the United
States.” If foreign territory is occupied, its government falls
under the president’s rule until Congress decides otherwise, but
annexation of such territory is absolutely beyond his authority.
Control of the secret service inheres in the president’s commander-
in-chiefship. He has authority to suspend hostilities by means
of an armistice, the terms of which he may stipulate. As com-
mander-in-chief his is the ultimate tribunal for enforcing the
rules and regulations Congress prescribes for the government
of the armed forces, which however he may amend at will in time
of war.
What then are the limits of the power of the commander-in-
chief? The late Charles A. Beard, who, as the dean of American
historians and political scientists and especially as an authority
on constitutional law and history, had given about as much
thought to the question as anyone, concluded that “the war
powers of the President are in fact so great and so indefinite that
their nature will not be fully known until our Republic has passed
through all its trials and ceased to be. The President’s war powers
are the unexplored ‘Dark Continent’ of American Government.’
The first experience with the commander-in-chiefship in a for-
eign war was in the War of 1812, and it was an unhappy one.
President Madison was not cast for such a role. Washington
Irving, writing at the time, considered him “a withered little
Applejohn.” The country was divided on the issue of war and
§ Fleming v. Page, 9 Howard 603, 615 (1815).
? The Republic (1944) p. 103.
The Commander-in-Chief * 229
utterly unprepared for it. It required six months to clear incom-
petent heads out of the War and Navy Departments and a year
more before successful generals such as Andrew Jackson and
W. H. Harrison were in high command. The standing army was
practically nonexistent so that the President, in June, 1812, sent
acall to the governors of the seaboard states for quotas of militia
to guard the seacoast. The call was made pursuant to congression-
al legislation. The Constitution authorizes the Congress ‘‘to pro-
vide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union,
suppress insurrections, and repel invasions.”’* Unfortunately the
Constitution does not designate the authority that is to decide
when an emergency justifies summoning the militia into Federal
service, and the governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut in
1812 refused to respond to the call arguing that they instead of
the President had the authority to decide when the necessity
existed for calling the militia into the Federal service.
Indicative of the prevailing confusion as to where the seat of
military authority resided in 1812-1815 was the fact that, when
the Governor of Vermont in 1813 attempted to recall the Vermont
troops in the midst of the war, the troops refused to obey and
sent back to the Governor the defiant reply, “We will not obey,
but will continue in the service of our country until discharged.”
The constitutional issue, along with others, was ultimately re-
solved authoritatively by a decision of the Supreme Court of the
United States in 1827. Justice Joseph Story, delivering the opinion
of the Court, declared that the president is the sole judge of the
existence of the emergency and his judgment is conclusive; the
militia when called are subject to the commander-in-chief or any
superior officer he appoints. That settled the matter.
The Mexican War taught us that the commander-in-chief can
present a fait accompli that leaves Congress no choice but to
declare war. On January 13, 1846, President Polk ordered
8 Art. I, sec. 8, clause 15.
° A.C. McLaughlin, Constitutional History of the United States (1935), p. 350.
10 Martin v. Mott, 12 Wheaton 19 ef seq. (1827).
230 + The Man in the White House
American troops to cross the Nueces River into disputed territory
claimed by both the United States and Mexico. In May President
Polk presented for the consideration of the cabinet his decision
to ask Congress for a declaration of war. Fortunately for the Pres-
ident before the day ended came news of the outbreak of hostili-
ties between American and Mexican troops. Polk promptly in-
formed Congress that “now, after reiterated menaces Mexico has
invaded our territory and shed American blood on American
soil.” When the act of Congress of May 13th, 1846, which
recognized ‘‘a state of war as existing by act of the Republic of
Mexico,” was passed, the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la
Palma had been fought and won by General Taylor’s army. Presi-
dent Polk had demonstrated the powers of the commander-in-
chief to initiate war. But only Congress can legalize a state of war.
It was the Civil War that provided the first great opportunity
to experiment with the ability and scope of the commander-in-
chiefship. With the bombardment of Ft. Sumter overt armed
resistance to Federal authority began. Lincoln promptly issued
a call for 75,000 militia, under the Act of 1795, by which Con-
gress had authorized such a call in Washington’s administration.
Lincoln’s proclamation declared that the laws of the United States
had been opposed and that the execution thereof had been ob-
structed by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the
ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested
in the marshals by law. These state militia, thus called into the
service of the United States, became subject to the Commander-
in-Chief in accordance with the Constitution’s provision to that
effect.
Mobilizing the militia was strictly constitutional. But the emer-
gency was great and required prompt action. Congress was not
then in session and indeed, in those days, could not have been
promptly convened. So it was called to convene July 4, nearly
u James D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents (1927), 1V,
442.
The Commander-in-Chief * 231
three months after the fall of Ft. Sumter. Meanwhile Lincoln,
assuming that the emergency justified extraordinary measures on
the part of the Commander-in-Chief, executed one move after
another, the authority for which the Constitution has explicitly
vested in Congress. Thus Lincoln ordered the regular army in-
creased by 22,714 officers and men and the navy by 18,000, and
he called for 42,034 volunteers for three years. This could be
justified by no interpretation of the powers of the commander-
in-chief under the Constitution, which unequivocally vests in Con-
gress the power to “raise and support armies.” When Congress
convened, Lincoln invited it to grant him retroactive authority
for what he had done without authority. “These measures,” he
informed Congress, “whether strictly legal or not, were ventured
upon under what appeared to be a popular demand and a public
necessity, trusting then as now, that Congress would ratify them.
It is believed that nothing has been done beyond the constitutional
competence of Congress.”
Confronted by what Lincoln had done and by public opinion
supporting it, Congress had no choice but to grant Lincoln’s
request, and the courts did not challenge that ratification. The
consequence of such congressional action then and since has been
almost incalculable. It has led Professor Clinton Rossiter to con-
clude that “since we are entitled to assume from past perform-
ances that the court regards the war powers of Congress as limited
only by the necessities of the case, which are for Congress to
ascertain, there is apparently nothing the President cannot do
constitutionally if war should strike the country.”
Lincoln’s disregard of constitutional prescriptions continued
throughout the Civil War. Despite the Constitution’s specific
delegation to Congress of the power “to make rules for the
government and regulation of the land and naval forces,”
12 Ibid., vi, p. 24.
13 The Supreme Court and the Commander-in-Chief (1951), pp. 101-02.
14 Art. l, sec. 8, clause 14.
232 * The Man inthe White House
Lincoln promulgated the elaborate code of rules applicable to
armies in the field prepared at his direction by Francis Lieber.
Nor can such power be presumed to inhere in the commander-
in-chief when the Constitution specifically vests it in Congress.
Because Lincoln distrusted certain subordinates, he directed the
Secretary of the Treasury to advance without security $2,000,000
of public money to three private citizens for the purpose of paying
for certain military and naval measures, and this, despite the
Constitution’s provision, “No money shall be drawn from the
treasury but in consequence of appropriation made by law.”
All these ultraconstitutional acts Lincoln serenely reported to
Congress."
Suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus may,
under certain circumstances, be incidental to the commander-
in-chiefship. At the very beginning of the Civil War Federal troops
moving through Maryland to Washington were interfered with,
and fatal casualties occurred. Lincoln consequently authorized
the commanding general of the army to suspend the writ of habeas
corpus “‘at any point or in the vicinity of any military line which
is now or should be used between Philadelphia and the city of
Washington.” Chief Justice Taney nevertheless attempted in vain
to have the writ of habeas corpus served in behalf of one Merry-
man. Upon failure Taney issued in chambers his protest that Lin-
coln’s order was unconstitutional, since the provision authorizing
the suspension of the writ is located in the legislative article of the
Constitution,” and that it could not have been intended that the
president possessed the power of suspension.» Contrary to
Taney’s view Lincoln argued that the framers could not have
intended. to leave the power of suspending the habeas corpus
15 Art. 1, sec. 9, clause 7.
16 James D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents (1927), vi, 79.
17 Ibid., 18.
18 Art. 1, sec. 9, clause 2.
19 Ex parte Merryman, 17 Fed. Cas. No. 9487 (1861).
The Commander-in-Chief + 233
privilege solely to Congress, since that would mean “that in every
case the danger should run its course until Congress could be
called together, the very assembling of which might be prevented,
as was intended in this case,” that is, the Merryman case.
At the opening of hostilities in 1861 Lincoln, as Commander-
in-Chief, proclaimed a blockade of the belligerent states thereby
throwing a perplexing problem into the lap of the courts. Block-
ade is no power of the president prescribed by the Constitution
but instead is derived from international law. How could inter-
national law apply in a Civil War, that is, an internal instead of
an international war? The Supreme Court, justifying the blockade
as an exercise of the president’s powers as commander-in-chief,
reasoned: ‘‘The parties belligerent in a public war are independent
nations. But it is not necessary to constitute war, that both parties
should be acknowledged as independent or sovereign states. A war
may exist where one of the belligerents claims sovereign rights
as against the other.”? Lincoln issued the Emancipation Procla-
mation as a military order of the Commander-in-Chief designed
among other purposes to reduce the labor force of the insurrec-
tionists, and its constitutionality has never been judicially chal-
lenged.
The military tribunals established by Lincoln for the trial of
civilians were ultimately held to be unconstitutional, but not
before hostilities had ended and Lincoln had been assassinated.
In September, 1862, the President had issued a proclamation in
support of the draft declaring all persons resisting or discouraging
voluntary enlistments to be subject to martial law and trial by
court martial without the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.
In October, 1864, one Milligan, an alleged major general in the
Sons of Liberty, a Copperhead or disloyal organization, was
convicted of conspiracy to release rebel prisoners and was sen-
tenced to be hanged on May 9, 1865. By that date the war was over,
20 E, S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers (1957), p. 230.
21 Prize Cases, 2 Black 635, 666-667 (1863).
234 + The Man in the White House
Lincoln was dead, and the case was carried to the Supreme Court,
which held that the President had lacked authority to institute the
military tribunals outside the actual theater of war where civil
courts were functioning. The Court confined the role of president
as commander-in-chief to “the command of the forces and the
conduct of campaigns.” In the hysteria following Lincoln’s
assassination the decision provoked bitter recrimination against
the Court, but the decision has never been judicially reversed.
However, it can scarcely be successfully controverted that “the
law of the Constitution is what Lincoln did in the crisis not what
the Court said later.”
President Lincoln’s apologia of his extraordinarily broad inter-
pretation of his authority as President and Commander-in-Chief
was epitomized in his letter to A. G. Hodges, dated April 4, 1864,
in which he wrote:
My oath to preserve the Constitution imposed on me the duty
of preserving by every indispensable means that government,
that nation, of which the Constitution was the organic law. Was
it possible to lose the nation and yet preserve the Constitution?
By general law life and limb must be protected, yet often a limb
must be amputated to save a life but a life is never wisely given
to save a limb. I felt that measures otherwise unconstitutional,
might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preser-
vation of the Constitution through preservation of the nation.
Right or wrong, I assumed this ground and now avow it. I could
not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had ever tried to pre-
serve the Constitution, if to save slavery or any minor matter,
I should permit the wreck of the government, country, and Con-
stitution altogether.
As early as December 20, 1861, Congress was challenging
Lincoln’s commander-in-chiefship and sought to share the war
power through a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.
22 Ex parte Milligan, 4 Wallace 2 (1866).
23 Clinton Rossiter, The Supreme Court and the Commander-in-Chief (1951),
p. 39.
24 Nicolay and Hay, Works of Abraham Lincoln (1894), x, 65-68.
The Commander-in-Chief * 235
Designed ostensibly to assist Congress in the performance of its
constitutional war powers, it so far exceeded its constitutional
power as to take over partial control of military operations.
Their investigating missions at the front undermined army disci-
pline and discouraged competent commanders. The favorites of
these “deputies on mission” were Generals Fremont, Butler, and
Hooker, three of the less competent commanders in the Union
army. Interrogating generals as if they were school boys and ad-
vising the President like military experts, the committee sought
to intimidate Lincoln by threatening to turn Congress against
him. Only Lincoln’s extraordinary resourcefulness in out-
maneuvering Congress together with his support by loyal public
opinion enabled him to maintain unimpaired the authority of the
President throughout his incumbency.
No sooner were we in World War I than Congress, quite nat-
urally, turned to the Civil War for precedents and the guidance
that the experience then might afford. Three months after the
Declaration of War a movement developed in Congress to estab-
lish a bipartisan committee of the two houses on the conduct of
the war. It was President Wilson’s familiarity with our political
history that enabled him to counter the move to repeat the strange
arrangement that had proved to be such an annoyance to Lincoln,
and Wilson’s protest promptly scotched the project. Later there
was a strong movement for a coalition Cabinet to be headed by
ex-President Theodore Roosevelt. Democratic Senator Chamber-
lain of Oregon led the movement arguing that the military estab-
lishment had “broken down and almost stopped functioning be-
cause of inefficiency in every bureau and every department of the
Government.” Just as Asquith’s government in England had
failed, only to be succeeded by the Lloyd George Coalition cabinet,
23G. W. Dimock, Congressional Investigating Committees (1929), p. 112.
æ G. W. Julian, Political Recollections 1840-1872 (1874), p. 205.
27 W, E. Dodd, Woodrow Wilson and his Work (1922), p. 253; Lindsay Rogers,
“Presidential Dictatorship in the United States,” Quarterly Review, CCxxxi (1919),
141,
236 + The Man in the White House
so was Theodore Roosevelt heralded as the potential savior of the
United States and destined to head a coalition Cabinet.
President Wilson countered this congressional maneuver with
neat Lincolnian strategy by sending to Congress a bill asking for a
grant to himself of the very powers proposed for the war Cabinet.
The result was the Overman Act giving the president practically
the powers of a dictator in redistributing the functions, duties, and
powers of administrative agencies and personnel of the government
as he might deem necessary for the successful prosecution of the
war. This move to curb the President in the midst of the war col-
lapsed, and when the clash of arms in France grew furious, the
American people gave overwhelming support to the President. An
unprecedented hysteria against criticism of the government seized
the American people and spread from the people to the Depart-
ment of Justice and even to the courts, which gave severe sentences
for remarks that today would seem to have been no more than legiti-
mate discussion of public issues. However, no civilians were tried
by military courts as during the Civil War. Every sentence was giv-
en by a civil court after a verdict by a jury, which however also re-
flected the prevailing hysteria. Official authority, combined with a
reign of social terror, drove criticism of the executive under ground.
“Senators of sovereign states and leaders of parties groveled in their
marble corridors so terrified were they of public opinion.”
Confidential information following the Munich debacle in 1938
convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt that another war in
Europe was imminent and that the United States must rearm.
When World War II began in Europe, President Roosevelt issued
executive orders increasing the army, navy, and marine corps under
statutory authority. But he had to await the development of events
for the accumulating public opinion that would support rearma-
ment and convert the United States into what he conceived to be
the “arsenal of democracy.” The fall of France in June, 1940,
created an alarm that induced the necessary crystallization of
28 G. R. Brown, The Leadership of Congress (1922), p. 187.
The Commander-in-Chief * 237
public opinion, and Congress then voted the required appropria-
tions. When Poland fell, the President declared a “limited emer-
gency” based on statutes enacted from time to time during half a
century. When France fell, he declared an “unlimited emergency.”
Britain’s situation seemed desperate. She had lost most of her mil-
itary equipment at Dunkerque. She needed destroyers especially
and Roosevelt made a “Yankee horse trade” by which he conveyed
to Britain overage destroyers in return for a ninety-nine-year use
of naval and air bases in west Atlantic islands belonging to Britain.
This deal had violated at least two statutes, and the President had
asserted and exercised a power specifically assigned to Congress
by the Constitution. However his action was defended by Attorney
General Jackson, soon to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme
Court, as resting strangely enough on his power as Commander-
in-Chief to “dispose” the armed forces of the United States. Un-
like Lincoln, in similar circumstances, Roosevelt did not ask Con-
gress to ratify his action. So gratified was Roosevelt over the deal
for the air fields that he pronounced it “the most important action
in reinforcing our defense since the Louisiana Purchase.” 2°
The arsenal of democracy was enabled freely to supply the for-
eign armed forces battling the axis through the Lend-Lease statute
enacted by Congress, which authorized the president “to transfer
title, to exchange, lease, lend or otherwise dispose of any defense
article.” So sweeping was the authority conferred by this statute
that the venerable John Bassett Moore criticised Congress for ab-
dicating its power “‘to declare war,” “grant letters of marque and
reprisal,” “raise armies,” “provide and maintain a navy,” and
“regulate land and naval forces.” Thus congressional powers that
Lincoln cavalierly appropriated, Congress freely turned over to
President Roosevelt, even though the Constitution delegated them
unequivocally to Congress.
One of the strangest episodes in the history of the presidency is
President Franklin Roosevelt’s Labor Day address to Congress
29 Roosevelt, Public Papers (1940), p. 5.
238 + The Man in the White House
in 1942 in which he coupled a demand for the repeal of the six-
month-old Emergency Price Control Act with the most audacious
threat ever delivered by a president face to face with Congress.
In event that the Congress should fail to act adequately [he
declared] I shall accept the responsibility and I will act... . I
have given the most thoughtful consideration to meeting this
issue without further reference to Congress. I have determined
in this vital matter to consult with Congress... . The American
people can be sure that I will use my power with a full sense of
responsibility to the Constitution and to my country. The Ameri-
can people can be sure that I shail not hesitate to use every
power vested in me to defeat our enemies in any part of the
world where our safety demands such defeat. When the war is
won, the powers under which I act automatically revert to the
people to whom they belong.
Where did the President get this extraordinary power? From the
people, he implied, when he said, “When the war is won the pow-
ers under which I act automatically revert to the people to whom
they belong.” How the sovereign conveyed these powers was never
revealed. Presumably Roosevelt conceived the powers to be de-
rived from prerogatives of the ‘“Commander-in-Chief in war time.”
At any rate the Labor Day address to Congress represented the
most extreme assertion of the president’s war power by Roosevelt.
