PART FOUR: “MY GOD! WHO PICKED THAT GUY?”

By Edwin Cooney

TRUTHS, PRINCIPLES, OBSERVATIONS AND A WARNING!

As we approach the 2020 presidential election, we face a challenge that is even greater than any personal grievance we might have with President Donald Trump. Thus, I begin by offering the following set of truths:

Truth number one is a basic truth of human history. From the beginning of time, every society, whatever its political, social, ideological or even religious structure, has been ultimately controlled by the rich. Our history records that only three Twentieth Century presidents, Truman, Coolidge, and Ford, reached 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with less than seven-figure bank accounts, and all three of these gentlemen became president on the death or resignation of the sitting president. As for the rich, most men and women become rich by inheritance or by earning their wealth, whether the establishment is agrarian (as it was from Washington through Andrew Johnson) or increasingly industrial (Grant through Reagan). Since approximately the 1980s, we’ve gone from the Industrial Age to the Services or Information Age. 

Hence, I offer the second truth: except in rare instances where their greed invariably gets the better of their creative genius, the rich really and truly control the United States of America! They can hardly do otherwise — after all, someone’s got to control it! When the greed of the rich reaches the saturation point, that is, when the rich stop realizing that in order to continue prospering, they should invest in their employees and their customers, it is from amongst their number that their sins are ultimately identified and corrected. That’s why we celebrate Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as among our greatest presidents.

Next, we come to our third truth. Only when the rich really and truly lose their sense of direction, can the generally disorganized majority of the people successfully master the art of government as they did between 1933 and 1969. Remember, there were five depressions between the 1830s and the 1930s which was well before either liberalism or socialism had any influence whatsoever in Washington. Those depressions occurred in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, and again in 1893. Usually, the cause for those depressions was bad investments by big business.

The fourth truth is that the American people, up to this point in time, have been successfully manipulated to ignore some of the main objectives of the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution was not established for the protection or the destruction of capitalism, but for the establishment and protection of American liberty. While it can be legitimately argued that capitalism has been vastly successful in insuring our historical prosperity, there are no references to capitalism or of socialism in our constitution.

The fifth truth: it has been perfectly legitimate to advance the prosperity of the rich because, after all, if the rich become poor, the poor themselves become even poorer!

Truth number 6 is the most dangerous truth. Throughout our history, the profit motive has been advanced as the only legitimate moral strategy for our prosperity. In other words, it is both immoral as well as illegitimate to consider any changes in society that might control or regulate the body politic. Too many people still believe that the ownership of property (rather than human rights) constitutes the bedrock of our society. Socialism, too many people insist, is antisocial. That is the greatest danger we face from the Trump administration. Sadly, however, or perhaps ironically, naughty Donnie Johnny Trump may fall from grace because he is nasty rather than dangerous and because he is economically, environmentally, internationally and humanistically incompetent. Thus, even if the White House changes hands in 2021, too many Americans will still fail to realize that democratic socialism is a vitally important social stratagem so long as it is regulated, as every stratagem ought to be. The Constitution was not established to delegitimize a specific economic structure whether it be capitalistic or socialistic. Here are the five stated purposes for establishing the Constitution:

1) “to form a more perfect union…” — That refers to the functional structure of our union.

2) “to establish justice” —  That points to the purpose of our legal system.

3) “insure domestic tranquility” — that addresses the need to keep peace among the various elements of the people.

4) “provide for the common defense” — which refers to our right to protect ourselves from foreign aggression, and

5) “Promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…” — which denies the right of the establishment of a dictatorship. Nowhere in those five stated reasons for establishing this Constitution and Union is an economic strategy or a political ideology recommended or outlawed. While no president up to President Trump has been fabulously wealthy, most of them could be ranked as being upper middle class during their presidential service. The two Roosevelts, Herbert Hoover,  John Kennedy, and perhaps the two Bush’s were outstandingly rich.  As for the rest, most of them primarily served the agendas of the rich. This includes Presidents Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan.

