Recapturing the Oval Office: New Historical Approaches to the American Presidency

RECAPTURING THE

OVAL OFFICE

NEW HISTORICAL APPROACHES

TO THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY

Edited by Brian Balogh and

Bruce J. Schulman

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Published in association with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center

Contents

Introduction

Part I. Balancing Agency and Structure

1. The Unsettled State of Presidential History

2. Personal Dynamics and Presidential Transitions

3. Narrator-in-Chief

Part II. The Social and Cultural Landscape Presidents Confront

4. The Reagan Devolution

5. There Will Be Oil

6. Ike’s World

7. Black Appointees, Political Legitimacy, and the American Presidency

8. Presidents and the Media

9. The Making of the Celebrity Presidency

Part III. The Presidency and Political Structure

10. Stand by Me

11. Taking the Long View

12. American Presidential Authority and Economic Expertise since World War II

13. The Changing Presidential Politics of Disaster

Conclusion

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Introduction

Confessions of a Presidential Assassin

Brian Balogh

As an undergraduate, I did not major in history.¹ In fact, I only took one history course, which I vowed would be my last. Although the professor was a towering figure in his field and, as I later learned, a gracious and generous colleague, the focus on the presidency to the exclusion of other elements within the political universe, not to mention the vast world that lies beyond politics, was stifling. My reaction was not based on a sophisticated knowledge of the new social history that was gaining ground in history departments in the early 1970s when I was in college. Rather, it was the gut reaction of a naive twenty-year-old who sensed that there was more to history than presidents and their outsized personalities. Besides, hitching the nation’s history to its president at the very time that the Watergate hearings were exposing Richard Nixon’s high crimes and misdemeanors did not seem to be a wise choice. Upon graduating from college, I worked at the grassroots level for a community-based organization that was fighting for more equitable utility rates for poor people and then worked in a series of government positions in Massachusetts and New York, ultimately directing several income maintenance programs for the New York City Human Resources Administration. At age thirty I enrolled in a PhD program in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Social history dominated the field, spawning work that explored race, class, and gender. By the mid-1980s, informed by anthropology and eventually literary criticism, the new frontier was cultural history, which moved the field even farther from magisterial accounts of presidential administrations toward the generation and reception of ideas, behavior, and customs by average Americans and marginalized groups.²

As a former New York City welfare administrator scrambling to understand how and why Americans created durable bureaucratic regimes despite longstanding antagonism toward big government, I latched onto the few shards of political history that remained afloat in a sea of social and cultural history. One fragment was the organizational synthesis. Pioneered by historians who were also interested in social structures—Samuel P. Hays, Ellis Hawley, Robert Wiebe, Louis Galambos—this approach to political history credited large-scale shifts in social relations and the political economy—industrialization, urbanization, professionalization—with causal agency.³ The roots of the organizational synthesis were grounded in the broader shift to social history, even as its practitioners remained focused on top-down outcomes. Another band of historians focused more exclusively on the recent history of public policies forged by the modernizing twentieth-century American state.⁴ Scholars like Edward Berkowitz, Martha Derthick, and Michael Hogan demonstrated that programs ranging from social security to the Marshall Plan were worth studying in their own right.⁵

Political history was a dying field then, but historical approaches to politics were thriving in the social sciences. American Political Development focused attention on the state as an independent actor, or at least one that was capable of adapting to broad social changes, at times even inducing some of those changes. The rise of APD offered important methods and analytical tools to historians interested in politics and public policy. More importantly, it reassured them that somebody was listening.⁶

What all of these scholars shared was a skepticism about the kind of history that focused exclusively on the Oval Office. Even Steven Skowronek’s Building a New American State—a foundational text in the APD literature that dealt extensively with the Progressive Era administrations of Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson—was animated by the clash between an older polity built around parties and administrative institutions in the military command, fiscal sinews, and transportation networks of the twentieth-century state that were constructed in response to the pressures of a modernizing society.⁷ The key argument in the seminal synthetic work in the organizational school—Robert H. Wiebe’s The Search for Order—credited a rising professional middle class and the bureaucratic mechanisms of continuous management with far more agency than the individual actions of TR and Wilson.⁸

It was not simply social and cultural historians who reduced presidents to bystanders in the march of history: It was first and foremost several generations of political and policy historians who abandoned the Oval Office. That is why presidents remain on the outside looking in at the historical profession today, even as political history has rebounded within the academy. Several generations of political historians had quite self-consciously constructed an approach to their topic that displaced the presidential synthesis forged by the likes of John Morton Blum, John Milton Cooper, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.⁹ I had joined a team of presidential assassins intent on taking out the chief executives around whom much of the century’s political history had been framed.