It may be possible to cover the extralegal and even extraconsti-
tutional acts of Lincoln, Wilson, and the two Roosevelts with the
mantle of the “stewardship theory” of the first Roosevelt. Some-
thing like this seems necessary in order to rationalize the so-called
emergency powers of the president. In time of war it becomes a
means of justifying such extraordinary assumption of powers
specifically delegated to Congress as Lincoln cavalierly exercised
during the four months between the fall of Sumter and the con-
vening of the special session of Congress, July 4, 1861. These acts
of Lincoln indubitably went far beyond the mere exercise of the
president’s commander-in-chiefship. How else can Franklin
Roosevelt’s “Yankee horse trade” of destroyers in exchange for
the lease by Britain of sites for air bases be justified than as an
The Commander-in-Chief * 239
exercise of presidential stewardship of the American people’s
interest in survival? And Roosevelt’s breath-taking assurance to
his “children,” the Congress, in the preceding paragraph would
apparently prove to be classified under ‘““The Stewardship Theory
in Total War.”
World War II brought an unprecedented instance of wholesale
invasion of the civil rights of American citizens. On February 19,
1942, President Roosevelt issued an executive order “‘by virtue of
the authority vested in me as President of the United States and
Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy,” as he expressed it
in directing the Secretary of War to take action that excluded
Japanese from certain designated areas near the West Coast and
removed 112,000 of them from their farms and homes, first to
temporary camps, and later to relocation centers, mainly in desert
areas of the West. It was apparently the President’s intention to
base this action on his power as Commander-in-Chief. It was, of
course, impossible to legalize the segregation of these Japanese
literally as alien enemies since two-thirds of them were citizens
of the United States. One Korematsu confessedly violated the
order excluding persons of Japanese ancestry from forbidden
areas and failed to report to an assembly center. In this case the
Supreme Court upheld “the exclusion order as of the time it was
made, and when the petitioner (Korematsu) violated it,” as the
opinion of the majority of the Court was cautiously expressed by
Justice Black. He stated further, as justification of the order,
“When, under conditions of modern warfare, our shores are
threatened by hostile forces, the power to protect must be com-
mensurable with the threatened danger." Dissenting opinions,
no less than Justice Black’s, revealed how unhappy the Court was
over the matter. Four weeks after the President’s executive order,
Congress enacted a supporting statute that, because of its lack
of safeguards of civil rights, was pronounced by E. S. Corwin
30See E. S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers (1957), pp. 250-52.
31 Korematsu v. U. S., 323 U. S. 214 (1944).
240 * The Man in the Wnite House
“just about the most heartless measure ever enacted by the
American Congress.”’»
Historically world-policing to protect American citizens and
property has been a function of the president as commander-in-
chief, with 149 instances between 1798 and 1945 counted by James
Grafton Rogers.» For example, in 1846 Lieutenant Hollis of
U.S.S. Cyane bombarded Greytown, Nicaragua, when reparations
for the attack of a mob on the United States consul were not
forthcoming. President McKinley in 1900 sent 5,000 American
troops to join the international military force that went to the
relief of foreign legations besieged in Peking by Chinese Boxers,
as they were called. The extent to which circumstances determine
what the president can do policing the world to protect American
citizens is brought into relief by the contrast between how very
much President McKinley could do to protect American citizens
in China in 1900 and how very little President Eisenhower could
do about American airmen held captive by the Chinese in 1955.
On June 24, 1950, a full-scale invasion of South Korea was
begun by Communist armies of North Korea. The next day the
Security Council of the United Nations Organization denounced
the aggression, called for an immediate cease fire, and asked
member nations of the United Nations to take action against the
invaders. The following day President Truman ordered General
MacArthur to aid the South Koreans, which order the Security
Council endorsed and then made General MacArthur the United
Nations Commander.
Despite the abundant authority under which President Truman
acted in resisting Communist aggression in South Korea, he came
under a storm of partisan criticism for not having consulted
Congress, which alone can declare war. Excited stump speakers
during the presidential campaign of 1952 made the most of this
by denouncing the Korean conflict as Truman’s War. In order
32 Total War and the Constitution (1947), p. 98.
33 World Policy and the Constitution (1945), pp. 92-123.
The Commander-in-Chief * 241
to forestall another such partisan charge and also to convince
Communist China of the essential unity of the American people,
President Eisenhower in 1955 asked Congress for a resolution
approving in advance military action he might order in defense
of Formosa. President Eisenhower frankly stated in his message
asking for the resolution his conviction that he already possessed
the power. This, thought Richard H. Rovere, “was to act as if
the Bricker amendment, which was narrowly defeated in the last
Congress and might be narrowly passed in this one, was so sound
in principle that its provisions should be honored even without
being enacted into law .... But any future President who neglects
to ask Congress’s leave in a matter of this sort will be accused of
ignoring the admirable precedent set by Mr. Eisenhower in
1955.”’s* While passage of the resolution forestalled calling any
resulting hostilities Eisenhower’s War, the price paid for that
advantage was high in the limitation the precedent set on the
freedom of the commander-in-chief in exercising his essential
world-policing function in the very midst of the Cold War and
with a sudden outburst of nuclear war not impossible.
In January, 1957, in the thick of the Middle East crisis, Presi-
dent Eisenhower again asked Congress for a blank check, this time
for authority to provide economic aid and armed support to any
Middle East nation requesting it against a Communist threat.
Although public opinion, as measured by Gallup polls, appeared
to support economic aid 70 per cent for to 19 per cent against and
the dispatching of troops 50 per cent for to 34 per cent against,
Congress engaged in a prolonged debate and was consequently
less prompt than on the Formosa resolution. There were com-
plaints about the cost, the danger of goading Russia into war, and
significantly, about Eisenhower “trying to pass the buck to Con-
gress.” After two months of debate Congress voted an appropria-
tion of two hundred million dollars for economic-military aid
in the Middle East along with the curiously phrased resolution
3 “Letter from Washington,” New Yorker, Feb. 26, 1955, pp. 88, 89.
242 +» The Man in the White House
that “‘if the President determines the necessity thereof, the United
States is prepared to use armed forces to assist any nation or
group of nations requesting assistance against armed aggression
from any country controlled by international communism.”
Thus Congress washed its hands of responsibility for such
a move and threw it squarely back in the lap of the President.
What then are the limits of the power of the president as com-
mander-in-chief? In time of war Congress in practice can exercise
no restraint as the careers of war presidents Abraham Lincoln
and Franklin Roosevelt indubitably demonstrated. Nor can the
courts do any better. There is the ominous warning of Justice
Jackson, “If the people ever let command of war power fall into
irresponsible and unscrupulous hands the courts wield no power
equal to restraint.” With the legislative and judicial branches
incapable of restraining the president’s exercise of his power as
commander-in-chief, then only the will of the sovereign—the
American people functioning through public opinion—can do it
if it is to be done at all.
The institutionalizing of the commander-in-chiefship is one of
the striking developments of recent years. It is a far cry from
the Spanish-American War when, “as his own Chief of Staff,
McKinley carried on the war,”” to the present elaborate imple-
mentation of the office of the commander-in-chief. The most
important arm of the commander-in-chief is the National Security
Council, consisting of the vice-president of the United States,
the secretaries of state and defense, the director of mutual se-
curity, and the director of the Office of Defense Mobilization.
The Security Council advises the president with respect to the
integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating
to national security. President Eisenhower gave this council such
particular emphasis and attention that for a while his Cabinet
35 See Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (1958),
pp. 944-45.
36 Korematsu v. U. S., 323 U. S. 214, 248 (1944).
37 W., H. Taft, The National McKinley Birthplace Memorial (1918), p. 78.
The Commander-in-Chief * 243
seemed to fade into the background. Auxiliary to the Security
Council is the Central Intelligence Agency, whose mission is
that of co-ordinating the intelligence activities of the departments
concerned with the national security. The Office of Defense Mo-
bilization controls and co-ordinates mobilization activities in-
cluding production, procurement, manpower, stabilization, and
transport services. The business aspects of war are administered
by the Department of Defense with its three component Depart-
ments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
No matter how elaborate the apparatus set up to institutionalize
the office, the president still remains the commander-in-chief.
Never could that have been more decisively manifested than in
the Formosan crisis of 1955. That the Joint Chiefs of Staff, im-
portant as they are, are purely advisory and possess not a spark
of authority—with the president perfectly free, with respect to
their advice, to take it or leave it—was demonstrated absolutely.
Admiral Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted
in vain on a blockade of Communist China. Richard H. Rovere
observed that “in almost every case the President has pursued
the exact opposite of the course recommended by the Joint
Chiefs.” Despite all the apparatus the president is still as much
of a commander-in-chief as he has the capacity and will to be.
38 The Eisenhower Years (1956), p. 249.
LINCOLN’S LETTER TO
GENERAL JOSEPH HOOKER
JANUARY 26, 1863
Executive Mansion
Washington, January 26, 1863.
Major General Hooker:
General.
I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Of
course I have done this upon what appear to me to be sufficient
reasons. And yet I think it best for you to know that there are
some things in regard to which, I am not quite satisfied with you.
I believe you to be a brave and skilful soldier, which, of course,
Į like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your profession,
in which you are right. You have confidence in yourself, which is
a valuable, if not an indispensable quality. You are ambitious,
which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm.
But I think that during Gen. Burnside’s command of the army,
you have taken counsel of your ambition, and thwarted him as
much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country,
and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer. I have
heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that
both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course
it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the
command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up
dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will
risk the dictatorship. The government will support you to the
utmost of it’s ability, which is neither more or less than it has done
and will do for all commanders. I much fear that the spirit which
you have aided to infuse into the Army, of criticizing their Com-
mander, and withholding confidence from him, will now turn
upon you. I shall assist you as far as I can, to put it down. Neither
you, nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out
of an army, while such a spirit prevails in it.
And now, beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with
energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.
Yours very truly
A. Lincoln.
* XII
The President
as Chief Diplomat
* “OUR PROCEDURES for the democratic
review and execution of international engagements are. . . in an
unholy mess,’ declared President Dickey of Dartmouth College
several years ago. It should be emphasized that this stricture was
on procedure and not on policy. That the management of foreign
relations is difficult enough for any self-governing people was
demonstrated, for example, by the acrimonious debate in Britain’s
Parliament on the Egyptian debacle of 1956, but for the people
of the United States it is complicated by the inflexible prescrip-
tions of the written Constitution only somewhat less than by per-
during usages of the unwritten constitution. In mid-twentieth
century the strain consequent upon our peculiar system for the
determination and execution of foreign policies has been intensi-
fied by the fact that the leadership of the free world suddenly
fell into the lap of the United States. The sudden realization in
1957 that we could no longer negotiate as the master power cre-
ated a crisis.
It is in the management of foreign relations as nowhere else in
the American system of government that except in crisis there is
‘Quoted by Hans J. Morgenthau in “Conduct of American Foreign Policy,”
Parliamentary Affairs, m, No. 1 (Winter, 1949), 158.
245
246 * The Man in the White House
such a dilemma as between what, on the one hand, it seems ought
to be done and on the other hand what the oracle of public
opinion will permit. Here is where president and secretary of state
must, from time to time, consider whether to sacrifice apparently
sound policy to the prejudices of a perverse public opinion, ag-
gravated often enough by an irresponsible demagoguery, or seek
to promote sound policy by a legerdemain that leaves the public
wondering where the rabbit came from. In a critical era it may
call for the cultivation of the delicate art of walking on eggs.
Nobody can tell just what the framers of the Constitution
intended by the provision that the president “‘shall have power,
by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties,
provided that two-thirds of the Senators present concur.” It is a
curious if not significant fact that the semifinal draft of the
Constitution, that is, the report of the Committee of Eleven in
the Constitutional Convention when it was near the end of its
three months of deliberations, provided that “the Senate of the
United States shall have the power to make treaties and appoint
ambassadors.” This was changed to the final form quoted in the
opening sentence of this paragraph only ten days before adjourn-
ment of the Convention sine die. This provision, which would have
vested management of foreign affairs exclusively in the Senate,
was a natural one since all treaties of the United States then in
force had been made by the Continental Congress when there was
no chief executive to share the power. It was the Father of the
Constitution, Madison himself, who rose in the Constitutional
Convention to protest against vesting the treaty power solely in
the Senate. That body, he observed, represented the states alone,
and for this and other reasons he thought the president as repre-
senting the nation should also be an agent in making treaties. An
inconclusive debate ensued, and the final arrangement as to treaty-
making was determined by the Committee of Five that gave the
Constitution its final form and phrasing.
Presumably vesting exclusive treaty power in the president
might have jeopardized the rights of the states, of which the
The President as Chief Diplomat » 247
Senate was to be the guardian. However, inclusion of the Senate
in treaty-making introduced an element of discord in the formula-
tion of foreign policy, which the very growth of the Senate in
numbers has intensified. Statistically inclined commentators have
calculated that senators representing considerably less than 10
per cent of the total population of the United States could veto
the painfully negotiated work of the executive. The Supreme
Court has held that not only does a treaty repeal a statute repug-
nant to it, but a statute likewise repeals a standing treaty. Since
that puts the two on a par as to validity, it has been plausibly
argued that treaties be negotiated by the president and submitted
to Congress and validated like statutes by simple majority votes
of the two houses. But since this would require an amendment
to the Constitution, it is inconceivable that the Senate would, in
the foreseeable future, give the two-thirds vote for a constitutional
amendment surrendering the tremendous treaty power it now
wields. Thus it was not until the accumulation of the overwhelm-
ing pressures of powerful interest groups that the long-delayed
ratification of the St. Lawrence Seaway treaty was effected.
The government under the Constitution was only four months
old when President Washington, confronted with the negotiation
of a treaty, had to attempt a practical interpretation of the treaty
clause of the Constitution. He knew that the governor’s council
of the colonial and the succeeding state governments was the
prototype of the United States Senate. There was as yet no
thought of a president’s Cabinet and Washington quite naturally
assumed that the Senate, which then consisted of only 22 mem-
bers,? would be his advisory council. He confidently expected oral
communication with the Senate preparatory to the negotiation of
treaties. It has already been related: how he came to the Senate in
August 22, 1789, and took the chair of the vice-president just as
a state governor had customarily taken the chair of the lieutenant
governor whenever he came to the council. In the words of
2 North Carolina and Rhode Island had not yet ratified the Constitution.
3 See p. 10.
248 * The Man inthe White House
querulous Senator Maclay, Washington “told us bluntly that he
had called on us for our advice and consent to some propositions
respecting the treaty to be held with the Southern Indians.”* What
Washington desired and confidently expected was the advice of his
council, that is, the Senate, to guide him in the negotiations, but
such expectations were dashed by Senator Maclay’s objection to
answering the questions without more information. Senator
Maclay spoke up because he was certain if he did not no one else
would ‘‘and we should have these advice and consents rushed in
a degree from us.”
It became evident that the Senate would not give “advice and
consent” on plans for treaties with the President looking on and,
as some senators feared, overawing them. The uniqueness of the
episode just related lay in the President’s consulting the Senate in
person prior to negotiating the treaty. Later in the ensuing three
years Washington consulted the Senate by written message instead
of in person, and this kind of prior consultation of the Senate did
not cease until Washington’s drafting of instructions to John Jay
preliminary to the negotiating of Jay’s Treaty in 1794. “So a prac-
tice which Washington seems clearly to have expected to be estab-
lished as a matter of course was still-born on the very threshold of
our constitutional history and the failure of the method was a first
step in terminating prior consultation in any form as the normal
practice, and hence in reducing the term ‘advice’ in the constitu-
tional phrase ‘advice and consent’ to a formalism as meaningless
or unreal as it now is in the enacting clause of English statutes.’’s
4 William Maclay, Sketches of Debates in the First Senate (1880), p. 122.
5 Minor incidents sometimes turn out to be landmarks in constitutional devel-
opment. Washington had inadvertently failed to invite Senator Maclay to dine
with him prior to the incident in the Senate, and when he bethought himself of
doing so, it was too late. But it is doubtful whether the dinner invitation would
have made any difference.
ê James Hart, The American Presidency in Action, 1789 (1948), pp. 94-95. The
enacting clause of an English statute is “Be it enacted by the King’s Most Excel-
lent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords, Spiritual and Tem-
poral and Commons in Parliament assembled and by the authority of the same
as follows.”
The President as Chief Diplomat + 249
In time the settled practice became that negotiation is solely
the responsibility of the president. Though it originated as sheer
usage of the unwritten constitution, it has been sanctified as su-
preme law of the land by the fiat of the Supreme Court. “He alone
negotiates,” declared the late Associate Justice Sutherland, speak-
ing for the Court. “Into the field of negotiation the Senate cannot
intrude and Congress itself is powerless to invade it.”’ Moreover
the Senate cannot compel the president to divulge a particle of
information concerning the negotiations or anything else he
chooses to withhold. However, there is nothing to prevent the
Senate from offering the president advice informally through its
leaders concerning planned or pending negotiations, and it would
be an imprudent president who would spurn or ignore such ad-
vice. But, whatever the part played by the Senate, actually rat-
ification of a treaty for the United States is the president’s act,
dependent for validation of the treaty upon the two-thirds vote of
a quorum of the Senate.: The Senate may, by a sufficient vote,
consent conditionally or unconditionally or not consent at all.
Even after the Senate has given its two-thirds vote, the treaty is
not the law of the land until the president “promulgates,” that is,
makes public the treaty. He can decide not to promulgate, which
is equivalent to a veto, and unlike the veto of acts of Congress
this one is absolute and not merely suspensive, that is, it cannot
be overthrown by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.
The president’s foreign policy may have to run the gauntlet of
the inquisitorial powers of congressional committees with some
congressmen giving vent to feelings of frustration over their in-
ability to snatch from the executive the initiative in foreign policy.
Such is the division of power in this matter that the president dare
not alienate the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate or the
Foreign Affairs Committee of the House or even the Appropria-
tions Committee if expenditures are necessary to execute a foreign
1U. S. v. Curtis-Wright Export Corp., 299 U. S. 304, 319 (1936).
8 See E. S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers (1957), p. 211.
250 * The Man in the White House
policy. Congress’ paring of budget proposals for aid to western
Europe and for the Voice of America, as well as the guerilla
tactics of the late Senator McCarthy’s roving agents among our
diplomatic staffs in Europe, illustrate how Congress can modify,
emasculate, or even nullify the president’s administration of his
foreign policy. Congress has used resolutions of either house or
joint resolutions of the two houses to warn the president that a
proposed foreign policy had better be slanted to placate dissident
legislators. That the attitude of congressional leaders can be
crucial is illustrated by the intransigence of Republican floor
leader Senator Knowland with respect to any Far East policy
President Eisenhower might have planned different from the Sen-
ator’s views. One authority has concluded that
the issue of the ultimate responsibility for the conduct of Ameri-
can foreign policy is being decided, on each individual occasion
by a running battle between the Senate or the two Houses of
Congress on one side and the executive branch on the other...
