President, Public, and Press: A Romance Gone

Harry Dart’s charming cartoon from 1911 conjures up a vision of the US president, public, and press bound together in a happy if inescapable relationship.  William Howard Taft was then president, and the nation’s falling into a star-struck frenzy as he fled Washington to spend a few weeks at a “summer White House” in New England supplied the theme for Dart’s cartoon.  Between 1909 and 1912, the 300-pound Taft and his wife Helen summered in the Massachusetts town of Beverly, generating headlines and intense local curiosity.  In making a resort community “the nation’s summer capital,” Taft was following long-established custom.  Presidents at least as far back as Buchanan and Van Buren had traded stifling conditions on the Potomac for the salubrious pleasures of a few weeks by the sea, in the hills, or at a fashionable watering hole.

No matter how “ordinary” the Tafts sought to be, their presence turned the starchy enclave of Beverly all circus-y.  Journalists and others clogged its byways to glimpse the President passing in his car or the First Lady patronizing the local shops.  According to the Boston Globe, “motorists in goggles and dusters formed a half-mile line outside the president’s cottage awaiting his emergence for a Sunday drive.”  Gawkers paddled skiffs out into the harbor to inspect the grand presidential yacht, The Mayflower, a 273-foot vessel with a staff of 166 under eight officers.  Mrs Taft claimed that only by boarding the yacht and sailing up the coast could the president get a short interval of rest, “steaming away out of the reach of crowds.”

In fact, the pressure of the Tafts’ celebrity affronted Beverly’s carefully cultivated aura of exclusivity.  “Secret service men patrolled the grounds” around the president’s temporary residence, “trampling the flower beds and generally spoiling the serene summer atmosphere.”  Souvenir hunters snatched the prayer books the president had used while worshiping at the local Unitarian church.  All the while, Taft kept up with his official duties, visiting the executive offices set up for him at Pickering House when not indulging in his well-known passion for golf.

Yet the hoopla surrounding the president’s appearance spoke to the prestige of the presidency itself.  The comical aspects of the public’s love affair with the president are gently satirized in Dart’s cartoon, which imagines George Washington, the first president, similarly circumstanced at “the first Summer Capital” of Mount Vernon.  Messengers dart across the grounds, delivering urgent messages to an executive office set up in one of the plantation’s outbuildings, while on a veranda, man-servants tote trays of cold martinis.  Temporary quarters have been set up for the Departments of Justice, Treasury, and War on Mount Vernon’s front lawn, where Washington, dangling a tennis racket, ponders an urgent communique that has interrupted his game.

Radical dames crusading for the right to vote crowd around outside, bearing signs reading “Our Rights Are Paramount; Let Congress Wait” and “If We Don’t Get Our Rights This Year, We Will The Next” (which is funny because women’s perennial effort to gain the franchise had been going on for more than seventy years and would not culminate in success until 1920).  The president’s security detail is badly outnumbered, allowing groups such as the Daughters of the Revolution and suppliants for pensions to breach the sanctity of the presidential compound.  The presidents’ friends lounge at a table in the shade, trading political intelligence and waiting to get away with G. W. for a round of golf.

Dart’s cartoon evokes nostalgia, because no American would think of drawing or publishing such a cartoon today.  Over the past decades, changes in the press, the public, and the presidency have made the gentle affection that infuses this cartoon a rarity.  The press, the public, and the president are no longer united in a virtuous dynamic of mutual dependence and trust.  Above all, President Trump’s meanness and talent for alienating others makes such a happy scene unthinkable.

 

Image: Harry Grant Dart, “Mount Vernon, The First Summer Capital,”
Puck, vol. 70, no. 1798, 16 August 1911,
from this source.

“A Thanksgiving Truce”

Teddy Roosevelt and wild animals gathered around a table for a Thanksgiving meal.
The Bear, raising his glass in a toast to Teddy Roosevelt, says with much feeling,: “Here’s hoping that when next we meet, we see you first.”

Image: from this source.

After The Tax Bill Passed

cartoon shows tax inspectors looking under a woman's crinoline and under a bed in her home.

A federal income tax was first levied in the United States in 1862.  Congress instituted the tax to meet the extraordinary expenses of the Civil War.  The Revenue Act of 1862 levied a progressive tax on Americans, of 3% on incomes between 600 and 10,000 dollars, and 5% on incomes over 10,000 dollars (roughly $238,000 today).

