History Buff's Guide to the Presidents (12 page)

The issue concerned a tax. Designed by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton to increase federal revenues, the levy imposed a nine-cent charge on each gallon of distilled spirits. The burden fell hardest on the frontier poor who viewed hard alcohol as their currency, commodity, tea, and the best way to squeeze high profits out of cheap grain. Protests were at first modest and covert, mostly by way of smuggling. By the summer of 1794, citizens in western Pennsylvania were physically accosting tax collectors. The Whiskey Rebellion turned into a shooting war soon after. When federal marshals killed three protesters, a mob of thousands began to form near Pittsburgh to contemplate their next move (within a few miles of where a very young Lt. Col. George Washington unleashed the French and Indian War exactly forty years before).
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The president immediately called out the militia from Pennsylvania and the surrounding states. On some stretches, he led the marching columns in person, a total force in excess of twelve thousand (in 1776, he attacked the Hessians at Trenton with less than two thousand). The rebellion melted before them, and only twenty arrests were made, leading some to conclude that their commander had fabricated the whole thing as a demonstration of his supreme authority. Why else, they reasoned, would a man who made his name by rebelling against a tyrannical government suddenly refuse the same right to his own people? Washington was correct in his answer: the Americans of 1794 had something the previous generation did not—elected representation. The law could now be changed by peaceful means, and he as president expected his people to understand, respect, and exercise that great privilege.
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Repression of the Whiskey Rebellion marked the first and only time a sitting U.S. president personally led soldiers in the field against his own countrymen.

9
. THEODORE ROOSEVELT

THE COAL STRIKE OF 1902

When Republican officials named New York governor Theodore Roosevelt to be William McKinley’s running mate in the 1900 elections, McKinley’s closest adviser, Mark Hanna, exclaimed, “Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one life between this madman and the Presidency?” The statement would be prophetic, not that TR was particularly insane, but that he would become chief executive by way of assassination.
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Compared to the sheepish McKinley, Teddy was an unassailable wildebeest. A man’s man to the nth degree, he possessed a rigid sense of right and wrong, was cordial and enchanting toward women, and loved to play with kids, especially his own. The first president to fly in an airplane, to own an automobile, and to dive in a submarine, Roosevelt had a joie de vivre that either consumed or overwhelmed everyone around him. “You don’t smile with Mr. Roosevelt,” said a reporter from the
New York Times
, “you shout with laughter with him.” To fuel his bulldozer lifestyle, TR downed about a gallon of coffee per day.
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He did not speak softly, nor did he wield a big stick. Quite the opposite, TR opted for iron-fisted rhetoric and white-gloved compromise. A bitter critic of big business, the “Trustbuster” was not against monopolies per se, just against corruption and price gouging (William Howard Taft would dismantle twice as many monopolies as Roosevelt). His sweeping conservationism was more to regulate the use of natural resources than to preserve virgin lands. To help both the white collars and the workers, he created the comprehensive Department of Commerce and Labor.

This department was the offspring of a national crisis, one that threatened to literally freeze the major cities of the Northeast. In the summer of 1902, exhausted and endangered coal miners in Pennsylvania began to strike. Working more than ten hours every day in conditions that were often lethal, the miners demanded a 20 percent increase in wages and a 20 percent decrease in work hours. With winter approaching and coal being the primary source of heat for most every home and building in the country’s major cities, the mine owners cried blackmail and refused to negotiate.
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Roosevelt initially invited both sides to the White House to talk (the first time a U.S. president personally intervened in such a labor dispute). When the meetings failed, riots in the mining towns became increasingly violent, leading to several deaths. It was already October. Homes, schools, and hospitals were going without heat. Rumors of a nationwide strike were becoming more and more credible. If he sided with labor, Roosevelt would play into the hands of the growing socialist movement, numbering in the low millions already. Should he abide by the wealthy owners, he would lose the confidence of the working class. In the end, Roosevelt calmly chose neither, instructing his secretary of war to begin preparations for the invasion of Pennsylvania. Ten thousand troops were called at the ready. Roosevelt prepared to have federal soldiers take over operations of the anthracite coal mines. Labor and management would get nothing.
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Facing the most aggressive presidential performance since the Civil War, both sides caved. In a masterful move to the center, Roosevelt successfully tamed a growing national division, brought a renewed prestige to his office, and taught the warring parties that it was possible for all sides to achieve victory. Renewed negotiations brought higher wages for the miners and, accordingly, higher prices for the owners. Shipments of heating coal resumed to the cities, and in 1904 Roosevelt became the first of five “accidental presidents” to be elected in his own right.

TR was an exceedingly confident and persuasive individual. Not once in his long inaugural address in 1905 did he use the pronouns “I” or “me.” Instead he preferred “we” and “us,” which he said a total of seventy-one times.

10
. JOHN ADAMS

ALIEN AND SEDITION ACTS (1798)

Historian Alan Taylor observed, “The same qualities…that so offended colleagues have endeared Adams to scholars.” Adams is definitely making a comeback, helped in part by David McCullough’s bestselling (and exceedingly kind) biography of him in 2001. Not the most successful president, Adams still makes for good print because he is such a fiery paradox.
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Prickly in public and charming in private, sickly in body and magnificent in intellect, the provocative Adams was never boring, but he was also excessively difficult, and he would rather be right than popular. One way for a president to always be right, and unpopular, is to make it illegal for people to criticize him, which is what Adams did in 1798, signing into law several bills that effectively negated the First Amendment.

