Thirty-six Presidents into the future, how will Barack Obama be viewed? Put another way, when another 175 years of history that needs to be crammed into the same-sized textbook reduces his presidency to a few paragraphs, what will be their theses?
Will the context of the Great Recession be discussed, or will it be described generically as a "periodic downturn" that is to be comprehended with the digestion of a sentence or two? Will our president's reasoning regarding ongoing human rights abuses be considered, or will such atrocities be lumped into an overall pattern of moral depravity characteristic of this period in American history? Will people as far removed from us in time as we are from Martin Van Buren understand the complexities of how people of our time perceived race?
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we'll use computers to talk about the presidency during which the telegraph was invented. We may also find that though the men themselves share little in common, the political circumstances in which they found themselves certainly did.
The Story Up To Now (a/k/a Reducing 50 Years of a Man's Life and Works to Two Short Paragraphs)
Last week's episode focused on the life and early political career of Martin Van Buren, son of a tavern owner in the town of Kinderhook, New York. His childhood was so Dutch that today he'd be classified as an ESL student, but his accent, his enemies learned, was part of his considerable set of political skills. Through shrewdness and adroit maneuvering on the legislative battlegrounds of 1810s and '20s New York and in the federal Senate, he rose to through the ranks, even serving as governor for a couple of months before being tapped by newly-elected Andrew Jackson to serve as Secretary of State.
As President Jackson's relationship with Vice President John C. Calhoun deteriorated around social scandals and increasingly bitter disputes between the various sections of the country, Van Buren grew into one of Jackson's most trusted advisors, and finally his protégé and heir apparent. His work in establishing the Second Party System essentially founded the Democratic Party, and his organizational skill was critical in Jackson's winning of a second term – during which Van Buren served as Vice President. In the Election of 1836, Old Hickory, having served his two terms, threw all his considerable influence behind electing his hand-picked successor.
Weird Historical Sidenote: In 1836, the idea of a powerful president being succeeded by his veep might've seemed a logical outgrowth of the American political process, perhaps even an inevitable dynastic tradition secretly encoded within our Constitution. If that was the prediction of futurists back then, though, they were as wrong as a woman who thought she should have the right to vote: a sitting vice president wasn't to be elected again until George HW Bush did it in 1988.
Let's Call It the 25-State Strategy (Michiganders, you'll have to wait for the next one)
Though he had the support of General Jackson, Martin Van Buren's election in 1836 was no sure thing. Even his own party – the one he had essentially constructed – wasn't unified behind him. Oh, sure, the vote at the 1835 nominating convention was unanimous, but there was an awful lot of chicanery and grumbling behind the façade of a united front.
in the words of a contemporary journalist, [the Democrats were] comprised of "the Jackson party, proper; the Jackson-Van Buren party; the Jackson-anti-Van Buren party."
Senate.gov
There is a modern parallel here. The life of George W Bush, Ivy League legacy frat boy and failed businessman, has very, very little in common with Andrew Jackson, self-educated, self-made frontier lawman dueling enthusiast. But personality-wise, the Hero of New Orleans and the Guy Who Bungled Katrina shared a few traits, even if they were arrived at for completely different reasons – both men display obstinacy, arrogance, and an accustomization to getting his own way as a matter of day-to-day life. Like Bush nominating Harriet Meirs to the Supreme Court, Jackson had decided that Van Buren was to succeed him, and to hell with what his party members in Congress thought about it.
But Jackson wouldn't be around forever, and there were Democrats who worried that Van Buren would exploit or enhance what they saw as Jackson's already-too-imperious re-interpretation of the role of the chief executive. At least some of this may have been what we would now call negative spin – Van Buren didn't have Jackson's charisma or ability to completely dominate a room, and since he had been in Washington for fifteen years, he had made enemies in his own camp as well as that of his non-Democrat rivals.
Those rivals consisted largely of powerful personalities in the Senate, men like Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C Calhoun of South Carolina. They hated Jackson, and by extension Van Buren, with a passion – Calhoun openly referred to Van Buren as "The Weasel" – but it wasn't limited that once-august body: Van Buren had his haters in the House, too. Back before he'd lost an election and gone to Texas to get himself killed at the Alamo, David Crockett, a former Jacksonian who had irreconcilably broken with his fellow Tennessean in 1828 over the latter's Indian Removal policies. Crockett, who was
one of "Aunt Matty's" sharpest critics, ridiculed the vice president's appearance as he presided over the Senate, "laced up in corsets, such as women in a town wear, and, if possible, tighter than the best of them." Cartoonists portrayed Van Buren clutching the president's coattails, or donning Jackson's too-large greatcoat. More serious detractors warned that Van Buren would continue the aggrandizement of executive power that Jackson had begun. Democrats countered with pointed allusions to the Federalists, who had supported the First Bank of the United States, they reminded voters, as well as such equally repugnant measures as the Alien and Sedition Acts. They coupled these attacks with paeans of praise for the president who had slain the "monster bank."