It can be safely said that, in a period of international relations
dominated by the psychology and technique of the ‘cold war’,
the executive branch of the government of the United States
must make a greater effort to maintain friendly relations with
the United States Congress than with the Soviet Union.’
It need not be assumed that internal conflict is an inevitable
feature of the theory and practice of formulating American for-
eign policy. Some administrations are quite free from difficulties
in this field. When President Johnson’s politician-statesman Wil-
liam H. Seward undertook to acquire Alaska—a _ hair-brained
project, as it then seemed to most Americans-——he took the pre-
caution to ensure first the support of Senator Charles Sumner,
Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, who vigorous-
ly championed the treaty of acquisition on the floor of the Senate.
Since the debacle of President Wilson’s handling of the Covenant
® Hans J. Morgenthau, “Conduct of American Foreign Policy,” Parliamentary
Affairs, vi (Winter, 1949), 149, 155.
The President as Chief Diplomat * 251
of the League of Nations in the Senate, presidents have developed
a technique for co-ordinating treaty formulation with the Senate
characterized by considerable finesse. It is axiomatic that a treaty
is doomed if ratification becomes a party issue, and there has
consequently emerged the practice of a bipartisan foreign policy.
A president cultivates the good will of the party of the opposition
in support of his foreign policies by conferences and the appoint-
ment of senators and representatives to international conferences
and organizations—the United Nations, for example. The main-
tenance of cordial relations with the legislative branch has even
been institutionalized in the office of the Assistant Secretary of
State for Congressional Relations located in the State Department.
Despite all the difficulties due to constitutional provisions plus
the vagaries of our political usages, the president as chief executive
and commander-in-chief possesses authority in the area of foreign
relations that the Supreme Court has denominated ‘“‘the very
delicate, plenary, and executive power of the President as the sole
organ of the federal government in the field of international
relations”! and in no sense is this a delegated power. It inheres in
the presidential office as a consequence of the existence of the
United States as a sovereign nation. The Continental Congress
promptly became the organ of international relations, and -the
Articles of Confederation formally vested in it “the sole and ex-
clusive right and power of sending and receiving ambassadors and
entering into treaties and alliances.” The Constitution continued
these powers, and the president has all the powers that inter-
national intercourse require that the Constitution does not vest
elsewhere. Moreover, international law is law of the land, to which
also applies the president’s obligation to “‘take care that the laws
be faithfully executed.”
Charged with extraordinary power in the determination of
foreign policy and exclusive power at that is the prescription of
the constitution, “He shall receive ambassadors and other public
10 U. S. v. Curtis-Wright Export Corp., 299 U. S. 304 (1936).
252 +» The Man in the White House
ministers.” Here is a presidential function that Congress rarely
presumes to invade. Until the dawn of the twentieth century such
recognition of a foreign government by receiving ambassadors
was almost automatically given to the government of any nation
that appeared to be stable and willing to fulfill international
obligations. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard
Taft did, of course, refuse recognition to the governments of the
Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Portugal until assured
protection of American investments there. President Wilson how-
ever introduced a striking new departure by withholding recog-
nition of governments in Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, and Bolivia
on the ground that they were not “constitutional governments.”
The Kerensky government of Russia in 1917 satisfied Wilson and
was recognized, but the succeeding Bolshevik government was
refused recognition by Wilson and ensuing presidents till 1933.
President Washington had just begun his second term when he
had to decide upon the policy of the United States with respect
to the war that had broken out between England and Revolution-
ary France. The problem was complicated by the standing Treaty
of Alliance with France under which that nation had aided us by
land and by sea in our war for independence, and the antiadminis-
tration party was insisting that we repay our ally by a declaration
of war against England." In the face of the threat of mob violence
by the Francophiles against him, Washington issued the first Proc-
lamation of Neutrality in 1793.
Because the Constitution did not, in as many words, authorize
it, the opposition denounced this first presidential proclamation of
neutrality as a usurpation of congressional power. Did not Con-
gress have the power to declare war and by inference then to deter-
mine peace? The controversy provided Hamilton with an
u John Adams, Works (1850-56), x, 47, 48.
12 Even Secretary of State Jefferson in a letter to Madison expressed the opinion
that Washington’s proclamation that the nation was at peace was equivalent to
declaring it would not go to war, which took on the character of encroachment on
the legislature. Moreover, had not the President set at naught one treaty of alliance
with France and broken our plighted faith?
The President as Chief Diplomat * 253
appropriate opportunity to set forth, over the pen name of
Pacificus, a startling interpretation of presidential power, startling
at any rate to the already emerging cult of states rights. After
enumerating the specified constitutional powers of the president
and asserting that it would be unreasonable to assume that his
powers were confined to these alone, Hamilton continued:
The different modes of expression employed in the Constitution
in regard to the two powers of the legislature and executive,
serves to confirm this inference. In the article which gives the
legislative power of the government the expressions are ‘all
legislative power herein granted shall be vested in a Congress
of the United States’. In that which grants the executive power
the expressions are ‘the executive power shall be vested in a
President of the United States... .’ The general doctrine of our
Constitution then is that the executive power of the nation is
vested in the President subject only to the exceptions and
qualifications which are expressed in the instrument."
Although Hamilton’s theory of presidential prerogative did not
become established interpretation with respect to domestic
matters, it has become accepted judicial interpretation as to the
president’s power in the conduct of foreign relations. Presidential
proclamations of neutrality in due time became an unchallenged
exercise of executive power.
If the appropriation of money by Congress for executing foreign
policy, the declaration of war by Congress, and the consent of
two-thirds of the Senate in validating treaties are excepted, the
president’s power in the field of foreign relations is plenary. He
can declare a policy that in effect has virtually the permanent
effect of a major statute, as did Monroe in proclaiming his
Monroe Doctrine in 1823 merely by means of a presidential
message to Congress, or as Cleveland did in his belligerent
message on the Venezuela boundary dispute in 1896 or as Truman
did in the Truman Doctrine of the containment of communism in
1947. He can recognize or refuse to recognize a foreign government.
13 Hamilton’s Works (Lodge edition 1904), iv, 142-44.
254 * The Man inthe White House
There is no legal or constitutional limitation on his authority to
direct troops anywhere and leave Congress no choice but a formal
declaration of the existence of a state of war as could have
happened if President Truman had chosen to order armed resist-
ance to the Berlin blockade in 1948 when he chose instead the air-
lift to circumvent the seige. No one can doubt President Franklin
Roosevelt’s imperious mastery in the conducting of foreign policy
preceding the outbreak of war with Japan and Germany. His
international understandings from the destroyer deal to Yalta
were executive agreements consummated as such transactions are
without the advice and consent of the Senate.
The growing use of the executive agreement in making com-
pacts with foreign nations is a natural consequence of the Sen-
ate’s overplaying its veto power of one-third plus one in dis-
posing of treaties negotiated by the president. If an international
engagement requires no supplementary legislation or an appro-
priation, the president can effect it with an executive agreement
achieving the same purpose as with a treaty. In the 1940’s this
device came to be virtually the normal means for effecting inter-
national agreements. Significant indeed is the ratio of treaties to
executive agreements in a seven-year period: 1939, 10 to 26; 1940,
12 to 20; 1941, 15 to 39; 1942, 6 to 52; 1943, 4 to 71; 1944, 1 to 74;
1945, 6 to 54. Many of these were, of course, then made under
the president’s power as commander-in-chief.
From early in our history executive agreements have been
authorized by treaty or statute with respect to postal, trade-mark,
and reciprocal-trade agreements with foreign nations. Such agree-
ments are used in handling day-to-day diplomatic matters such,
for example, as territorial or boundary adjustments, policing
boundaries, regulating fishing rights, and private claims against
foreign governments. This modus vivendi can be a temporary sub-
stitute for a formal treaty. In time of war temporary virtual
alliances have been effected by executive agreements of the com-
mander-in-chief. The naval limitations on the Great Lakes
originated in 1817 as an executive agreement, which President
The President as Chief Diplomat + 255
Monroe then submitted to the Senate, where it was approved by
a two-thirds vote without formal exchange of ratification with
Great Britain.
President McKinley terminated hostilities of the Spanish War
in 1898 with an executive agreement on conditions that practically
determined the terms of the ensuing Treaty of Peace ending the
state of war. In 1901 President McKinley accepted the protocol
by the terms of which China agreed to indemnify for losses of our
citizens due to the Boxer Rebellion in China, and McKinley never
submitted the agreement to the Senate. In 1900 President
McKinley’s Secretary of State, John Hay, negotiated and con-
summated his Open Door agreements as to China’s trade and
territorial integrity, which were never submitted to the Senate.
President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 simply by-passed the
Senate by an executive agreement with Santo Domingo for the
collection of customs in order to repay creditors who had made
loans to that nation after the Senate had refused Roosevelt a
treaty to that effect. Then there was the Taft-Katsura Memo-
randum of 1905 in Theodore Roosevelt’s administration permit-
ting Japan a free hand in Korea and in the same administration
the Root-Takahira Agreement carrying still further the terms of
the Taft-Katsura Memorandum. President Theodore Roosevelt’s
gentleman’s agreement with Japan in 1907 to curb Japanese im-
migration to the United States was also merely an executive
agreement. The House-Gray Memorandum of 1916 pledged prob-
able American assistance to the Allies and the Lansing-Ishi
agreement of the following year recognizing Japan’s special inter-
est in China was but another executive agreement firm enough
that it took two formal treaties to terminate it.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 agreement with Russia’s
Foreign Minister recognizing the Soviet government in return for
its agreement to restrain persons or organizations from fomenting
internal disturbances in the United States was, of course, merely
an executive agreement. The Supreme Court held this to be an
international compact that the President “as the sole organ” of
256 + The Man in the White House
international relations of the United States was authorized to
enter into without consulting the Senate and that it superseded
contrary state statutes." Evidently this signified that the executive
agreement was supreme law of the land. The rise of the executive
agreement to such a peak of significance constitutes a notable
landmark in our constitutional development. No method of re-
stricting this development is possible short of a constitutional
amendment such as Senator John Bricker aimed to achieve.
The Cold War converted the president into the international
leader of the free world. If the threat of Soviet world domination
was to be countered, the strength of the United States in popula-
tion, resources, economic productivity, and military potential
made it the logical mobilizer of the free world if the president
would only provide the leadership. But this required his obtaining
agreement of divergent groups at home. It meant readiness to
employ military force where needed and an occasional audacious
stroke such as Truman’s appearance before Congress to ask for
four hundred million dollars for economic and military aid to
Greece and Turkey, confronted by Soviet threat. World leader-
ship of the president meant such moves as sending the fleet into
Formosa Straits, the Berlin airlift, and intervention in Korea. It
required formulas flexible enough to cover with the mantle of
foreign aid allies as divergent as Communist Tito and Fascist
Franco."
The leader of the free world dare not neglect leadership in pro-
moting or enforcing civil-rights legislation at home. The eyes of
the free world were upon President Eisenhower throughout the
Little Rock crisis. Neither can the president neglect counteracting
recession. Let him lead feebly, and Congress seizes the reins there-
by impairing his prestige before the world. Moreover, since
World War II, leadership of the free world has become institu-
1 U. S. v. Belmont, 301 U. S. 324 (1937).
15 See Richard P. Longaker, “The President as International Leader,” Law and
Contemporary Problems, Autumn, 1956 (Duke University Law School).
16 Ibid,. pp. 747-52.
The President as Chief Diplomat * 257
tionalized by such organizations as ANZUS, SEATO, NATO,
Latin-American pacts, and above everything else the United
Nations, which the president addresses from time to time.
No matter if the Supreme Court has declared that “in its vast
external realm [of foreign relations} with its important, compli-
cated, delicate, and manifold problems the President alone has the
power to speak or listen as the representative of the nation,”
his voice is sometimes almost lost by the confusion of tongues in
the maze of agencies constituting the executive branch of our
government. No technique has yet been devised to ensure avoid-
ance of inter- if not even intradepartmental clashes as to foreign
policies. A frustrated congressman may look with ill-concealed
glee at the baffled executive branch and sometimes even fan the
flames of controversy! There is the instance of Senator McCarthy
even planting virtually a personal agent in the State Department
to create confusion therein and a near reign of terror in the entire
diplomatic service. The State Department is even organizationally
divided against itself due to the cleavage between the geographical
agencies of Inter-American, European, Near Eastern, and Far
Eastern affairs on the one hand and the functional agencies on the
other. Furthermore, as Hans Morgenthau has pointed out, “‘Cer-
tain Ambassadors, such as Dodd in Berlin and Kennedy in
London in the 1930’s and Hayes in Madrid, during the Second
World War, were able for months to pursue policies at variance
with the policies of the State Department.”’* The Hoover Com-
mission on the Organization of the Executive Branch counted
nearly forty-five executive agencies outside the State Department
concerned with some phase of foreign policy. More than thirty
interdepartmental committees and boards were struggling to. re-
solve their conflicting views on foreign policies with the results
reaching the president through the National Security Council.
17 U, S. v. Curtis-Wright Export Corp. 299 U. S. 304 (1936).
18 “Conduct of American Foreign Policy,” Parliamentary Affairs, vi (Winter,
1949), 158.
258 * The Man in the White House
There is the picture of President Woodrow Wilson so distrust-
ful of Secretary of State Bryan that he would retire to the privacy
of his office with his typewriter and peck out a solemn note to the
German Foreign Minister protesting the submarine torpedoing of
neutral shipping. Or he would send his alter ego, as he called him,
his quasi ambassador, Colonal Ed. M. House, abroad to sound
out foreign ministries in casual disregard of the regular diplomatic
service, quite as Wilson’s protégé Franklin Roosevelt used his
own roving ambassador, Harry Hopkins, on similar missions two
decades later. President Truman had W. Averill Harriman as an
informal diplomat whose function became formalized as Foreign
Affairs Advisor to the President. But this title expressed precisely
what the Secretary of State was intended to be, and the time came
when Secretary of State Cordell Hull was to say that the use of
presidential envoys “tended in many instances to create havoc
with our ambassadors and ministers in the capitals they visited,
even though the envoys themselves had no such intentions.’
Sometimes a president sends up a trial balloon or has his
secretary of state or even the vice-president do it for him in order
to test public sentiment as to a contemplated foreign policy. For
example Franklin Roosevelt sought to alert an indifferent public
to. the peril due to the Japanese invasion of China in his Chicago
speech in 1937 urging an international quarantine of aggressors as
the only means of preserving peace but promptly discovered that
he had ventured ahead of current public opinion. But a year later
when he boldly declared at Kingston, Ontario, that the United
States would help defend Canada against invasion, the Gallup
Poll soon revealed public approval. Then there was Vice-President
Nixon’s off-the-record speech to the American Society of News-
paper Editors in 1954 concerning the Communist aggression in
Indo-China. If his startling statement that the United States could
not afford further retreat in Asia and that the administration
19 Cordell Hull; Memoirs (1948), 1, 200. See Felix Morley, The Foreign Policy
of the United States (1951), pp. 117-19.
The President as Chief Diplomat * 259
should face up to the dispatching of troops to Indo-China was a
trial balloon, it was one that did not stay up. There have been
times when the president is left in no doubt as to what the public
wants, and the country forces a foreign policy on the adminis-
tration as it did in the 1930’s when the enactment of neutrality
legislation was virtually forced upon an unwilling President.
No president wants to commit political hara-kiri and con-
sequently inevitably has his eye on the next election and the effect
of his foreign policy on it. The very nature of representative
government practically compels this practice, and the alternative
is dictatorship more or less. A United States Senator once ob-
served that unusual activity in the room of the Committee on
Foreign Relations indicated that a presidential election was in the
offing.” Perhaps no secretary of state was more adept in practical
politics than William H. Seward of Lincoln’s Cabinet. When an
impetuous American naval captain boarded a British mail steamer
and captured two Confederate commissioners assigned to Britain,
the public in the North was ecstatic over the defiance of the tradi-
tional enemy. But the Lincoln administration, harassed by seces-
sion and armed rebellion dared not risk a threatened foreign war
with England also, and after popular passion had cooled some-
what, the captured commissioners were released. Nor did Seward
miss the opportunity to mollify somewhat his public by congratu-
lating the British on having at long last accepted, even insisted
on, the principle of freedom of the seas for which we had fought
them in 1812. By a narrow margin the Lincoln administration -had
avoided committing hara-kiri.
The fear of what Congress might do to their policies has be-
come a veritable obsession to many members of the executive
departments. And Congress in its turn is susceptible to the pres-
sures of constituent interests that affect foreign policy—the sugar
and oil lobbies, the American Legion, and certain ethnic and
religious groups. Resolving the consequent confusion of opinion
20T. Bailey, The Man in the Street (1948), p. 88.
260 +» The Man inthe White House
as to what foreign policy shall be depends mainly upon whether
the president reasserts the historic role of the chief executive as
the initiator and formulator of foreign policy as, for example, for
better or for worse, it was played in the presidency of Theodore
Roosevelt.
President Eisenhower attempted to utilize the National Security
Council in order to co-ordinate and integrate foreign policy as
administrative agencies might contribute to it. Here, presided over
by the President, convened each week the Secretaries of State and
Defense, the Vice-President, the Director of Foreign Operations
Administration, and the Director of the Office of Defense Mobi-
lization with the frequent unofficial presence of the Secretary of
the Treasury and the Director of the Budget. Inevitably there is
difficulty in arriving at an enforceable consensus. ‘‘With the ex-
ception of the President and the Vice President each member [of
the Council] is the ambassador of a significant power complex
within the administration, so he can hardly act as a free agent at
the N. S. C. meetings.” The council affords opportunities for
composing intra-administration differences, but if decisions
arrived at are to be valid, that is, enforceable, they would have
to reflect bargaining power of the several agencies represented,
instead of abstract considerations of national security. The
various agencies can put their cards on the table, but that does
not change the weight the holders of them command, and “‘it is
doubtful whether any magical institution can be devised that will,
for example, transform the Secretary of State’s cards into aces.”’”
The handicap of the State Department is that it is the orphan
child among the great administrative agencies of the Federal
government. No matter which political party is in power, it is
under attack while the other departments are usually relatively
immune. It is “the one major administrative division that has no
21 John P. Roche and Murray S. Stedman, Jr., The Dynamics of Democratic
Government (1954), p. 394.
