Nineteenth-century Presidents Research Articles

Informing a Nation: The Newspaper Presidency of Thomas Jefferson

Informing a Nation: The Newspaper Presidency of Thomas Jefferson

Presidential Influence in an Era of Congressional Dominance

Research on presidential power focuses almost exclusively on the modern era, while earlier presidents are said to have held office while congressional dominance was at its peak. In this article, I argue that nineteenth-century presidents wielded greater influence than commonly recognized due to their position as head of the executive branch. Using an original dataset on the county-level distribution of U.S. post offices from 1876 to 1896, I find consistent evidence that counties represented by a president’s copartisans in the U.S. House received substantially more post offices than other counties, and that these advantages were especially large under divided government and in electorally important states. These results are robust across model specifications and when examining the Senate. The findings challenge key components of the congressional dominance and modern presidency theses, and have important implications for scholarship on interbranch relations, bureaucratic politics, and American political development.

Presidential Politics on Tour: George Washington to Woodrow Wilson

This article uses a study of presidential touring to advance an alternative view that nineteenth-century presidents embraced opportunities provided by exogenous forces to develop and maintain a relationship with the public. This argument stands in contrast to traditional accounts that the president was bounded by norms and ideas of proper behavior. Instead, I posit that presidents were much more responsive to evolving opportunities to participate effectively in political competition.

Take Up Your Pen: Unilateral Presidential Directives in American Politics. By Graham G.Dodds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 309 pp.

Take Up Your Pen: Unilateral Presidential Directives in American Politics. By Graham G. Dodds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 309 pp. Writing in the Notre Dame Lawyer in 1963, a young law student by the name of Robert B. Cash observed that history of executive orders is, to a great extent, a narrative of the evolution of presidential power. Graham G. Dodds' impressive book, Take Up Your Pen: Unilateral Presidential Directives in American Politics, shows how correct Cash was. Over the past two decades there has been no shortage of scholarly attention to unilateral presidential directives. During President George W. Bush's tenure, four fine books by political scientists were published: Kenneth Mayer's With the Stroke of Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power (Princeton University Press, 2001), Phillip Cooper's By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct Action (University Press of Kansas, 2002), William Howell's Power without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action (Princeton University Press, 2003), and Adam Warber's Executive Orders and the Modern Presidency: Legislating from the Oval Office (Lynn Rienner, 2006). However, each of these books, in keeping with most presidency research, focuses on the post-Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) presidency. What sets Dodds' book apart is the careful attention he gives to the development of unilateral directives from the founding era through FDR. Of Dodds' six substantive chapters, only one is devoted to what most political scientists think of as the modern presidency: the post-WWII era to the present day. Of course, anyone with even a passing knowledge of American history has heard about the most famous nineteenth-century unilateral directives: Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Andrew Jackson's Nullification Proclamation, and George Washington's Neutrality Proclamation. But Dodds' in-depth history takes us far beyond these well-known episodes of unilateral presidential action. In Chapter 3 (Judicial Sanction), he recounts the many unsung nineteenth- and early-twentieth century cases in which courts placed their stamp of approval on unilateral presidential directives--and in which they sometimes placed limits on what a president could do via executive action. The many cases that Dodds recounts occasionally make for tedious reading, but they amply support Dodds' contention that the judicial sanction of unilateral presidential directives helped pave the way for presidents' more expansive use of executive orders in the early twentieth century. Chapter 4 (Early Unilateral Presidential Directives) provides a fascinating sojourn through nineteenth-century presidential history. Dodds shows that on a wide range of domestic policy issues, including Reconstruction, the management of public lands, the treatment of Native Americans and Mormons, and labor disputes and domestic unrest, nineteenth-century presidents--especially after the Civil War--frequently resorted to unilateral executive action. Dodds' account is particularly helpful in dispelling the notion that these presidents were mere clerks (p. 119). Many of the executive orders were, of course, mundane--more housekeeping than policy making. But a number of the confrontations over executive orders have a decidedly modern ring. Take, for instance, Grover Cleveland's end-of-term proclamation in 1897 that set aside 21 million acres for forest in six western states, a move so unpopular in the West that Congress affixed a rider to an essential government funding bill to undo the president's action. Forced to choose between funding the federal government or preserving his forest reserves (p. 100), Cleveland opted for a government shutdown and pocket-vetoed the bill. Among William McKinley's first acts as president was to call Congress into session to repeal Cleveland's forest reserves. Not that McKinley objected to rule by executive action: in fact, by Dodds' count, McKinley issued executive orders more frequently than any of his predecessors, including Cleveland (p. …

The President and the Public: Inaugural Addresses in American History

This article examines presidential inaugural addresses to gain a perspective on the changing relationship between the people and the presidency throughout American political history. The analysis suggests three distinct models of inaugural address—constitutional, party, and plebiscitary—each articulating a different understanding of presidential leadership and the relationship between the presidency and the people. The constitutional presidents see themselves largely as restrained, constitutional officers with a minimal relationship to the people. The party model yields a role for the president which is more tied to the people's will, especially as expressed through party. Even though tied more strongly to the public, party presidents recognize constitutional limits on their roles and powers. Plebiscitary presidents often eschew party affiliation and the guise of constrained constitutional officer, and cast themselves as engines of the American political system fully tied to public opinion. Plebiscitary presidents often make few references to other political actors or to the Constitution. Beyond helping us to better understand the contours of American political development, this analysis challenges the prevalent assumption in studies of the presidency that nineteenth-century presidents were not popular or “public” leaders.