senate.gov
Jackson's opponents, in disarray during his first term, had coalesced during his second into the Whig Party, named after the anti-monarchy faction of the British Parliament. In 1836, the Whigs offered up Henry Clay for another of his nearly-perennial runs at the White House. Since he'd failed to win the presidency as a Democratic-Republican in 1824 and as a National Republican in 1832, Clay cooked up a novel scheme for his new Whig persona to win in the Election of 1836: run 3 regionally popular candidates in the hopes of siphoning off enough electoral votes that Van Buren would be unable to secure the necessary majority and the election would be tossed to the House of Representatives, in which a majority of the state delegations were Clay-supporting Whigs. (Note to Modern Readers: in those days, the Supreme Court did not intervene in disputed elections – such matters were resolved in the manner actually prescribed by the Constitution. These 1800s-guys are so quaint, aren't they?)
Clay's plan almost worked: his regional candidates carried their home states and several others (see map), and future presidents like William Henry Harrison and John Tyler gaining a little campaign experience, but Van Buren's superior organization managed to garner enough electoral votes so as to not make a legislative contest out of it. The Whigs were thus obligated to regard 1836 as a "building year," but that did not mean that they felt any compunction to regard the election results as a mandate of the people, and they did their damndest to stymie everything that President Martin van Buren wanted to do. Even more unfortunate for the "Little Magician," his predecessor had left behind some people and policies that were bound to become problematic at best, and catastrophic at worst.
The Buddy Pass
In rugby, sometimes a ball-carrier will, in an effort to avoid getting creamed, toss the ball to a teammate in such haste that the ball arcs steeply upward. The teammate – the guy who is supposed to be the beneficiary of the pass – is forced to extend his arms over his head and expose his midsection to the depredations of the opposing defenders. Hence, the "buddy pass," as in "here, buddy!"
Jackson tossed a few buddy passes Van Buren's way. One was Richard Mentor Johnson (pdf) (pictured at right), the running mate that Jackson had insisted Van Buren bring with him on the 1836 ticket. Johnson, a steadfast Jacksonian since his days in Congress in the early 1820s. It was Johnson who broke the news to Jackson that Henry Clay had been nominated by John Quincy Adams to be Secretary of State, presumably as the quid pro quo part of the Corrupt Bargain of 1824, and during the presidency of John Quincy Adams, he supported Jackson from his perch as a Senator of Kentucky.
He had built a career around an event that may well be fictitious: some participants at the 1813 Battle of the Thames claimed they saw Johnson personally kill Tecumseh, leader of a significant resistance movement by the Shawnee and other tribes of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. True or not, the incident was evoked in the 1836 campaign, in which Johnson used as a slogan a line from a popular play: "Rumseh dumseh, Johnson killed Tecumseh."
Johnson brought frontier cred and military exploits to the Dem ticket (Van Buren had neither) to the campaign trail, but he came with a lot of baggage, as well:
[Johnson] later lived openly with Julia Chinn, a mulatto slave raised by his mother and inherited from his father, until her death from cholera in 1833. Johnson freely acknowledged the relationship, as well as the two daughters born to the union, and entrusted Julia with full authority over his business affairs during his absences from Blue Spring Farm.
ibid (pdf)
This made him an "amalgamator" in the eyes of many Southerners – the kind of race-mixer who was held in contempt by the slave (and press)-owning aristocracy. Threatened exposure of his miscegeny caused his support in the Kentucky legislature to dry up during the 1828 campaign, and he never did manage to return to the Senate, losing to Clay twice and John Crittenden once. With few other options, he returned to the House, where he spent two terms as a powerful member who curried favor with the Jackson administration whenever he could. Now Jackson wanted to repay that loyalty, even over the objections of Southerners and his anointed successor. Martin Van Buren, always more politically astute than second-tier rivals like Johnson, probably knew what having him on the ticket would bring:
In the bitter campaign that followed, Whigs attempted to attract disaffected Democrats by focusing on personalities rather than issues. In the South, opposition strategists raised the specter of abolition against Van Buren, while attacking Johnson as a "great amalgamator," who had "habitually and practically illustrated" abolitionist principles in his own home. Johnson not only cost his party southern votes, but he also failed to attract western votes as anticipated. His own state went for Harrison and Granger. In spite of these disappointments, however, Van Buren still managed a narrow victory with just over fifty percent of the popular vote.
