Almost President

by Scott Farris

  CHAPTER ONE. THE CONCESSION

  An extraordinary collection of concession speech excerpts is found in John R. Vile, Presidential Winners and Losers: Words of Victory and Concession (CQ Press, Washington, D.C., 2002). I drew from several of political scientist Paul Corcoran’s published articles, including “Presidential Concession Speeches: The Rhetoric of Defeat,” Political Communication 11 (April-June 1994), pp. 113–117, and an updated version of that article, which appeared in a U.S. State Department publication as “Democracy’s Rhetoric of Defeat,” eJournalUSA, Vol. 15, No. 1 (January 2010), pp. 13–15. Also quoted in this chapter is Corcoran’s “Saying Uncle and Mouthing Bromides,” Los Angeles Times, November 7, 2004.

  Most helpful in assessing the loser’s role in promoting a stable democracy is, Christopher J. Anderson, André Blais, Shaun Bowler, Todd Donovan, and Ola Listhaug, Losers’ Consent: Elections and Democratic Legitimacy (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2005), a series of enlightening essays aimed at academics, which draws on the research of political scientists from three nations.

  In understanding the crafting of concession speeches, I drew upon Robert Schlesinger, White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2008). Some of the anecdotes were drawn from texts and memoirs cited elsewhere in this bibliography or included in the appendix, some from contemporary news reports, primarily the New York Times, but some of the discussions on the candidates’ reaction to defeat were found in Brad Koplinski, Hats in the Ring: Conversations with Presidential Candidates (Presidential Publishing, North Bethesda, Md., 2000).

  On the role of religion in concession speeches: David Domke and Kevin Coe, The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008); Russel B. Nye, This Almost Chosen People: Essays in the History of American Ideas (Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 1966); and Stephen H. Webb, American Providence: A Nation with a Mission (Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, 2004).

  Finally, two general political reference books consulted not only for this chapter, but also throughout the book, were William Safire, Safire’s Political Dictionary (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2008), and Charles Henning, The Wit and Wisdom of Politics (Fulcrum, Inc., Golden, Colo., 1989).

  CHAPTER TWO. HENRY CLAY

  Robert V. Remini, also perhaps Andrew Jackson’s greatest biographer, produced Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union in 1991 (W.W. Norton and Co., New York and London). Remini, the official historian of the U.S. House of Representatives, is the leading expert on the politics from 1825 to 1850. Statesman for the Union remains the definitive study of Clay and benefits from Remini’s studies of Jackson, which allow Remini to appreciate Clay’s essential role as Jackson’s bête noire. Remini also penned a slimmer volume focused on Clay’s role in the Compromise of 1850, At the Edge of the Precipice (Basic Books, New York, 2010).

  David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler wrote Henry Clay: The Essential American (Random House, New York, 2010), a lively, affectionate portrait of Clay whose judgments are similar to Remini’s. The authors spend more time than Remini on Clay’s home life and flesh out his usually overlooked wife, Lucretia.

  Clement Easton, in Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics (Little, Brown and Co., Boston and Toronto, 1957), did a fine character study as part of the Library of American Biography series edited by Oscar Handlin. One must then go back to the 1930s for published biographies of Clay. The best from that period is Glyndon Van Deusen, The Life of Henry Clay (Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., reprinted 1979).

  Former Newsweek editor-in-chief Jon Meacham won the Pulitzer Prize for American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (Random House, New York, 2008), though he may not have appreciated the role Jackson’s feud with Clay played in shaping the policies of both men. Another recent Jackson biography consulted was H. W. Brands, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times (Doubleday, New York, 2005). Despite their merits, neither book will boast the influence that Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. had in The Age of Jackson (Little, Brown and Co., Boston, 1945). Schlesinger later acknowledged in his Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950 (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston and New York, 2000), that his groundbreaking study gave Clay and the Whig Party short shrift. Despite his own work, Schlesinger has labeled Remini as Jackson’s finest biographer. I confess that I did not consult Remini’s full three-volume study of Jackson, but I do highly recommend his abridged one-volume version, The Life of Andrew Jackson (Harper and Row, New York, 1988).

  A superb condensed assessment of how Clay and Jackson’s rivalry defined American politics in the period is Harry L. Watson, Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay: Democracy and Development in Antebellum America (Bedford/St. Martin’s, Boston and New York, 1998), which contains original source speeches, letters, and other documents that provide further insight into the two men’s contrasting characters. To judge Clay against his other rivals, Calhoun and Webster, I consulted Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (Oxford University Press, New York, 1987).

