How Did We Get Here?

From TR to Donald Trump

Robert Dallek

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062873057
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The award-winning, New York Times bestselling historian considers the vast array of triumphs and failures of America's modern presidents that paved a path to Donald Trump, offering an understanding of our current moment and hope for a way back to true leadership. The struggle to preserve the Republic has never been easy or without perils. The rise of conflicting political parties, which the founders opposed, and President John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts repressing First Amendment rights made Franklin's observation at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention—"a republic, if you can keep it"—seem prescient.

In the twentieth century, America endured numerous struggles: economic depression, World War II, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran-contra scandal, the war in Iraq—all of which gave rise to demagogues, as did the growth and reach of mass media. But this wasn't the Founding Fathers' vision for our leadership. The resistance to putting a demagogue in the White House survived the anti-Communist agitation of the 1950s and the Vietnam War in the 1960s. But the latter opened the way for Richard Nixon's election in 1968 and Watergate, which again tested our democratic institutions and the rule of law. Nixon's resignation in August 1974 moved Vice President Gerald Ford, his successor, to declare, "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over."

But was it? Donald Trump's 2016 election has presented a new challenge. How did past politics and presidential administrations pave the way for this current assault on American democracy? Our nation's history provides reassurance that we will restore our better angels to government. Yet it must be considered that earlier administrations and public outlook facilitated the rise of such an un-presidential character as Trump in the first place. In How Did We Get Here?, Robert Dallek considers a century of modern administrations, from Teddy Roosevelt to today, shining a light on the personalities behind the politics and the voters who elected each. His cautionary tale reminds us that the only constant in history is change, but whether for good or ill the choice is Americans' to make.

Chapter 1
Theodore Roosevelt
“Master Therapist of the Middle Classes”

Theodore Roosevelt came to maturity in the Gilded Age, a time of national industrialization, labor strife, and concentrated wealth. Diamond Jim Brady was an emblematic figure of the era—an unrefined mogul whom Roosevelt thought contemptible. Brady’s diamond stickpin attached to a colorful cravat ostentatiously signaled his wealth. He made a fortune in the railroad business and the stock market, and became famous for his gluttony and corpulence. His meals at Delmonico’s and Rector’s, two of New York City’s favorite restaurants of the rich and the famous at the start of the twentieth century, were undoubtedly exaggerated when described as multiple courses consisting of oysters, crabs, lobsters, steaks, vegetables, salads, and an array of desserts, all washed down by volumes of fresh orange juice and lemon soda. While Brady’s self-indulgence offended some people, it appealed to others as a splendid example of the rags-to-riches story. The owner of Rector’s described Brady as the best twenty-five customers he had. His stomach was reputed to be six times the size of a normal organ. He was supposed to have asked Johns Hopkins University surgeons to consider replacing his stomach with an elephant’s stomach. It was a legendary tale of vulgar self-indulgence that made Brady more of a hero than a crude glutton to millions of Americans who admired his opulence.1 Brady was called the Prince of the Gilded Age.

Despite his contempt for Brady and other robber barons, TR was never the consummate foe of the capitalists for whom he expressed so much scorn. He thought labor was as much a menace to republican virtues as their business adversaries, and feared the rising power of organized workingmen. He saw them as “extremists,” “radical fanatics,” “the lunatic fringe,” and “the professional criminal class.” He aimed to tame both capital and labor by subjecting them to the mastery of the federal government, or what he called the “New Nationalism,” perhaps better described as “paternalistic nationalism.” His assertion of executive authority to rein in the country’s competing economic forces set the stage for future presidents to uniformly claim ownership of prosperous surges. Of course, none of them have wanted to identify themselves with any downturns. And to defend themselves from bad publicity, presidents have worked to control the message. Roosevelt set the standard here as well by being the first president to cultivate the press. He would have been envious of later presidents’ ability to directly reach millions of Americans by radio, television, and now electronic media.

For Roosevelt, all would be well as long as he could steer the ship of state. His grandiosity had few limits. It was said of him that he needed to be the baby at every christening, the groom at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral. His need for ego satisfaction was insatiable. The British diplomat and TR friend Cecil Spring-Rice said, “You must always remember that the President is about six.” Secretary of War Elihu Root tested the limits of TR’s sense of humor when he told him, “You have made a very good start in life, and your friends have great hopes for you when you grow up.” Roosevelt craved the hero’s role as the soldier at the head of the charge, the moralist who led the country to a higher ground and the world to accept the rule of law as interpreted by him in the name of the United States. Rudyard Kipling, the English journalist and author, after listening to Roosevelt pontificate on every manner of thing in human affairs, said, “The universe seemed to be spinning around and Theodore was the spinner.” The novelist Henry James called him “the very embodiment of noise.” Roosevelt’s behavior as chief executive gave license to his successors to think of themselves as masters of the universe2 and believe that a president needed to be at the center of national and international attention.

