lection
home authors titles dates links about9 october 2008
Benjamin Harrison can't be said to have lived in uninteresting times. He was a volunteer colonel in the Civil War, seeing combat in several campaigns. He was a key figure in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. He served in the U.S. Senate during the Gilded Age and as President, signed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and other milestone legislation, and fought unsuccessfully to give the 14th and 15th Amendments some statutory teeth. Why, then, does his career seem one of the least interesting of any President? read more
7 october 2008
It's hard to write anything original about Theodore Roosevelt. To his credit, Louis Auchincloss, in the Times Books American Presidents series, doesn't really try. He admits the problem of Roosevelt's magnitude in American history and historiography – not to mention Mount Rushmore – and goes on, in a brief 136 pages, to deliver just some impressions of what TR was like personally. Auchincloss assumes that the reader is familiar with TR's accomplishments before, during, and after his Presidency. A distinguished chronicler of that age, Auchincloss fits TR easily into his context, and shows how the 26th President shaped his era, often by the aggressive contrasts he presented to everyone around him. read more
5 october 2008
Four years before they were elected to the White House, almost all American Presidents have been highly visible national figures. John McCain, in 2004, was perhaps the best-known Republican Senator; Barack Obama, though still a state senator, gave a positively Bryanesque speech to the '04 Democratic convention that made him a clear potential future nominee. Four years before their election, Bush 43, Clinton, and Carter were all governors active in national party politics. Bush 41 was Vice President; Ronald Reagan was running his second campaign for the Republican nomination. Even the great dark horses had a plausible national presence: Franklin Pierce had served in both houses of Congress and was a general in the U.S.-Mexican War, and James Polk, though he lost the Tennessee state house in 1840, had been Speaker of the House of Representatives. Even the unlikeliest President of all, Zachary Taylor, was a military commander near a volatile frontier. And then there's Grover Cleveland. read more
2 october 2008
When I was young – ten years old or so, about 1970 – I owned a small plaster bust of William McKinley. Salvaged from the domestic relics of some great-aunt or other, the thing was a real curiosity in an age when most kids my age were into posters of the Beatles or baseball cards of Hank Aaron. I no longer have the bust, but somewhere I still have a tiny statuette of McKinley, one of a series of netsuke-like Presidential figurines collected at some long-defunct Chicago supermarket chain of the 1960s, "Hand-Painted by Artists." It displays McKinley as a corpulent, mildly scowling, clean-shaven gent in an impossibly voluminous overcoat, propping a top hat against his thigh. The close shave marks him as the first President of the 20th century, but everything else about the little McKinley bespeaks Gilded-Age self-satisfaction. I have no idea whether the real McKinley tended to embonpoint, but he falls right in the middle of a range of seriously hefty Presidents, from Arthur to Taft, who literally embody the extravagance of an America grown to preponderance on the world stage. read more