  In exploring Clay’s role in the formation of the Whig Party, I relied on two superb studies. One is Michael F. Holt’s twelve-hundred-page The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1999). Holt underscores Clay’s central role in the formation and continuation of the Whig Party and aptly notes that when Clay died, so did the only man still able to unite the Whigs. Equally instructive is Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984).

  Howe has also written the definitive general history of the era: What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2007). The brilliant book gives Clay his due as perhaps the most important American statesman of the age. Conversely, Sean Wilentz, The Rise and Fall of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (W. W. Norton and Co., New York and London, 2005), like Schlesinger sixty years before, gives Clay a clearly secondary role and sees Jackson’s expansion of the franchise to all white males as the more important development in American democracy than the Whigs’ role in growing a civic-minded middle class. A third recent book, David S. Reynolds, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (HarperCollins, New York, 2008), is a more offbeat study but helps bring to life the richness of the period.

  Great help in assessing Clay’s impact on Lincoln came from Michael Lind, What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President (Doubleday, New York, 2004), while a slim monograph by Edgar DeWitt Jones, The Influence of Henry Clay upon Abraham Lincoln (The Henry Clay Memorial Foundation, Lexington, Ky., 1952) has anecdotes that reinforce the close ties between the two men. Maurice G. Baxter, Henry Clay: The Lawyer (University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 2000) argues that if Clay had done no more than practice law, he would still be a historically significant figure.

  CHAPTER THREE. STEPHEN DOUGLAS

  Until a new substantial biography comes along, we can give thanks for Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (Oxford University Press, New York, 1973). As editor of Douglas’s papers, The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1971), Johannsen has kept Douglas before the academy and uncovered and organized the material that should help historians appreciate Douglas’s key role in American history. Johannsen also supplies an incisive essay on the 1860 Democratic National Convention in Norman A. Graebner, ed., Politics and the Crisis of 1860 (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1961)

  A smaller, more specialized monograph recently came with James L. Huston, Stephen A. Douglas and the Dilemmas of Democratic Equality (Rowman and Littlefield Inc., Lanham, Md., 2007). An economic historian, Huston provides insight into why Douglas believed territorial expansion was more critical to the nation’s well-being than resolving the debate over slavery.


  Another shorter Douglas biography is Gerald M. Capers, Stephen A. Douglas: Defender of the Union (Little, Brown and Co., Boston and Toronto, 1959). Part of a series of biographies on key nonpresidential figures in American history, the book highlights Douglas as a man of principle, but is hampered because the Douglas papers had not been organized yet when it was being written, the civil rights movement had not yet come to the fore, and it does not focus on Douglas’s role in preserving the Democratic Party.

  A particularly helpful book in the development of this chapter on Douglas was Roy Morris Jr., The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America (HarperCollins, New York, 2008). Morris particularly emphasizes Lincoln being spurred to greatness partly by his envy of Douglas, and Lincoln being forced to grow because Douglas made such a worthy adversary. A fine new account of the presidential election of 1860 is Douglas R. Egerton, Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War (Bloomsbury Press, New York, Berlin, and London, 2010).

  Of course, Lincoln and Douglas are linked in popular memory mainly by their series of debates, an excellent recent study of which is Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2008). Original transcripts plus some superb accompanying essays appear in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858: The 150th Anniversary Edition (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2008).

  One of the great early Civil War scholars, Allan Nevins, devotes considerable space to Douglas in three of the six volumes of his history of the Civil War era: Ordeal of the Union: A House Dividing, 1852–1857 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York and London, 1947); The Emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857–1859 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York and London, 1950); and The Emergence of Lincoln: Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York and London, 1950). Nevins admires the courage Douglas showed in campaigning in the South against secession in 1860 but spends little time on how Douglas’s goal of maintaining a legitimate Democratic Party impacted either the conflict or the restoration of the Union. Too skeptical of Douglas’s role, in this author’s opinion, is Damon Wells, Stephen Douglas: The Last Years, 1857–1861 (University of Texas Press, Austin, 1971).

  Allegedly, more books have been written about Lincoln than any other person except Jesus Christ. I relied primarily on what is generally accepted as the finest one-volume biography of Lincoln, David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1995). To understand the rise of the Republican Party, in part as a response to Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act, the definitive study probably remains Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1995). Foner recognizes that Douglas Democrats’ increasing animosity toward the South created the united front in the North as the Civil War began. Foner also explores Douglas’s pragmatic brand of politics in Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1980).