Nothing was more exciting or rewarding for Roosevelt than soldiering. He loved any opportunity for battlefield heroics. He denounced pacifists as men weak in body and mind, and decried the many Americans who were schooled in isolationism and opposition to participation in any of the world’s wars as lacking courage. He admired the saying, making it a hallmark of his presidency, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you’ll go far,” though no one who heard him ever thought he did anything “softly.”

In 1904, as the Republican convention met to nominate him, he seized the chance to give meaning to big-stick diplomacy. A bandit in Morocco named Raisuli kidnapped a Greek American, Ion Perdicaris, and demanded a ransom for his return. In response, Roosevelt sent a naval squadron to prod the Moroccan government into action. At the same time, he instructed the American consul to tell the sultan, “We want either Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.” When Roosevelt’s message was read to the delegates at the convention, they responded with cheers of approval for the president’s decisiveness. And when news reached the country that Roosevelt’s demand had won the release of Perdicaris and other hostages, Americans across the country cheered as well.

Roosevelt himself was no stranger to combat. The war with Spain in 1898 had given him the chance to fulfill his fantasies of battlefield derring-do. Organizing the Rough Riders, a thousand skilled horsemen from the Southwest, into a cavalry brigade that fought in Cuba, he saw an opportunity to engage in what he called the “fighting edge” or “heroic virtues.” He reflected on the joy of battle when he rode up a hill, waving his hat, and killing “a Spaniard with my own hand.” “Look at those damn Spanish dead,” he exalted. A comrade in the battle described him as “just reveling in victory and gore.” Despite many accomplishments to come as president after Cuba, Roosevelt remembered his battlefield experience as “the great day of my life.”3 And he renewed his contempt for pacifists when the United States stood on the sidelines during the first three years of World War I. After the U.S. entered the fighting in 1917, when Roosevelt was fifty-nine years old, just two years before he died, he asked President Woodrow Wilson to let him lead a cavalry unit in France. To Roosevelt’s dismay, Wilson refused his request, noting that battlefield conditions in the war largely outdated a cavalry charge.

It wasn’t just the excitement of battle that captured his enthusiasm but the sense of being superior to the Spanish and everyone else he was in competition with. His reach for greatness seems to have grown out of some emotional desire to be viewed as top dog or the best at everything. In Roosevelt’s time it resonated with the social Darwinist mind-set of the Victorian era. The British social biologist Herbert Spencer caught the spirit of the times when he coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which described the progress of the human species from cavemen to modern gentlemen.

TR saw the doctrine as applying not only to individuals but also to nations and civilizations. He believed that the greatest achievements of an individual and a nation rested on contributions to human progress and, in his case, to what he did for humankind. It wasn’t material wealth that marked out a man’s life but whether he contributed to moral and social advancements. Some contemporaries lost patience with Roosevelt’s grandiosity and pomposity. Speaker of the House Joe Cannon described him as “drunk on power,” saying, “That fellow at the other end of the Avenue wants everything, from the birth of Christ to the death of the devil.” The historian H. W. Brands describes TR’s dominating personality during dinner-table conversations as allowing guests “little more than monosyllables in reply” to anything he said. It was all evidence of a self-centered character with an insatiable need for attention.

Roosevelt also saw a divide between superior and inferior races. Caucasian westerners were the best, while Africans and Asians were at the bottom of his rankings, though he considered the Japanese, who were imitating Europeans, much superior to the Chinese, who were under west European, Russian, and Japanese control. Roosevelt aimed to ensure that America stood in the front rank.

TR’s presidency was distinguished by his groundbreaking, but not always aboveboard, executive actions. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said of Roosevelt, “He was very likeable, a big figure, a rather ordinary intellect, with extraordinary gifts, a shrewd and I think pretty unscrupulous politician [my italics].” Holmes added, “What the boys liked about Roosevelt is that he doesn’t give a damn for the law.” Joe Cannon echoed Holmes when he said that Roosevelt’s “got no more use for the Constitution than a tomcat has for a marriage license.” It gave grounds for future presidents to do the same with as much sleight of hand as they could muster.

Roosevelt came to the presidency by chance. Accepting William McKinley’s offer to be his running mate in 1900, TR’s mostly ceremonial position as vice president made him the automatic successor to the Oval Office when an assassin’s bullet killed McKinley in September 1901. But Roosevelt was prepared to assume command. He had won a statewide gubernatorial election in New York, then the country’s most populous state, as well as appointment to national offices on the Civil Service Commission and as assistant secretary of the navy. When Republican boss Mark Hanna described him as a “damn cowboy” after McKinley’s assassination, he ignored the fact that Roosevelt was a seasoned politician who understood the need for public backing if he was to succeed in the presidency. Indeed, TR proved to be brilliant at mobilizing popular support. Like “circus impresario P. T. Barnum,” Roosevelt understood how to “put on a corking good show.” He was a vessel of unbounded energy: A British visitor to the United States compared him to “Niagara Falls . . . both great wonders of nature.” As historian William E. Leuchtenburg explained, TR was a study in “self-promotion . . . He made sure that he was front-page news. . . . As tales of his antics and adventures circulated, Roosevelt became the first president to be treated as a media personality. . . . His flashing teeth, pince-nez, bushy mustache, and frenetic gestures proved irresistible to caricaturists.”