If Democracy is, as historians often observe, the most inefficient form of government, the reason for that is that a free people, uninhibited by rigid principles, are a vulnerable people whom men and women of all types, missions, and resources  continually manipulate for profit and electoral triumph. Remember, every politician, regardless of his or her ideology, needs to be needed by a constituency. What it comes down to is that our rights and priorities have become the property of corporate and political entities.

It has traditionally been the fear of many Americans that we are on a “steady, deadly drift to the left.” However, consider the following possibility that Michael Bloomberg, Charles Schultz, and President Donald Trump, all billionaires, could constitute our choice for president in 2020. If that isn’t national corporatism or plutocracy, someone will have to explain what it is to me!

The bottom line is that it’s up to you and me to be interested enough in the fate of our country to ascertain what it all means. Many Americans reasonably blame the character of Hillary Clinton for the Democratic loss to Trump in 2016. However, unless Democrats make it a priority to suspend their doubts and their negative preconceptions about the ultimate nominee, Donald John Trump could well ride to a victory more historic than we can possibly imagine.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY 

PART THREE: “MY GOD! WHO PICKED THAT GUY?”

By Edwin Cooney

THE CULT OF THE PRESIDENCY

Forty-eight years ago, on Monday, February 15th, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon proclaimed over nationwide radio and television that President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1968 Federal Holidays Act was about to take effect. All federal holidays, except for Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, would henceforth be celebrated on a Monday. A major element of the act combined Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays. The beauty of Presidents Day was that the third Monday in February never falls on either the 12th or the 22nd, Lincoln’s and Washington’s respective birthdays. Since Presidents Day celebrates no particular president, it might be said that it celebrates all presidents — big or bad, small and sad, calm or mad. In other words, Presidents Day enhances the cult of the presidency.

As established under Article II of our Constitution, the president is constitutionally an institution as much as it is a person. It  consists  of qualifications and powers.  Throughout history, the first leader of virtually all new nations has invariably been a victorious warrior. Take United Britain, for instance. The first king of a United Britain was either Alfred the Great (871 CE to 899 CE) or William the Conqueror (1066 CE to 1099 CE). Take your pick! Once General George Washington was picked by the electors of the several states, most of his contemporaries began hoisting him high atop the newly   created presidential pedestal.  Much time during April of 1789 (Congress’s first month in existence) was taken up on the topic of how to address the new president. Should he be called “His Honorable Excellency,” “His Excellency and Majesty,” or “His Excellency, the President of the United States”? (Note: who came up with simply Mr. President.) Vice President Adams wasn’t so revered. Much of the time taken up by considering his title was met with derision, including “his corpulency.” Ultimately, George Washington’s military heroism, his grand height and appearance (especially on a horse), his dignified manner, his relative political impartiality, his planter aristocracy, and finally his integrity would successfully be ingrained into his lofty executive office. By March 4th, 1797, Washington had inculcated several vital public expectations into the the presidential office. They included the structure of seniority in the cabinet, standards of selecting presidential appointments to both the cabinet and especially to the Supreme Court, and finally the expectation that a president would only serve two terms of office.

Although primarily institutional insofar as the population was concerned, the presidency has never been short of candidates nearly half of whom throughout the 19th Century had a military background or at least had military service. Still, most people realized that the president served as the civilian rather than the military Commander-In-Chief. After all, a successful soldier, in the public mind, was the most likely candidate to keep the public safe.

Some potential presidential candidates realized however that there was a difference between soldiering and administering the Office of President. Andrew Jackson, for instance, once insisted that although he could command a body of men in a rough sort of way, he wasn’t vain enough to think he could become president. Abraham Lincoln, even as he expanded his national speaking schedule following the 1858 Illinois U.S. Senate election against Stephen A Douglas, admitted that the taste for the presidency was only in his mouth a little. By 1895, those who knew and worked with Theodore Roosevelt (then the President of the New York City Police Commission) were convinced that the 36-year-old was a possible future president. 