senate.gov
When it came time to certify the electoral votes, the state delegations duly expressed the will of their voters by casting their ballots for Martin Van Buren, but the delegation from Virginia simply couldn't abide an amalgamator, so they withheld their votes. This left Johnson with one electoral vote less than he needed to become Vice President, and the matter of a disputed Vice Presidential election was tossed to the Senate for first and only time. The Senate did eventually ratify Johnson's election, but the struggle was indicative of the kinds of interwoven sectional, racial, and personality conflicts with which President Van Buren would have to contend.
A long time before, Johnson's eccentric habits and disdain for prevailing norms of social discourse and hygiene had seemed rustic and frontiersy. As President of the Senate, however, they were cause for increasingly embarrassment, especially given that his predecessor in the office had been Martin Van Buren, who was universally acknowledged to be urbane, tactful, and always impeccably dressed. Johnson's barbarous habits grew so pronounced that by 1840, even Andrew Jackson supported pulling him from Van Buren's re-election ticket in favor of James K. Polk:
"I like Col. Johnson but I like my country more," he wrote Francis P. Blair shortly before the Democratic convention, "and I allway go for my Country first, and then for my friend."
via senate.gov
Van Buren ended up deciding to keep Johnson on the ticket in 1840, not because he was effective, but because he brought a couple of key voting blocs with him and because the Whigs had subtly forced his hand. That year, the Whigs were running William Henry Harrison, Johnson's old commander-in-arms, was pinning his war-hero cred on the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe; since it seemed to Van Buren ill-advised to get rid of his own ticket's built-in hero, the pair stayed intact and trotted out the old "rumseh, dumseh" rhymes again.
"Martin Van Ruin"
Even more pressing than the slowly-unfolding disaster that was his vice president, Martin Van Buren found himself immediately confronted with one of the worst economic downturns in the nation's history:
... [It] became Van Buren’s primary concern during his presidency. Historians have identified three causes of the depression that wracked the American economy during the late 1830s. First, English banks—responding to financial troubles at home—stopped pumping money into the American economy, an important reversal since those funds had financed much of the nation’s economic growth over the preceding two decades. Second, U.S. banks, which had overextended credit to their clients, began to call in loans after British banks cut their money supply. Third, President Andrew Jackson’s "hard" money policies, especially the 1836 Specie Circular that aimed to stabilize what Jacksonians saw as an out-of-control economy by requiring that all purchases of federal land be made with precious metal (i.e. "hard" money) rather than paper ("soft") money, only exacerbated the credit crunch.
— via edsitement.neh.gov
On the day that he assumed office, one of the nation's most prominent trading houses suspended payments, the first in a wave of brokerage house failures that swept the nation during the panic of 1837. Jackson's "hard money" fiscal policies were only partly to blame for the panic. A trade imbalance and a sharp decline in the price of American cotton had also contributed to the crisis, which was international in scope. But Whigs were quick to blame the nation's economic woes on Jackson and, by extension, on Van Buren, sometimes dubbed "Martin Van Ruin" during this period. He had inherited a situation that one scholar has characterized as a "potentially devastating emergency, probably the worst facing any new President on taking office until James Buchanan had to cope with slavery and the Dred Scott decision in 1857."
senate.gov
The Panic of 1837 was on, as the economic policies of Van Buren's predecessor, coupled with an unfavorable economic climate on the world scene, came home to roost. Across the country, people showed up at banks looking for their deposits, only to find they'd been used to invest in badly inflated speculative ventures – in other words, disappeared into the ethers and now gone for good.
This panic was made worse by a number of factors: large debts incurred by states due to over-expansion of canals and the construction of railroads; an unfavorable balance of trade as imports exceeded exports, resulting in a loss of specie (gold and silver -- as opposed to paper currency) ; and several crop failures in 1835 and 1837. The major cause of the panic, however, was the economic impact of land speculation. It was a period of speculative mania.
After the demise of the Bank of the United States, state and wildcat banks grew rapidly during the 1830s. Funds were more easily available, and investors borrowed money at an incredible pace. Not only the small Western farmer, but merchants, manufacturers and traders also borrowed heavily. The business community, rather than paying off their debts and refinancing new ventures, anticipated greater returns if they invested their borrowed money in speculative enterprises -- investments that, they hoped, would greatly increase in value while they held them. Leading the list of speculative ventures were investments in the vast amounts of readily available cheap land.