The acts were born from the perennial Britain-France rivalry (a hatred that reached back to the Norman Conquest of 1066). In the tradition of the Washington presidency, Adams professed neutrality. In practice, his stance was blatantly pro-Brit. To crush growing dissent among some twenty-five thousand French émigrés, the legislature passed and Adams quickly signed the Alien Acts, one of which allowed the president to deport any foreigner he deemed a threat to national security during wartime (as of 2012, the Alien Enemies Act is still in effect). More extreme were the Sedition Acts, which made it a federal crime to write, print, or say anything that was “false, scandalous, and malicious” against Congress or the president. Just what exactly constituted a false, scandalous, and malicious statement was never specified.
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The oppressive measures were written of, by, and for the Federalist Party, the ruling faction in the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the presidency. Shackled by these laws (quite literally in some cases) were the Democratic Republicans, who openly wondered if the government was turning into a dictatorship or, at the very least, returning to the British Empire. Vice President Thomas Jefferson was so appalled by what was happening that he abruptly left Philadelphia and remained in seclusion at Monticello for nearly two months. Suspecting his mail was being searched, he used private messengers to communicate with his colleagues. Several states contemplated leaving the Union.
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Defenders of Adams, including biographer McCullough, argued that the president exercised considerable restraint when applying the laws. It is true that Adams never deported a foreigner under the Alien Acts, but hundreds and perhaps thousands feared for their lives and left on their own, especially at the height of the Quasi War with France. Only a few dozen people were ever arrested under the Sedition measures. But all of them were Republicans, more than twenty of them were newspaper editors, and one was a member of Congress, Representative Matthew Lyon of Vermont.
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Under the Sedition Acts of 1798, it was not a crime to say or write “false, scandalous, and malicious” things about the vice president—who just happened to be Democratic Republican Thomas Jefferson.

COMMONALITIES BETWEEN GEORGE W. BUSH AND BARACK OBAMA

Factions often paint their closest rivals as polar opposites. The tactic is commonplace wherever and whenever open elections transpire. Real or imagined, differences are simplified and exaggerated by competing parties in a desperate bid to sway voting populations. This habit is nothing new in the United States. The Declaration of Independence itself was written not for King George III; it was an emotional plea to convince moderates to join the “patriot cause.”

Since 1856, the nation has been under the political direction of two dominant groups, and despite their respective rhetoric, their similarities often outweigh their differences. To start, both the Republican and Democratic parties began as reformists. In 1854, a cacophony of former Whigs, Northern Democrats, and anti-immigration Know-Nothings coalesced around the goal of preventing the extension of slavery. In six years, these upstart Republicans gained the White House with a unionist lawyer from Springfield, Illinois. Older than the Grand Old Party, the Democrats were born in the late 1820s, committing themselves to expand voting rights to the landless, to break a longstanding stronghold of an assumed east coast elite. Their unionist lawyer, Old Hickory, won the chief executive position three years later.

As is often the case, once these two movements reached the top of the political food chain, they opted for the status quo. Reflecting this is the enduring myth of the two-party system. Of course, there is no stipulation for, or mention of, political parties in the Constitution. In 2012, at least eight other parties ran presidential and vice presidential nominees, including the perennial Constitution, Green, and Libertarian parties. Thus far in the twenty-first century, the largest political affiliation in the United States consists of voters who classify themselves as independent.

The bitter rhetoric endures, while the overarching evidence speaks otherwise. Below are ten examples of how Barack Obama, and his predecessor George W. Bush, frequently echoed each other amid all the partisan shouting, despite being born on opposite ends of the country and joining supposedly opposite political parties.

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. BOTH GRADUATED FROM THE IVY LEAGUE

By his own admission, George W. Bush was not an outstanding student, a point he emphasized on the campaign trail in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the general public. Though the history major was indeed a Cstudent, his alma mater was Yale. He later attained a master’s in business from Harvard. Despite his unscholarly persona, Bush was one of the most academically trained U.S. presidents ever, and the first with an MBA. Of the forty-two chief executives before him, only seven had achieved advanced degrees. Although Bush wished to present himself as an average American, at the time of his election, less than twenty-five percent of the U.S. population aged 25 or older held one degree, let alone two.
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While Bush occasionally viewed his path from prep school to Harvard as a political liability, Barack Obama considered his own academic ascension as testimony to personal achievement. Yet he, as with Bush, had the benefit of attending a prestigious academy at a young age. Bush went to the exalted Phillips in Massachusetts during his high school years, while Obama entered the elite Punahou Academy in Oahu at age ten. At eighteen, “Barry,” as he was then known, attended Occidental College in Los Angeles. In 1981, he moved to New York, began to call himself by his given name of Barack, and soon earned a degree in political science from Columbia. Increasingly studious, Obama returned to academia in 1988 and earned a law degree from Harvard in 1991, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush.
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