Roosevelt understood that political campaigns were never a model of decorum. Once elected, however, presidents, eager to maintain the dignity of the office, have resisted using derogatory language in public about opponents, though they would give private vent to their anger. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, could be scathing about Congress, privately writing a friend, “There are several eminent statesmen at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue whom I would gladly lend to the Russian government, if they care to expend them as bodyguards for Grand Dukes whenever there was a likelihood of dynamite bombs being exploded.” He was no less abrasive about some foreign leaders. But in public, he was a model of tact and decorum.

It was also a time when the press was much more under a president’s command. Journalists were forbidden to quote a president directly unless given permission, and those who did so without approval were barred from further access to the White House. And Roosevelt was taken at his word when he denied the accuracy of a quote. Respect for the president’s word was simply not in question. Every occupant of the White House understood that presidential credibility was an essential ingredient of majority rule.

Not only did Roosevelt see the office as an opportunity for self-promotion, he also saw it as a chance to right national wrongs. He took constructive actions that fulfilled his vision of a dynamic chief executive, creating long-term federal agencies that put the Washington government at the center of American politics. Where the states, counties, and cities were more influential than the federal authority in the post–Civil War era, TR changed this in order to reduce if not eliminate the country’s economic and social ills. In short, he expanded the powers of the presidency—both positively and negatively—in ways that have lasted to this day.

In 1902, a coal miners’ strike that underscored the fierce conflict between labor and management of the time threatened to deprive most Americans of winter heating supplies. Roosevelt stepped in to mediate the 163-day clash. He wrote the British historian George Trevelyan, “Somehow or other we shall have to work out methods of controlling the big corporations without paralyzing the energies of the business community and of preventing any tyranny on the part of the labor unions while cordially assisting in every proper effort made by the wage workers to better themselves by combinations.” When he arranged a settlement by establishing an arbitration commission to mediate differences, under the rubric of the “Square Deal,” it made the president a national hero, and the federal government the defender of the people and a fair arbiter of national disputes.

His leadership was notable for its evenhandedness, or at least an effort to convince the public of that. He explained that he was not intent on destroying the country’s large trusts but on regulating them. The nation’s corporations, he argued, were “an inevitable development of modern industrialism.” His handling of his most famous antitrust action, the reining in of the Northern Securities holding company, a railroad monopoly in the Northwest, won Roosevelt additional popular support for his decisive use of presidential power. As important, his prosecution of the company did nothing to impede the national economy. “It was a brilliant stroke of publicity that could hardly have been resisted even by a more conservative politician,” historian Richard Hofstadter wrote. It was all part of what Roosevelt called the square dealing that endeared him to the public. In a time of demoralization about politics, which was seen as corrupt and captive to special interests, Wisconsin Progressive Robert M. LaFollette, Sr. said TR “is the ablest living interpreter of . . . the superficial public sentiment of a given time,” or as another commentator said, he understood the “psychology of the mutt.” In Hofstadter’s description, TR was “the master therapist of the middle classes.”

His popularity with the public, and voters in particular, reflected itself in the 1904 presidential election, when he defeated Democrat judge Alton B. Parker by 2.5 million votes out of 12.7 million, then the largest popular vote percentage difference in U.S. history. Parker commanded only 38 percent of the general ballots and won the support of only the solid Democratic or ex-Confederate South. Roosevelt described himself as, of course, pleased but “astound[ed]” by “such a sweep.” And yet Roosevelt couldn’t accept that anyone or any part of the country would oppose him. He dismissed the vote across the South as the product of “fraud and violence” best described as a “farce.” He salved his ego by telling his son that he had “the greatest popular majority and the greatest electoral majority ever given to a candidate for President.”

Roosevelt gained and maintained the public’s backing with reforms that regulated the railroads (the Elkins and Hepburn Acts); a Department of Commerce and Labor partly committed to exposing business corruption; regulation of the food and drug processing industries with a Meat Inspection Act; the creation of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); regulations overseeing children’s and women’s working conditions; and conservation measures that included the Reclamation Service, the National Forest Service, the Antiquities Act restricting the use of public lands for private gain, and the creation of five national parks. He has been seen as the greatest conservationist president in the country’s history, his only competitor being his successor and distant cousin...