On one occasion sometime in 1895, writer Lincoln Steffens was in TR’s office with a friend when he asked Roosevelt if he had ever thought of becoming president one day. Suddenly TR leaped to his feet, his face showing rage: “Don’t you dare ask me that!” he almost screamed.  “Don’t you put such ideas into my head! No friend of mine would say a thing like that. Never, never, must either of you remind a man on a political job that he may be president.  It almost always kills him politically.  He loses his nerve, he can’t do his work, and he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility.” However, once TR became president, he created a new and ongoing expectation that the President of the United States was the “people’s president” whose first and foremost obligation was as much to the will of the people as to the Constitution of the United States. 

It followed that Teddy purified our food and regulated the manufacture of our medicine. William Howard Taft busted trusts even more effectively than TR. Woodrow Wilson established the Federal Reserve System. Warren Harding hosted the 1921-22 World Disarmament Conference. Calvin Coolidge protected business and lowered our taxes. Herbert Hoover worried that dependence on government would be worse for you and me than starving to death. Franklin Roosevelt insisted that the interests and welfare of your family were essential to the welfare of his family. Harry Truman insisted that the buck stopped at his desk. Ike tried to wage peace as he had once waged war. John Kennedy insisted that the primary task of every president was to set before the American people the unfinished public business of our nation. Lyndon Johnson offered you and me a “Great Society” to improve our general welfare. Nixon brought us “peace with honor.”  Jerry Ford would carry on Nixon’s unfinished task. Jimmy Carter would give us a government that is as decent as we are. Ronald Reagan would get government “off our backs” so we could make more money and enjoy more liberty. George H. W. Bush would create a New World Order. Bill Clinton assured us that he felt our pain. George  W. Bush would ferret out terrorism and eradicate  it. Barack Obama insisted that “yes we can” change things for the better. Now, President Donald J. Trump insists he can  do anything he wants to do to assure the people’s safety and security, even if it is unconstitutional.

Millions of Americans, me included, have come to look to the president as an advocate on our personal behalves. We expect the president to protect us from danger, insure peace and prosperity, and protect if not share our personal values and religious beliefs. Our president is supposed to be our friend and advocate as well as our national leader and teacher.Twenty-one presidents have sat in the White House since Grover Cleveland observed in his second Inaugural Address that the government wasn’t designed to serve and support the people, but that it was the people’s task to serve and support the government.

Thus, the questions: If the government’s primary task is to serve the people, who is supreme? If it is the task of the people to serve the government, as President Cleveland insisted, who is supreme? Finally, has the American presidency become a secular cult? If so, is a cult a good investment?

I find questions like these fascinating! If the government is to be the servant of the people, is it legitimate for a conscientious  servant to protect the people against themselves or is a servant only an order taker? If the people are the servants of the government, is the welfare of the government their primary — if not their only — responsibility?

What say you?

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

PART TWO: “MY GOD! WHO PICKED THAT GUY?”

By Edwin Cooney

Amidst constantly changing social, technological, and political conditions, twenty men would become president between 1901 and 2019.   

Blame the assassin of William McKinley, if you must, for the advancement of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency. After all, the politicians didn’t want him.

Of course, since the election of “unanimous George” in 1789, politicians had the  key role in electing a president, but in 1900 and 1901, it was different. At the 1900 GOP Convention led by Senator Thomas Platt of New York and other political leaders, the politicians sought to kick “Governor Teddy” upstairs to the least powerful office in all “federal-dom” - the vice presidency of the United States.” 

At 4:07 p.m. on Friday, September 6th, 1901, while shaking hands with the public at 

at the Pan-American Exposition’s Temple of Music in Buffalo, New York, President William McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz, a 28-year-old unemployed iron worker from Detroit, Michigan. Eight days later at 2:15 a.m., the president died. 