2 Ibid., p. 395.
The President as Chief Diplomat + 261
constituency, no constellation of interest groups to look after its
interests in the way the Farm Bureau protects the Department of
Agriculture. When an appropriation is cut by Congress the pro-
tests pour in from indignant farmers.”** But the Department of
State has no farmers. Under both Truman and Eisenhower Secre-
taries of State Acheson and Dulles in turn became sitting ducks
for congressional and public marksmanship without a single
powerful interest group ready to fly to their defense. As a conse-
quence the prestige of the Department of State declined in the
very era of the Cold War when it most of all needed increased
prestige and power, and its essential functions were transferred to
the Economic Co-operation Administration, which administered
the Marshall Plan aid, to the Mutual Security Agency, now the
Foreign Operations Administration, which handles both military
and economic aid, and even to the Department of Defense, which
has a powerful constituency that can give its officers support and
protection while an official of the State Department is “fair game
for any Congressman seeking notoriety.” “Gradually the State
Department has been stripped of its operating functions and left
with the hopeless job of formulating policy without being in a
position to enforce its decision.”’* In the play of social forces it
is apparently the victim of a process of reverse natural selection.’
23 Ibid., p. 80. Italics mine. W. E. B.
21 Ibid., p. 386.
25 Henry Adams, distressed by the frustrating experiences of his friend John
Hay as Secretary of State under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore
Roosevelt at the turn of the present century, dipped his pen in vitriol and wrote:
“The Secretary of State exists only to recognize the existence of a world which
Congress repudiates whenever it can; of bargains which Congress distrusts and
tries to turn to its advantage or to reject. Since the first day the Senate existed,
it has always intrigued against the Secretary of State whenever the Secretary has
been obliged to extend his functions beyond the appointment of Consuls in
Senators’ service.” The Education of Henry Adams (1931), p. 422.
* XIII
The Vice-Presidency and
Succession to the Presidency
* THE VICE-PRESIDENCY appears to have
crept into the Constitution with a curious casualness. Its first
mention therein is in the provision that the vice-president shall
preside over the Senate and, when necessary, vote to break a tie,
but there is no intimation of just how such an office came to be.
So it pops up here and there in our fundamental instrument with
a happy-go-lucky nonchalance as if it were just something to be
taken for granted. The legislative power “shall be vested in a
Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and
House of Representatives,” “the executive power shall be vested
in a President of the United States,” and “the judicial power...
shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts
as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish,” but
nowhere is there any specific authorization of the vice-presidency.
It has all the appearance of having been an afterthought of the
framers, and such indeed it was.
The problem of the creation of the office of vice-president did
not arise until the Constitutional Convention had almost com-
pleted its deliberations. The seventh resolution of the so-called
Virginia Plan, which practically provided the initial agenda of
the Convention, proposed “‘that a national executive be instituted
262
Vice-Presidency, Succession to the Presidency * 263
to be chosen by the National Legislature.”: No less than five times
did the Convention vote in favor of election of the executive by
the legislature, that is, by Congress, before finally rejecting that
method.? The point to be noted is that as long as the Convention
adhered to the election of the president by Congress, no distinct
stand-by officer to serve when necessary in his stead, such as the
vice-president, was made necessary by the Constitution.
The tenth article of the preliminary draft of the Constitution
submitted by the Committee of Detail on August 6 provided:
The Executive Power of the United States shall be vested in a
single person ... . He shall be elected by the Legislature. He
shall hold his office during a term of seven years; but shall not
be elected a second time. . . . He shall be removed from his of-
fice on impeachment by the House, and conviction in the Su-
preme Court, of treason, bribery or corruption. In case of re-
moval as aforesaid, death, resignation, or disability to discharge
the powers and duties of his office, the President of the Senate
shall exercise those powers, until another President of the Unit-
ed States be chosen, or until the disability of the President be
removed.:
Clearly this arrangement required no vice-president. The Senate
could not function without a president so that it would have been
easy virtually always to have available the one to act as president
until Congress, either in regular or special session, could elect a
president.
This method of electing the president was abandoned by the
Committee of Eleven, and two weeks before adjournment they
astonished the delegates with their substitution, which was the
proposal of what has come to be called the Electoral College. It
provided that the president “‘shall hold his office during the term
1C. C. Tansill (ed.), Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the American
Union, 69th Cong., Ist Sess., House Document, No. 398, p. 117.
2 Max Farrand, “Compromises of the Constitution,” American Historical
Review, 1x (1904), 479 ff.
3C. C. Tansill, op. cit. (above, Chap. xii, note 1), pp. 478, 479.
264 * The Man inthe White House
of four years, and together with the Vice President, chosen for the
same term, be elected as follows: Each state shall appoint in such
manner as the legislature may direct, a number of electors, equal
to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the
State may be entitled in the Congress.” It was provided that these
electors, meeting in their respective states, would vote by ballot
for two persons without designation of the office for which each
was intended. When these ballots had been assembled and
counted before a joint session of the two houses of Congress, the
one receiving the greatest number of votes would be president if
such number was a majority of the whole number of votes. The
person having the next greatest number of votes would be vice-
president.‘
The history of the vice-presidency since the Constitutional Con-
vention reveals a succession of phenomena suggestive of biological
evolution. The germ of the office is to be found in the lieutenant
governor of the English colonies. The royal governor, appointed
by the king, was sometimes little more than a royal pensioner who
remained in England enjoying the emoluments of the office while
a lieutenant governor, present in the colony, performed the duties
of the office. When the English colonies, in the 1770’s, became
American states, the office carried over, and in four states that
gave their chief executive the title of president his lieutenant
became vice-president, and this title was adopted by the framers
of the Constitution. “The exact prototype of the office of Vice
President is to be found in that of the lieutenant governor of New
York (in 1787). He was to preside in the Senate, without a vote,
except in case of a tie, was to succeed the governor, when succes-
sion was necessary, and was to be succeeded by the President pro
tempore of the Senate.”
Nothing did more to ensure the high quality of our earliest vice-
presidents than the provision of the framers that each presidential
4 Ibid., p. 660.
5 Alexander Johnson, “What the Federal Constitution Owes to the Constitutions
of the Several States,” New Princeton Review, September, 1887.
Vice-Presidency, Succession to the Presidency * 265
elector was to vote for two persons without designating the office
for which either ballot was to count. Since, in this blind voting,
either ballot might contribute to the election of a president, the
elector dared not cast either one for a second-rater. The effect of
making the runner-up for the presidency the vice-president had
the effect of starting off the vice-presidency with incumbents of
very high quality—indeed the office got off to a fine start. In
electing John Adams the first Vice-President the system selected
probably the second ablest statesman in the country at that time,
Thomas Jefferson then being still in France. When the third
election promoted Adams to the presidency, Jefferson, receiving
the next highest vote of the Electoral College, became Adams’
Vice-President. But political parties were getting pretty well es-
tablished by this time with the consequence that in 1800 every Re-
publican elector cast one vote for Jefferson and the other for Burr
with a resulting tie resolved eventually in the balloting of the House
of Representatives by electing Jefferson President and leaving the
vice-presidency to Burr. By this time the precedents made each
vice-president heir-apparent to the presidency. When Aaron Burr
in 1800 obtained endorsement of his candidacy for Vice-President
by the New York legislature, it must have been with the confident
expectation that election to that office, following the established
precedent, would make him in due course the successor of Jeffer-
son in the presidency.’
In electing to the vice-presidency Adams, Jefferson, and Burr,
the Electoral College, functioning as the framers intended, had
chosen men of presidential caliber. It can be said that during the
vice-presidency of Burr the office had a high prestige it was not to
attain again for a century and a quarter. Whatever else can be said
of Burr, he served as President of the Senate with exemplary
propriety. At the end of his presiding over the impeachment trial
€ American Historical Review, vu (1903), 512.
266 + The Man in the White House
of Associate Justice Samuel Chase of the Supreme Court his
bitterest opponents commended his rulings. Following his im-
pressive valedictory address (at the end of his term), which
reduced some of the senators to tears, the Senate gave him a vote
of appreciation for the “impartiality, dignity, and ability with
which he had presided over their deliberations.’”
Because the blind voting for two persons without designation of
the office for which each ballot was intended led to the tie vote of
1800 and could have led to an indefinite number of similar ties
in future presidential elections, the Twelfth Amendment to the
Constitution was adopted. This required the presidential electors
to indicate which office each ballot was intended for. The conse-
quence was almost disastrous to the quality of later incumbents
and to the prestige of the vice-presidency through the nineteenth
century. It stopped promptly the established custom of promotion
of vice-presidents to the presidency. Since 1800 only one Vice-
President, Martin Van Buren, has succeeded directly by election to
the presidency. Nor was the effect of the Twelfth Amendment on
the vice-presidency unforeseen when its adoption was pending.
For example, as early as 1802 Gouverneur Morris, an active
framer of the Constitution, warned that separate balloting for the
two offices as such would make the vice-presidential nomination a
“bait to catch state gudgeons’’—that is, an office to be obtained
without skill or merit. Never was a shrewder or more accurate
prophecy made by an American statesman. Political parties
promptly began nominating vice-presidential candidates selected
for no other purpose than to capture the electoral votes of pivotal
states, which is precisely what Morris meant by “state gudgeons.”’
The presidential election of 1804, only a matter of weeks after
the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment had been proclaimed,
revealed its almost catastrophic effect on the vice-presidency. The
exigency of party politics brought to that office George Clinton,
than whom ‘‘a worse choice...could scarcely have been made,”
7Isaac J. Cox, “Aaron Burr,” Dictionary of American Biography, mi, 317.
Vice-Presidency, Succession to the Presidency * 267
according to Senator John Quincy Adams. So ignorant was he of
parliamentary law that the senators were relieved when he was
absent, and absenteeism of the Vice-President came to be almost
habitual.: Though Clinton’s faculties were quite evidently failing,
so inconsequential was the office now considered that he was even
renominated and served during Madison’s presidency until he
died at the age of seventy-three. Elbridge Gerry was elected Vice-
President in 1812 and began presiding over the Senate frail in
health and in his seventieth year. The vice-presidency had become
a refuge for aged and ailing statesmen too old for the presidency.
Daniel Tompkins, the next Vice-President, was simply absent
from his post most of his four-year term.
In 1824 an unusual set of circumstances elevated to the vice-
presidency the first incumbent of presidential caliber in almost a
quarter of a century. The managers of Andrew Jackson’s presi-
dential candidacy needed to dispose of his strong southern com-
petitor, John C. Calhoun. Jackson, aged sixty-one, kept insisting
that he was a very old man, in poor health, and not expecting to
live very long. He was persuaded to let it be rumored that he
practically had one foot in the grave and in no case would con-
sider serving more than a single term. Under such circumstances
the vice-presidency proved effective bait for Calhoun. So Calhoun
was elected Vice-President, although Jackson was not elected
President until four years later when Calhoun was re-elected Vice-
President, to be followed by Martin Van Buren. Next came John
Tyler, the first Vice-President to succeed to the presidency.
It fell to the first Vice-President, John Adams, to set the pattern
of the office’s chief function, that of presiding over the Senate.
In the absence of an elaborate set of rules, Adams exerted a con-
trol over the proceedings of the Senate that its later rules made
impossible.» He broke twenty-nine ties, the record to this day.
Thus he had the opportunity to cast the vote deciding the
8 See Irving G. Williams, The Rise of the Vice Presidency (1956), pp. 32-34.
? Edward S. Corwin, The President, Office and Powers (1957), pp. 60, 61.
268 * The Man in the White House
president’s power of removal of his appointees without consent of
the Senate, commercial reprisals on Great Britain, neutrality, and
Hamilton’s financial policies.'° Vice-President Jefferson distin-
guished himself by preparing his Manual of Parliamentary
Practice for guidance in presiding over the Senate. Since the vice-
president was inevitably the runner-up in the balloting of the
Electoral College before adoption of the Twelfth Amendment, he
tended to become an opposition leader, and Jefferson was an out-
standing critic of Adams’ administration as indeed Burr was of
Jefferson’s administration. Calhoun’s rulings in 1826 that the vice-
president could not call a senator to order set a precedent tending
toward the Senate’s present-day individualism." Moreover,
despite the Twelfth Amendment’s insuring that president and
vice-president belong to the same party, Jackson’s antinullification
policy converted Calhoun into a critic of the administration.
Calhoun’s resignation to become a Senator did not lift the prestige
of the vice-presidency, since it implied that a seat on the floor was
more significant than presiding over the Senate.
The death of President Harrison in 1841, a month after his
inauguration, and the succession of John Tyler mark the greatest
landmark in the history of the vice-presidency. During the first
fifty-two years under the Constitution there had been no vacancy
in the presidency, and the public seemed to assume that there
never would be. Immediately upon Harrison’s death the five
Cabinet members announced the President’s death and dispatched
Fletcher Webster with a message to Williamsburg, Virginia,
addressed to “John Tyler, Vice President of the United States.”
Returning to Washington, John Tyler was administered the presi-
dential oath only fifty-three hours after the death of Harrison.
The preponderance of evidence seems to indicate that giving
Tyler the presidential oath was one of the major errors of our
10 Worthington Chauncey Ford, “John Adams,” Dictionary of American
Biography, 1,717.
"E, S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers (1957), p. 61.
'2 James D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents (1927), 1v, 22, 23.
Vice-Presidency, Succession to the Presidency * 269
constitutional history. Ex-President John Quincy Adams, then a
Representative in Congress, confided to his diary his dissent to
this succession with the entry that Vice-President John Tyler
“styled himself President of the United States and not Vice-Presi-
dent, acting as President, in direct violation both of the grammar
and context of the Constitution which confers upon the Vice-Pres-
ident on the decease of the President, not the office but the powers
and duties of the office.”* The ambiguity in the Constitution from
which the controversy derives was due to an imperfect merging of
two Convention resolutions by the Committee of Style of the Con-
stitutional Convention. One resolution provided that in case of a
vacancy in the office of president or his “inability to discharge the
powers and duties of his office the Vice President shall exercise
those powers and duties until another be chosen or until the in-
ability of the President be removed.”! The other resolution
authorized Congress to “‘declare by law what officer...shall act
as President in case of vacancy in both the presidency and the vice
presidency or the inability of both to perform the duties of the
office of President.” It is crystal clear that both resolutions in-
tended that no one was ever to be president who had not been
elected to that office but others might “perform the duties of the
office.” In consolidating the two resolutions the Committee of
Style produced Article Two, section one of the Constitution in
which, in case of vacancy in the office of president “or inability to
discharge the powers and duties of said office, the same shall
devolve on the vice president.” What is the antecedent of “the
same”? is the question that plagues us to this day.
Tyler took the oath as President April 6 and three days later
published his Inaugural Address,'* and began promptly to sign
official papers, “John Tyler, President of the United States.”
Whether or not the cabinet made the decision that Vice-President
Tyler should become President, they found him to be a resolute
13 Entry of April 16, 1841.
14 Max Farrand, The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (1911), 1, 575.
18 Ibid., 573.
16 Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1v, 36-39.
270 * The Man inthe White House
incumbent. Tyler’s son Robert related that when his father con-
fronted the Cabinet at the first meeting following Harrison’s
death, the Secretary of State, Webster, said, “Mr. President, I
suppose you intend to carry out the ideas and customs of your
predecessor, and that this administration, inaugurated by Presi-
dent Harrison, will continue in the same line of policy.” Seeing
that Tyler assented, Mr. Webster continued, “Mr. President, it
was the custom of our cabinet meetings of President Harrison that
he should preside over them. All measures relating to the adminis-
tration were to be brought before the Cabinet and their settlement
was to be decided by a majority vote, each member of the Cabinet
having but one vote.” To Webster’s suggestion Tyler replied to
the effect that he could never consent to being dictated to. “I am
President,” said he, “and I shall be held responsible for my
administration.” These are by no means sentiments of an acting
president.
Some contemporary newspapers insisted that Tyler was only
acting President.'* However, the controversy subsided, and even
John Quincy Adams was soon speaking of “President John Tyler.”
When, nine years after President Harrison’s death, President
Taylor died, his Cabinet communicated the information to Vice-
President Fillmore by a note addressed to the “President of the
United States,” and Fillmore took the presidential oath the fol-
lowing day before a joint session of the two houses of Congress.
Senator Webster introduced the resolution providing for the
administration of the oath to Fillmore as President. Professor
Ruth Silva found no evidence of objections to this procedure in
either house and considered it significant that the resolution
passed unanimously." Although the bitter critics of President
Andrew Johnson persistently referred to him as merely “Acting
President,” their articles of impeachment arraigned him as
Y John Tyler, Jr., quoted by John Fiske in J. G. Wilson, The Presidents of the
United States (4 vols., 1914), n, 73 n.
18 See Ruth Silva, Presidential Succession (1951), pp. 18, 19.
19 Ibid., p. 25.
Vice-Presidency, Succession to the Presidency + 271
President of the United States. The usage had settled down into
firmly established constitutional law.
From 1840 to the end of the century it seemed to be impossible
for the American people to learn from experience the danger of
treating the vice-presidency as “bait to catch state gudgeons.”
Tyler, who never was a genuine Whig but rather an anti-Jackson
Democrat, had been put on the ticket with Harrison to gather
votes, and his nearly four years as President was a continuous war
with Whig Congresses. Fillmore belonged to the conservative
wing of the Whig party, and his succession to the presidency
brought prompt reversal of presidential policies as to the pending
Compromise of 1850. Andrew Johnson was a Union Democrat
whom Lincoln selected to be his running mate in 1864 as pure
campaign strategy. In 1880 Chester A. Arthur was nominated to
placate the Stalwarts or conservative Republicans, who were dis-
gruntled over Garfield’s nomination. Even today it still remains to
be seen whether the American people have yet learned the serious
responsibility resting upon them to select for vice-president candi-
dates who have every qualification requisite in a president of the
United States. How far this has been missed is evident from the
fact that very few of our vice-presidents have had much else to
distinguish them than that they were once incumbents of the office
or succeeded from it to the presidency. Even to the reasonably
well-informed citizen the role of vice-presidents has the semblance
of a list of almost total strangers.