The Joy of Power: Changing Conceptions of the Presidential Office

Political scientist James David Barber (1972) built bis well‐known theory of presidential character on the premise that psychological health could be measured by whether a president enjoys the exercise of political power. Although this psychological theory may predict presidential success in the twentieth century, the theory fails to illuminate the behavior of eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century presidents. None of the great or near great nineteenth‐century presidents gave the appearance of having fun in the White House. To behave in such a way would have seemed conduct unbecoming of the president of the United States. Presidents in the nineteenth century largely experienced presidential power as a burden and a duty not because they were psychologically unsuited to the office but because powerful cultural norms and expectations told them that was how a president should experience the exercise of power.

The Joy of Power: Changing Conceptions of the Presidential Office

Political scientist James David Barber (1972) built bis well-known theory of presidential character on the premise that psychological health could be measured by whether a president enjoys the exercise of political power. Although this psychological theory may predict presidential success in the twentieth century, the theory fails to illuminate the behavior of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century presidents. None of the great or near great nineteenth-century presidents gave the appearance of having fun in the White House. To behave in such a way would have seemed conduct unbecoming of the president of the United States. Presidents in the nineteenth century largely experienced presidential power as a burden and a duty not because they were psychologically unsuited to the office but because powerful cultural norms and expectations told them that was how a president should experience the exercise of power.

Reimagining the “Lost Men” of the Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Late Nineteenth Century Presidents

For much of the twentieth century, scholars treated the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era as starkly contrasting phases in the unfolding of the American story: the post-Civil War dark ages followed by the bright light of the early twentieth century. More recently, historians have recognized the oversimplification if not downright wrongheadedness of that dichotomy. The past few decades have witnessed an explosion of studies on a variety of topics with coverage dates roughly from the 1870s to the 1920s. Most of these newer works underscore the continuities between the two periods and the relatively seamless evolution of forces and institutions.

Alberto Masferrer and the Vital Minimum: The Life and Thought of a Salvadoran Journalist, 1868-1932

The events of Alberto Masferrer's life and the parallel evolution of his social thought reveal much about the broader forces which shaped El Salvador and Central America during his generation. His lifetime brackets the consolidation of the Salvadoran state and the formation of modern social groups. Alberto Masferrer was born in 1868, the age of the Liberal presidents' ascendence throughout Central America; he died in 1932 as Depression-era dictators assumed power throughout that same region. In fact, 1932 is a watershed year in Central American history. With Agustín Farabundo Martí's failed Communist uprising in El Salvador and the murder of Augusto Cesar Sandino in Nicaragua, the early 1930s brought a decisive end to the possibility for Masferrer's idealized type of elite-led reform and instead turned opponents toward ideologically-motivated popular revolt. Alberto Masferrer, like most intellectuals, struggled with ideas and power. He realized that the liberal reforms of the late nineteenth century Presidents not only had failed to improve the material and moral condition of the majority of his countrymen, but actually had degraded them. Though Masferrer's admiring biographer Matilde Elena López observed that “[t]he reality of man exploited by an unjust society is the central idea of his life,” it remains no easy task to categorize the cranky journalist's thought for, indeed, he does not fit neatly into any single ideology. Masferrer the humanist gave primary importance to the betterment of social and economic conditions for those living on the material plane, while Masferrer as a Christian stressed the otherworldly values of humility, hard work, patience and charity. Masferrer the communist called for a return to theejidallandholding system of the traditional Indian communities and a guaranteed standard of living for all Salvadorans, but Masferrer the corporatist recognized the existence of a natural state of hierarchy and felt that harmony would prevail if each remained true to his pre-ordained vocation. Masferrer the aestheticarielistavenerated language and culture, but Masferrer thecriollistacould not be restrained to the world of pure art and consistently returned to earth to criticize uneven social conditions. Masferrer the hispano-falangist idealized a strong and vigorous nation, yet Masferrer the pacifist abhorred violence and aggressiveness.

The President's Legislative Agenda

The president has come to be known as our chief legislator within the past fifty years, with Franklin Roosevelt and his successors taking a much more active role in the legislative process than nineteenth-century presidents took. Despite elaborate efforts and a fully developed congressional liaison capacity in the White House, however, only three presidents have been markedly successful with Congress: Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan. This article examines some of the lessons that have been learned about presidential effectiveness with Congress. Even the most successful presidents, however, have not been able to sustain their legislative effectiveness throughout their terms, and this article analyzes the frustrations of divided government and proposals for constitutional reform to alleviate the problem. The article concludes that whether one approves of these reform proposals depends how one conceives of the problem.