Recapturing the Oval Office

New Historical Approaches to the American Presidency

Brian Balogh, Bruce J. Schulman, Brian Balogh, Bruce J. Schulman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781501700873
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

Several generations of historians figuratively abandoned the Oval Office as the bastion of out-of-fashion stories of great men. And now, decades later, the historical analysis of the American presidency remains on the outskirts of historical scholarship, even as policy and political history have rebounded within the academy. In Recapturing the Oval Office, leading historians and social scientists forge an agenda for returning the study of the presidency to the mainstream practice of history and they chart how the study of the presidency can be integrated into historical narratives that combine rich analyses of political, social, and cultural history.The authors demonstrate how "bringing the presidency back in" can deepen understanding of crucial questions regarding race relations, religion, and political economy. The contributors illuminate the conditions that have both empowered and limited past presidents, and thus show how social, cultural, and political contexts matter. By making the history of the presidency a serious part of the scholarly agenda in the future, historians have the opportunity to influence debates about the proper role of the president today.Contributors: Brian Balogh, University of Virginia; Michael A. Bernstein, Tulane University; Kathryn Cramer Brownell, Purdue University; N. D. B. Connolly, The Johns Hopkins University; Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut; Gareth Davies, University of Oxford; Darren Dochuk, Washington University; Susan J. Douglas, University of Michigan; Daniel J. Galvin, Northwestern University; William I. Hitchcock, University of Virginia; Cathie Jo Martin, Boston University; Alice O'Connor, University of California, Santa Barbara; Bruce J. Schulman, Boston University; Robert O. Self, Brown University; Stephen Skowronek, Yale University

Part I

Balancing Agency and Structure

The tension between agency and structure in the history of presidential administrations and the history of the office of the presidency itself generally pits the talents of the incumbent and his capacity to mobilize the accoutrements of political power against the constitutional constraints on the power of the office. That those constraints echoed larger fears about the dangers of distant centralized authority to a fledgling republic grounded this legal structure in deep cultural and political soil. While this is political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s point of departure, that context merely serves to introduce a far more original and penetrating exegesis of the relationship between presidents and the structural constraints of the office. Scholarly conceptions of the history of the presidency, Skowronek argues, have been a powerful agent in interpreting and indeed shaping the prevailing structures within which presidents operate. Skowronek identifies a period of remarkable consensus about the basis of modern presidential power—one that shifted the debate from a formalistic balance among the three branches of government to one that decidedly enhanced presidential power at the expense of the other two branches. That consensus was grounded in the work of Progressive historians and political scientists. By reaching outside of the Constitution to the capacity of presidents to speak for national public opinion and drawing on expertise intended to serve all three branches of government, the self-conscious Progressive project built a durable basis for expanding the reach of the presidency without relying on presidential prerogative. Post-Progressive scholarly critiques, starting in the era of Vietnam and Watergate, pointed out a series of intractable problems with this source of authority, problems exposed by presidential actions that were clearly out of step with public opinion and congressional determination to use experts of their own. His essay concludes with a discussion of the current state of affairs in presidential studies, in which the break between “modern” presidents and those who preceded them in the nineteenth century has been challenged. Each scholarly movement is the product of its time, shaped by factors ranging from industrialization to the speed of communications; Skowronek makes a strong case for the agency of intellectual communities in the centuries-long struggle to adapt the structure of politics to the needs of the nation. In that spirit he welcomes historians back to the study of the presidency but warns those returning to the fray to understand themselves as a community of scholars and to take stock of where they stand in relationship to others who have taken part in this high-stakes enterprise.

Frank Costigliola introduces a third element into the analysis of the give-and-take between presidential agency and the structural constraint on presidential influence—contingency. Examining the transition from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Harry S. Truman in the months immediately following Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Costigliola points to a rare “plastic” moment in international relations precipitated by the end of World War II. FDR died just at the moment that deference to the commander-in-chief had been enhanced by wartime secrecy, a Democratic majority in Congress, and the sudden acceleration of the war’s end due to the decision to use atomic weapons in Japan. Beyond America’s borders, Costigliola argues, such critical junctures for reordering foreign relations in the twentieth century can be counted on one hand: August 1914; November 1989; September 2001. The confluence of Roosevelt’s death and a rare opportunity for presidential agency propelled another relatively contingent factor to the forefront: personality. Costigliola distinguishes the divergent personalities of each occupant of the White House during this drama by comparing their self-confidence and their comfort level with difference—both gendered and cultural. He concludes that Roosevelt’s extraordinary self-confidence and ease with difference, when contrasted to Truman’s need to prove himself to others and distrust of difference, ended up mattering. At stake was nothing less than the future of the international system. Costigliola suggests that had FDR mentored Truman while he was still vice president, or had FDR lived a few more years, the rupture in the alliance that ultimately became the Cold War might have been avoided or at least mitigated. His essay sheds a new perspective on a fierce debate among students of foreign relations. It also offers a valuable framework for demarcating the course of presidential agency over the history of that office. Scholars must be attuned to critical junctures and consider how presidents handle these rare moments. In doing so, they will benefit by weighing the personal characteristics that are formed long before presidents set foot in the Oval Office.

