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
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