Prior to the Civil War, the federal government relied primarily on tariffs (duties on goods imported into the US) to finance its activities.  The use of the tariff protected the growth of nascent American manufactures, by making foreign goods more expensive relative to those made in the US.  This arrangement allowed the government to operate without taxing citizens directly.

The cartoon above, published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper soon after the Revenue Act went into effect, captures its impact on American psyches.  The tax is depicted as indecorously invasive.  In the drawing, four federal tax collectors are snooping around inside the home of an American citizen named Scroggs.  Caught in the act of arranging his hair, Scroggs faces interrogation armed only with a brush and comb.  A tax commissioner in a high hat accosts him while fingering Scroggs’s pocket-watch.  Another visitor peeks under his wife’s skirt, while still others scrutinize the couple’s clothes and look under their child’s bed.  The caption: ‘Scroggs says he is ready and willing to pay any amount of tax, but he would like them to leave his wife’s crinoline and other domestic trifles alone.’

Did instituting the income tax create an antagonistic relationship between citizens and the government that had not existed before?  What we do know is that in 1867, the Civil War at an end, the income tax was sharply reduced, and in 1872 it was eliminated.  According to the Internal Revenue Service website, between 1868 and 1913, 90 percent of internal revenue was garnered through taxes on alcohol and tobacco.  The income tax was re-instituted only in Woodrow Wilson’s era, following the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, which increased Congress’s discretion in levying income taxes directly on the citizenry.

Image: from this source.

The Nullifiers and Cliven Bundy

Nullification . . . despotism (1833 lithograph by Endicott & Swett)Not fifty years had passed before some Americans grew restive under the federal Union.

Back then, in 1832, the unhappy ones were called “nullifiers.”  They hailed from South Carolina, and their leader was the redoubtable John C. Calhoun, a senator and out-going Vice President with a good head on his shoulders and plenty of determination.  (In the cartoon above, he is the central figure, reaching for the despot’s crown.)

The nullifiers argued that because the states had existed before the federal Union, the states had the right to “nullify,” or say no to, a federal law.  Nullifiers believed that the states, which had ratified the Constitution, retained a kind of sovereignty, despite having empowered the federal government and established the Constitution as “the supreme law of the land.”

The down-side of federalism

By the 1830s, Americans were having to grapple with the fact that, under the federal system, their point of view would sometimes be in the minority.  Congress would sometimes craft federal laws that defied individual interests or the interests of individual states.  The preferences of a state or region could be perennially disregarded unless it could persuade a majority to share its view.

Slave states, in particular, became deathly afraid that, if slave-holding became a minority interest, the federal government could legislate slavery out of existence.

So radicals in South Carolina got busy inventing a school of thought that would justify their disobeying federal laws they didn’t like.  As it happened, a political controversy over tariffs rather than slavery furnished their first test case.

Unhappy radicals nullify a federal law

The uproar came over what they called “the tariff of abominations.”  Battles over tariff policy were to 19th-century politics what tax issues are to Americans now.  In the first century or so of the country’s existence, tariffs, not internal taxes, supplied most of the federal government’s revenue.

Tariffs protected America’s developing economy, which, though burgeoning, was in danger of being cannabalized by mature economic powers like England.  So the US imposed many tariffs on imports, both manufactured goods and commodities.  Congress drafted and debated tariff legislation every few years, occasioning intense negotiations and bad feelings.

Inevitably, tariffs affected southern and northern interests differently.  Tariffs forced southerners, who engaged mainly in agriculture, to pay more for manufactured goods or imports they needed, whereas northerners benefited from the protection given to their emerging industries and to internal trade.  In the long term, the South stood to benefit from more goods being produced domestically, but it was not inclined to see it that way.  The system of tariffs imposed through federal legislation in 1828 and again in 1832 roused the radicals to defy the so-called “Tariff of Abominations.”

South Carolina’s nullifiers got serious and, on November 24, 1832, used their majority in the state legislature to pass a Nullification Ordinance declaring the national tariff law void.  Their action posed a threat to the entire federal system, for what would remain of the Union if every state were allowed to defy a law it didn’t like?

Andrew Jackson, who was president at the time, might have been thought sympathetic to the nullifiers.  After all, he was a Southern slave-holder who opposed certain forms of centralized power, such as a national bank.  His response to South Carolina, however, was swift and uncompromising: he had Congress pass a Force Bill, empowering him to enforce the federal law by military means if necessary.  In the meantime, Henry Clay obtained some concessions in the tariff legislation that made it easier for South Carolina to retreat from its dangerous position without losing face.  Jackson never had to use the power the Force Bill gave him.  The crisis passed.