The assassination of the exceedingly genial Bill McKinley did more to alter political life in this country than the preceding assassinations of Lincoln and Garfield as well as the future assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. You may ask how that could be.

The short answer is because Vice President Theodore Roosevelt became president. The better answer is because President Theodore Roosevelt began advocating on behalf of the “general welfare” more insistently and persistently than any previous chief executive. 

First, TR advocated for business to recognize the anthracite coal miner’s union when it went on strike in May 1902. Although he wasn’t fully successful, TR put sufficient pressure on the mine owners to be open to ongoing negotiations through the coming winter, thus keeping millions of homes warm while saving vulnerable Republican seats in the upcoming 1902 congressional elections. During the next seven years, there followed such presidential initiatives as passage of the Food and Drug Administration, lawsuits against big oil, big tobacco, railroad and other trusts, and conservation of land and natural resources. There was also the establishment of the Commerce and Labor Department and the Bureau of Investigation (which became the FBI in 1935). Roosevelt’s administration, more than the most enlightened 19th Century administrations (such as those of Lincoln, Rutherford Hayes, Chester Arthur, and Grover Cleveland), established an expectation that government had an obligation to be of service, directly as well as indirectly, to the people. Thus, the period between 1901 and 1921 is generally known as ‘the Progressive Era.” If most presidents were picked by politicians and functioned as politicians, 20th and 21st Century politicians had a much wider constituency to account to than our first twenty-five presidencies. (Note that Grover Cleveland was both our 22nd and 24th president.)

The Twentieth and Twenty-first Century presidents continued to hail mostly from small towns such as: Staunton, Virginia, Marion, Ohio, Plymouth Notch, Vermont, Abilene, Kansas, and Plains, Georgia. Surprisingly to many, only half of these twenty men were lawyers:  McKinley, Taft, Woodrow Wilson (only nominally, as he never practiced), Coolidge, FDR, Nixon, Ford, Clinton and Obama. Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, both George Bush’s, and Donald Trump came from business backgrounds. (Hoover and Carter were mining and nuclear engineers respectively.) Harding was a small town newspaper publisher, Taft was a district judge, John Kennedy was a journalist, LBJ was a high school teacher, and Ronald Reagan was an actor.  William Howard Taft, Hoover, Eisenhower, and Donald Trump became president on their first try for elective office. Presidents as advocates began acting more like politicians than their predecessors. Thus, Theodore Roosevelt hand-picked William Howard Taft to be his successor. Woodrow Wilson was chosen to become Governor of New Jersey after serving as president of Princeton University in 1910 and was in the White House by 1913. Passage of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution establishing the progressive income tax, establishment of the federal reserve banking system, and child labor reform marked his first presidential term. However, World War I and its controversial League of Nations dominated the second term of his presidency.

From 1921 to 1933, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover sought largely to undo the ravages of the Wilson Administration with its return to normalcy. Government wasn’t about people, it was about business. “The business of America is business,” proclaimed Calvin Coolidge, the high priest of economy and business.

By March 4, 1933, the bottom had dropped out of practically everything. “Dr. New Deal” in the person and skills of Franklin Delano Roosevelt advocated without apology the use of government as a legitimate tool to regulate the financial and economic forces which left unchecked could wreck the lives of so many innocent people. Whether government should involve itself in your affairs and mine lies at the root of almost every controversial issue today. What is especially fascinating is how often both conservative and liberal issue advocates are willing to use the tactics of their opponents once they become entangled in a deadly clash. For example, conservatives insist on using government to control bedroom and birth activities. Liberals, on the other hand, become states’ rights advocates when it comes to the question of sanctuary cities.

Truman, who came from the Midwest, used plain speech and an unswerving will to master the Cold War. Ike, the country’s last war hero, mastered the home front as he had his military compatriots during World War II. JFK charmed and inspired us through the early 1960s after conquering religious prejudice during the 1960 campaign. Lyndon Johnson, who came from the South, boldly took on Jim Crow thus permanently injuring the power of the party he rode to the White House on the assassination of President Kennedy. 