  Interestingly, Foner does not even mention Douglas in his Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (Harper and Row, New York, 1988). Foner emphasizes, not inappropriately, the Democrats’ interest in keeping freed African Americans disenfranchised after the war but does not emphasize that the Democratic Party seemed to play a role as envisioned by Douglas and his followers, which was to be a legitimate vehicle for sectional reconciliation when the war ended. That task is left to Joel Sibley, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868 (W. W. Norton and Co., New York, 1977), which shreds the cliché, pushed by Republicans for decades after the war, that Democrats were broken into two distinct groups: War Democrats who set aside all partisan activity and Copperheads who favored peace at any price, even if it undermined the Union cause. Jules Witcover, Party of the People: A History of the Democrats (Random House, New York, 2003) does not discuss the Democrats’ positive role in Reconstruction but does claim Douglas joined the National Union Party, which is not correct.

  Two other books that influenced my thinking in this chapter were James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1988), and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon and Schuster, New York and London, 2005). Both books have earned immense praise, and while neither spends a great deal of time on Douglas, they acknowledge his key contribution as expanded upon in this book. Douglas’s probable influence on Ulysses S. Grant was gleaned from Jean Edward Smith, Grant (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2001).

  CHAPTER FOUR. WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN Four

  A superb recent William Jennings Bryan biography is Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Anchor Books, New York, 2006). Kazin acknowledges that, as a secular liberal, he has a “certain ambivalence” regarding Bryan’s religious beliefs, but the book is admiring of its subject and fair on all the key points. Three slimmer volumes on Bryan are also recommended: LeRoy Ashby, William Jennings Bryan: Champion of Democracy (Twayne, Boston, 1987); Robert Cherny, A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1994); and Kendrick A. Clements, William Jennings Bryan: Missionary Isolationist (University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1982). The latter, as the title implies, especially focuses on Bryan’s views on foreign policy.

  To compare Woodrow Wilson’s own infusion of morality into foreign affairs, there is John Morton Blum, Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality (Little, Brown, Boston, 1956). On one of Bryan’s harshest critics and putting that criticism in perspective, a fine biography is Fred Hobson, Mencken: A Life (Random House, New York, 1994).

  Perhaps the most influential study of Bryan in recent times is Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan, The Last Decade, 1915–1925 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1987), which first came out in 1965, five years after Inherit the Wind was made into a film, and which offers a fresh assessment of Bryan’s motivations for embarking on his crusade against the teaching of evolution. A collection of essays edited by Paul W. Glad, William Jennings Bryan: A Profile (Hill and Wang, New York, 1968) is extremely illuminating. This book includes Richard Hofstadter’s essay on Bryan, “The Democrat as Revivalist,” which can also be found in Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New York, 1948). Glad also includes a wonderful essay by Ray Ginger on the Scopes Trial that comes from Ginger’s book, Six Days or Forever?: Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (Oxford University Press, London and New York, 1974). The best complete study of the Scopes trial is likely Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Basic Books, New York, 1997). Two other Hofstadter books have been key in painting both Bryan and the Populists in negative terms: The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (Vantage Books, New York, 1960), and The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965).

  A nice antidote to Hofstadter is an article by Robert M. Collins, “The Originality Trap: Richard Hofstadter on Populism,” Journal of American History 76 (1989: pp. 150–167), as are these key books on Populism: John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1931), C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South (Third Edition) (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1994), and the most influential contemporary overview of Populism, Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford University Press, Oxford, London, and New York, 1978).

  Bryan himself was a fine writer, as was his wife, Mary Baird Bryan, who finished Bryan’s memoirs after his death. Memoirs are never objective, of course, but these at least appear guileless: The Memoirs of Will
iam Jennings Bryan, Volumes 1 and 2 (Kennikat Press, Port Washington, N.Y., and London, 1971).

  For a more detailed look at the 1896 campaign, the University Press of Kansas continues its superb series on pivotal presidential elections with R. Hal Williams, Realigning America: McKinley, Bryan, and the Remarkable Election of 1896 (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2010). It is the finest account since Paul W. Glad, McKinley, Bryan, and the People (J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia and New York, 1964).

  On Bryan’s role in the period in which the Fundamentalist movement was born, I have relied on Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America: 1880–1930 (University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 1982). Other works consulted include Willard H. Smith, The Social and Religious Thought of William Jennings Bryan (Coronado Press, Lawrence, Kans., 1975); Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1991); and Ronald C. White and C. Howard Hopkins, The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1976).

  Recent books that explore the intersection of faith and populism in contemporary politics include Garry Wills, Head and Heart: American Christianities (Penguin Press, New York, 2007); Amy Sullivan, The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap (Scribner, New York and London, 2008); E. J. Dionne, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 2008); Jim Wallis, The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America (HarperOne, New York, 2008); and Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Henry Holt and Co., New York, 2004).