We succeeded. Our triumph was most pronounced in the field of twentieth-century political history, arguably the very period in which presidents were most influential. Graduate students, buffeted by a powerful current of history crafted from the bottom up and trained by a generation of political historians who forged careers by dismantling the presidential synthesis, were discouraged from writing about the presidency. For twenty years I warned graduate students against writing dissertations centered on a presidential administration or the presidency. Although my advice was based on instinct and anecdotal evidence from the career paths of scholars who were either courageous or foolhardy enough to write about presidents, a recent review of hiring patterns confirms my suspicions. Of the roughly seventy first books (the product of dissertations) published by twentieth-century U.S. historians currently teaching at the top fifteen history departments over the past two decades, only one deals largely with the presidency.¹⁰ And that one, Fred Logevall’s Choosing War: The Last Chance for Peace and Escalation of War in Vietnam, came in the field formerly known as diplomatic history—and even that one we actually counted as only half about the presidency. The presidency was an island unto itself, just as isolated from mainstream political history as it was from currents in social and cultural history. As such, diplomatic history never relinquished its interest in the executive branch and presidents themselves, as work by Robert Dallek, John Gaddis, and Mel Leffler, among others, demonstrates. As a result of this continuity, what is now a field of study called America and the World and the history of U.S. foreign relations, which has since reconnected with mainstream currents in the historical profession, can serve as a model for reintegrating the presidency into twentieth-century political history as well as U.S. history more broadly.

It is time to take study of the presidency off the endangered species list elsewhere in the historical profession, and it is essential that a new generation of political historians lead the way. That is because dissertations and the monographs they become are the basic building blocks of the profession. A generation of work lost at the beginning is a generation lost forever. Now is a propitious time to integrate the presidency into cutting-edge historical scholarship because we know so much more about the context in which presidents operate and the structures that guide, and often limit, their actions and beliefs. That is because over the past thirty years social, cultural, intellectual, and more recently, economic historians have developed and mined rich fields of inquiry. The histories of African Americans, gender, workers, the environment, and consumption, to name just a few subfields, have thrived.¹¹ These studies have illuminated the social and cultural environments in which presidents operate.

No doubt, initially much of this new energy came at the expense of political history and especially scholarship on the presidency. Recently, however, scholars working in social and cultural history and a range of some of the other new subdisciplines have brought politics back into their work.¹² Meanwhile, the subdiscipline of political history has witnessed a renaissance. The history of U.S. foreign relations has also incorporated a number of new approaches, expanding its global perspectives to examine America and the world.¹³ At the same time, legal historians have drawn on the methodologies of social and cultural history to explore the ways in which the law shapes day-to-day activities and common understandings.¹⁴

The essays in this volume model the scholarly possibilities for bringing the presidency back in, situating the presidency in literatures that have displaced it over the past thirty years. Social historian Robert Self, in his penetrating analysis of presidents’ ability to harness and domesticate the energy that fuels social movements, illustrates the integral connection between the bottom-up politics of the street and the Oval Office. Economic historian Michael Bernstein’s savvy explication of the ways in which presidents failed to consider the exceptional historical conditions that undergirded the influence of economists from 1945 through 1975 demonstrates the historically contingent power of expertise. Political historian Gareth Davies’s essay on the evolving role that presidents play in responding to disasters captures nicely the crucial role that shifting responsibilities between the states and the national government, on the one hand, and public expectations, on the other, play in dictating the chief executive’s response to hurricanes, floods, and other acts of nature. Historian of religion Darren Dochuk’s incisive narrative about oil patch spirituality that seeped into presidential politics during the New Deal and continues to fuel debate today connects the worldviews of presidents to a broad range of public policies. In these and the other essays in this volume, this book illustrates what is possible when materials from the Oval Office are deployed by scholars who are not specialists on the presidency.

There are promising signs that junior scholars are already testing the presidential no-fly zone. Kathryn Brownell, an assistant professor at Purdue University and an author in this volume, has synthesized popular culture and presidential history in her analysis of the ways in which celebrity has reconfigured the nation’s highest office. James Wilson, a scholar in the Office of the Historian in the U.S. State Department, just published The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End of the Cold War.¹⁵ Wilson has continued an older tradition that balances presidential agency and personality with the more structural factors that undergirded the Cold War. These examples from the ranks of junior scholars, combined with a recent spate of scholarship on the presidency from senior scholars ranging from contributors to this volume, Frank Costigliola and Bruce Schulman, to David Greenberg, James Kloppenberg, Dan Rodgers, Tom Sugrue, Sean Wilentz, and Julian Zelizer, suggest that this is an auspicious time to capitalize on the historical context that was often missing in the presidential synthesis and that has been honed by the historical profession over the past thirty years.¹⁶