Economic crises, like critical junctures in international systems, present another kind of opportunity for presidents to assert their agency in a context relatively unconstrained by prevailing structural constraints. One of the most distinctive tools available to presidents in the twentieth century has been rhetorical—shaping and controlling the story of what happened, who caused it, and what needs to be done to restore the nation to economic health. Alice O’Connor compares presidential responses to three of the most devastating economic calamities of the twentieth century: the Great Depression of the 1930s; the Great Inflation of the 1970s; and the recent “Deep Recession” begun in 2008. O’Connor recounts the key components of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s and Ronald Reagan’s transformative responses and questions why such a gifted orator as Barack Obama has failed to craft a similar transformative narrative and policy response. O’Connor concedes that the degree of difficulty is higher for President Obama, who operates in a far more bitter and evenly divided partisan environment and has inherited a permanent electoral campaign footing (going back to Reagan) that slices and dices constituencies in ways that undermine broad ideological appeals, even to a president’s own base. Yet O’Connor ultimately places the blame squarely on Obama himself. President Obama failed to craft a compelling explanation for the crisis and, perhaps more importantly, has refused to embrace an overarching public philosophy, perhaps fearful that doing so would alienate key constituencies. Second, O’Connor argues, President Obama has failed to delineate a broad vision of economic citizenship comparable to Roosevelt’s “forgotten man” or Reagan’s call to release the economic power of individual citizens by getting government off their backs. Finally, in O’Connor’s opinion, President Obama has simply aimed too low. Both Roosevelt and Reagan proved transformative because their narratives contributed to an ambitious set of policies that sought to make the impossible inevitable. In light of Steve Skowronek’s provocative claim that the very scope of presidential ambition is defined in part by the degree to which a united intellectual community can craft the historical justification for the kind of ambition that O’Connor is calling for, might the long absence of historians from the field of presidential studies be another, albeit indirect, contributing factor?

Chapter 1

The Unsettled State of Presidential History

Stephen Skowronek

Historians contemplating a return to the study of the presidency will want to think about what has been going on in their absence. Presidential history is vital to work in a variety of disciplines, and recasting that history has been a central concern of many for some time. Alternative renditions of the broad sweep of affairs are now readily available, and they seem to be accumulating at a rapid clip. If energy and creativity are indicative of the state of a field, presidential history has been thriving.

By these same indicators, however, the historians’ input has sorely been missed. Storylines are proliferating because a long-dominant understanding of the relationship between past and present has lost its grip and because precepts essential for reassessing that relationship have been thrown up for grabs. Efforts to revise the conventional wisdom began decades ago, but scholars find themselves today farther than ever from a shared framework for discussion or a common understanding of the nature of the problem. I doubt that the return of the historians can remedy this situation all at once or all on its own, but I do think that their absence from the debate has made it easier for the rest of us to assume our scattered positions. By the same token, it seems to me that historians contemplating reentry into the field face a threshold question: Do they intend merely to stake out a bit of ground for themselves, or do they intend to deploy the tools of their trade to recast the terrain more broadly? Stated differently, will theirs be just another voice or will it be a clarifying voice?

“Presidential history” encompasses a number of related enterprises. It might be useful at the outset to array the literature along a continuum, with the history of the presidency on one side and the history of the presidents on the other. There are no stark divides along this line, no clear demarcations where questions about institutional structure end and questions about the agents begin. How the history of the institution is narrated depends a lot on how the contributions of individual incumbents are interpreted, and how the contributions of individual incumbents are interpreted depends a lot on how we understand the institution and its place in the larger governing scheme. Nonetheless, each pole anchors a distinct set of concerns.