Panic of 1837 lesson plan, part of publicly-available educator's resources through the Henry George School of Social Science
Those get-rich-by-flipping-property schemes had certainly been enticing: land valuations in New York City rose of 50%, timber lands in Maine tripled in price, and speculators were bragging about 75% annual profits. Credit was extended to virtually anyone with a pulse, based upon appreciation of land that was overvalued in the first place – in other words, numbers written down on sheets of paper or "folding money" printed up by state and privately-held banks, not upon the exchange of things with actual, physical value.
To curb the speculation boom, Andrew Jackson proclaimed via executive order the Specie Circular on July 11, 1836. The directive held that henceforth, payment for all purchases of government lands would be required to be in gold or silver, and it quickly constricted the money supply. Cries of "Rescind the Circular!" echoed throughout the specie-drained west, but even as Van Buren took office, Jackson wrote him asking for more time to let the corrective action work its magic.
Beware the Locofoco
It never really did. Van Buren stuck with the Circular, but came up with another, far more novel, approach to fixing the problems between the US government and the financial "industry" – he would simply divorce them altogether. There's more on that below; for our purposes here, though, it's worth noting that the issue of hard vs. soft currency was yet another that caused rifts in the Democratic Party.
The radical wing, which supported Jackson, Van Buren, and the circular, became known as the Loco-focos. The Locofocos also stood against a great many of the entrenched elites and ideas of their own party: they began in 1835 in New York as a response to Tammany Hall, and in opposition to monopolies, state banks, paper money, "generally any financial policies that seemed to them antidemocratic and conducive to special privilege" (ibid.) (and occasionally, against economic-Locofoco Martin Van Buren). They became the sometimes-difficult-to-control allies on Van Buren's left flank; Whigs seized on the name and applied it to all Democrats everywhere, the same way Teabaggers feel they're smearing all Democrats when they call them "Lib'ruls."
Weird Historical Sidenote: I had a feeling the question may come up, so I went ahead and did some digging on the origin of the name "Locofoco" – and it turns out that we modern progressives might have an easier time grokking where these guys coming from than most. In 1835, a group of Dems who sought to nominate a slate of candidates other than that approved by Tammany descended upon a meeting in the Hall. In an effort to get them to leave, the gaslights were extinguished, but the self-styled "Equal Rights Party" (by modern standards, it was nothing of the sort) had anticipated this, and had brought with them a bunch of lanterns and newfangled Italian sulfur-tipped matches.
A very tumultuous and confused scene ensued, during which the gas-lights..were extinguished. The Equal Rights party..had provided themselves with loco-foco matches and candles, and the room was re-lighted. Immediately after this outbreak at Tammany Hall, the Courier and Enquirer, a whig, and the Times, a democratic..newspaper, dubbed the anti-monopolists with the name of the Loco-Foco Party, a sort of nick-name which the whigs have since given to the whole democratic party.
J. D. HAMMOND Polit. Hist. N.Y. II. 491-2 (1842), via ibid.
"What is laisser-faire but an orthodoxy? The most tyrannous and disastrous of all the orthodoxies, since it forbids you even to learn." ~ George Bernard Shaw
Martin Van Buren presaged Herbert Hoover and Ronald Reagan in his Inaugural Address:
"the less Government interferes with private pursuits, the better for general prosperity."
Laissez-faire was as wrong a way to respond to economic crisis in 1837 as it was in 1929, 1981, or now, but since it is one of the easiest to implement of all the elements of small-r republicanism, it's one of the ones most often employed by conservatives who like to say they're "Jeffersonian" when faced with a problem that demands a federal solution. Accordingly, Van Buren's actions at the federal level were pretty minor: he suspended further disbursements of federal funds to state banks (and in so doing controlled a treasury that actually ran a large surplus during the depression, which had its own negative impacts), and provided for the release of $10 million in government-backed treasury notes.
The economic situation was such that Van Buren was forced first to confront, then to wrestle with, the core of his Jeffersonian identity. "State's Rights" – still thought of in terms of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves and the Alien & Sedition Acts, though increasingly used to justify anything sectional or state leaders felt lay outside their best interests – was something upon which he had based the entire party he had built, and a major component of the cement that held his coalition (especially the Southern part of it) bound in a unified Jacksonianism. The solution he proposed flew in the face of all of that.
In September, 1837, President Van Buren called a special session of Congress to consider a measure that would divorce the business of the US government from that of private enterprise once and for all. He proposed creating what became known as the "independent treasury," a/k/a the "subtreasury," which would collect and disburse government revenue independent of private or state banks, and permitted only designated federal agents – not simply any old bankster, as had heretofore been the case – to handle government funds. It was a most un-Jacksonian solution, and one that seems tinged with a little foreshadowing (added emphases mine – um) of today's economic debates:
In recommending the creation of an independent treasury, the president invoked Jeffersonian rhetoric in an attempt to disguise the radical aspects of his program. He cautiously explained the origins of the panic, being careful not to blame state banks for the collapse. "All communities are apt to look to government for too much," the president told the special session. "If, therefore, I refrain from suggesting to Congress any specific plan for regulating the exchanges of the country, relieving mercantile embarrassments, or interfering with the ordinary operations of foreign or domestic commerce, it is from a conviction that such measures are not within the constitutional province of the General Government." But the government was obliged to safeguard its own funds. It was in this context that Van Buren recommended an independent treasury. In so doing, he was careful to point out that such a program required no increase in government patronage.
Although cautious and couched in familiar terms, the president's proposals constituted a radical departure from the premise upon which the Democratic party was built. As a loose and often factious coalition of state interests, the Jacksonian alliance functioned smoothly so long as state leaders could interpret federal policy to suit their own interests. Van Buren's proposal for an independent treasury contained no encouragement for state initiative. Quite the contrary, the president placed the needs of the federal government ahead of those of the states. He reversed the delicate balance of political priorities that he had struggled so long to maintain. No matter how careful his wording, how respectful his tone, the president had created a dilemma from which there would be no easy escape.
Martin Van Buren - The independent treasury, an excellent article located at presidentprofiles.com
It was a bold idea, but it was opposed by a quickly-galvanized batch of people we'd today call conservadems, and unity within the Democratic Party evaporated. The measure barely passed in the Senate (25-23), then ran into a wall of Whigs and dissenting Dems in the House, where Van Buren's surrogate lost control of the debate by turning the floor over to a Congressman from South Carolina.
It wasn't always a good idea to hand the microphone (had such a thing been invented yet) to a South Carolinian in those days, and Francis Pickens showed why. Instead of speaking in support of the President's subtreasury scheme, Pickens fired off a broadside against northern capitalism and its war on slavery. It had the effect of ratcheting up the emotions in the debates – dialing up to 11, as Jon Stewart might say – and when the vote was finally held, Van Buren's subtreasury plan went down in defeat.
The same thing happened the next year, and the next, but in 1840, Van Buren finally got his Independent Treasury Plan passed, based largely on the argument that the federal government had an obligation to guard and provide good stewardship of the taxpayer's money. As fate would have it, the bill passed on July 3, so Van Buren waited a day and spun the signing as "America's second Declaration of Independence." Alas for his hyperbole, the Whigs won the presidential election that year and 1841 saw the plan repealed, but it was back to stay (more or less) in 1844. It underwent considerable modification during the Civil War and was effective at both curbing speculation and stifling the legitimate extension of credit, but it could not survive the complicated finance of the twentieth century – an act of Congress closed the last subtreasuries in favor of district banks in 1921.
Historiorant:
Oh, man: it's happening again. I start on a diary that I think is going to be a about an obscure topic, worrying that I won't be able to find enough interesting stuff to fill it out, and once I see all the little bright, shiny bits of context and weird footnotes that lie just off The Path, the diary grows from a one-off to a two-parter, and finally to a series. That's what's happened here: I'm on page 11 of a single-spaced Word document, and have yet to talk about Van Buren's foreign relations, his vicious stance toward Indians, his regrettable pragmatism on abolition, and his life in the aftermath of the Election of 1840.
Granted, I do tend to ramble, but one almost has to if one wants to draw an even semi-accurate picture of American political life 175 years ago. And we have to have such a picture: Martin's Van Buren's predecessor gets a whole chapters of history texts named after him, while Old Kinderhook merits an entire presidency to a paragraph or two in the chapter on Jackson and a handful of vocab terms that "may or may not be on the test." This is more than a little sad, because it's the circumstances of Van Buren's presidency, not Jackson's, that provide the best road map for how the modern Democratic Party ought to deal with today's crises.
So lemme go ahead and announce the upcoming release of the third episode of the Van Buren Trilogy, but I'm gonna have to beg the Gentle Reader's indulgence for an extra week to get it together – much grading on the docket for next weekend, so look for the final installment at the same bat-time on January 23.