While internal historiographic opportunities explain some of this resurgence, exogenous factors explain far more. The electrifying victory of America’s first African American president is certainly one crucial catalyst. Making up for the decades-long neglect of the history of racial relations had pointed historians toward the grass roots and the cultural interstices of history. Obama’s election and, perhaps more remarkably, his reelection offer an opportunity to write about racial politics through the highest office in the land. With (at this writing) Hillary Clinton the odds-on candidate to win the Democratic nomination in 2016, the same can be said for gender. Two other factors have redirected attention of historians of all stripes toward the Oval Office. The first of these is the recent fascination with globalization (in spite of its centuries-old role in American life). As the focal point for America’s interactions with the rest of the world, the Oval Office looms far larger in the lives of Americans who are attentive to such global influences. Second, decades of growing income and wealth inequality have raised fundamental questions about the kind of society that the United Sates is becoming. Questions like this, just as the battles over the shift from an agrarian to industrial economy at the turn of the twentieth century and America’s permanent military deployment abroad during and after World War II indicate broad-gauged debate that is often best interpreted through an examination of America’s highest office.

Bringing the presidency back into the mainstream of historical scholarship has important implications that extend far beyond the ivory tower. As Stephen Skowronek argues in his essay in this collection, the intellectual community in the twentieth century has played a crucial role in defining the possibilities for and limitations on presidential power. The presidency might never have attained the power and position it now holds in American government, argues Skowronek, without a broad and influential cadre of public intellectuals committed to its development and capable of lending legitimacy to its transformation. Progressive interpretations of history were a crucial ingredient in this mix, pitting democratizing movements, given voice by newly empowered presidents, against the strictures of an outmoded Constitution. More than half a century later, an equally committed intellectual insurgency in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate helped rein in the imperial presidency. Once again, historians and a cohesive interpretation of history were pivotal factors in the debate. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and other key architects of the presidential synthesis, normally not shy about presidential prerogative, now charged that Richard Nixon had exceeded the limitations that historically had governed executive power.

This book signals historians’ reentry into a discussion that for too long has been left to political scientists, the public intellectuals labeled presidential historians by the media, and, most recently, legal scholars. Bringing historians back into the debate is likely to reshape the very definition of the powers at the president’s disposal by emphasizing the long history of debate over the nature of the office. Underscoring this historical perspective will likely undermine any notion of the progressive expansion of the powers of this office. Because the actual authority of presidents has rested in part on a shifting intellectual consensus, not simply judicial interpretations of the Constitution or the personalities of the individual occupants of the Oval Office, historians do not simply chronicle the history of that office. The historical framework they craft can play an important role in determining the course of that history. Of course historians themselves are hardly immune to the influence of the times in which they write. Contemporaneous events will no doubt continue to shade the historical examples and tendencies that historians privilege when they contextualize the presidency, just as they did for Charles Beard and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

The essays in this volume also model ways to address the gap between academic historians and those presidential historians. These public intellectuals, including Michael Beschloss, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and David McCullough, do extensive research and craft evocative narratives about presidents and their legacies.¹⁷ What distinguishes presidential historians from academic historians is that the former do not engage the voluminous scholarship on their topic. Rarely do presidential historians delve into deeper structural questions or plumb the historical context that scholars are inclined to examine. For their part, because academic historians have been heavily invested in explicating complex social, cultural, and economic structures, they tend to understate the possibilities for individual agency—at least when it comes to presidents.

The tension between agency and structure provides the organizing principle for this volume. Part I, titled Balancing Agency and Structure, includes three essays that introduce this central tension. Are presidents the architects of the world they operate in or prisoners of that world? Is the presidency largely defined by the individuals who occupy it, or are all presidents restricted by larger forces and structures that limit their actions? Part II, The Social and Cultural Landscape Presidents Confront, addresses the social, cultural, intellectual, religious, and economic structures that presidents face and examines in greater detail the interaction between the Oval Office and these factors. And Part III, The Presidency and Political Structure, examines the political structures that shape the presidency.

As Bruce Schulman notes in the conclusion, a number of the essays in this book chart a third way that promises to bridge the agency/structure divide. Eliminating the top-down/bottom-up split between social and political actors, they take a page out of presidential history by deploying more narrative microhistories of individuals. In contrast to heroic accounts that credit the protagonist with herculean agency, however, these scholarly accounts embed subjects within their contexts, to illuminate broader structures rather than obscure them. It is our hope that these examples of presidential history, which draw on the structural context in which presidents operate, will capture the attention of popularizers, encouraging them to draw on a broader range of historical scholarship when crafting their powerful narratives.