Not long ago, the history of the presidents appeared the more imperiled of these projects. The turn to social and cultural understandings of the past stigmatized “great man” approaches to the American experience and laid siege to their narrow conception of politics. But work at this pole has proven resilient, and in recent years its public profile has been soaring. Whatever its limitations, the history of the presidents claims a clear and compelling unit of analysis, and that is no small asset. Incumbency is easily delineated; even the broader construct of a presidential “administration” has relatively clear boundaries. Presidents appear one at a time for a set term, and their tenure in office has a straightforward narrative structure. They are selected in elections that periodically mobilize and crystallize national sentiments. They represent the nation, both internally and externally, as high officers of state. They hold potent powers, the exercise of which becomes the focal point of national political contention and invariably changes politics moving forward. In the end, when achievements and failures are assessed in summary form, each agent encapsulates a unique episode, and each episode becomes an emblem of its time.

No one today will defend a presidential “synthesis” of American history, but the history of the presidents appears to have adjusted to its status as one point of access among others, and it continues to demonstrate its capacity to ferret out issues that bear more or less directly on present-day concerns. Interest in interrogating, reconstructing, and redeploying the reputations of our presidents seems inexhaustible, and far from undermining the program, the controversies sparked by these ever-changing depictions are precisely what sustain it. No doubt, the safest bet for a group of historians seeking to reengage with presidential history would be to join the work at this pole and pull a broader range of social and cultural issues into its orbit.

The chief concerns of this essay lie at the other pole of research in the field, the history of the office. The issues encountered on this side of the continuum are harder to tame. The history of the presidency reaches back to the early formation of nation-states and the operation of executive power in monarchical empires, and it sprawls forward from the American Founding across more than two centuries of political change and institutional reform.1 In this history, the unit of analysis is the primary sticking point. The rejection of executive independence during the American Revolution and its rehabilitation just a few years later in the Constitution created an office of uncertain character and scope. Of all the Framers’ improvisations, this was the most inscrutable. Scholars have long tried to divine “general political tendencies” from the reverse double flip that produced the American presidency, but the issues that beset work on the history of the office today are a sobering reminder of the opacity and irresolution of that founding sequence.2

The objective in narrating a history of the office is plain. It is to account for the creation over time of a “presidency-centered” system of government out of a republican tradition deeply suspicious of executive power. Research scouts the relationship between the “modern presidency” at the heart of our contemporary regime and the executive office as it was originally framed by the Constitution. No one doubts the critical significance of this relationship or the urgency of the issues that the development of the office poses for American government as a whole. Everyone is aware that the presidency continues even now to expand its reach.3 But an assessment of the distance traveled from the point of origin—of the development of the presidency conceptually, operationally, and constitutionally—is only as sturdy as its premises, and present-day controversies have been amplifying the noise at the foundations.

The remarkable thing, perhaps, is that a modicum of consensus once did hold sway over these matters. Then again, the presidency might never have attained the power and position it now holds in American government without a broad and influential cadre of public intellectuals committed to its development and capable of lending legitimacy to its transformation. Between the publication of Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government in 1885 and the publication of James McGregor Burns’ Presidential Government in 1965, scholarly work on the development of the presidential office employed and elaborated a common understanding of historical problems and latter-day priorities.4 A shared reading of the relationship between past and present created this field of research, and a timely program for accommodating old institutional arrangements to new governing demands deepened its appeal. Scholars closely tied to the events they were describing set the “rise” of the presidency within a historical framework that was acutely diagnostic, powerfully prescriptive, and sweeping in its conception of the development of American government and politics at large.

It seems unlikely that another construction of the history of the office will attain the commonsense status of the Progressive paradigm. But it is equally unlikely that the work of recasting that history will soon shed its programmatic thrust. Situated between the muddy origins of the office and its sweeping powers in contemporary government, scholarly work on the development of the presidency remains deeply implicated in the controversies that swirl around its operation. This is an instance in which structure so expands the play of agency as to include as a vital component of their interactions the many different communities of scholars currently at work trying to make sense of them. For historians about to reenter this field, the only thing more valuable than a full view of the lay of the land will be a clear sense of their own purposes, of what they themselves have to bring to the table.

The Progressive Paradigm

The Progressive paradigm was constructed on a critical assessment of the Constitution as an instrument of modern government. The foundations of this critique were laid in Woodrow Wilson’s blistering assault in Congressional Government on the notion that the powers of the nation-state should be divided and held in a timeless balance.5 The mechanical equilibration of separate authorities was, Wilson claimed, an ideal already antiquated by the time the Constitution made it fundamental law; the Framers’ decision to formalize the division in writing was, in his view, “a grievous mistake.” It was not just that the written format had locked in an institutional framework that was operationally c...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part I. Balancing Agency and Structure
• Part II. The Social and Cultural Landscape Presidents Confront
• Part III. The Presidency and Political Structure
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index