Nullification’s baleful legacy

The desire to break free of federalism’s limits continued to disorder the political culture of the Palmetto State.  Its radicals never disavowed the anti-federalist temptation.  Their principles were still doing damage a generation later, when fire-eaters in South Carolina were the first to take their state out of the Union, claiming that this was every state’s right.  Eleven states eventually followed their lead.  It took the Civil War and four years of bloodshed to lay to rest the nullifiers’ dangerous doctrines.

When I hear of Cliven Bundy and others who do not wish to abide by federal law, I hear the echoes of the nullifiers.  These are Americans ignorant of the tragic consequences of the doctrines they mouth.  Federalism, however imperfect, has secured to every American benefits that never would have been attained under a weaker system.  Cliven Bundy subverts the values of the flag that he loves to wave.  “From the many, one?”  He’s forgotten what that means.


Image: An 1833 lithograph by Endicott and Swett correctly envisions the consequences of nullification’s doctrines.  Calhoun and other nullifiers mount a pyramid at whose base lie two slain figures, draped in the American flag and the motto “E Pluribus Unum.”  They represent the Constitution and the Union.  At right is Andrew Jackson, pulling down the nullifier who would ascend from nullification to treason.  The kneeling figures at left are modestly circumstanced Southerners, forced to endure whatever may come of the nullifiers’ rash and self-serving deeds.  Beyond the top step of the pyramid, labeled Disunion, lies Anarchy.


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Up Salt River

It was a dreaded nineteenth-century destination, a fabled snare where presidential candidates ended up fighting for their lives: Salt River was a tantalizing, semi-mythical waterway whose treacherous shoals were synonymous with the ruination of great leaders and their parties.

In this election season, do we not owe a moment’s recollection to the legions who have met defeat and disaster on the way?

Cartoon showing Zachary Taylor rowing his opponent Lewis Cass up Salt River

Salt River was, to begin with, a real place: a small, winding tributary of the Ohio River originating in the wilds of Kentucky.  Before railroads, the Ohio was the main cross-country route for reaching the eastern cities.  To go up Salt River was to leave a broad waterway, which steamboats plied daily carrying hundreds of passengers, and end up in the middle of nowhere on a dead-end stream.

Add in the fact that the state of Ohio was even then known as a “king-maker,” and you can understand how the Salt River became synonymous with political oblivion.  Judging from these old prints preserved at the Library of Congress, political cartoonists had a field day with this theme.  Salt River became the setting for betrayal and folly of all kinds.  Above, we see Whig presidential candidate Zachary Taylor rowing his Democratic opponent Lewis Cass up Salt River.  The expression on Cass’s face shows that he knows what fate awaits him.  He is resigned.

Political cartoon showing Martin Van Buren and others attempting to cross Salt River

Here, presidential candidates of 1848 attempt to cross Salt River to reach the White House.  Martin Van Buren (who often figures in these Salt River fantasies) is shown piggybacking on the shoulders of his son, John, a popular figure whom many expected to equal his father in fame one day.  And the other men, submerged and in danger of drowning?  These are Van Buren’s rivals, including Horace Greeley.  On the bank sits a Greeley ally, who declines to save him.

Cartoon showing James Polk and his Democratic allies sailing up Salt River

This 1844 cartoon shows candidate James Polk and his Democratic Party allies.  Polk was a dark-horse candidate who many sensed would cause trouble for his party. (They were right.)  Perched on the edge of a dingy that a steamboat is towing, he towers over his party’s elders, who are oblivious to the disaster looming.  They believe that they are still on the Ohio.  Polk, knowing the truth, isn’t worried.  Equipped with the body of a long-legged wading bird, he’s perfectly capable of reaching safety.  Alone.  While Van Buren blithely expresses delight at being near “the headwaters of navigation,” Polk, noting the water growing shallow, prepares to take off.

At times, Salt River could become positively crowded with victims, as in 1854, when the Democrats routed the Whig Party, a defeat that spelled an end to the party for good.  Here, the Democrats drive their Whig opponents into the briny river with malicious glee.

Looks like fun, doesn’t it?  Salt River, anyone?

Cartoon map of Salt River showing its hazards and un-navigability(Courtesy Library of Congress))


All images courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division
of the Library of Congress

(top to bottom):
Rowing Him Up Salt River (1848)
Fording Salt River (1848)
Polk & Co. Going Up Salt River (1844)
Terrible Rout & Total Destruction of the Whig Party in Salt River (1852)
A Correct Chart of Salt River (1848)
Click on any title for more information.