Richard Nixon united his divided party of the mid 1960s and compelled it toward the reluctant recognition of Mao Tse-Tung’s Chinese Communist party. President Ford, a child of the House of Representatives, performed respectably as president in the wake of his predecessor’s Watergate debacle, but his pardon of President Nixon, more than anything else, did him in at the polls in 1976.

Jimmy Carter, who came from the “new South,” utilized his religious faith plus his brilliant mind to tackle such domestic and foreign feats as trucking and telephone deregulation, energy reform measures, and lasting peace agreements in Latin America and the Middle East. However, Carter preferred principle to politics and lost the possibility of a second term.

President Reagan came out of Hollywood via a corporate America that demanded lower taxes and a more dramatic challenge to the Soviet Union. He performed articulately and decisively for eight years.

George H. W. Bush, perhaps the most qualified presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, was a good president, but he made a promise he couldn’t keep: “Read my lips: no new taxes!”

Bill Clinton was brilliant and articulate, but flawed. His presidency came to be known more for those flaws than for his achievements.

George W. Bush, determined to fight terror abroad and solidify conservatism at home, saw his second term end in economic disaster as corporate America which insisted that it needed no regulation proved that regulation was exactly what it did need.

Barack Obama, brilliant and articulate, husbanded the economy he inherited from a high of ten percent unemployment down to almost four percent in seven years. His controversial Affordable Care Act may well survive the test of legal challenges which its enemies have brought against it. It’s fair to say, as I see it, that Obamacare has already survived its political test.

Donald John Trump comes to the presidency more on his own than any president in history. Many conservative intellects have tried to love him, but they just can’t. Professional conservative talk show hosts and the Fox television network are, so far, solidly behind him, but so erratic is his behavior that no one can be sure what his political fate may be.

When the era I’ve written about here began, there were comparatively few special interest groups, although lobbying has always been a part of our body politic. Most voters had never even heard the voice of the President of the United States before the mid 1930s. Hence, the “cult” of the presidency is less than a hundred years old.

Let’s start musing about that together next week. Whaddya say?

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

PART ONE: “MY GOD! WHO PICKED THAT GUY?”

By Edwin Cooney

“When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President and, unfortunately, I believed it,” asserted two time unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate Adlai E. Stevenson in 1962.

“The executive power shall be invested in a President of the United States of America…No person except a natural born citizen or a citizen, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of the President; neither shall any person be eligible to the office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a Resident within the United States.” (Article I, Section 1 of the United States Constitution)

Above are the only qualifications one must have to be President of the United States of America. Donald J. Trump subsequently was electable to the most powerful and consequential office in all humanity just because he had attained the age of thirty-five years and was a citizen of the United States. It mattered not how well educated he may or may not have been, how smart he was or wasn’t, how knowledgable he was judged to be, whether he had ever been convicted of a felony, or whether he was good or bad, decent or indecent. These attributes and liabilities weren’t addressed in the American Constitution. One might easily concur that the personal character of the president was irrelevant to the “Founding Fathers.”

The genius and the greatness of the Constitution of the United States lies in the structure and the political and social relationships it outlines in both the original Seven Articles and the first ten amendments known as “The Bill of Rights.” As for who might become president, clearly no black, Catholic, Jew, or woman in 18th Century American culture need apply.

Although George Washington was picked by almost everyone who set foot in shoe leather or was a child of 18th Century motherhood, most of our earliest presidents were picked by the majority in Congress along with resolutions of support from key state legislatures.