In spite of the serious indifference of party management and of
the electorate to the importance of the vice-presidency, the turn of
the present century marked the end of an era. President McKinley’s
first Vice-President, Garret A. Hobart, came to be called the
“assistant President,” since McKinley frequently consulted him
on affairs of state, and he presided over the Senate with such
satisfaction that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge declared that he had
“restored the Vice Presidency to its proper position.” An
20 Congressional Record, 59th Cong., Ist Sess., p. 743.
272 + The Man in the White House
important factor in the change of the vice-presidency in the pre-
sent century has been the personality of the incumbents of the
office. Contrasting with the frequent nonentities who were vice-
presidents in the nineteenth century are such twentieth-century
notables as Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas R. Marshall, Calvin
Coolidge, Charles Dawes, John Garner, Harry Truman, and
Richard Nixon. Theodore Roosevelt had no opportunity to dis-
tinguish himself as Vice-President, but he did manage to break
the hex that had hitherto prevented any vice-president succeeding
to the presidency from getting elected president and thereby
serving a second term.
Woodrow Wilson’s two-term Vice-President, Thomas R.
Marshall, was the first in that office in eighty-eight years to be re-
elected. He mastered the rules of the Senate and distinguished
himself at first as an impartial moderator until he fell under
criticism for not using his office to promote administration
policies. By Wilson’s second term he functioned as a party man
and thereby practically initiated the present-day vice-president’s
function as the president’s principal liaison with the Senate. He
presided at Cabinet meetings while Wilson was at the Paris Peace
Conference. His most trying experience was during Wilson’s long
illness, when he was pressured to assume the duties of the presi-
dency, which he resolutely refused to do. Marshall was probably
the most popular of all the vice-presidents.
Vice-President Coolidge sat in the Cabinet meetings of Presi-
dent Harding at the President’s request and consequently when
Harding died assumed the duties of the presidency familiar with
the administration’s plans. We have William Allen White’s judg-
ment that Coolidge “came out of the Cabinet sessions a well
equipped man for the job Fate held in store for him.”» He was
a competent presiding officer of the Senate, where he ‘“‘demon-
strated the power of the chair by planned absence and passivity
rather than by affirmative action.” Thus, after agreeing to
21 Calvin Coolidge, The Man Who is President (1925), pp. 114, 115.
22 Irvin G. Williams, The Rise of the Vice Presidency (1956), p. 125.
Vice-Presidency, Succession to the Presidency * 273
recognize a certain Senator to introduce a farm-relief measure, he
deliberately left the Chamber at the critical moment after calling
to the chair one who refused to recognize the agreed-upon Senator.
No wonder Coolidge is on record as declaring that the vice-
president’s power to recognize “often means that he decides what
business is to be taken up and who is to have the floor at a specific
time for debate.” He had no sympathy with agriculture.
Coolidge’s Vice-President, Charles A. Dawes, got off to a bad
start by lecturing the senators on their archaic rules only to see
filibustering go on as usual. Then, accepting the inevitable, he
settled down to presiding so satisfactorily as to win the respect and
confidence of the Senate. Coolidge was unable to persuade Dawes
to follow his own precedent of sitting in with the President’s
Cabinet. Dawes provided no legislative liaison whatever for
Coolidge but, on the contrary, proceeded to promote whatever
legislation he chose regardless of the President. Thus he facilitated
passage of the McNary-Haugen Bill for farm relief which anti-
agrarian President Coolidge knocked out with a vigorous veto
message. No wonder Coolidge felt impelled to comment that ‘‘the
President of the Senate can and does exercise a good deal of
influence over its deliberations.” Dawes’s successor, Vice-Presi-
dent Charles Curtis, had stood up in the convention that nomi-
nated Herbert Hoover and spoken against his nomination on the
ground of his doubtful Republican party affiliation. He could con-
sequently provide no legislative liaison and was in fact the last
Vice-President nominated without attention to his acceptability as
running mate of the presidential candidate.
Franklin Roosevelt is responsible for initiating the modern
vice-presidency. Vice-President John N. Garner had been Speaker
of the House of Representatives and as President of the Senate he
was in a position to be the most expert co-ordinator of the legis-
lative functions of president and Congress in our history. He was
adept in dealing with House leaders, and in the Senate he could
23 Ibid., p. 125,
274 * The Man in the White House
call someone to the chair while he lobbied on the floor. He would
“wander around the Senate during a zig zaggy debate... and sit
down in a seat next to a wavering Senator at exactly the right time
to come up with that Senator’s vote on the subsequent roll call.’
During the “hundred days” of the New Deal era he would counsel
a freshman Congressman: “...the South has been mighty proud
to have a Democratic President. They want you to support him
...to yield something....If I were you I would vote with the
President on this and everything else I could.... You are young
enough to be my son If I had to campaign I would stake my
chances on supporting the President.’’*» There were times when
President Roosevelt would even telephone Garner at his Texas
home seeking his advice. But in the end when Garner broke with
the President on the New Deal, he dragged his feet as President
of the Senate slowing down if not resisting administration
measures.
That leadership of the vice-president depends very much upon
personality was demonstrated by the experience of Franklin
Roosevelt’s second Vice-President, Henry Wallace. In contrast
with Garner, Wallace and the senators are said to have been
scarcely acquainted with each other even at the end of his four
years of presiding over the Senate. The vice-presidency stood still
if it did not retrograde during Wallace’s term. So indifferent was
he said to be that Jesse Jones, though scarcely an unbiased wit-
ness, swore that Wallace “usually dozed ...often sleeping fifteen
or twenty minutes at a stretch.” After Wallace, senators were
chosen as vice-presidents partly with a view to their functioning
as legislative liaison for the president. Vice-President Wallace was
far less inept in the diplomatic and administrative duties assigned
to him by President Roosevelt during his vice-presidency than in
his constitutional function of presiding over the Senate.
24 Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas: A Personal History (1948), p. 229,
25 Ibid., pp. 180-88.
26 Quoted by Irving Williams, The American Vice Presidency (1954), p. 32.
Vice-Presidency, Succession to the Presidency + 275
The weakness of Vice-President Wallace as legislative liaison is
believed to have been a factor in the turn to the Senate for the next
Vice-President, Harry S. Truman. Three vice-presidents in succes-
sion—Truman, Barkley, and Nixon—have come from the Senate.
Moreover, Senator Nixon was elected Vice-President in 1952 in
competition with Senator John Sparkman, the Democratic candi-
date for the office. In 1956 Vice-President Nixon was pitted
against Senator Estes Kefauver, who won his candidacy in the
Democratic convention by a breath-taking victory for that nomi-
nation over Senator John Kennedy. For the time being the Senate
has become the recruiting ground for vice-presidents.
No vice-president demonstrated more promptly his competence
as liaison between president and Senate than Harry Truman. No
sooner had he been inaugurated as Vice-President than there fell
to him the almost impossible job of getting the Senate to confirm
President Roosevelt’s nomination of Henry Wallace as Secretary
of Commerce. Only once in more than a century had the Senate
broken the well-established usage of confirming a president’s
nomination of a member of his official family and that was when
Vice-President Dawes was awakened from a nap too late and did
not reach the Capitol in time to break the tie that would have
confirmed President Coolidge’s nomination of Charles B. Warren
as Attorney General. As it was, Vice-President Truman overcame
the intense antipathy of the senators to Wallace and persuaded
them by personal appeal to his recent colleagues to confirm the
nomination. As Jesse Jones put it, “Truman . . . lobbied among
the Senators. . . . Otherwise he [Wallace] would not have been
confirmed.”’”
Personality, combined with rich experience in both houses of
Congress, made Truman’s Vice-President, Aiben Barkley, seem
something like the realization of an ideal with respect to the office.
Evidently the era of nonentities in the office was becoming ancient
27 Jesse H. Jones with Edward Angly, Fifty Billion Dollars: My Thirteen Years
with the R. F. C. (1951), p. 510.
276 * The Man in the White House
history. Never had there been a pair that got along so well in
office, thought President Truman in 1951. In 1949 upon Truman’s
recommendation the vice-president was made a permanent mem-
ber of the National Security Council, whereupon that office
acquired its first statutory duties. However, Truman kept the N.
S. C. within bounds, fearful, it seems, that it might develop into a
supercabinet for supervising other agencies. The vice-president
through membership of the council became party to the most
secret affairs of state and was obligated to participate in the
formulation of policies of national defense and indeed of all the
activities of American policy. No longer did the vice-presidency
outside the Senate depend upon mere custom and the caprice of
the president.
The vice-presidency of Richard Nixon marked the culmination
of a trend in the office. From the day of his inauguration he
became the busiest of all our vice-presidents, bearing readily the
multifarious responsibilities assigned him by President Eisenhower.
Never was an amateur politician president more fortunate than
Eisenhower in having a trusted expert at hand to brief him on the
mysteries of doings at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and
at the same time to serve as legislative liaison. The death of
Senator Taft in the middle of Eisenhower’s first year as President
increased his dependence on Nixon. The Vice-President proved a
good administration lobbyist in the Senate as, from time to time,
he called someone to the chair and circulated among the senators.
He became a member of the Big Four, a group consisting of the
Vice-President, the Speaker of the House, and the majority leaders
of the House and of the Senate, who conferred with the President
on administration bills.
When President Eisenhower’s tax program was threatened in
the congressional election year of 1954 by the Democrats’ strategy
of proposing to increase the income-tax exemption for all tax-
payers, the President decided on an all-out opposition. To Vice-
President Nixon was assigned the job of reasoning with
28 H, Truman, Years of Trial and Hope (1955), p. 60.
Vice-Presidency, Succession to the Presidency * 277
sixty key Republican Representatives from close Congressional
districts . . .. Nixon warned that it was up to the Republicans
in the House to back up the President.... He Knew, Nixon
said, how tough it was to stand up to the Democrats on such an
issue in an election year. But it was often good politics to fight
on a seemingly unpopular side of an issue expecially if the
voters sensed in their hearts that it was the right side... . Those
who heard Nixon were much impressed.”
Young Vice-President Nixon was practically catapulted into a
key position in the Eisenhower administration. Despite his youth
he was probably the most adept politician in the Republican party
not excepting the veteran Senator Taft. Someone was needed to
explain the black magic of politics to the raw amateurs in the
Eisenhower team, particularly the Cabinet of businessmen. “Get
to know personally and promptly the key committeemen for your
unit,” he advised. “Don’t take with you, or send to represent you
at the Capitol aides prominently associated with the Truman
Administration. If you get a formal tough letter from a Member
of Congress (and try to prevent such a situation from arising)
answer it verbally and in a very friendly way.” There never was
a president’s Cabinet that got sounder advice or needed it more.
On the other hand the Vice-President “smoothed ruffled congres-
sional feathers” when businessmen officials acted maladroitly. The
death of Senator Taft in August, 1953 increased the importance of
Nixon as a mediator between congressmen and the amateurs
toward the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
It was indicative of the new look of the vice-presidency when
Nixon remarked that presiding over the Senate required only
about 10 per cent of his time. By having him frequently preside
over the Cabinet and the National Security Council, President
Eisenhower unconsciously gave the once-neglected vice-presidency
a status superior to both Secretary of State and Secretary of
29 Joseph and Stewart Alsop, “Matter of Fact,” New York Herald Tribune,
March 8, 1954. Quoted by Irving G. Williams, The Rise of the Vice Presidency
(1956), p. 23.
3 Irving G. Williams, The Rise of the Vice Presidency (1956), p. 247.
278 + The Man in the White House
Defense. No wonder Nixon’s remarks came to be considered as
representing administration’s policies. He even sent up a trial
balloon now and then as when he indicated at a news conference
that armed intervention by the United States might be required
in the Indo-China crisis. Unless there is a reversal of the trend,
the time need never come again when a vice-president will succeed
to the presidency unfamiliar with his new duties. The vice-presi-
dency was at long last providing an apprenticeship for the
presidency.
President Franklin Roosevelt initiated the vice-president into
the field of diplomacy. In 1936 John N. Garner was sent as a sort
of good-will ambassador at the head of a senatorial delegation to
the inauguration of Manuel Quezon, the first Philippine President,
and to Mexico representing the President at the dedication of
Laredo Bridge on the Inter-American Highway. Vice-President
Wallace was sent on a high diplomatic mission to China from
which he returned with some decisions and recommendations
that shaped the controversial China policy. Wallace, who spoke
Spanish, was sent repeatedly to South America, where he became
more popular than at home. Vice-President Barkley flew to the
front lines in Korea, had Thanksgiving dinner with the soldiers in
1951, and had conferences at Seoul and Tokyo. Even more exten-
sive and numerous were the well-nigh habitual diplomatic mis-
sions of Vice-President Nixon, the most spectacular of which was
that of May, 1958, when he encountered riotous anti-American
demonstrations in South America that seemed to threaten his very
life. If it is objected that this is disconcerting to the State Depart-
ment, it can be pointed out that this diplomatic function of the
vice-president together with his membership on the National
Security Council are appropriate preparation in the field of
foreign relations for the stand-by president of the United States.
_At any rate it has become a firmly established usage to assign
diplomatic missions as a part of the work of the vice-president.”
31 See Williams, ibid., pp. 25, 26.
Vice-Presidency, Succession to the Presidency * 279
Certainly the time is now long past when the only duty a vice-
president is certain of having to carry out is that of presiding over
the Senate. By statute a member of the National Security Council
and by established custom even vice-chairman of the council and
of the Cabinet, he is now important in the formulation of adminis-
tration policy. In the closely divided Senate of the present day he
is a frequent voter, although in the breaking of ties his vote is only
affirmatively effective, since the tie vote defeats the matter under
consideration, which his added negative vote only emphasized.
Now that the president becomes more and more certainly the chief
legislator, it is increasingly important that the vice-president be
his legislative liaison officer. It has turned out that, in considering
what it takes to make a good vice-president, the least important
of all his qualifications are those that prepare him for the one duty
the Constitution prescribes for him while he is vice-president, that
is, his presiding over the Senate.
It was not until President Garfield had been shot by a disap-
pointed office-seeker and disabled for eighty days before his death,
that the American people became acutely aware of the most
enigmatic passage of the Constitution. The essential words of the
puzzling passage are: “In case of the . . . inability (of the Presi-
dent) to discharge the powers and duties of said office, the same
shall devolve on the Vice President.” The poignant problem is how
and by whom is the “inability” to be determined. In the perfect
babel of opinions on the passage, even by the most competent com-
mentators, no consensus has ever emerged. In the summer of 1881
Secretary of State James G. Blaine and indeed Garfield’s Cabinet
as a whole were said to have asked Vice-President Arthur to act
as President.” Arthur was deterred by the fact that he had been
nominated as Vice-President to appease the “Stalwart” faction of
the Republican party, and at the time of the assassination he was
in Albany lobbying to persuade the New York legislature to vin-
dicate by re-election the two New York senators Conkling and
32 Report in Boston Evening Transcript, August 24, 1881, cited by Ruth Silva,
Presidential Succession (1951), p. 54 n.
280 + The Man in the White House
Platt, who had resigned in protest against an appointment made
by President Garfield subject to confirmation by the Senate.
Under the extremely embarrassing circumstances Arthur bore
himself with dignity and propriety. He came to Washington
promptly, standing by for the eventuality of the President’s death,
and received daily reports from Secretary of State Blaine but made
no move to assume the duties of the presidential office. When, late
in August, Garfield seemed on the way to recovery Arthur re-
turned to his New York City home, where he remained until the
President’s death. He never saw Garfield during the President’s
inability, and, incredible as it seems, apparently no vice-president
was ever permitted to see a president at such a time before 1955.
The inherent difficulty of determining just what condition con-
stitutes the “inability” of a president “to discharge the powers
and duties of said office” has been intensified by the fact that John
Tyler, the first Vice-President, confronted with a vacancy in the
presidency, deliberately succeeded to the office of President de-
spite the almost certain intention of the framers that in such a case
the vice-president would only “‘act as President.” By the time
Garfield was invalided, the error of Tyler had been sanctified as
established constitutional usage by the succession of three vice-
presidents to vacancies in the president’s office. This usage had
created the potential corollary implication that no vice-president
could ever merely “‘act as President” but would become irrevoca-
bly president upon assuming the duties of a president even during
a temporary inability of the latter. No matter how able the dis-
placed president might later become, he would be only an ex-presi-
dent. Here is another consideration that gave pause to Vice-Presi-
dent Arthur if he was ever inclined to step into Garfield’s shoes.
When Arthur finally succeeded to the presidency, his urging upon
Congress legislation to solve the problem led to debate but not
legislation.
Wilson’s inability created a much more critical problem than
Garfield’s, whose illness was not so prolonged and came in a
period of relative calm, when Congress was not in session. Wilson’s
Vice-Presidency, Succession to the Presidency * 281
stroke occurred when he was on a tour of the country appealing
to the people to pressure Senate ratification of the Covenant of
the League of Nations and at the very time that the Senate was in
the midst of the debate on the controversial issue. In the eyes of
many the President was incapacitated in the midst of an inter-
national crisis of which he was the key personality. Since Mrs.
Wilson determined, after consulting the President’s doctor, what
matters were to be brought to the sick President’s attention, she
became a sort of de facto President—at any rate the disposition
of momentous issues depended on her judgment as to whether
they would be brought to the attention of the only person with
authority to pass judgment upon them.
Because of Wilson’s inability, twenty-eight acts of Congress,
then in session, became law due to the failure of the President to
sign them within the ten days prescribed by the Constitution. For
three weeks he passed on only one of sixteen acts presented to
him. Viscount Edward Grey spent four months in Washington
unable to see the President, whom alone the Constitution invests
with the duty of receiving representatives of foreign nations. So
secluded in fact was the President that the rumor, plausible under
such circumstances, that he was dead circulated. Another rumor
was that he was insane.*? Meanwhile Vice-President Marshall was
left in complete ignorance as to Wilson’s condition.
Under the prevailing circumstances Secretary of State Lansing
called twenty-one Cabinet meetings to keep executive business
going. This almost certainly forestalled congressional action to
establish Wilson’s inability. Only after these meetings had been
going on for four months did Wilson hear of them and then he
angrily denounced Lansing for what he had done and demanded
his resignation, which was promptly submitted. “Under our con-
stitutional law and practice, as developed hitherto,” wrote Wilson
to Lansing, “no one but the President has the right to summon the
heads of the executive departments into conference, and no one
33 See Ruth Silva, Presidential Succession (1951), pp. 58, 59.
282 * The Man inthe White House
but the President and the Congress has the right to ask their views
or the views of any one of them on any public question.”* An edi-
torial in the New York Times promptly observed, “If Congress
had accepted the theory which Mr. Wilson now proposed that the
Cabinet could do nothing without his presence, and consequently
that the government was at a standstill, Congress might have felt
it to be its duty to ascertain whether, in respect to the President,
the condition described in Article I] of the Constitution as ‘inabil-
ity to discharge the powers and duties of said office’ actually
existed.”
When President Wilson was first stricken, those nearest him
believed death near, and they refrained from informing Vice-
President Marshall lest he assume power too soon. Democrats in
Congress made no suggestion to Marshall lest it publicize the
President’s condition. Republicans did nothing, believing that the
status quo was embarrassing the Democrats. It was doubted
whether Congress had constitutional authority for action on the
matter. The language of the Constitution devolves the power
specifically on the vice-president in case of the president’s in-
ability.Marshall might, on his own volition, have assumed the
power, but he refused to do so as resolutely as Vice-President
Arthur had thirty-eight years earlier. There was even a story
published in the Christian Science Monitor that the Chief Justice
conveyed through a friend of the Vice-President the message,
“Tell Tom Marshall he can have his writ whenever he asks for it”
to which Marshall replied he would never do it in a thousand
years.» The net result of the confusion of opinion and advice in
1919 was exactly nothing, and not an inch of progress has been
made on the matter to this day.
Perhaps the shrewdest suggestion yet made is that, whenever
there is evidently inability of a president to perform his duties,
Congress pass a concurrent resolution asking the vice-president to
34 New York Times, Feb. 14, 1920.
35 Feb. 15, 1920.
36 See Ruth Silva, Presidential Succession (1951), p. 64 n.
Vice-Presidency, Succession to the Presidency * 283
act as president during the period of the president’s disability.
Fortunately a concurrent resolution does not require a president’s
signature, and no president would be available under the circum-
stance. Nor does such a resolution have the force of law but is
rather a strong expression of congressional opinion. It would how-
ever give the vice-president enormous moral support in the
decision to act, which would nevertheless have to be his decision.
The concurrent resolution could declare that the vice-president
should act as president only until the inability of the president
be removed. This would leave undisturbed the long-established
usage that the vice-president succeeds to the presidency when
there is a vacancy. Sometime the Gordian knot will have to be
cut. The concurrent resolution might be the means to the end.
On February 26, 1958, President Eisenhower revealed to the
press that he and Vice-President Nixon had arrived at a clear
“verbal” understanding as to what was to be done in case of a
temporary illness that would take the President away from his
desk. The Vice-President and the White House staff would carry
on the government so far as constitutionally possible. The Vice-
President would hold Cabinet meetings and make policy decisions
with the aid of the President’s staff. Of course everything would
still be subject to the President’s approval. This, of course, would
be only a make-shift, since the Vice-President would not possess
one iota of the President’s constitutional or statutory authority.
He would have no authoritative control of the administrative
system, since he could have none of the President’s power to
appoint and remove upon which depends executive command of
administration. The Cabinet heads would still be Eisenhower’s,
not Nixon’s, It would be Eisenhower’s staff in its entire personnel
headed by the resolute chief of staff, Sherman Adams, still
Eisenhower’s Sherman Adams, loyal to his disabled chief. What-
ever the Vice-President’s conception of foreign policy, he would
have Eisenhower’s John Foster Dulles, the titular head man of the
Cabinet, whom President Eisenhower had even pronounced one
of the greatest secretaries of state in our history. Inasmuch as the
284 + The Man inthe White House
President might recover, the Vice-President would be no more
than the shadow of a President. Even if, by some means, presum-
ably a constitutional amendment, the Vice-President could be in-
vested temporarily with all presidential powers, the uncertainty of
his tenure would impair seriously his determination and adminis-
tration of policy. In the absence of crisis we would doubtless get
by, and even in a crisis the traditional high political morality of
the American people could be counted on to help the Acting Presi-
dent. But the uncertainty of the legality of the acts of an acting
president will persist until the obscurity of the Constitution at this
point is decisively clarified.
The clause of the Constitution concerned with vacancies in the
presidency is free from all obscurity where it authorizes Congress
“to provide for the case of removal, death, resignation, or inabil-
ity, both of the President and Vice-President declaring what officer
shall then act as President, and such officer shall act accordingly,
until the disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.”
Here the Constitution permits Congress no choice but to provide
that whoever they designate can only “act as President” and not
succeed to the office unless later elected to it. Congress passed the
first law under this clause in 1792. James Madison, then a member
of the House of Representatives, had proposed that the secretary
of state be designated to act as president, but this was countered
promptly by the influence of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander
Hamilton, who tended to dominate Congress then as “prime
minister,” which he asked his friends to call him, and who wanted
no arrangement that would devolve the President’s duties upon
Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. It is significant that
Washington had been so ill with pneumonia in his first year as
President that he was not expected to recover.
This first Succession Act, as it has been somewhat erroneously
called, provided that in the case of neither president nor vice-presi-
dent being in office or able to function then the president of the
Senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives in turn
were to succeed to the duties of the president, that is, “act as
Vice-Presidency, Succession to the Presidency * 285
President.” The statute further provided that in case of a vacancy
in both these latter offices the secretary of state was to call a
special presidential election—that is, for the choosing of electors
to elect a president. The Whigs, who in 1841 contemplated im-
peachment proceedings against President Tyler, looked forward
to utilizing this provision for a special election in order to elect
a satisfactory Whig president. Concerning this first Succession
Act Edward S. Corwin has observed:
It is unlikely that Congress ever passed a more ill-considered
law. As Madison pointed out at the time it violated the principle
of separation of powers and flouted the probability that neither
the President pro tempore nor the Speaker is an ‘officer’ in the
sense of the paragraph of the Constitution. It thus contemplated
the possibility of there being nobody to exercise the powers of
the President for an indefinite period, and at the same time set
at naught, by the provision made for an interim presidential
election, the synchrony evidently contemplated by the Consti-
tution in the choice of a President with a new House of Repre-
sentatives and a new one-third of the Senate. Yet this inad-
equate enactment remained on the statute book for nearly
one hundred years becoming all the time more and more un-
workable from obsolescence.”
Time and again during the ninety-four years that the first Presi-
dential Succession Law was in force there was neither a president
pro tempore of the Senate nor a speaker of the House of Repre-
sentatives. During the invalidism of President Garfield, Vice-Presi-
dent Arthur became seriously ill while neither of the two offices,
president pro tempore of the Senate and speaker of the House,
had an incumbent. Four years later President Cleveland did not
travel to Indianapolis to attend the funeral of Vice-President
Hendricks lest something happen that might incapacitate him
when the two offices were again vacant. Almost a year later
Congress enacted the second Presidential Succession Law, which
37 E, S. Corwin (ed.), The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis
and Interpretation (1953), pp. 387, 388. Corwin’s reference to upsetting the
“synchrony” refers to the fact that a president elected by this special election
would have to be for the four-year term prescribed by the Constitution.
286 + The Man in the White House
had been on its way through the congressional mill for some time.
It provided that, in case of the disqualification of both the presi-
dent and vice-president, the members of the president’s Cabinet
should succeed to the duties of the office, that is, act as president,
following one another in the chronological order of the creation
of the executive departments of which they were the respective
heads, provided they had the qualifications for the president pre-
scribed by the Constitution. The act seemed to imply that the
Cabinet member acting as president retained his Cabinet office.
On May 9, 1945, James A. Farley in a speech delivered at
Hazelton, Pennsylvania, pointed out that the Succession Act en-
abled President Truman, in the absence of a vice-president, to
appoint his own successor, which he considered undemocratic.
This was surely not the first time this had been possible under the
sixty-year-old statute. Politically minded Farley may have left
unrevealed a partisan concern over the fact that the heir-apparent
just then, Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, was suspected
of being a Republican. At any rate, the point that the president’s
successor by statute ought to be an elected officer took hold of the
public, and President Truman sent a message to Congress re-
commending that the speaker of the House and the president pro
tempore of the Senate should in turn be made immediate success-
ors instead of the Cabinet. Congress after some time took to the
idea of one of their number rather than the members of the
Cabinet, and in 1947 Truman’s recommendation became law. The
Cabinet members follow in the order of the Act of 1886, but the
new act provides specifically that any officer succeeding to the
powers of the president must resign the office he held.
The present Succession Law revived the old question as to
whether the first two offices in the succession are offices within
the meaning of the Constitution. It also makes possible a change
of party in the presidential office in the midst of a term by the
succession of the speaker. It should be noted that the point
that the speaker is a popularly elected official is watered down
considerably by the fact that the electorate that selected him is
Vice-Presidency, Succession to the Presidency * 287
inevitably atypical, not at all analogous to the national elec-
torate. Speakers become eligible only after prolonged seniority
due to persistent election by one-party districts and are conse-
quently not intimately in touch with anything like our national
multigroup society. This raises the question as to just how im-
pressive might be the popular mandate of a speaker who succeeds
to the powers of the president. Presidents pro tempore of the
Senate have been, on the whole, rather less significant than the
speaker, while a long line of notable secretaries of state have pre-
sented a claim to statesmanship scarcely less than that of our
presidents.
* XIV
The President as
a National Symbol
* IN A FLASH of intuitive insight the late Henry
Jones Ford perceived ‘“‘that in the Presidential office as it has been
constituted since Jackson’s time, American democracy has revived
the oldest political institution of the race, the elective kingship.
It is all there: the prerecognition of the notables, and the tumultu-
ous choice of the freemen, only conformed to modern condi-
tions.”! Had he chosen to give details, Ford might have mentioned
the elaborate ritual of the inauguration, suggestive of the coro-
nation, the twenty-one-gun salute on arrival and departure of the
president, and the throngs that gather to see and hear him. A long
generation before Ford made his observation, Lincoln’s Secretary
of State, William H. Seward, had answered an inquisitive English
newspaper correspondent, “We elect a king for four years and
give him absolute power within certain limits, which after all he
can interpret for himself.’? It is all significant of a deep-seated
human longing for symbolism. However, this was not just the
work of the Founding Fathers. Their efforts were frustrated by a
long generation of resolute resistance of the Jeffersonians to the
investing of the office of president with any trace of symbolism.
1 The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898), p. 293.
2 Ibid., p. 291.
288
The President as a National Symbol + 289
Whoever has observed the behavior of Britons with respect to
their monarch will have some conception of the profound signif-
icance they attach to the “oldest political institution of the race”;
nor is this significance confined to the unthinking masses. The
English monarch is busy enough with ceremonials to kill a horse,
but at the point where the sovereign exhausted stops for the day,
the president of the United States in addition to such ceremonials
starts his practical duties. No wonder two internationally known
Oxford dons expressed to the writer their sober conviction that
the United States ought to establish a monarchy. Imperturbable
and indomitable as the British are, one can only wonder what
might be the effect of the sudden loss of the myth of royalty,
especially when incarnate in the lovely personality of Elizabeth II.
That is something we shall never know, but it is conceivable that
the blasting of London by the Luftwaffe was but a mosquito bite
in comparison. Sir Ivor Jennings writes:
Certain it is that democratic government is not merely a mat-
ter of cold reason and prosaic policies. There must be some dis-
play of colour, and there is nothing more vivid than royal purple
and imperial scarlet. During the present century, therefore, we
have placed almost intolerable burdens on the royal family.
They must not only head subscription lists and appear on State
occasions; they must, also, inspect this and that, open this and
that, lay this stone and that, and undertake a thousand other
dull tasks in a blaze of publicity. We can hardly blame Edward
VIII if he preferred to make toffee in the kitchen.»
Of course, the Queen does not have to open a baseball season
by tossing out the first ball or shake hands with interminable lines
of people. But the fact that custom has imposed upon the presi-
dent extraofficial burdens similar to those of royalty is indicative
of the symbolism of the president. By and large, he symbolizes the
American government to the American people. According to
Professor Rossiter, “The American President is the one-man
distillation of the American people just as surely as the Crown is
3 The British Constitution (1950), p. 116.
290 » The Man in the White House
of the British Commonwealth.” To William H. Taft he was “the
personal embodiment and representative of their dignity and
majesty.”’* His voice and only his can be that of the American
people whether it be Lincoln at Gettysburg or delivering the in-
comparable second inaugural. Franklin Roosevelt declaring “The
only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ was the spokesman of a
distressed nation. How many Americans proudly declared, “The
President shook this hand of mine.” President Hoover reported
that after these daily ordeals his hand would be so swollen that
for days he could not write.:
So our elective king no less than a hereditary monarch goes a
breathless ceremonial pace. He awards medals of honor to uncom-
fortable military heroes, buys the first poppy at the annual V. F.
W. sale, broadcasts the opening of the annual March of Dimes,
greets delegations of firemen, Boy Scouts, Elks, Eagles, and such,
issues the Thanksgiving Proclamation, lays a wreath on the tomb
of the Unknown Soldier even as the Queen at the base of the
Cenotaph on Whitehall on Remembrance Day, lights the White
House Christmas tree, opens distant expositions by pressing a
button at the White House, receives monarchs, foreign prime
ministers, and delegations of awestruck school children, sponsors
the Easter egg rolling on the White House lawn, to mention but
a few. Then there are addresses on this, that, and other occasions.
Nor can it be doubted that this symbolism serves to strengthen the
practical powers of the presidential office.
When Washington was inaugurated in 1789, all adult native
Americans had been subjects of George III; and they did not
suddenly, on a particular day, cease to be such subjects. The
transition was somewhat gradual. For months after Bunker Hill,
American chaplains were reverently remembering the King in
their prayers. Even as late as January, 1776, and not so many
months before the Declaration of Independence, the King’s health
4Clinton Rossiter, “The American President,” Yale Review, xxxvn (1948), 622.
5 The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, 1920-1933 (1952), p. 323.
The President as a National Symbol * 291
was still being toasted nightly in the officers’ mess presided over
by General Washington.: Fortunately there was no Un-American
Activities Committee in that day.
Nor were these professions of loyalty to the King inconsistent.
The grievances of the patriots were over ministerial policies, and
Washington was battling the “ministerial troops,” as his letters
then expressed it. So professions of loyalty to the King persisted
for nearly a year after the first shot had been fired at Lexington.
Loyalty to the King evaporated rapidly in the spring of 1776.
The shift in the attitude of patriots toward King George found
expression in a pamphlet published with perfect timing. In Thom-
as Paine’s Common Sense not only was King George denounced
with savage ferocity, but the symbolism of royalty was covered
with obloquy. The Norman Conquest as a foundation stone of
British monarchy was given a breath-taking reinterpretation.
A French bastard, landing with an armed banditti, and estab-
lishing himself king of England against the consent of the
natives, is in plain terms, a very paltry, rascally original. It
certainly hath no divinity in it....Let them promiscuously
worship the Ass and the Lion, and welcome. I shall neither copy
their humility nor disturb their devotion....The plain truth is
that English monarchy will not bear looking into.
Nearly every literate patriot read Common Sense while the ink was
still fresh, and its ideas struck a responsive chord. Thomas
Jefferson’s indictments in the Declaration of Independence were
consequently directed against the King, not Parliament.
Undoubtedly the destruction of the symbolism of the King
created a psychological vacuum. However, it scarcely mattered,
since there was then little sentiment of American nationality that
needed to be symbolized. It was state independence, not national,
that had apparently been declared. The Continental Congress was
an assembly of ambassadors lacking in prestige, and at its best a
eS. E. Morison and H. S. Commager, The Growth of the American Republic
(1937), 1, 77.
292 * The Man in the White House
congress can scarcely constitute an impressive national symbol.
When the Constitution of 1787 invested Congress with specific
legislative powers, the opponents of ratification cried out, “We
did not dethrone King George only to enthrone King Congress.”
The inauguration of President Washington, as well as the later
procedures and etiquette introduced by the Federalists, precip-
itated a controversy over appropriate symbolism of the president.
Vice-President John Adams declared, “Take away thrones and
crowns from among men and there will be an end of all dominion
and justice.’ Accordingly, while presiding over the Senate,
Adams was urging an elaborate and high-sounding title for Presi-
dent Washington and was horrified when the simple title pre-
scribed by the Constitution was retained precisely as set down.
“What,” he demanded, “will the common people of foreign
countries, what will the sailors and soldiers say, ‘George
Washington, President of the United States’? They will despise
him to all eternity.”*
In the Constitutional Convention Hamilton had avowed a pref-
erence for monarchy. Soon President Washington was being
maneuvered into something of the separateness of a monarch
under the management of public affairs by his energetic Secretary
of the Treasury. Hamilton assumed the role (secretly even the title)
of prime minister, recommended measures to Congress, and pres-
sured Congressmen to enact them, with the consequence that the
legislative program of the first administration still stands as
Hamilton’s, not Washington’s. If the precedent then set had not
been battered to bits by the opposition, the president might never
have become, as he did in the twentieth century, a combination
of king and prime minister.
Adams’ and Hamilton’s “aping of monarchy” brought about
a strong emotional reaction on the part of the inland agrarians.
The symbol-smashing French Revolution, which produced an
7 Gazette of the United States, March, 1790; quoted in V. L. Parrington, Main
Currents of American Thought (1927, 1930), 1, 311.
s James Hart, The American Presidency’in Action, 1789 (1948), p. 36.
The President as a National Symbol * 293
epidemic of Jacobin Clubs in the United States, re-enforced the
reaction. Jefferson coined a word “‘monocrats,” and, to the glee
of his partisans, applied it to the Federalists.» Even Washington’s
inauguration, thought Jefferson, had been “‘not at all in character
with the simplicity of republican government and looking, as if
wistfully, to those of European courts.” So when the time came
for Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801, he walked unostentatiously
from his boarding house over to the Capitol to deliver his
inaugural address to the two houses assembled in the Senate
Chamber. The Puritans had not been one whit more determined to
eradicate popish symbols from their churches than were the
Jeffersonians to divest the president of the trappings of royalty.
Deprived of its symbolism, the office of president was to be
nothing more than a purely utilitarian agency of government,
merely a means to an end.
During the twenty-four years of the Virginia dynasty, not only
did the president lose his symbolism, but the very prestige of the
office sank to its nadir. Congress took charge of the executive,
nominating the candidate for the presidency by congressional
caucus, and, under the then prevailing one-party system, nomi-
nation was equivalent to election. Madison, for example, was so
completely the prisoner of Congress that he could scarcely have
been less a factor in the government if he had spent the eight years
of his presidency at home on his plantation.
