söndag 14 oktober 2012

The Best of the 44

It is now only twenty-two days until the result of the presidential election will be hours from being announced. Twenty-two; half a day for every president - a full for Cleveland - at least until the 20th of January. It is in my opinion unlikely that the world's most prosperous and powerful democracy will have it's fourty-fifth name... yet. Here are some of my favourites from the fourty-four. I should admit I have been careful with wartime leaders and the ones with lifetimes protruding into my own, in favour of a balanced five. Whatever that is.

Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809)



Rhetorically astute and with a brilliant wit, the first president to overthrow an incumbent president (and friend) through an election - self-labeled the "revolution of 1800" - was as sharp as his eight years were revolutionary. Authoring the Constitution of 1789, the oldest currently in practice, the Virginia Francophile and first Secretary of State pioneered the young republic by his Republican Party (now the Democrats) and unduly, in present-day terms, fought for the rights of individual states and citizens against the pressure for anti-civil rights Alien and Seditions Acts and a strong central government. Whereas his qualities in these matters are pondered by his apparent support for slavery - he owned many and bred a child with coloured servingwoman Sally Hemmings but denounced the institution as a "hideous blot" - and the factual that his administration was in fact not as passive and libertarian as he might have argued, he remains the most compelling and important of the Founding Fathers and early leaders of the United States.

The Louisiana purchase of 1803 expanded the still young republic far westward to twice its size, for a very modest price. Jefferson distrusted cities, party politics and concentrated power, and when once asked about the rights to religious worship and protection, he famously remarked there would always be a "wall of separation" between legislation and religion, setting a then-unremarked national standard enforced by the Bill of Rights his Secretary of State James Madison wrote, now an example for secular democracies everywhere (eventually reaching Sweden on January 1, 2000).

Like John Adams, he died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1826. Added together, the two men reached the age 173.

Grover Cleveland (1885-1889 and 1893-1897)



The only man with a "full day" in my previous pun, Cleveland faced election thrice on the Democratic ticket, and won the people every time. Due to the electoral college's infamous preference for less populated states, he was ousted in favour of "icicle" Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888, but returned four years later with resurging popularity, to a fault. Consequently, he is the only of the fourty-four to be two presidents in one. The only Democrat to rule for decades in either direction, Cleveland was renowned for his honesty, his patience and a principled sense of justice. A simple man who grew to govern New York, the most populous state was one of a few presidents to marry while in the White House and ominiously referred to as the "Hangman of Buffalo", due to his simple origins as a Sheriff in Buffalo, New York. He was considerably more lenient to external enemies, and against the trend of the day opposed the campaigns to annex the Hawaii islands and the Indian territories. A bachelor and the father of an illegitimate child, he was the only President to take a wife in the White House shortly after.

Cleveland would work 18 hours a day, wrote practically all his speeches, and despite a generally Republican-dominated Senate returned a sense of strength and executive authority to the White House after a series of weak administrations. Nevertheless, his conservative and passivist outlook, coined by his outspoken notion that "the people should support the government, the government should not support the people" and steadfast opposition to the egalitarian notion of gold-and-silver currency earned him the same fate as Harrison when the Panic of 1893 dealt a crushing blow to his economic doctrines and blistered all chances for a third term. He was succeeded on the 1896 ticket by former Populist leader (and bimetallist) William Jennings Bryan, who also became (a less successful, but more influential) three-time nominee.

When he left the White House, and politics in March 1897, Cleveland's regenerated Democratic Party had once more been revitalized into a potent political force, if yet under principles were very different from his own. Like Jefferson and much unlike Bryan and most of the succeeding leadership of his party, Cleveland was a slavish constitutionalist with little regard and much scorn for economic and social intervention into common Americans' lives, which during his exile earned him much respect restored only after his death. The end of his second, half-catastrophic term saw rapid economic recovery from the crisis which had ousted him, but nothing could blister the gallant character of principles and integrity which alone which had secured his historic second presidency.

Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909)



Roosevelt was never "supposed" to be president. A reformer within the predominant Republican Party, the widowed ex-cowboy and Harvard alumnus, this asthmatic turned boxer and skinnydipper was elected Governor of New York, just as Cleveland, after fleeing his successor McKinley's administration to help liberate Cuba from the Spanish yoke. The far more conservative leadership of the party tried to use Roosevelt's success against him by nominating him for McKinley's Vice President in 1900, only to find a hideous backfire a year after when a gun-wielding anarchist's bullet elevated Roosevelt to the job they had tried to keep him away from. Out with his family on a picnic when McKinley unexpectedly died, Roosevelt was inaugurated during his race home and reigned for a near two full terms, as astute and well-read as he was unyielding in a quest to smash oligopolistic trusts, earning the nickname "Trust-Buster", worked towards federal customer protection legislation (most notably in the meat industry), strengthened the presidency and celebrated the United States' first Nobel Price in 1906 after negotiating peace between Japanese and Russian empires. He coined the terms "White House" and "west wing" and fought the cause of environmental conservation and the "square deal", favouring labour over big business. Abroad, he took equally unorthodox measures when intervening in Panama to  secure its independence in exchange for a U.S.-controlled Panama Canal.

Despite massive resistance against his reformist policies, he won a stunning re-election in 1904 against conservative Democrat Alton Parker and might have been the first to see a third term in office had he not chosen to instead nominate his Minister of War William Taft in 1908. Taft was safely elected, but was either usurped or taken willingly by the more conservative elements and less respondent to his purposed mentor's influence. Despite continued anti-trust-legislation and concessions to labour, the pro-tariff Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909 and a meek foreign policy caused Roosevelt to seek the nomination again in 1912. He failed, but achieved a bitter vengeance by catalyzing progressive Republicans into a party of his own making, the Progressive Party (nicknamed "Bull Moose" after Roosevelt was infatally shot before a campaign speech in Wisconsin, noting to the audience with blood dripping from his shirt that it took "more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose" and that he did not need immediate medical attention). Roosevelt and Taft ran rather distant second and thirds to Democrat and Klansman Woodrow Wilson, who hence won 40 states, most of the North and the presidency with a stark 40 % of the vote. After retiring to pursue other interests, including climbing Mount Blanc, Roosevelt announced intentions to return before the 1920 election, with a stroke-ridden and nearly mute Wilson was facing retirement, but died in early 1919 due to an infection caused during an expedition in the Amazonas. His son, Theodore Roosevelt Junior, might have planned to follow him when riddled with German bullets on Omaha Beach, Normandy twenty-five years later, ending what might have become a great political dynasty and the future of progressive Republicanism.

Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929)



