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
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