It was the upsurge of the recently enfranchised masses and their
election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency as their champion
in 1828 that terminated the purely utilitarian conception of the
presidency and made the president peculiarly the symbol of the
national government. State legislatures had in the main been
selecting presidential electors, but this ceased in 1828, and Jackson
was practically the first popularly elected President. His unequi-
vocal denunciation of nullification in 1833 and readiness to use
%See The Oxford Dictionary and Jefferson’s Writings (1859), 11, 494.
10 See R. V. Harlow, The History of Legislative Methods in the Period before
1825 (1917), p. 196.
294 « The Man in the White House
armed force in order to “take care that the laws be faithfully
executed” enhanced the prestige and symbolism of the presidency.
As a “tribune of the people” Jackson used the veto against special
privilege such as the bill to renew the Bank charter in 1832. To
this day, a presidential veto tends to strengthen the prestige of a
president. The idea of the tribuneship persists, no matter what
congressmen may think of it.
The acclaim with which President Andrew Jackson was greeted
by the populace heralded a revival of the symbolism of the presi-
dency. His journey to New England in 1833 illustrates the point.
Entering Philadelphia on a white charger, provided for the
occasion, the aging warrior accepted the obeisances of the crowds
for five hours as they filled streets, windows, and roofs, and the
reception continued for four days and nights. From New York
City Jackson wrote, “I have bowed to upward of two hundred
thousand people today.” His passage through Connecticut was a
continuous ovation. “Across Rhode Island cannon boomed from
town to town as if New England were a battle line,” and recep-
tions overlapped each other. In Boston he was “received with all
the show of honor which we paid to Lafayette,” wrote an aston-
ished citizen. And Harvard outdid itself in conferring upon
Jackson the degree of Doctor of Laws.
A generation after Jackson’s election, so exalted had the presi-
dent become as the symbol of the Federal government that the
symbolism became a major factor in the secession movement. Se-
cession could scarcely have been based on a cool calculation of the
results of the election of 1860. The fact is generally overlooked
that, although the Republicans had elected Lincoln (with a pop-
ular plurality of about 40 per cent), they had nevertheless lost
both houses of Congress. They had only 31 of the 66 senators and
105 of the 237 representatives. Had the southern senators and
representatives retained their seats, Lincoln could not have made
one important appointment—not even of his Cabinet members—
n Marquis James, The Life of Andrew Jackson (1938), pp. 639-44.
The President as a National Symbol * 295
with the consent of only Republican senators. When the southern
senators and representatives walked out, they turned the govern-
ment over to Lincoln and thus paid an unconscious tribute to the
symbolism and authority that had become attached to the office
of president.
Day after day English newspapers and periodicals must feed the
insatiable public appetite for pictures of the Queen and her family.
This has its counterpart in the president and his family. Since the
first Roosevelt, the White House family has belonged to the nation
as an essential element in the symbol of the presidency. Theodore
Roosevelt’s children running bareheaded out of the White House
on their way to school, Quentin riding his pony into the White
House and getting it on the elevator, the vivacious young Alice
keeping Washington agog with her quips and her unconventional
and unpredictable ways, were all part of the first Roosevelt
regime. The death of Coolidge’s son touched the heart of every
American parent. As the barometer registering Truman’s popu-
larity struck a new low, one wondered how much more it might
have fallen if Bess and Margaret had been out of the picture. How
many points of Ike’s score depend on Mamie? What might have
happened to the presidency if Chief Justice Warren and his bevy
of daughters had moved into the White House? The president’s
family is part of the national symbol that constitutes the presidency.
Never was the symbolism of the presidency more dramatically
demonstrated than in the sudden translation of diffident Vice-
President Harry S. Truman into President, Chief Executive, and
Commander-in-Chief in the command of our far-flung battle line
in a global war.
Harry, as the clock under the portrait of Woodrow Wilson in
the Cabinet room passed 7:09, suddenly ceased to be ‘Harry’
and became Mr. President. Then within the time it takes for the
clicking of cameras, he was the almost superstitiously honored
man symbol of America who can still after our pattern of
reverence, be described in the native argument in the American
language as one angry truck driver might describe another....
296 * The Man inthe White House
He was not Harry Truman any longer; he never would be again.
The prison of the presidency dropped around him. The Secret
Service scurried beside him as he moved. The personages shook
his hands and fell away.
Even the history of presidential elections emphasizes the sym-
bolism of the presidency. How often has the electorate turned to
the candidate who captivated the voters as a symbol rather than
as one eminently qualified for the difficult job? If preparation for
statesmanship by scholarship, accumulated knowledge, and long
practical political experience qualifies for the presidency, few
incumbents of the great office were more entitled to a second term
than John Quincy Adams. Instead the hysterical populace turned
to their idol General Andrew Jackson, whom Adams in a pardon-
able hyperbole declared to be “a barbarian who could... hardly
spell his own name.” There was scarcely an abler President in the
generation preceding the Civil War than Martin Van Buren, but
instead of re-electing him the still more hysterical electorate
turned to the victor of the battle of the Thames, General William
Henry Harrison. In 1848 ignoring the receptive statesmen, Clay
and Webster, the perverse electorate preferred instead one whom
the latter had pronounced “an ignorant frontier colonel,” Zachary
Taylor, the hero of Buena Vista.
How could the voters in 1869 turn so decisively from the politi-
cally experienced Governor Horatio Seymour to the utterly politi-
cally inexperienced General Grant except as he symbolized the sal-
vation of the Union? And in our own day, if he the electorate had
been thinking of political experience and demonstrated executive
competence, would it have turned so decisively from Governor
Adlai Stevenson to a general confessedly unfamiliar with politics
and compelled consequently to learn the perplexing art gradually
after inauguration? Curiously enough it is when the electorate is
most thoroughly aroused that it usually elects a symbol rather
12 Jonathan Daniels, Frontier on the Potomac (1946), pp. 9, 12, quoted by
D. W. Brogan, Politics in America (1954), p. 274.
The President as a National Symbol = 297
than a candidate distinguished by demonstrated competence for
the presidency.
If anyone asks for conclusive evidence of the symbolism of the
president, let him recall the extraordinary demonstrations of per-
sonal grief manifested by ordinary people when President Franklin
Roosevelt died. Unforgettable are the pictures of these people
with streaming tears as they looked at the passing funeral pro-
cession. It is conceivable that multitudes of Americans mourned
more profoundly the passing of President Franklin Roosevelt than
the English people did the death of King George VI.
Nor is such grief anything new. The writer can never forget how
he found his father, just after the news of McKinley’s assassi-
nation had arrived, weeping as bitterly as if he had lost a child.
So it was to others when Lincoln, Garfield, and Harding died in
office. The son who protested to his foreign-born mother Harding’s
lack of merit when he found her weeping over news of the Presi-
dent’s death got this significant response: “Ach, aber er ist doch
der President.’ Here we have the essence of the symbolism. No
matter what hard-boiled public officials and politicians may think
of such conduct, it is the feeling of the rank and file of Americans,
their emotional reaction, that determines the matter of the presi-
dent as a symbol of the nation.
13 Henry Reiff, “We Live by Symbols,” The Social Studies, xxxi1, No. 3 (1940),
103. The sentence in German can be translated, “Ah, but he is still the President.”
Bibliography
Abbott, Lawrence F. Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt. Garden
City, 1919.
Adams, George Burton. An Outline Sketch of English Constitu-
tional History. New Haven, 1918.
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (The Modern
Library). New York, 1931.
———. John Randolph. Boston, 1882.
Adams, John. Works. 10 vols., Boston, 1850-56.
Adams, J. Q., Memoirs. 12 vols. Philadelphia, 1874-79.
Angle, Paul M. The Lincoln Reader. New Brunswick, 1947.
Bailey, Stephen K., and Samuel, Howard D. Congress at Work.
New York, 1952.
Bailey, Thomas A. A Diplomatic History of the American People.
New York, 1958.
———. The Man in the Street. New York, 1948.
Baker, Ray Stannard. Woodrow Wilson, Life and Letters. 6 vols.
Garden City, 1927.
Bancroft, George. History of the United States from the Discovery
of the Continent. 6 vols. New York, 1883-85.
Basler, Roy P. Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings.
Cleveland, 1946. i
298
Bibliography * 299
Beard, Charles A. The Republic. New York, 1944.
———, and Beard, Mary. The Rise of American Civilization.
2 vols. New York, 1927.
Beer, Thomas. Hanna. New York, 1929.
Bellush, Bernard. Franklin Roosevelt, Governor of New York. New
York, 1955.
Bemis, Samuel Flagg. John Quincy Adams and the Union. New
York, 1956.
Beveridge, Albert J. Abraham Lincoln. 4 vols. Boston and New
York, 1928.
——~—. Life of John Marshall. 4 vols. Boston, 1916-19.
Binkley, Wilfred F. American Political Parties: Their Natural
History. New York, 1947.
——-——. Powers of the President. Garden City, 1937.
———. President and Congress. New York, 1947.
Bishop, J. B. Theodore Roosevelt and his Times. 2 vols. New York,
1920.
Blaine, James G. Twenty Years of Congress. 2 vols. Norwich,
1884-86.
Blair, Niles. The James. New York, 1939.
Bolles, Blair. Uncle Joe Cannon. New York, 1951.
Bowers, Claude. The Tragic Era. Boston, 1929.
Brogan, D. W. Politics in America. New York, 1954.
Brown, George Rothwell. The Leadership of Congress. Indianapolis
1922.
Browning, O. H. Diary of Orville Hicks Browning. 2 vols. Spring-
field, 1925, 1933.
Brownlow, Louis, et al. The President’s Committee on Adminis-
trative Management. United States Government Printing Office,
Washington, 1937.
Bryce, James. The American Commonwealth (Commonwealth
Edition). New York, 1908.
Burgess, John W. The Administration of President Hayes. New
York, 1916.
Busbey, L. W. Uncle Joe Cannon. New York, 1927.
Carroll, E. M., Origins of the Whig Party. Durham, N. C., 1925.
Chamberlain, Lawrence H., The President, Congress, and Legis-
lation. New York, 1946.
Cole, G. H. D. and Postgate, Raymond. The British Common
People, 1746-1938. New York, 1939.
300 + The Man in the White House
Coolidge, Calvin. Autobiography. New York, 1929.
Corwin, E. S. (editor). The Constitution of the United States:
Analysis and Interpretation. United States Government Printing
Office, Washington, 1953.
——-—. The President: Office and Powers. New York, 1957.
———. Total War and the Constitution. New York, 1947.
Corwin, E. S., and Koenig, L. W. The Presidency Today. New
York, 1956.
Croly, Herbert. Marcus Alonzo Hanna. New York, 1913.
Dana, C. A. Recollections of the Civil War. New York, 1898.
David, Paul, Moos, Malcolm, and Goldman, Ralph. Presidential
Nominating Politics. 5 vols. Baltimore, 1954.
Dawes, Charles G. A Journal of the McKinley Years. La Grange,
Ill., 1950.
Dennett, Tyler. John Hay. New York, 1933.
Dimock, G. W. Congressional Investigating Committees. Balti-
more, 1929.
Dodd, W. E. Expansion and Conflict. Boston, 1915.
Donovan, Robert J. Eisenhower: The Inside Story. New York,
1956.
Elliott, Jonathan (editor). Debates, Resolutions, and Other Pro-
ceedings in Convention on the Adoption of the Federal Consti-
tution. 6 vols. Washington, 1827-46.
Farley, James A. Jim Farley’s Story, The Roosevelt Years. New
York, 1948.
Farrand, Max. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787.
3 vols. New Haven, 1911.
Flynn, Edward J. You’re the Boss. New York, 1947.
Ford, H. J. The Rise and Growth of American Politics. New York,
1898.
———. Woodrow Wilson, the Man and his Work. New York,
1916.
Fuess, Claude M. Calvin Coolidge. Boston, 1940.
Galloway, George B. Congress at the Crossroads. New York,
1947.
Gauss, Christian. Democracy Today: An Interpretation. New
York, 1919.
Gompers, Samuel. Seventy Years of Life and Labor. 2 vols. New
York, 1925.
Goodnow, Frank J. Comparative Administrative Law. 2 vols. New
York, 1893.
Bibliography * 301
Gunther, John. Roosevelt in Retrospect: a Profile in History. New
York, 1950.
Hamilton, Alexander (H. C. Lodge, editor). Works. 12 vols. New
York, 1904.
Hamilton, John C. History of the Republic of the United States
of America as Traced in the Writings of Alexander Hamilton.
7 vols. New York, 1850-51.
Harlow, R. V. The History of Legislative Methods in the Period
before 1825. New Haven, 1917.
Hart, James. The American Presidency in Action, 1789. New York,
1948.
Hayes, Rutherford B. Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes.
(C. S. Williams, editor.) 5 vols. Columbus, 1922.
Herring, E. P. Presidential Leadership. New York, 1940.
—~~_—. Public Administration and the Public Interest. New York,
1936.
Hertz, E. The Hidden Lincoln. New York, 1940.
Hicks, John D. The American Nation. 2 vols. Boston, 1941.
Hoar, George F. Autobiography of Seventy Years. 2 vols. New
York, 1903.
Hoover, Herbert. The Challenge to Liberty. New York, 1935.
———. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, 1920-33. New York,
1952.
House, E. M. Intimate Papers. 4 vols. Boston, 1926-28.
Hull, Cordell. Memoirs. 2 vols. New York, 1948.
Hyman, Sidney. The American President. New York, 1954.
James, Marquis. The Life of Andrew Jackson. New York, 1938.
Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Williamsburg,
1782.
—-——. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. (P. L. Ford, editor.)
10 vols. New York, 1892-99.
Jennings, Ivor. The British Constitution. Cambridge, England,
1950.
Johnson, Allen. Jefferson and his Colleagues. New Haven, 1921.
Jones, Jesse H., and Angly, Edward. Fifty Billion Dollars: My
Thirteen Years with the R. F. C. New York, 1951.
Julian, G. W. Political Recollections, 1840-1872. Chicago, 1874.
Kerney, James. The Political Education of Woodrow Wilson. New
York. 1926.
Key, V. O. Southern Politics. New York, 1949.
Lane, Franklin K. The Letters of Franklin K. Lane. Boston, 1922.
302 * The Man in the White House
Laski, Harold J. The American Presidency: An Interpretation.
New York, 1940.
Latham, Earl. The Group Basis of Politics: A Study of Basing
Point Legislation. New York, 1952.
Lawrence, David. The True Story of Woodrow Wilson. New York,
1924.
Learned, H. B. The President s Cabinet. New Haven, 1912.
Lewis, W. D. The Life of Theodore Roosevelt. New York, 1919.
Link, Arthur S. Wilson: the Road to the White House. Princeton,
1947.
Luce, Robert. Legislative Problems. Boston and New York, 1935.
McBain, Howard L. The Living Constitution. New York, 1927.
McLaughlin, A. C. Constitutional History of the United States.
New York, 1935.
Maclay, William. Sketches of Debates in the First Senate. Harris-
burg, 1880.
MacMahon, Arthur W., and Millett, John D. Federal Adminis-
trators. New York, 1939.
Macy, Jesse. Political Parties in the United States, 1846-1861.
New York, 1900.
Merriam, Charles E. A History of American Political Theories.
New York, 1926.
———. Four Political Leaders. New York, 1926.
Moley, Raymond. After Seven Years. New York, 1939.
Moos, Malcolm. The Republicans. New York, 1956.
Morison, Samuel E. By Land and By Sea. New York, 1953.
———. Oxford History of the United States. 2 vols. London, 1927.
———, and Commager, H. S. The Growth of the American Re-
public. 2 vols. New York, 1937. Revised, 1950.
Morley, Felix. The Foreign Policy of the United States. New York,
1951.
Nevins, Allan. The Emergence of Lincoln. 2 vols. New York, 1951.
——W—-. Ordeal of the Union. 2 vols. New York, 1947.
Nicolay, John G., and Hay, John. Abraham Lincoln: a History.
10 vols. New York, 1890. i
———. Works of Abraham Lincoln. 10 vols. New York, 1894.
Nourse, E. G. Economics in the Public Service. New York, 1953.
Oberholtzer, E. P. History of the United States Since the Civil War.
5 vols. New York, 1917-37.
Olcott, Charles S. The Life of William McKinley. 2 vols. Boston,
1916.
Bibliography * 303
Ostrogorski, M. Democracy and the Party System. New York,
1910.
Parrington, Vernon L. Main Currents of American Thought. 3 vols.
New York, 1927, 1930.
Peck, Harry Thurston. Twenty Years of the Republic. New York,
1906.
Pringle, H. F. Theodore Roosevelt, a Biography. New York, 1931.
Putnam, G. H., and Lapsby, A. B. (editors). Complete Works of
Abraham Lincoln. New York, 1888-96.
Richardson, James D. Messages and Papers of the Presidents.
10 vols. Washington, 1927.
Rock, John P., and Stedman, Murray, S., Jr. The Dynamics of
Democratic Government. New York, 1954.
Rogers, James Grafton. World Policy and the Constitution. World
Peace Foundation, Boston, 1945.
Roosevelt, Franklin D. On Our Way. New York, 1934.
Roosevelt, Theodore. Autobiography. New York, 1913.
Rossiter, Clinton. The American Presidency. New York, 1956.
-—_——. The Supreme Court and the Commander-in-Chief. Ithaca,
1951.
Rovere, Richard H. The Eisenhower Years. New York, 1956.
Sait, Edward M. American Political Parties. New York, 1839.
Sandburg, Carl. Lincoln: the Prairie Years. 2 vols. New York,
1926.
——_—-. Lincoln: The War Years. 4 vols. New York, 1939.
Schouler, James. History of the United States Under the Consti-
tution. 6 vols. New York, 1880-1913.
Schubert, Glendon A., Jr. The Presidency and the Courts. Min-
neapolis, 1957.
Sherman, John. Recollections of Forty Years in House, Senate,
and Cabinet. 2 vols. Chicago, 1895.
Silva, Ruth. Presidential Succession. Ann Arbor, 1951.
Smith, Harold D. The Management of Your Government. New
York, 1945.
Swisher, Carl. American Constitutional Development. Boston,
1954.
Taft, W. H. Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers. New York,
1916.
Tansill, Charles C. (editor). Documents Illustrative of the Forma-
tion of the American Union. 69th Congress, Ist Session, House
Document, No. 398, Ist Session.
304 * The Man in the White House
Thomas, Benjamin P. Abraham Lincoln. New York, 1952.
Timmons, Bascom N. Garner of Texas: A Personal History. New
York, 1948.
Truman, Harry S. Memoirs. 2 vols. New York, 1955.
Tumulty, J. P. Woodrow Wilson as I Knew Him. New York, 1921.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. The United States: 1830-1850. New
York, 1935.
Underwood, Oscar W. Drifting Sands of Party Politics. New
York, 1931.
Upshur, Able P. A Brief Inquiry into the True Nature and Char-
acter of Our Federal Government. Petersburg, Va., 1840.
Van Buren, Martin. Autobiography. (John P. Fitzpatrick, editor.)
American Historical Association Report, 1918.
Walker, Francis A. Making of the Nation. New York, 1895.
Washington, George. Writings of George Washington. (Worthing-
ton C. Ford, editor). 14 vols. New York, 1889.
Weed, H. A. Life of Thurlow Weed. Boston, 1884.
Wehle, Louis B. Hidden Threads of History. New York, 1953.
West, Willis M. History of the American People. Boston, 1918.
White, Leonard D. An Introduction to the Study of Public Admin-
istration. New York, 1926. Revised editions, 1939, 1948, 1955.
White, William Allen. Calvin Coolidge, the Man Who is President.
New York, 1925.
Whitman, Walt. Complete Prose Works. New York, 1914.
Williams, Irving G. The Rise of the Vice Presidency. Washington,
1956.
Wilson, James Grant. The Presidents of the United States. 4 vols.
New York, 1914.
Wilson, Woodrow. Constitutional Government in the United States.
New York, 1907.
Wise, Henry A. Seven Decades of the Union. Philadelphia, 1871.
Woodbury, Levi. Writings. Boston, 1852.
Index
Adams, Henry: quoted on McKinley, 73
Adams, John: quoted, 54; and XYZ
Affair, 56; on political parties, 115;
on symbolism of President, 292
Adams, John Quincy: on vice-presi-
dency, 269
Adams, Sherman: Chief Assistant to
President, 215, 216, 217
Bank of the United States: 58, 59
Barkley, Alben: as vice-president, 275,
278
Beard, C. A.: on F. D. Roosevelt’s
leadership, 170; on president as Com-
mander-in-Chief, 226, 228
Blair, Niles: quoted on Washington, 21
Bowers, Claude: quoted on the presi-
dency, 84
Bricker Amendment: 4
Brownlow Committee: 213
Bryce, James: on “artificial selection”
of Presidents, 85, 86; on presidency,
163.
Budget, federal: origin, 208; Dawes, first
director, 209; Bureau prepares vetoes,
220
Burgess, J. W.: quoted, 69
Butler, Pierce: quoted, 18
Burr, Aaron: election of 1800, 100
Cabinet: emergence, 12; Jefferson’s
practice, 13; Eisenhower’s practice,
13; decline, 210, 211
Cannon, J. G.: cooperation with T.
Roosevelt, 164, 165
Chief Executive: 185 ff; bases of author-
ity, 187; extra constitutional author-
ity, 188; Hamilton on executive pre-
rogative, 188, 253
Cleveland, Grover: quoted, 2; repulses
Senate, 70; inadroit politician, 70, 71;
rejects annexation of Hawaii, 7!; and
Civil War passions, 72
Cold War; 256
Commander-in-Chief: 225 ff.
Committee on Conduct of the War: 235
305
306 +
Compromise of 1850: 59, 60
Congress: effect of seniority, 144; urban
population under represented, 145;
rural population over represented,
145, 177; delay in redistricting, 146;
Rules Committee dominates, 146;
need of executive leadership, 147;
Hamilton’s leadership of, 148; Hamil-
ton’s Reports, 148; Whig theory of,
150; dependence on advice of the de-
partments, 154; consumer interest un-
der represented, 155; reform of Con-
gress, 158; parliamentary system un-
suited to, 158; proposed reform, 159;
special sessions, 173; presidential
leadership of, 179 ff.
Congressional Caucus: presidential
nomination by, 80
Constitution of the United States: a
synthesis of state constitutions, 5
Coolidge, Calvin: as leader in legisla-
tion, 152; as vice-president, 272
Corwin, E. S.: quoted, 92; quoted on
election of President, 96
Council of Economic Advisers: 221; ori-
gin, 222
Crittenden Compromise: 61
Croly, Herbert: quoted, 126
Daniels, Jonathan: on Truman’s succes-
sion, 295
David, Paul: quoted, 88, 90
Dawes, Charles: on McKinley, 127; as
vice-president, 273
Department of State: no supporting
pressure group, 261
Dickinson, John: on public opinion, 144
Eisenhower, Dwight D.: meager prepar-
ation for presidency, 50; Richard Ro-
vere’s estimate of, 50; and pressures,
77; and school aid bill, 77; campaign
issues, 110; goes to Korea, 111; and
The Man in the White House
Formosa, 112; Peace issue 1952, 112;
as party leader, 137-141; rebukes Sec-
retary G. M. Humphrey, 138; man-
ages campaign, 1956, 139; his “New
Republicanism”, 140; vetoes Gas Bill,
141; his fireside chats, 141; State of
Union Message, 172; illness, 184; re-
organizes White House Office, 216;
Congress approves his Formosa pol-
icy, 241
Emancipation Proclamation: 66
Emerson, R. W.: quoted, 52
Electoral College: original purpose, 6;
functioning changed by political
parties, 6
Employment Act of 1946: 222
Executive, The: under Articles of Con-
federation, 186; Hamilton on, 186
Executive agreements: 254, 255
Ex parte Merryman (1861): 232
Ex parte Milligan (1866): 234
Fairman, Charles: on president as Com-
mander-in-Chief, 226
Farley, James A.: on “purge” of 1938,
134
Federalist Papers: quoted, 4
Fillmore, Millard: and Compromise of
1850, 60
Fleming v. Page (1815): 228
Ford, H. J.: quoted, 57; on presidency,
162; on presidency as kingship, 288
Foreign policy: confusion on, 257; pres-
sures on, 259
Foreign relations: president’s plenary
power in, 192
Garner, John N.: as vice-president, 274
Giraud, Emile: on leadership in legisla-
tion, 147
Governor, Colonial: genesis of Ameri-
can executive, 3
Governor, state: prototype of the presi-
dent, 4
Hamilton, A.: quoted, 80; on presiden-
tial prerogative, 188, 253
Hamilton, Walton: quoted, 2
Harding, W. G.: a constitutional presi-
dent, 152
Hawthorne, Nathaniel: on Pierce, 84
Hay, John: quoted, 62; on Hanna, 126
Hayes, R. B.: repulses the Senate, 69
Herring, E. P.: quoted, 51; on Franklin
Roosevelt, 169, 170
Hobart, Garret A.: vice-president, 271
Holmes, O. W.: quoted, 143
Hoover, Herbert: as leader in legisla-
tion, 153
Hyman, Sidney: quoted, 92
In re Debs (1895): 202
In re Neagle (1890): 193, 203
Institution: defined, 1, 2
Jackson, Andrew: influence on presi-
dency, 19; lawyer and judge, 28; in
Tennessee Constitutional Conven-
tion, 28; in Congress, 28; militia gen-
eral, 28; victory at New Orleans, 28;
able party leader, 29; and Bank of
U. S., 58; manages own election, 102;
effect of Bank veto, 103; party leader,
118; use of veto, 118, 175; censure by
Senate, 119; selects successor, 119;
“tribune of the people”, 149; dom-
inates Congress, 179; removal of
Duane, 197
Japanese: internment of, 239
Jay’s Treaty: 55
Jefferson, Thomas: influence on presi-
dency, 18; frontier democrat, 24; co-
lonial legislator, 25; in Continental
Congress, 25; writes Declaration of
Independence, 25; Minister to France,
26; leads opposition to Hamilton, 26;
vice-president, 26; idolized by Lincoln,
27; and Embargo Act, 57; election of
Index * 307
1800, 99; elected by House of Repre-
sentatives, 100; first inaugural, 101;
and patronage, 101, 117; party leader-
ship, 116; leads Congress, 179
Jennings, Ivor: symbolism of monarch,
289
Johnson, Alexander: quoted, 5; on ori-
gin of vice-presidency, 264
Johnson, Andrew: pressures on, 67;
champion of the underdog, 68; and
Congress, 173
Key, V. O.: quoted, 137
Korea: intervention in, 240
Korematsu v. U. S. (1944): 239, 242
Laski, H. J.: on “great presidents,” 86;
“great prime ministers,” 86
Lawrence, David: on Wilson as “prime
minister,” 133
Lend-Lease Statute: 237
Lincoln, Abraham: influence on presi-
dency, 19; postmaster of New Salem,
32; Illinois legislator, 32; member of
Congress, 33; Bloomington speech,
34; veteran politician, 34; quoted, 52,
97, 98; opposes Crittenden Compro-
mise, 61, 122; constructs his cabinet,
62; and Ft. Sumter, 63, 123; mobilizes
military, 64, 230, 231; cabinet crisis of
1862, 64, 124; and Emancipation
Proclamation, 66; election of 1860,
97; preserves party unity, 98; as party
leader, 122; and Union Party, 123; use
of patronage, 123, 180; calls special
session, 174; uses posse comitatus, 200;
and habeas corpus suspension, 232;
creates military tribunals, 233; on ex-
ercise of war powers, 234; as Com-
mander-in-Chief, 227; Letter to Gen-
eral Hooker, 244
Little Rock crisis: 199
308 *
Little v. Barreme (1804): 194
Lodge, Henry Cabot: quoted, 137
Lowell, A. L.: on presidential initiative,
168
Luce, Robert: quoted, 152
McBain, Howard Lee: quoted, 16; on
presidency, 162
McKinley, William: union soldier, 34;
prosecuting attorney, 35; defends
striking miners, 35; congressional
leader, 35; national party leader, 36;
Governor, 36; manipulation of pres-
sures, 71; and Spanish American
War, 73, 74; as party leader, 125, 126;
checks Hanna, 127
Macmahon, Arthur: quoted, 6
Madison, James: and pressure for war
in 1812, 58; as Commander-in-Chief,
229
Marbury v. Madison (1803): 13
Marshall, John: on Jefferson’s presi-
dency, 116; on president’s power, 192
Marshall, Thomas R.: as vice-president,
272
Martin v. Mott (1827): 229
Monroe Doctrine: 253
Moore, John Bassett: on Lend-Lease
Statute, 237
Morgenthau, Hans J.: on president and
foreign policy, 250
Myers v. U. S. (1926): 198
National Security Council: 223, 260
Nevins, Allan: quoted, 63
Nixon, Richard: activities as vice-presi-
dent, 276, 277, 278
Nominating Convention, National: ori-
gin, 82; Anti-Masonic, 82; National
Republican, 82; pure usage, 87; Polk,
first “dark horse,” 87; power of pa-
tronage in, 88; nomination of Eisen-
hower, 1952, 89; the leverage of mi-
norities in, 90
The Man in the White House
Office of the Executive: 212, 214 ff.
Orth, S. P.: on the presidency, 161
Overman Act: 236
Paine, Thomas: his contempt for Eng-
lish royalty, 291
Patterson, Grove: on Truman in 1948,
135
Patronage: presidential use of, 180, 181
Pierce, Franklin: seeks declaration of
war, 61
Polk, James K.: state legislator, 29; con-
gressman, 29; speaker of the House,
30; Governor, 30; first “dark horse,”
87; party leadership, 120; overworked,
206; and Mexican War, 230
Presidency: the institution, 1, 2; effect of
Electoral College on, 7; effect of veto
power on, 7; criticism of first inaugur-
ation, 8; criticism of first message to
Congress, 9; influence of Washington
on, 18;. Jackson’s influence on, 19;
Lincoln’s influence on, 19; influenced
by nominating methods, 79, 80, 81;
nomination by congressional caucus,
80; nomination by national conven-
tion, 81; “tribune of the people,” 83;
low prestige in 1860's, 84, 85; almost
an urban agency, 156; in 19th century,
163
President: genesis of the title, 4; power
of removal, 14, 15; election, power
politics, 96; party leadership, 114 ff.;
leader in legislation, 164 ff.; preparing
message to Congress, 171; Special ses-
sions of Congress, 173; use of broad-
casting, 182; leadership institution-
alized, 183; as chief executive, 185 ff.;
plenary power in foreign relations,
191, 192, 251; subject to law, 193 ff.;
power of removal, 197, 207; use of
armed force, 199; Little Rock epi-
sode, 199; and Whiskey Rebellion,
199; use of posse comitatus, 200,
Hayes’ use of troops, 201; Cleveland
and Pullman strike, 201; W. Wiison
on burden of, 207; turned to in crisis,
209; decline of cabinet, 211; Brown-
low Committee recommendations,
213; Commander-in-Chief, 225, ff.; as
chief diplomat, 245 ff.; power to pro-
claim neutrality, 252; recognizing for-
eign governments, 252; president as
national symbol, 288 ff.; ceremonial
functions, 290; symbolism favored by
Federalists, 292; symbolism de-
nounced by Jeffersonians, 292; re-
vived by Jacksonians, 294; president’s
family, 295; generals as president,
296; mourning at death of presidents,
297
Presidential elections: and urban vote,
156
Presidential Succession Acts: 284, 285;
E. S. Corwin’s opinion of, 285
Primary, National Nominating: defects
of, 90, 91
Pringle, H. F.: on Theodore Roose-
velt, 104, 128 ff., 166
Prize Cases (1863): 233
Roosevelt, Franklin D.: in state legis-
lature, 44; assistant secretary of the
Navy, 45; candidate for vice-presi-
dent, 45; polio victim, 45; governor,
45; skill as politician, 46; conserva-
tionist, 47; mobilizes interest groups,
76; group diplomacy, 107; his oppor-
tunism, 108; the “forgotten man,”
108; depression legislation, 109;
“Court Packing” Bill, 110; as party
leader, 133; use of patronage, 133,
181; “purge” of 1938, 134; and James
Farley, 134; leadership in legislation,
168 ff.; the “hundred days,” 169;
Lend-Lease Statute, 237; on war pow-
er, 238; internment of Japanese, 239;
Roosevelt, Theodore: state legislator,
Index * 309
37; civil service commissioner, 38; in
Spanish American War, 38; Gover-
nor, 39; expert politician, 39; courting
the interests, 103; quoted, 104, 151;
manages own campaign, 104, 129;
checks Hanna, 128; manages his own
nominations, 129; picks his successor,
130; theory of the presidency, 164;
liaison with the speaker, 164; leader
in legislation, 165; on powers of presi-
dent, 180; and the anthracite coal
strike, 190, 202
Root, Elihu: on Hanna and McKinley,
126
Rossiter, Clinton: estimate of Truman,
48; estimate of Eisenhower, 50; on
burden of president, 215
Rovere, Richard: estimate of Eisen-
hower, 50; criticism of Eisenhower,
241
Sait, E. M.: quoted, 81
Schlesinger, A. M., Jr.: poll of histor-
ians, 81, 83, 85,93
Schubert, Glendon: on steel mill seizure,
196
Senate: rebuffs Washington, 10
Senatorial Courtesy: genesis, 11
Seward, W. H.: checked by Lincoln,
122; on President as “king,” 288
Sherman, John: on president and Con-
gress, 150
Smith, T. V.: quoted, 172
Speaker of the House: still a “czar,” 157
Taft, W. H.: on president’s powers,
189, 190
Taft-Hartley Law: 177, 178
Taney, Roger: on suspension of habeas
corpus, 232
Taussig, F. W.: quoted, 133
Taylor, Zachary: and Compromise of
1850, 59
Treaty annexing Alaska: 250
310 * The Man inthe White House
Treaty-making power: in constitutional
convention, 246; Washington and
Senate, 247, 248; Jay’s Treaty, 248
Trent Affair, 1861: 259
Truman, Harry S.: conception of presi-
dency, 20; Clinton Rossiter’s estimate
of, 48; knowledge of history, 48;
county judge, 48; U. S. senator, 49;
the Truman Committee, 49; manages
own nomination, 135; addresses
Democratic Convention, 136; Whis-
tle-stop campaign, 136; as leader in
legislation, 153; and Eightieth Con-
gress, 173; veto of Taft-Hartley Act,
176; seizure of steel mills, 195; on
president’s powers, 203; intervention
in Korea, 240; as vice-president, 275
Turner, F. J.: quoted, 59
Twelfth Amendment: disastrous to vice-
presidency, 266
Tyler, John: succeeds to presidency, 268
U.S, v. Belmont (1937): 256
U. S. v. Curtis-Wright Export Corp.
(1936): 192, 249, 251, 257
Upshur, A. P.: on presidential power,
189
Veto power: Jackson’s use of, 175;
Whig Party view of, 176; F. Roose-
velt’s use of, 176
Vice-presidency: 262 ff.; creation of the
office, 263; prototype of office, 264;
election of 1800, 265; decline of office
after 1804, 265; Twelfth Amendment,
266; John Adams’ influence on, 267;
John Tyler’s succession, 268, 269,
270; used to balance ticket, 271; prob-
lem of the Succession, 279; Garfield’s
prolonged invalidism, 279; obscurity
of Constitution, 280; Wilson’s long
invalidism, 280, 281, 282; Eisenhower-
Nixon understanding, 283
Wade-Davis Manifesto: 163
Wallace, Henry: as vice-president, 274
Washington, George: setting precedents
as president, 8; rebuffed at first ap-
pearance before Senate, 10; genesis of
cabinet, 12; presidency shaped for
him, 18; Governor Dinwiddie’s agent,
21; in French and Indian War, 23; as
a planter, 23; in Revolutionary War,
23; pressures on as president, 53, 54,
55; and first neutrality proclamation,
54; and Jay’s Treaty, 55; quoted, 115;
and treaty power, 247
Weed, Thurlow: on John Quincy
Adams, 115
White, Leonard D.: on Office of the
President, 214
White House Office: 216; value during
Eisenhower’s illness, 224
Whitman, Walt: quoted, 97
Wilmot Proviso: 121
Wilson, Woodrow: a practiced orator,
39; develops theory of the presidency,
40; President of Princeton, 40; Gov-
ernor, 41; party leader, 42; puts
through legislative program, 43; and
Colonel House, 43; blasts tariff lobby,
75; ultraconservative, 105; conversion
to liberalism, 106; theory of party
leadership, 131; presidential leader-
ship in legislation, 132, 151, 166 ff.;
removal of postmaster Myers, 198;
Overman Act, 236
Wilcox v. Jackson ex. dem. McConnel
(1839): 197
Williams v. U. S. (1843): 197
XYZ Affair: 56