Coolidge did not live for laughter, nor power, but might have had a record ten-year administration - for a Republican. His decision not to might be what saved him a legacy of shadow-coated gold. When the Republicans regained the White House in 1921 (the first after womens' suffrage had reached all 48 states) spearheaded by popular maverick Warren Harding, times were about to change. Unfortunately, Harding had been as tough and swift-spoken a fighter (he was accused both having African American genes and membership card in the Ku Klux Klan) as he was insufficient as a leader. Scandal-ridden, tired and keen for gambling (and possibly some of the many drinks he had helped to ban in 1919), his sudden death might have been what saved the Republican Party. Coolidge assumed the presidency in his parents' dining room in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, sworn in before the local press by his clerk father in the light of a kerosene lamp before returning to a second, formal inaugural (he was, by 1925, the only one to have a third) and shoulder an aching nation. In the wake of fiscal unrest and the devastating Teapot Dome Affair, which sent the Secretary of Interior into prison, he reshuffled the cabinet and cut federal income taxes (before Wilson an unknown phenomenon during peacetime) from draconian war-time rates to a top 25 %, restricting their use to the very wealthiest. For all these measures he was accounted more than anyone else for the "Happy 20's", and the tremendous growth that renewed confidence in the American spirit - and the world. He spoke very little and, like the Founding Fathers, cared even less for the affairs of other countries, but dispatched troops to China and Nicaragua to protect American interests and invoked, rather in the spirit of Wilson, a lenient and cooperative policy towards the German government, which earned his Vice President Charles Dawes the Peace Price. Both racists abroad and domestic lost much of their influence during his term. A conservative radical of Lincoln's brand, he unusually denounced the notion of the United States as "white man's land" with a penchant for equal opportunity and value, embodied in the granting of citizenship to all Native Americans, yet gave in to pressure for the very strict Immigration Act of 1924, effectively ending nearly a century of massive influx from East and West. The same year, he won re-election with more votes than the Progressive and Democratic contenders together and took every state but Wisconsin outside the South. Work on Mount Rushmore commenced with federal aid in 1927, and perhaps his face would have deserved more than any other to be the model of a fifth. When leaving the presidency in 1929, the budget deficit had been eradicated, federal revenue had more than doubled to nearly one trillion dollars a year, and peace seemed to rule. If accepting the nomination for an unprecedented third term in 1928, he would have had it. Coolidge is dubiously denounced for laying the groundwork, if yet unknowingly, for the stock market crash in September 1929, six months after his departure, which reversed nearly all his policies and the tide to a much darker one. Still, a flamboyant renaissance came with the "Reagan revolution" of the 1980s, which despite their numerous differences played the "supply-side economics" on the success of Coolidge. Reagan's years, however, saw much turmoil, domestic and abroad, and ended with a record deficit, and also saw the Republicans lose the race for the minorities which had once been solely theirs.

John Kennedy (1961-1963)



He was by no means perfect, but in two years inspired impression and hopes of far more. Nobody, not even Franklin Roosevelt might have reshaped the outlook of the Democratic Party in a more profound way. Among record-young Kennedy's first calls - he was 43, slightly older than Roosevelt at 42, but by far younger than the latter at the time of his actual election at 46 - was to push the economy, space race and cause for freedom on the offensive, as well as an already prepared invasion of Castro's Cuba. He promised, like his less audacious and vital opponent Richard Nixon (whom he defeated with a few thousand votes in swing states Texas and Illinois) to move towards civil rights for all Americans, with a charismatically broadcasted interest to move the world in the same direction. When the two met in the first televised debate in late 1960, together a mere 90 years old, it was indeed a sign of a new decade. Republicans had secured voting rights independent of colour or "previous condition of servitude" in 1870, but new voting rules, most notably poll taxes, literacy tests and "grandfather clauses" to exclude most whites from said qualifications had successively eliminated minority participation, ultimately ejecting the last African American congressman from Washington in 1901.

Kennedy's promise was to repeat the achievements of Lincoln to consummation, and he succeded - but did not live to see it. Though not as personally stringent; even in the White House, he sported numerous lovers and clotted policymaking by allegations of electoral fraud, supposed relations to organized crime and an undisclosed aching back (treated with amphetamine, amongst other substances), many Americans would bask in the same light when this courageous reformist secured a blodless détente with the Soviet Union in 1962, negotiating the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Cuba and Turkey. Whilst choosing not to act against the erection of the Berlin Wall, he compensated it to the better of his image in famous speech where he humiliously and humorously remarked he was a "Berliner", or a jam cookie, predicting the world would be united once more under a beacon of liberty and free-mindedness. He did not steer through an actual civil war, but could shoulder the flaps of a wartime leader when the union, and the Democratic Party, divided in spirit over his agenda for civil rights. When, like Lincoln, his skull was pierced by one of many an assassin's bullets during an open rally in Dallas in November 1963, the issue was less than a year from painful resolvement upon which Vice President and successor Lyndon Johnson famously remarked that the Democrats had lost the South "for a generation". A further, just as important bill, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, came to passage by massive Republican support in a time of unrepeated Democratic dominance and successful economic growth, all in the shadow of his never-ending flame. Even through massive oppsition to the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, which Kennedy as much as Johnson and Nixon helped to escalate, his legacy would endure. For years the first and only Catholic president was indeed raised to a saint-like status, allegedly as the most admired and celebrated politician of his century.

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