Following the political debacle in the House of Representatives in 1825 which defeated Andrew Jackson, the winner of both the popular and electoral vote, and elected John Quincy Adams, known as “the corrupt bargain,” there was considerable pressure to find another method of nominating and electing presidential candidates. The solution to this challenge was the establishment of national political party conventions. The first national convention was held by the Anti-Masonic Party which nominated its first candidate William Wirt in September of 1831. However, the first major party convention nominated Henry Clay for president and John Sergeant for vice president in December of 1831. Andrew Jackson, the incumbent, wasn’t renominated until May of 1832.

Presidents between Washington and Lincoln were either successful soldiers (Washington, Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and even Franklin Pierce) or planter-lawyers (Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and James Polk). John and son John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren and James Buchanan  were farmer lawyers. Note that John Tyler (a planter-lawyer) and Millard Fillmore (just a lawyer) weren’t elected but became president on the deaths of Harrison and Taylor respectively. Presidents Jackson, Harrison and Taylor became prominent as “Indian fighters.” Mr. Lincoln, despite his genuinely humble beginning, was a capable corporate lawyer, a state legislator, and a former congressman. As for those who supported these early candidates, they consisted of combinations of bankers, merchants and, perhaps most of all, land speculators. Washington invested heavily in lands in Ohio and Kentucky. These land speculators through their congressional and presidential surrogates had a lot to say about every domestic activity and transaction from the Lewis and Clark expedition to the removal of American Indians to unproductive lands west of the Mississippi. Abraham Lincoln was probably the best pure politician of the first sixteen presidents. Aware of his national and political obscurity, he and his advisors entered the 1860 GOP convention determined to make “Honest Abe” the second rather than the first choice of state delegations during the early stages of that historic convention. Thus, Abraham Lincoln was in a position to be the solution rather than the cause of a divided party held in that famous Wigwam in Chicago in mid May of 1860.

In addition to special interests and powerful politicians, major events forced men and interests to move in specific directions. These events included the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Compromise of 1820 which forced Congress to adopt a process of admitting states to the Union as slave and free states. Then, there was the Mexican War which intensified the economic and political factors in the admission of Northern versus Southern-oriented states into the Union.

Next came the Compromise of 1850 which brought about the Fugitive Slave Law along with the admission of California into the Union. The 1854 Kansas Nebraska Act destroyed the Whig Party and created the Republican Party and seriously divided the Democratic Party. The result was civil war.

Two of the next seven presidents who followed the Civil War, Andrew Johnson and Chester Arthur, succeeded to the presidency rather than being elected. Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley became politically prominent due to their Civil War service. This was true especially of Ulysses S. Grant who, like Washington, Jackson, W.H. Harrison, and Taylor before him, was a hero to the hopeful politicians of the day.

Grant’s almost certain election meant that the new Republican Party’s special interests would reap decades of favorable support as they successfully industrialized America thereby closing the frontier. Grover Cleveland, on the other hand, was something of an anomaly. Having purchased his exemption from the Union draft in 1863, he cultivated his political reputation as an honest and efficient administrator as Mayor of Buffalo, New York, and later as Governor of the State of New York. He was the man who couldn’t be bought — a candidate of both principle and effectiveness.

Republican presidential candidates and presidents were consistent in their continuous support of practically every position advocated by big banking and business. Any attempt to obstruct the conveniences or profits of big oil, mighty railroads and, above all, high protective tariffs met with full disapproval of post Civil War GOP presidents. Even the well-liked, generally gentle and gentlemanly William McKinley was a tariff man. He had an 1891 tariff named after him while he was still in Congress. (Note: that tariff cost McKinley re-election to Congress in 1892.) Most post Civil War presidents were small town lawyers, state governors,  congressmen, and Civil War veterans, five of whom were born in Ohio.

From small towns they came bringing their sweethearts along with them to Washington. In most ways, they adequately represented Main Street Americans. They weren’t planters. They lacked the aristocracy of Washington, Jefferson and William Henry Harrison. As president, they might propose legislation, but mostly they either signed or merely disposed of bills considered by Congress.

Soon, however, all that would dramatically change.

I’ll tell you more next time…

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY