The Great Republic:
Presidents and States of the
United States of America,
and Comments on American History

Anyone today saying, "Government, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a terrible master," would be dismissed as some "anti-government" extremist. However, since that was said by George Washington, the Father of the Country, we have the curious result that the modern media and intellectual elite, not to mention President William Clinton, who think of there being a contradiction between loving one's country and being "anti-government," must not understand what the country was supposed to be all about. Indeed, the Founding Fathers (except Hamilton) always worried about the tyranny of a government that had too much power, while the anointed today worry that the government doesn't have enough power to do all the good things it should be doing -- while all the squalid results of their do-gooding are merely taken as evidence that they didn't have enough power (and money). Thus, Washington, who could have been President for Life (as Hamilton wanted), retired after two terms, while it is characteristic of modern politicians (like FDR) to think that they are indispensable. The reason for Washington's views, as stated about one in his Farewell Address, is well given:

A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this proposition.

This already gives us a clue to Washington's personality, which today is hard to recover and appreciate under all the mythology, mystification, and ignorance. There is little doubt that the awe and love in which Washington was held was well founded on great virtues. He was resolute and brave in action, moderate and restrained in his judgment, yet passionate and committed, ferocious in his rare anger. As a general he did not win many battles, but he won the most important ones. He knew when to attack and when he had to retreat. He knew that the most important strategic goal was just to keep his army together and in the field, wear out the British, and then catch them at a vulnerable moment, as he did. He inspired unparalleled loyalty and love in his men, suffering with them, as through the nadir of their fortunes in the terrible winter at Valley Forge, as the British occupied Philadelphia (1777). After the war, Washington was as far from a demagogue as could possibly be. He often led, as when presiding at the Constitutional Convention, without even directly expressing his opinions, though he certainly had them. This was an ideal rather more like Taoism or Confucianism than the style we are familiar with today. But, in addition to the inactivity of the ideal Taoist ruler, Washington also embodied the qualities of the lesser kinds of rulers, to be "loved and praised," and, in a very healthy sense, to be "feared." And, let me end with a sentiment of the most extraordinary kind to come from the first military man to become President:

Hence likewise they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown Military establishments, which under any form of Government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.

It is noteworthy that police departments did not exist in Washington's day, and even when they were introduced were originally prohibited from arming themselves. Today, an "overgrown Military establishment" must mean, not just a vast standing army, but the heavily armed paramilitary police establishment in each community, not to mention the multiple, extra-constitutional, often unaccountable, police agencies of the Federal government. The hostility and danger to Liberty of this establishment is palpable.

+12. North Carolina (1629), 21 Nov 1789; Slave #6
+13. Rhode Island (1636), 29 Mar 1790; Free #5, ended slavery 1784
+14. Vermont (1777), 4 Mar 1791; Free #6
+15. Kentucky, 1 June 1792; Slave #7
+16. Tennessee, 1 June 1796; Slave #8
Territory South of the Ohio, 1790; Slave

A characteristic of Federalist government was tax rebellion. Under Washington, when Congress passed a direct tax on whisky, the result was the 1794 "Whisky Rebellion" in Pennsylvania, which had to be put down by the militia. Then in 1798, under Adams, Congress passed a direct tax on property, which set off the "Fries Rebellion," also in Pennsylvania. Again force was used, and the leader, John Fries, was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. As Washington had done with the leaders of the Whisky Rebellion, Adams pardoned Fries, much to the disgust of most Federalists. Adams, indeed, had had a bitter falling out with Hamilton and purged the Cabinet of Hamilton's friends. This reflects well on Adams, but it did not help him get re-elected against the tide of anti-Federalist (i.e. anti-tax) sentiment. The Federalist Party would never win the Presidency again. On the other hand, Adams, embittered by defeat, spent his last hours in office filling the judiciary with Federalist appointments. This would do great damage to the Republic in the long run, mostly because of just one appointment, John Marshall. Marshall, although usually revered with the Founders, was really the "Federalists' Revenge":  He carefully laid the groundwork for future Federal power and, in the doctrine of Judicial Review, raised the Supreme Court itself practically above Constitutional checks and balances. As Jefferson understood, such a Court in the long run would act to promote the power of the Federal government and undermine the principle of limited and enumerated powers in the Constitution. It would be many years before the full effect of that was felt, but the fracture was already in the foundation.

I am persuaded, however, that Mr. Adams meant well for his country, was always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses. -- Benjamin Franklin

Mississippi Territory, 1798; Slave
Indiana Territory, 1800; Free

Thomas Jefferson effectively re-founded the country by putting in place a government and a Party that understood and mostly practiced the principles of limited government fought for in the Revolution and embodied in the Constitution. Thus, Jefferson got repealed all the direct federal taxes passed by the Federalists and boasted that ordinary Americans would never see a federal tax collector in their whole lives. A federal whisky tax, indeed, did not return until the triumph of Hamiltonianism in the New Deal. The two terms each of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, the only time in American history that three successive Presidents, let alone from the same Party, were each elected to and served two full terms, served to solidify America as a Jeffersonian, rather than a Federalist/Hamiltonian, Democracy -- at least for the time being. Since Jefferson eloquently wrote about this, not just in the Declaration of Independence, but in a few lengthy essays and in a mountainous correspondence, anyone who cares to can still familiarize themselves with his thinking and principles -- as every American should in a day when Constitutional government has effectively been destroyed and a government of absolute power, beyond even what Hamilton wanted, is in place. The intellectual elite who are aware of how far we have fallen from Jeffersonian principles, tend to condescendingly dismiss Jefferson as at once both Utopian and anachronistic. This is pathetic and terrifying folly. American government now owes more to Otto von Bismark than to Thomas Jefferson; but far too many people, especially the political classes (lawyers, press, and bureaucrats) and intelligentsia, are smugly satisfied with how "progressive" this is. The result is a powerful and growing police state, which is what Bismark had in mind himself. Naturally, if Jefferson himself were to return, he would find today's government far worse than the government of George III he denounced and helped throw off. At the same time, Jefferson saw the future well enough to know where trouble would come from. Thus, not only were there deficiencies in the Constitution, but it was clear to him that something would have to be done about slavery or there would be hell to pay. (And there was.) Jefferson today is easily faulted for racism and for not freeing his own slaves, but the Civil War would not have surprised him:  He already saw it coming in 1820. Jefferson's life then ended in a moment of extraordinary synchronicity:  Both he and Adams died on the same day, the 4th of July, 1826, the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

+17. Ohio, 1 Mar 1803; Free #8
Orleans Terrritory, 1804; Slave
Louisiana Territory, 1805; Slave
Michigan Territory, 1805; Free
Illinois Territory, 1809; Free

The wisdom of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe makes most subsequent Presidents and politicians look like little more than clowns -- if not distressing examples of Schopenhauer's view that "the wicked and the fraudulent" dominate the sphere of action. But if Jefferson was the Philosopher President, Madison was the Law Giver, the one who had to make the Theory into a political reality. Madison's odyssey in that respect is instructive. As the Father of the Constitution and the author with Hamilton of many of the Federalist Papers, Madison might be expected to have been a Federalist. After a fashion he was. But he could not be a Federalist like Hamilton or even Adams. He understood that the limited and enumerated powers of the Constitution, and the system of checks and balances, were all indeed to limit the power of government. As the actions, ambitions, and intentions of the Federalists revealed themselves, Madison realized that Jefferson was his natural ally, not the Federalists. Thus, although he had originally argued against it, Madison was won over by the demand of Jefferson (and many States) for a Bill of Rights. So Madison became, indeed, the Father of the Bill of Rights. And into it Madison wrote the essence of American government itself:  The Ninth and Tenth Amendments. The Ninth Amendment folds into the Constitution the Natural Rights doctrine of the Declaration of Independence. This is anathema to people who put obedience above freedom and duty above liberty, which pretty much means all the politicians, judges, and police who love the power that subverting the Constitution has given them. Heaven forbid that we should disobey a bunch of treacherous, lying, dishonest, power-mad, faithless tyrants and demagogues! Then the Tenth Amendment makes explicit what Hamilton had claimed was implicit in the Constitution, that the Federal government had no powers except what were explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. All other powers belonged either to the States or to the People. Today, of course, most of what the Federal government does is a persistent effort to evade the Tenth Amendment:  When the "general welfare" clause is interpreted to mean that tax money can be spent on anything, and when the "interstate commerce" clause is interpreted to mean that laws can be passed about anything that "affects" interstate commerce (e.g. having a gun near a school, domestic violence, growing food, etc.), then it is clear that Federal laws can be passed about absolutely anything whatsoever. Thus Madison's handiwork has come to naught; but at least it took a long time; and, since the Ninth and Tenth Amendments have not actually been repealed, it calls for a very high level of dishonesty and hypocrisy in public life to maintain the current self-serving interpretations. Of course, there has never been a dearth of dishonesty and hypocrisy among politicians; but this does create a certain tension when people realize that more than 40% of their income is being looted and that a large part of their freedom is at the mercy of official thugs who can jerk them around for any reason at any time. The source of the corruption, and the maintenance of the dishonesty and hypocrisy, however, as P.J. O'Rourke perceived in A Parliament of Whores, is that too many people think they are getting a good share of the loot themselves (don't you dare take away my Medicare!), and they are also more than happy to think that certain other people (marijuana smokers, businessmen, etc.) are getting jerked around. This sort of corruption may be inevitable in a democracy, and it remains to be seen whether future Jeffersons and Madisons will understand and implement more effective checks and balances to remedy the failing and prevent its recurrence.

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article in the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.... With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. -- James Madison, 1791

The Star-Spangled Banner

+18. Louisiana, 30 Apr 1812; Slave #9
+19. Indiana, 11 Dec 1816; Free #10
Missouri Territory, 1812; Slave
Alabama Territory, 1817; Slave

James Monroe was the only President in American history, besides George Washington, to be elected without opposition (in 1820) -- during the "The Era of Good Feeling," the only period in American history of one party rule, after the well deserved demise of the Federalists. Monroe, like Jefferson and Adams, died on the 4th of July (1831). -- Just before Monroe's Presidency, in 1816, Congress decided to do something about the American Flag. The 15 stripe and and 15 star Flag had been used ever since 1795. It had clearly been impractical to keep adding stripes for each new state, but the task of even addressing the alternatives was delayed for twenty years after the admission of the 16th state (Tennessee). Then, in 1818, Congress decided that the American flag should revert to the 13 stripes of the original flag and add a single star for each new State, with the change automatically taking effect the following Fourth of July. This has been the rule ever since. There is no statutory rule about how the stars are to be arranged, but arrangement for the 48, 49, and 50 star Flags has been set by Presidential Order. Four more new States during Monroe's Presidency meant that the Flag changed three more times.

 
+20. Mississippi, 10 Dec 1817; Slave #10
+21. Illinois, 3 Dec 1818; Free #11
+22. Alabama, 14 Dec 1819; Slave #11
+23. Maine, 15 Mar 1820; Free #12, Missouri Compromise
+24. Missouri, 10 Aug 1821; Slave #12, Missouri Compromise
Arkansas Territory, 1819; Slave
Florida Territory, 1822; Slave

Until George W. Bush, the only son of a President (John Adams) to become President, John Quincy Adams, however, ended up abandoning the Federalists -- though idiosyncratically so. Adams turned out to be the end of the Jeffersonian Apostolic Succession to the Presidency. Although John Adams and Jefferson had both been Vice-Presidents who succeeded their Presidents, Jefferson had also been Secretary of State, and he was succeeded by his own Secretary of State, Madison. Madison was succeeded by his Secretary of State, James Monroe; and John Quincy Adams was Monroe's Secretary of State, largely responsible himself for the Monroe Doctrine. (The Vice-Presidents of the period, except for John C. Calhoun, were non-entities, but Jefferson probably considered the Vice-President more properly part of the Senate than of the Executive Branch.) Adams' most extraordinary diplomatic post was as American Ambassador to Russia at the time of Napoleon's invasion in 1812. Adams wrote to his mother, "The two Russian generals who have conquered Napoleon and all his Marshals are Famine and General Frost." Thus, Stalin's quip, in the context of Hilter's later invasion, that his best generals were January and February, may have an American antecedent. Nevertheless, Adams was a bit too grouchy, independent, and contrary to be a good leader. He began getting Federalist ideas about federally funded "internal improvements" as President, and the Democratic Party started to fragment. Adams had nearly lost to Andrew Jackson in 1824, and by 1828 Jackson was irresistible. After his defeat, Adams was elected to the House of Representatives, where he literally served the rest of his life, dying in the Capitol itself (1848). Indeed, Adams collapsed with a stroke in the old elliptical House chamber at the "whisper spot," one of the two focal points where voices can be heard from the opposite side of the room. During his years in the House, Adams was active in the cause against slavery. He is now famous, thanks to Steven Spielberg's 1997 movie Amistad, for his 1841 defense before the Supreme Court of the captured Africans who had broken free and seized the Spanish slave ship Amistad. The Africans were arrested by the U.S. Navy for piracy. Adams won their freedom.

Although shamelessly driving the "Five Civilized Tribes," including his Cherokee allies from the War of 1812, out of their homes in the East, Jackson is nevertheless, in most other areas, one of the greatest Presidents. A fierce Unionist, Jackson let South Carolina ("too small to be a Republic, too large to be a madhouse") know in no uncertain terms that federal laws applied to it and that secession would not be tolerated -- although, as it happens, the complaint about protective tariffs, which hurt Southern agriculture, was just. This kind of Unionism remained characteristic of some other Southern Democrats, like Sam Houston (who became President of Texas in 1836). Most importantly, Jackson, against Congressional opposition, vetoed and killed the Second Bank of the United States, ending the specter of a Central Bank until the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. A brainchild of the Federalists (in fact, Alexander Hamilton himself), and bitterly fought by Jeffersonians, the Bank of the United States was a breach in the system of limited government, successfully contained by Jackson, now entirely triumphant since the New Deal.

+25. Arkansas, 15 June 1836; Slave #13
+26. Michigan, 26 Jan 1837; Free #13
Wisconsin Territory, 1836; Free

The "George Bush" of Jacksonian Democracy. Van Buren was the first President whose experience was exclusively as a politician. The Jeffersonian Presidents had all been Secretaries of State, and all except Madison had held important foreign diplomatic positions. Adams had also been a diplomat. Washington and Jackson, of course, were distinguished as military men. So van Buren was the first pure politician and, not surprisingly, had a reputation as a manipulator. Groomed as Jackson's successor, van Buren nevertheless could not manipulate himself into a second term against the war hero Harrison. Portrayed as an opportunistic fool in Amistad, van Buren was not that bad, but it did mean the first loss of the Presidency to an Opposition Party since Adams lost to Jefferson in 1800. So far, every Vice President to succeed his President by election (Jefferson, Adams, van Buren, Bush) has failed to be re-elected, except Jefferson (who was the last Vice President to be from the Opposition Party to his President).

Iowa Territory, 1838; Free

Harrison was the first President to die in office. Hereafter, the President elected every twentieth year (marked with a red X) dies in office. Some regard this as the Curse of Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief defeated by Harrison at Tippecanoe in 1811. The only President to die in office without being elected in the twentieth year, Zachary Taylor, was the only other Whig, and the last, to win the office. No Democrats die in office until Franklin Roosevelt, who opens himself to the Curse only by violating George Washington's precedent and winning a third term in 1940. The first Republican subject to the Curse after Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, although shot and badly wounded, nevertheless survived and fully recovered (blue X). It remains to be seen whether that represents the end of the Curse. The President elected in 2000 will be the test.

+27. Florida, 3 Mar 1845; Slave #14

The admission of Texas (1845) and the Mexican War (1846-1848) were bitterly opposed by many who thought it was all a plot to add more Slave States to the Union. Henry David Thoreau's protests over the War led to his classic essay, "On The Duty of Civil Disobedience" (1849). The Mexican Cession, however, ended up hurting the cause of slavery much more than helping it, since the first State ready for admission from the territory was California, which would permanently tip the balance in the Senate, previously so carefully maintained, in favor of the Free States. Texas turned out to be the last Slave State. The Mexican War was the first large military campaign outside the territory of the United States. Future Civil War generals, like Grant and Lee, cut their teeth on it. The total defeat of Mexico did not seem like a forgone conclusion at the time, and there was some very hard fighting. Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott became the major war heroes. The Cession obtained from Mexico was the last large addition to the contiguous territory of the United States.  

+28. Texas, 29 Dec 1845; Slave #15, last Slave State
+29. Iowa, 28 Dec 1846; Free #14
+30. Wisconsin, 1848; Free #15
Oregon Territory, 1848; Free
Minnesota Territory, 1849; Free

+31. California, 9 Sept 1850; Free #16, Compromise of 1850
New Mexico Territory, 1850; Slave, Compromise of 1850
Utah Territory, 1850; Slave, Compromise of 1850
Washington Territory, 1853; Free

Kansas Territory, 1854; Free/Slave, Kansas Nebraska Act, 1954
Nebraska Territory, 1854; Free/Slave, Kansas Nebraska Act, 1954

Kansas was the last chance for the South to get another Slave State into the Union. The fraudulent nature of the Territorial government -- the fruit of the violence of "Bloody Kansas" -- however, meant that its petition for Statehood was rejected by a Congress that now had a majority of Free States in both Houses. Kansas was not admitted, as a Free State, until after the Southern States began to secede and their representatives had left Washington. What set off secession, of course, was the election of Abraham Lincoln, an avowed Abolitionist, in November 1860. By the time Lincoln was inaugurated the following March, seven States had left the Union. Buchanan did nothing to stop them but did make one crucial and fateful decision:  He did not willingly turn over federal installations to the seceding States. Thus, when Lincoln came to office, Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor was still held by the United States Army.

+32. Minnesota, 11 May 1858; Free #17
+33. Oregon, 14 Feb 1859; Free #18
+34. Kansas, 29 Jan 1861; Free #19
Colorado Territory, 1861; Free
Nevada Territory, 1861; Free
Dakota Territory, 1861; Free
-1. South Carolina Secession, 1860
-2. Mississippi Secession, 1861
-3. Florida Secession, 1861
-4. Alabama Secession, 1861
-5. Georgia Secession, 1861
-6. Louisiana Secession, 1861
-7. Texas Secession, 1861

On 12 April 1861, the forces of the Confederate States of America opened fire on Fort Sumter. That Lincoln responded to this as war and Rebellion set off the secession of four Border States, four years of terrible war, and the deaths of over 600,000 soldiers from combat and disease. Nothing quite like this slaughter would be seen again until World War I. Indeed, one might consider that the total Allied dead on D-Day in 1944 were 2,500 men, while this is only a third of the Confederate dead alone merely in Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. Similarly, there were 47,357 American combat deaths (10,796 non-combat) in the entire Vietnam War, while there were between 43,000 and 51,000 casualties (dead and wounded) in the Battle of Gettysburg alone. Whether this all was a good idea depends on one's estimation of the value of the Union as such and of the degree to which the existence of slavery was tolerable. Did the North have the right to invade the South to free the slaves? Well, quite frankly, yes. Did the United States have the right to conquer the Southern States just to preserve the Union? Well, no -- if, that is, the principle of self-determination means anything. The problem with these evaluations is that it was no stated war aim of the United States to free the slaves. Lincoln raised armies on the basis of saving the Union, and a great many Northerners, and even some Southerners, who responded to that didn't even want to free the slaves, let alone allow full civil rights for freedmen. Of course, Southerners did not believe Lincoln's stated purposes. The Deep South States seceded because an Abolitionist President was intolerable to them, regardless of Lincoln's promises to leave slavery untouched in the current slave States. They didn't trust him. Similarly, Abolitionists were unhappy with Lincoln for apparently making such concessions to the slavers. As it happened, of course, Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation at the first decent opportunity, on September 22, 1862, and the War in fact became an instrument of radical Abolitionists, not only freeing the slaves, even in loyal Border States (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, & Delaware, by the Thirteenth Amendment), but amending the Constitution to guarantee civil and voting rights to them (the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, however poorly enforced after President Grant), which Lincoln himself had at first not supported. Thus Frederick Douglass, who had nearly been arrested as an accomplice of John Brown, and who was impatient with Lincoln at first, ended up in some awe at what was finally accomplished. Lincoln, in short, may simply have been a superb Machiavellian politician, using the necessary and sufficient means to achieving the good and just end. Lincoln freed the slaves and, by the way, saved the Union. There are still, to be sure, important arguments that the cost was not worth this result. Some of these have been examined in the review of Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. Here, let me mention a couple of them. (1) Lincoln broadly abused civil liberties in his prosecution of the war and suppression of dissent in the North. True. Unfortunately, there is no side of the angels in that respect. The Southern States had actually been censoring mail before the War to suppress even private discussion of Abolitionism, and during the War, not only was the South the first to institute conscription, but Southern civilian Unionists, in several instances, were massacred by Confederate forces. If our concern is the preservation of civil rights, then neither slavery nor war are good circumstances in which to do this. The war in fact ended, but the regime of slavery was subsequently continued by other means in the Southern States. The primary sinner, then, was not Lincoln but the slavers and their racist Segregationist successors. (2) The failure of secession removed the only real check against unconstitutional usurpations of power by the Federal Government. Again, true. The fault, however, already existed in the original Constitution, which provided no means for its own enforcement. Both the final review authority of the Supreme Court, which Jefferson understood would promote Federal power, and the threat of secession by disaffected States were ad hoc devices which could only clumsily and imperfectly serve to preserve Constitutional government. Indeed, actual recourse to secession meant withdrawl from the Constitution altogether. That the withdrawl occurred over slavery and not over some noble, or at least honorable, purpose served to discredit the device altogether in retrospect. In our own day, when the rot of usurpation has destroyed Constitutional government altogether, the challenge again is the original one, of introducing such institutional, rather than ad hoc, checks and balances that will effect the original purposes of the compact. Since most Americans apparently don't even think this is necessary, the prospects for it are still poor. (3) Lincoln was in effect a Federalist, instituted many Federalist programs, like National Banks, and so prepared the way for the ultimate Federalist and Hamiltonian triumph in the putatively Jeffersonian Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt. Again, true. On the other hand, the post-War Federal government returned to a scale that was still all but Jeffersonian in comparison to anything that has existed since the New Deal. It was "Progressivism," not Lincoln, that really prepared the way for the muddled fascist/socialist welfare/police state that we have now. Indeed, the lapse of the Federal Government into pre-War limitations meant that the Segregation regime was allowed to rise in the South, as Federal powers to defend civil rights against the States were all but destroyed by, ironically, the Supreme Court, and the check against tyranny by the States recommended by James Madison himself, and passed as the Fourteenth Amendment, became, for a while, a dead letter. The consequences of this have been far more terrible than any Federal usurpations effected by Abraham Lincoln. Segregation ultimately became so discredited and hateful that its overthrow took with it not only the Tenth Amendment and the whole concept of enumerated powers, but also fundamental rights of private property and voluntary association. This violated not only the "takings" clause of the Fifth Amendment but even the hard won Thirteenth Amendment itself:  any businessman who is required by Federal law to serve customers he doesn't want to serve is, indeed, in the thrall of "involuntary servitude." This deconstruction of the principle of civil rights into the means of destroying freedom was due, not to Abraham Lincoln, but to subsequent socialist propaganda and to the massive breach effected in property rights when Franklin Roosevelt finally got the Supreme Court to wave through key New Deal legislation (instituting "relaxed review" of property rights and infringement on "commercial" free speech). We may see Lincoln's Federalism as, ultimately, helping to prepare the way for this, but it was a small step compared to the damage done later, and none of the Civil War Amendments were in themselves unworthy. In comparison, freeing the slaves and saving the Union don't look so bad. I am a Union man, myself.

Marching Through Georgia

-8. Virginia Secession, 1861
-9. Arkansas Secession, 1861
-10. North Carolina Secession, 1861
-11. Tennessee Secession, 1861
+35. West Virginia, 20 June 1863
+36. Nevada, 31 Oct 1864
Arizona Territory, 1863
Idaho Territory, 1863
Montana Territory, 1864

Andrew Johnson of Tennessee was picked for Vice President as a Republican tribute to Southern Democrat Unionists. Since there had actually been massacres of Southern Unionists, as far away as Texas, this was a nice touch. However, once Johnson became President, he was, like other Southern Unionists, not overly concerned to protect the rights of freed slaves. His theory was that the Southern States had never really left the Union, had the same powers that they had had before the War, and so could treat freed slaves any way they liked. He allowed reconstituted governments in the Southern States which passed "black codes" depriving freed slaves of citizenship and multiple civil rights. However, Congress was firmly in the hands of Republican "Radicals." They responded with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which Johnson vetoed. For the first time in American history, a Presidential veto was reversed. Then the Supreme Court declared the Act unconstitutional, so Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the civil rights and voting rights of blacks. The Southern State governments were deposed and new Reconstruction regimes set up. Johnson was not much more friendly to these Republican Reconstruction governments than most Southern whites were. Subsequent historians, sympathetic to the South, later portrayed Reconstruction as a terrible oppression and exploitation of the South, pushed by those who simply wanted revenge. Although the governments were often corrupt, and their black members often illiterate and unsuited to the task, we cannot overlook the fact that most Southern whites had no intention whatsoever of allowing political equality, or even the basic security of person, property, and contract, to the freed slaves. Even a President fully committed to black civil rights, like Grant, was only able to postpone, not to prevent, the subsequent Jim Crow and Segregation regimes. If Johnson had had his way, such a struggle would not even have been attempted, and nothing in the Constitution would protect anyone from attack by State governments. Today, when Johnson's role in this respect is unlikely to be celebrated by most, all that remains of sympathy for Johnson concerns his Impeachment and Trial in the Senate. Since Congress, knowing Johnson's sympathies, wanted to run the Executive Branch as well as the Legislative, it passed laws attempting to abridge Johnson's Presidential privileges, specifically to prevent him from firing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who, of course, was in charge of the Union occupation forces in the South. Johnson fired Stanton anyway and was Impeached over this act. Since the law preventing the firing was certainly unconstitutional, Johnson was truly innocent and was justly vindicated. However, the political anger at Johnson was fully justified, and the Radicals can hardly be blamed for doing all they could within their power to prevent unreconstructed Confederate sympathizers from depriving blacks of the freedom so lately and dearly won. The later triumph, indeed, of those to whom Johnson was sympathetic made for a century of Terror in the South for blacks, and for endless trouble (including the corruption of the whole idea of civil rights) in the years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 abolished Segregation. Stanton, on the other hand, was no paragon of righteousness himself. His nominee to head the new Secret Service, William P. Wood, began arresting dozens of people for counterfeiting, getting corrupt judges to convict them, just so that he could collect the rewards offered by the Treasury Department. Informed of this by public outrage, Johnson began pardoning those who were thus convicted. This also angered Congress. A revealing episode. The kind of political corruption that later would get blamed on President Grant was among many of the same people who were on the side of the angels when it came to protecting Southern blacks, while Johnson, who was prepared to leave the South to its own devices, nevertheless could respond acutely to other kinds of injustice. It just goes to show the complexity of human character, and the element of truth that was used to smear the whole Radical project of Reconstruction.

Those sons of bitches! I know that damned [Frederick] Douglass; he's just like any ni**er, and he would sooner cut a white man's throat than not! -- Andrew Johnson, 1866

+37. Nebraska, 1 Mar 1867
Wyoming Territory, 1868
+1. Tennessee Readmitted, 1866, Reconstruction Government ended, 1869
+2. Louisiana Readmitted, 1868, Reconstruction Government ended, 1877
+3. Arkansas Readmitted, 1868, Reconstruction Government ended, 1874
+4. Alabama Readmitted, 1868, Reconstruction Government ended, 1874
+5. Florida Readmitted, 1868, Reconstruction Government ended, 1877
+6. South Carolina Readmitted, 1868, Reconstruction Government ended, 1876
+7. North Carolina Readmitted, 1868, Reconstruction Government ended, 1870

Grant was one of the greatest generals in history. He and his friend, William Tecumseh Sherman, essentially won the Civil War. Grant was the only Union general who would go head to head with Robert E. Lee (the Bishma and Drona of the Confederacy) and not back down. The result was immense slaughter; but we know that when Grant had the chance, he preferred a war of movement with minimal casualties. It was the greatness of Lee as a general that foiled all of Grant's maneuver's and forced the bloody attempts at breakthrough. The final act, indeed, catching Lee at Appomattox Court House, was the result of maneuver and rapid movement. A grateful Nation elected Grant twice, and he became the only President between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to be elected to and serve two consecutive terms. It has become common for historians to say that he was not a very good President and that he allowed his Administration, through inattention or naiveté, to become riddled with corruption and scandal. This has now been forcefully disputed by Frank J. Scaturro in his President Grant Reconsidered [University Press of America, 1998]. The charges of corruption, beginning with the "Credit Mobilier" scandal, are either about things that occurred during Andrew Johnson's Administration, and which Grant's Administration prosecuted, about politically motivated and questionable accusations, or about matters that Grant fully understood and handled vigorously. In the latter category was the attempt of Jay Gould and James Fisk to corner to the gold market on September 24, 1869. They had hoped to neutralize the federal government by getting Grant's brother-in-law to influence him. Grant was not fooled or influenced, rebuking his brother-in-law, warning the Secretary of the Treasury, and then foiling Gould and Fisk's attempt by ordering the Treasury to sell gold. Nevertheless, this episode is often cited as an example of Grant's naiveté and gullibility. It is hard to imagine how historical facts could become so twisted. Who Grant's enemies were, however, is not hard to discover. Grant vigorously enforced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments during the last years of Reconstruction. Georgia was temporarily returned to military rule until it ratified the Fifteenth Amendment -- it probably would not have been ratified at all without Grant's action -- fraudulent elections and race riots (a massacre of 300 blacks had occurred) were suppressed in Louisiana with federal troups, and habeus corpus was suspended and parts of the South Carolina put under martial law in order to suppress the Ku Klux Klan (enforcing the anti-Ku Klux Klan Act of April 10, 1871). The original Ku Klux Klan was actually destroyed by 1872 (not to revive until under Woodrow Wilson's apparent blessing), though other violent, racist groups continued to form. The growing unpopularity of Reconstruction in the North cost Republicans the House of Representatives in 1874. The lame duck Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in a last effort to protect Southern blacks, but such a Congressional coalition would not exist again until the 1960's, and the Act itself was soon gutted by the Supreme Court. Grant earned the undying hostility of Southern whites, and of historians who later, until the 1960's, viewed Reconstruction as the oppression of the South. To this hostility was added that of Northern "reformers," often in league with Southern Democrats, who wanted to replace government patronage with a system of civil service examinations (expecting thereby to be selected themselves). Many of the charges of corruption leveled at the Grant Administration were simply complaints about a patronage system that had existed since Andrew Jackson. Nevertheless, in 1870 Grant himself called for civil service reform and established a civil service commission. He became disillusioned by 1875, saying that "...one of the most brilliant candidates before the civil service board was in jail very soon after his appointment, for robbery." Now, more than a century after a politically independent civil service system has been in place, and especially after bureaucrats have acquired the power of writing administrative regulations with the force of law, it is not clear that such an irresponsible authority is really an improvement over political patronage. Instead, we are aware of the rent-seeking corruption of bureaucratic authority described by Public Choice Theory. Otherwise, Grant displayed the sound instinct of insisting on restoring United States money to its pre-Civil War standard. Although this made for deflation and economic difficulties, it was part of a discipline of fiscal responsibility that now seems all but saintly and miraculous -- it is hardly politically possible anymore. The Gold Standard was first offically adopted in 1873. In 1876, the Centennial of the Declaration of Independence, there was also the tragic denouement of the Indian Wars. Grant, who was sympathetic to American Indians and genuinely wished to protect them (one member of his Civil War staff, Ely S. Parker, was a full-blooded Seneca), was little able to control events, as gold seekers had flooded into the Black Hills on the great Dakota reservation. Grant's Civil War colleagues, Sherman and Sheridan, were determined to use force after Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse became "hostile" and famously defeated General Custer. Public opinion could hardly be resisted, as Grant was also aware that his military interventions in the South were costing the Republicans support in the North. Even unpopular actions, however, did not cost Grant much personal popularity. He was almost nominated again for President in 1880, but he had little enthusiasm for it. After retirement, Grant was swindled out of his entire fortune by a crooked business partner -- like Jefferson, Grant was much better at the nation's finances than at his own. Then Grant discovered that he had fatal throat cancer. In a final act of determination and courage, Grant, in constant pain and hardly able to eat or talk, wrote the brilliant, best selling memoirs that provided for his family after his death (1885). Who is buried in Grant's Tomb (on the Upper West Side of Manhattan)? Grant and his dear wife Julia, who had endured all of the astonishing turns of fortune with him.

I regret to say that with preparations for the late election decided indications appeared in some localities in the Southern States of a determination, by acts of violence and intimidation, to deprive citizens of the freedom of the ballot because of their political opinions. Bands of men, masked and armed, made their appearance; White Leagues and other societies were formed; large quantities of arms and ammunition were imported and distributed to these organizations; military drills, with menacing demonstrations, were held, and with all these murders enough were committed to spread terror among those whose political action was to be suppressed, if possible, by these intolerant and criminal proceedings... I understand that the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution was made to prevent this and a like state of things, and the act of May 31, 1870, with amendments, was passed to enforce its provisions, the object of both being to guanantee to all citizens the right to vote and to protect them in the free enjoyment of that right. Enjoined by the Constitution "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed," and convinced by undoubted evidence that violations of said act had been committed and that a widespread and flagrant disregard of it was contemplated, the proper officials were instructed to prosecute the offenders, and troops were stationed at convenient points to aid these officers, if necessary, in the performance of their official duties. Complaints are made of this interference by Federal authority; but if said amendment and act do not provide for such interference under the circumstances as above stated, then they are without meaning, force, or effect, and the whole scheme of colored enfranchisement is worse than mockery and little better than a crime. -- Ulysses S. Grant, State of the Union Message, 1874

Many who approached him told me he was a silent man. To me, he was one of the best conversationalists I have ever met. -- Frederick Douglass

No American has carried greater fame out of the White House than this silent man who leaves it today. -- James A. Garfield, 1877

To [Grant] more than to any other man the negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. In the matter of the protection of the freedman from violence his moral courage surpassed that of his party; hence his place at its head was given to timid men, and the country was allowed to drift, instead of stemming the current with stalwart arms. -- Frederick Douglass

During my two terms of office the whole Democratic press, and the morbidly honest and "reformatory" portion of the Republican press, thought it horrible to keep U.S. troops stationed in the Southern States, and when they were called upon to protect the lives of negroes -- as much citizens under the Constitution as if their skins were white -- the country was scarcely large enough to hold the sound of indignation belched forth by them for some years. Now, however, there is no hesitation about exhausting the whole power of the government to suppress a strike on the slightest intimation that danger threatens. -- Ulysses S. Grant, 1877

+38. Colorado, 1 Aug 1876
+8. Georgia Readmitted, 1870, Reconstruction Government ended, 1871
+9. Texas Readmitted, 1870, Reconstruction Government ended, 1873
+10. Mississippi Readmitted, 1870, Reconstruction Government ended, 1876
+11. Virginia Readmitted, 1870, Reconstruction Government ended, 1869

Rutherfraud B. Hayes got into office, with a minority of the popular vote and a hung Electoral College, because of a deal in the House of Representatives to end Reconstruction with the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South. This freed the hand of Southern States to violate the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, stripping freed slaves of civil rights, voting rights, and any other rights they could think of. The institution of Segregation took a little while; but by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 (after a year of 230 lynchings in 1892), which allowed Segregation laws, the regime was established -- to persist until 1964. This whole shameful transaction, however, was probably unavoidable at the time. Northern opinion had been strong against Southern seccession, and had even come around to effect Emancipation, but the project of constantly protecting freed slaves or deposing hostile Southern State governments with Federal troups very quickly became too burdensome. There would be hell to pay for this, as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did as much to destroy civil rights as to enforce them (creating endless controversies about matters that are not public, legal, or government issues at all), but it is hard to imagine how anything short of prolonged military dictatorship could have stopped Southern whites in 1876. Grant himself had accepted victories by the Democrats in the South, as in Texas and elsewhere, when the elections were honest. All the trouble in Louisiana and South Carolina was because of the fraud and violence subverted what were, at the time, black majorities.