Making history whole, deploying that history as part of a broader intellectual discourse that influences the nature of the presidential power itself, and narrowing the gap between the presidential history that millions of Americans read (and view) and the scholarship that chronicles the historical context in which presidents have operated—all of this will require a sustained initiative, and this is true even if this volume achieves all of its objectives. Although we do not have any formula for ensuring its success, engaging graduate students in this initiative is essential. If the next generation of historians bring the presidency back in, and if the job market responds positively (as I believe it will), the historical profession can look forward to reaping the full benefits of its investment in social and cultural history. With a bit of luck, the nation will also benefit from a more nuanced understanding of its history as Americans continue to debate the parameters of the president’s power.

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 clumsy and politically conservative. More troubling were the structural distensions and distortions brought about by the changing nature of demands on government. The Progressives’ charge was that the Constitution’s ingrained checks on concerted action had come to thwart the organic adaptation of government to the exigencies of national development.

At the heart of this critique lay a keen appreciation for the nationalizing thrust of the Union victory in the Civil War and a practical concern that the social and economic transformations of the post–Civil War era had caught American government flatfooted. The urgency of reform was conveyed in apprehension of a developmental impasse, of a mismatch between the organization of state power and the emergent organization of national life, and these anxieties were not easily allayed. They persisted in the face of all evidence of this state’s success, seemingly indifferent to the government’s achievements in negotiating a string of extraordinary challenges during the first half of the twentieth century. Harold Laski rearticulated the Progressives’ angst on the heels of America’s triumph in World War II: A government does not prove its adequacy because it can transcend its own principles in an emergency; its adequacy is born of its ability to prevent the outbreak of emergency. That is the test by which the relationship between the president and Congress must be judged. At the least, there are grounds for grave doubt whether [American government] can meet this test successfully.⁶ Richard Neustadt beat the same drum at the height of the Cold War, arguing that politics as usual in American government had run afoul of a new age in which crises had become routine.⁷ Any reversion to the normal operations of the American system would have to be assiduously resisted, Neustadt warned, for concerted national action was no longer just a sporadic demand.

The turn to the presidency followed on this critique. Progressives identified the presidency as a latent solution to America’s developmental problem, an office that had, in its early history, signaled its potential to overcome the obstacles to concerted action and national direction interposed by the original constitutional settlement. This idea may be traced back to Wilson’s protégé, Henry Jones Ford. Like Wilson, Ford fretted about the separation of powers and its tendency to enshrine petty bossism in the high affairs of state. But in The Rise and Growth of American Politics, Ford pointed to pregnant paradoxes in the promulgation of the Constitution: On one hand, the precautions the Framers had taken to check legislative supremacy with the conservative counterweight of an independent executive were so effectual that Congress was made an incurably deficient and inferior organ of national government; on the other hand, by crafting the executive office to contain the powers of the Congress, the Framers had unintentionally positioned the president to become the master force in the shaping of public policy.⁸ For evidence of the presidency’s potential to supersede the Constitution’s narrowly conceived executive role and to provide direction to the polity as a whole, Ford pointed to the presidencies of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. In short order, Theodore Roosevelt elevated that pairing into a Jackson-Lincoln school of presidential leadership, a way of thinking about power that he contrasted with subservience to constitutional formalities (the Buchanan school) and that he elaborated into his own stewardship theory of the presidency.⁹ Wilson picked up the point in Constitutional Government in the United States.¹⁰ Revising his earlier dismissal of the presidential office for lacking the wherewithal to hold its own ground, he now celebrated incumbency as a test of personal skill in overcoming constraints: His capacity will set the limits.¹¹ Ford’s theme reappears time and again, for example in Walter Lippmann’s portrait of the Congress as a group of blind men in a vast, unknown world and in Neustadt’s famous juxtaposition of the clerkship role assigned to the president by the Constitution with present-day demands for the president to assume a leadership role.¹²

Two premises seem to compete in these formulations: one, that the Constitution thwarted necessary action; the other, that the Constitution did not stand in the way of its own reconstruction. The tension between these two claims is elaborated in all latter-day criticism of the Progressive paradigm. The Progressives imagined a fundamental change, a new declaration of independence, an overthrow of the monarchy of the Constitution.¹³ They wanted to invert institutional relationships as they saw them laid out in the original structure, and, as we will see in a moment, they acknowledged the scope of their ambition by providing a new