The first Democrat elected after the Civil War, the only President elected to non-consecutive terms, as the 22nd and 24th President, and the only northern Democrat, besides Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, to be elected since. On October 28, 1886, after it had taken ten years to build the pedestal for the gift of France in commemoration of the Centennial of the American Revolution in 1876, President Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty, perhaps the greatest symbol of all of American freedom. He also was the President who dedicated the Washington Monument, in 1888. In 1886 Cleveland became the first President to get married while in office -- after the embarrassment of previously having fathered an illegitimate child. Cleveland otherwise seemed to spend much of his time vetoing bills. Civil War pensions had been getting out of hand. Originally intended for those disabled by war wounds, an 1887 bill would have provided a federal disability and/or old age pensions to all veterans, or even their parents. Cleveland's veto was sustained, though his work would be undone in the next administration. Cleveland also had a clear understanding of the damage that protective tariffs did to the poor. He said that a tariff was a tax on consumers "paid by them as absolutely...as if it was paid at fixed periods into the hands of the tax-gatherer." Other dramatic events were in his second term, below; but we find a classic statement of Constitutional government in the first term, when Cleveland vetoed a bill for drought relief in Texas in 1887 and enunciated again what James Madison had said in the 1790's, that the federal government was not authorized to spend money merely on "objects of benevolence." Madison could not have said it better. "Paternal care" is now commonly assumed to be the principal duty of the federal government:

I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.... The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood. -- Grover Cleveland

+39. North Dakota, 2 Nov 1889
+40. South Dakota, 2 Nov 1889
+41. Montana, 8 Nov 1889
+42. Washington, 11 Nov 1889
+43. Idaho, 3 July 1890
+44. Wyoming, 10 July 1890
Oklahoma Territory, 1890

The Last Good President -- perhaps the last true Jeffersonian -- Cleveland understood Constitutional Government, enforced it, and in 1893 snubbed the gang who overthrew Queen Liliuokalani in Hawaii. Cleveland appointed J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska to kill the farm subsidies that had grown into a massive source of corruption in the Agriculture Department (though such a department should not have existed in the first place). Morton's success was not undone until the New Deal. A "hard money" Democrat, in 1894 Cleveland effectively killed the Free Silver movement, whose real goal was the inflation of debts. The Panic and Depression of 1893 set off the inflationary radicals in the Democratic Party, who became disillusioned with Cleveland and nominated firebrand Williams Jennings Bryan in 1896. Bryan's defeat that year was the final collapse of the Free Silver movement. The Depression may have been due in part to the tariffs that the Republicans had passed in the Harrison administration, which had the same ill effect on trade as under Hoover in 1930. Labor trouble culminated in the Pullman strike of 1894, when Cleveland had to call out federal troops to keep the railroads running. Although he had been mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York State, Cleveland was from New Jersey, and he retired to Princeton. He is buried there, with his wife and their child, under a modest monument, shown above, in the Princeton Cemetery.

...though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people.
-- Grover Cleveland

Grover Cleveland was perhaps the last lonely survivor of the old days. He had his faults... but no one could have imagined him yielding to the mob in order to make votes. Right or wrong, he was his own man -- and never more surely than when, by popular standards, he was wrong -- H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Sun, March 15, 1926

+45. Utah, 4 Jan 1896

McKinley immediately launched off into all the imperialistic projects that Cleveland had shunned: Annexing Hawaii and then acquiring a proper colonial empire through war on doddering Spain. Since the people of the Philippines thought that they would become independent when liberated from Spain, the insurrection that resulted when they didn't cost more American trouble, fortune, and lives than the whole Spanish-American War.

Hawaii Territory, 1900

Teddy Roosevelt in many ways seems quintessentially American, vigorous, adventurous, optimistic, enthusiastic. Unfortunately, much of what he did was not for the best in the long run. His war to subjugate the Philippines, after the country was "liberated" from the Spanish in 1898, was certainly in tune with the imperialist projects of the day, but now is an embarrassment most admirers would like to pass over in silence. A more durable evil, in no way passed over by admirers, was his Progressivist "trust busting," which earned him a spot on Mt. Rushmore as the liberator of the "working man." Unfortunately, John D. Rockefeller, who probably worked a lot harder than most recent Progressivists, did more for the common man than Teddy Roosevelt ever had a hope of doing. Roosevelt thus began the political tradition, now all but dominant in American politics, of attacking "Big Business," which produces the unprecedented wealth of the country, in favor of a Big Government which, parasitic on the productive, is supposed to make things both better and fairer for the whole. This was always a confusion, or a lie, but it didn't really gain leverage until the Depression, when the malfeasance of the Progressivist President (Hoover) and the Federal Reserve System created a crisis that henceforth could be blamed on businessmen and financiers.

Now look -- that damned cowboy is President of the United States. -- Mark Hanna, Senator (R), New York

The Roosevelts & Delanos

+46. Oklahoma, 16 Nov 1907

Since Teddy Roosevent thought that Taft was too conservative, he ran as a third party "Bull Moose" candidate. This divided the Republican vote enough to hand the election of 1912 to the appalling Woodrow Wilson.

+47. New Mexico, 6 Jan 1912
+48. Arizona, 14 Feb 1912
Alaska Territory, 1912

Although still ranking high in the estimation of most American historians, Wilson was a fool, a bigot, and a failure. The first Southerner (and only the second Democrat) elected President since the Civil War, Wilson immediately set out, purging black postmasters, to bring Southern Segregationism into the Federal government. He ushered in an Era in which the Confederacy was romanticized, rather than despised, by many Northern whites. The term "Great Rebellion," which is what Northerners used to call the Civil War, was no longer heard; and Wilson himself is supposed to have provided the name for D.W. Griffith's ode to the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation (1915) -- which may have inspired the actual revival of the Klan in the same year, by Colonel William Simmons of Atlanta -- in 1920, with advice from an Atlanta advertising agency, the new Klan spread rapidly to North and South. If this was not bad enough, Wilson was also a "Progressive," which meant he favored a powerful, centralized government, run by "experts." What this meant when "he got us into war" in World War I, was the Federal seizure of large parts of the economy, including the railroads, and a virtual total suspension of civil rights, so that people were imprisoned for any public dissent over the war. This might even have been, in a perverse sense, excusable, if Wilson had known what he was doing in the war itself; but he didn't. His naiveté and utopianism in dealing with the aftermath of World War I make Thomas Jefferson's foreign policy look positively Machiavellian. The result was repudiation at home and the seeds of the Third Reich abroad. Nevertheless, Wilson was a Ph.D. and the former President of Princeton University. To historians, he is one of their own; and so all his wickedness, racism, tyranny, and folly is happily overlooked, even when it is, by the way, mentioned.

Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit... -- Woodrow Wilson

Mr. Wilson bores me with his Fourteen Points; why, God Almighty has only ten. -- Georges Clemenceau

Wilson's empire has no border because He does not govern territories. Rather He interprets the needs, the hopes, the faith of the human spirit, which has no spatial or temporal limits. -- Benito Mussolini, 1919

Wilson, when he got home from Versailles, was higher in the world than any other American had ever got. Multitudes of his lieges regarded him as the wisest man since Solomon, and there were plenty who suspected that he was actually divine. More than once, in fact, in 1919, I heard bold whispers that the Second Coming, after long delays, was at last upon us. If he had incarcerated himself in the White House, and confined himself to issuing vague bulls in the voluptuous camp-meeting rhetoric of which he was a master, he would have died to the accompaniment of well-authenticated natural portents, and miracles would be worked at his tomb today. But he insisted fatuously upon exposing himself to the plain people, and the result was catastrophe.... When they turned out by the thousands to feast their eyes upon a genius, a superman, an archangel, what they saw was simply a Presbyterian pedagogue in a long-tailed coat, giving his old show for sophomores. It was a bitter disillusion and it cost Wilson a pair of wings -- H.L. Mencken, American Mercury, October 1931

Although provoking only ridicule from most historians ever since (because of scandals over oil leases on federal land), Harding was a popular President who mostly ended the Red Scare, released Wilson's anti-war political prisoners, like Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs (inviting him to the White House), saw the country through the brief depression that had started under Wilson, and then set it on its way to the prosperity of the rest of the decade, with consistent budget surpluses to pay down the War debt. Not a bad record, actually. But, discouraged by the friends who had betrayed his trust in the oil scandals, Harding's health declined, and he died, evidently of heart failure, after a trip to Alaska, at the (still existing) Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Three Presidents have died on the Fourth of July -- the last was James Monroe -- but only one was born on the Fourth of July:  That was Calvin Coolidge. Although a butt of jokes by the anointed, Coolidge was the last President of the Century who was within shouting distance of exercising truly responsible and Constitutional government. He knew what his job was supposed to be and said so in plain and direct language -- rarely quoted by the historians who despise his Jeffersonian sense of government and his Calvinist sense of morality (his full birth name was John Calvin Coolidge). He also exercised Constitutional government, helping create an era of low taxes and unprecedented prosperity (more explosive than any time since; the economy grew by half again in size), with the help of able men like Andrew Mellon. But the prosperity of the "Roaring Twenties," like that of the Eighties, would provoke only derision from the Left -- the people who never liked capitalism, a consumer economy with goods that people actually wanted, or the principles of limited, Constitutional government in the first place. The real evils of the Twenties were the continuing revival, since Wilson, of racism (and even the Ku Klux Klan itself), the virtual ending of immigration out of confused economics (they take away jobs!), nativism, and political paranoia (of a piece with the Red Scare), and especially Prohibition, which created Organized Crime and fostered political corruption on a vast scale. Prohibition was another bitter fruit of paternalistic, big government "Progressivism" -- a bitter fruit we still eat, since the Prohibitionist laws and mentality merely moved over from alcohol to medicine ("drugs") and are now being directed against tobacco. Coolidge was uncomfortable with Prohibition and regularly made statements on civil rights issues, proposing federal anti-lynching laws (he even gave a commencement address at the historically black Howard University), but he did not change the set of the tide and seemed to accept the protectionism implied by high tariffs and the immigration laws. Although Coolidge was characteristically laconic and withdrawn, this was exaggerated in apocryphal stories. But most of the jokes about Coolidge were originally affectionate. In fact, he gave an average of 8 press conferences a month, had a very relaxed, friendly relationship with the press, and was the first President to address the nation by radio, which he did regularly. That doesn't quite fit the "Silent Cal" image. By one count, he ended up giving more speeches than any previous President, though they were not the kind of speeches that pushed great projects, hectored people, or even attacked anyone -- they usually just enunciated what he regarded as American principles:  not the kind of thing to thrill the intelligentsia later on.

I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. That is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can re-establish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very distinct curtailment of our liberty. -- Calvin Coolidge, State of the Union message, December 3, 1924

If the day ever comes when Jefferson's warnings are heeded at last, and we reduce government to its simplest terms, it may very well happen that Cal's bones, now resting inconspicuously in the Vermont granite, will come to be revered as those of a man who realy did the nation some service. -- H.L. Mencken

Hoover was an activist government "Progressive," and a famous engineer and philanthropist, scorned by Coolidge (who called him "Wonder Boy"), who almost singlehandedly destroyed the American economy (after wrecking the agricultural export market for the second time -- he had done it first back in the Wilson Administration) and, soon enough, Constitutional government. Since FDR merely continued and expanded Hoover's economic policies and initiatives, it has been necessary for historians to reinterpret Hoover as a laissez-faire economist, which he certainly was not, if they are to demonize him but simultaneously sanctify Roosevelt. Hoover's confusion, shared by most industrialists as well as by Roosevelt's "Brain Trust" (Roosevelt really didn't believe anything himself), was that workers' wages would have to be driven up to create prosperity. This violated Say's Law and merely created unprecedented unemployment, not prosperity. But he never thought better of it.

His intelligence, I suspect, has been vastly overrated. He belongs to a class of shiny, shallow go-getters who were much esteemed during the late Golden Age. They swarmed in the country, and were everywhere mistaken for master-minds. But now their essential vacuity is plain to all. Facing genuine difficulties, they have gone to pieces unanimously -- with Hoover leading the pack -- H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, October 5, 1931