Presidential Elections

For Monday, Edwards ch. 5 and Nixon memo to Haldeman.

Introduce Esaam.

Questions on the assignment?  Be sure to link anecdotes to national patterns and trends.  Document what you say.

For your writeup, answer one of the discussion questions at the end of chapter 5. Alternatively, you may offer a guess as to the winner of the 2028 election, but provide reasons based on this week's material.

Keep an eye on the Iran situation.  We will later discuss war powers.

What are conventions for anymore?

Sometimes they backfire, big time

And 2024, not your grandfather's convention:

What do presidential candidates look for in running mates?

Running mates 1948-2020

Why Walz?  Why Vance?

Why did Congress change campaign finance law?

SUPER PACS!  (start at 3:00)

Why the electoral college?

How does it work?

Illustrates change in the political landscape:

Maps and strategy

What really matters?

Events:  what happened in 2024?

Demographics

Partisan trends:

Part of a larger trend in US politics, with consequences for presidential-congressional relations.  From Bruce Mehlman (P `25):

 

Presidential Nominations

For Wednesday, read Edwards, ch. 4.

Questions on the assignment?  Stylistic tips

• Please, no "the purpose of this paper is..."
• In US English, periods and commas go inside quotation marks. Superscripts follow punctuation.
• Do not dangle your modifiers or split your infinitives!
• Avoid dropped quotations.
• Cut down on -ize words and management-speak.
• Avoid the passive.
• Use endnotes with Arabic numerals.

How did the old system work?

Why did the system change?

The 1968 Democratic convention (Edwards 56)

New system relies on primaries and caucuses.  What are they?

New system more open to outsiders:

• Carter
• Reagan
• Obama -- HRC ahead at first
• Trump -- GOP pols slow to endorse in 2016

Why do primary debates make more of a difference than general-election debates?

Example from Edwards, p. 70.

The Shadows Stretch to the Present Day

For Monday, read Edwards ch. 3.

Questions on the paper?

For your writeup, take another look at Ike's Farewell Address.  In 1961, he foresaw problems that would beset his successors and the country as a whole. Other than "the military-industrial complex," briefly discuss one of those problems.

Why did Kennedy go by his initials?

Why did Kennedy conceal his health problems?

Then came Dallas

Kennedy:

LBJ 

With FDR and TX Governor James Allred, 1937

Early Senate campaign button:

LBJ's program was The Great Society.  Medicare was its key achievement.  Signing the Medicare bill, LBJ said:

In 1935 when the man that both of us loved so much, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, signed the Social Security Act, he said it was, and I quote him, "a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but it is by no means complete."

Well, perhaps no single act in the entire administration of the beloved Franklin D. Roosevelt really did more to win him the illustrious place in history that he has as did the laying of that cornerstone. And I am so happy that his oldest son Jimmy could be here to share with us the joy that is ours today. And those who share this day will also be remembered for making the most important addition to that structure, and you are making it in this bill, the most important addition that has been made in three decades.

Nixon:

Schoen: How could a political moderate be so polarizing? 

Impact on the presidency

• OMB and WH staff
• Communications

Nixon and his successors

Ford:  the veep

Carter: the anti-Nixon

Reagan: the frenemy

Bush:  the appointee

Clinton: Kennedy fanboy and Nixon doppelganger

Roger Stone:

"So what did you think of him?" I asked Richard Nixon after his first meeting with Bill Clinton.

"You know," Mr. Nixon replied, "he came from dirt and I came from dirt. He lost a gubernatorial race and came back to win the Presidency, and I lost a gubernatorial race and came back to win the Presidency. He overcame a scandal in his first campaign for national office and I overcame a scandal in my first national campaign. We both just gutted it out. He was an outsider from the South and I was an outsider from the West."

Bush 43, then Obama

Franklin Delano Obama?

Similarities between 2008 and 1932?

Differences in the political and institutional setting? 

The Shadow of FDR

For Wednesday, read the Schoen chapters on Nixon (Canvas).

Questions on the paper?

Coolidge:

Hoover

Connections

FDR a distant cousin of TR, who gave away Eleanor at their wedding. The connection helped him get the VP nomination in 1920 but he also moved away from the Roosevelt Corollary with The Good Neighbor Policy.

FDR and Wilson

• FDR served as Woodrow Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1913–1920: was also in touch with his British counterpart, Winston Churchill
• Wilson's "New Freedom" program was a template for the New deal and war leadership provided a model for FDR, who later adopted similar interventionist approaches to economic crises and global conflict. 
• WWI precedents for WWII;  financing through bonds, extensive use of propaganda; J. Edgar Hoover.
• League of Nations was both a model and a cautionary tale.

FDR expands presidential hard power:

• Comparisons with Trump
• Inaugural address (4:00)
• The New Deal and Administrative State
• Influence over Congress and the 100 Days
• Executive Office of the President and WH staff
• Supreme Court
• Failed court-packing scheme
• But eventually got a liberal majority
• War Powers: 
• Rationing and economic control
• Military establishment
• Internment of Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066. 

FDR Soft Power

• Rhetorical presidency and "Fireside Chats" -- not always on specific policy
• Portrayal of POTUS in newsreels and movies -- concealing his disability

Ike does not repeal the New Deal, instead warns of the military-industrial complex that had started to grow under FDR

JFK

• Joe Kennedy was first head of the SEC and Ambassador to Britain
• 1960 campaign, clutching the hem of FDR's garment

Sprinting Though Presidential History: From Lincoln to the 20th Century

PRESENTATION ON THE DC PROGRAM

QUESTIONS ON THE ASSIGNMENT?

FOR YOUR WRITEUP, DISCUSS ONE THING THAT SURPRISED YOU ABOUT ONE PRESIDENT WHO SERVED BETWEEN THE FOUNDING AND 1920

FOR MONDAY, READ 

• William Leuchtenberg, In the Shadow of FDR, 4th ed. (Cornell University Press, 2009), excerpts.  TWO CHAPTERS ON CANVAS.
• Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address
  
• Gregory Frame, "The Myth of John F. Kennedy in Film and Television," Film & History (Winter 2016).  ON CANVAS.

.The Very Long Shadow of the Civil War

Between 1876 and 1892, no president won a majority of the popular vote:

1876 Hayes.......... 48.0*
1880 Garfield.......48.3
1884 Cleveland.....48.5
1888 Harrison.......47.8*
1892 Cleveland......46.1

McKinley

• Imperialism and the Spanish-American War: Puerto Rico, Guam, Philippines -- and a few years later, Gitmo
• Hawaii
• Pioneered modern presidential communication and campaign finance, 
• Assassination led to permanent Secret Service protection.

TR, Wilson, and Taft:  Three Theories  of the Presidency

Roosevelt: "My view was that every executive officer, and above all every executive officer in high position, was a steward of the people bound actively and affirmatively to do all he could for the people, and not to content himself with the negative merit of keeping his talents undamaged in a napkin."

• "Bully Pulpit" and the rhetorical presidency
• Executive orders to create 150 national forests, federal bird reservations, and game preserves, protecting roughly 200 million acres
• Trust-Busting 
• Legislative advocacy and the Hepburn Act
• Foreign Policy: the "Big Stick"Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
• Outside the box: involvement in labor disputes and even in football!  Precedent for reaching far beyond fedeal policy.

Taft: Constitution and the presidency: "The true view of the Executive functions is, as I conceive it, that the President can exercise no power which cannot be fairly and reasonably traced to some specific grant of power or justly implied and included within such express grant as proper and necessary to its exercise."

Wilson: "The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution, — it will be from no lack of constitutional powers on its part, but only because the President has the nation behind him, and Congress has not. He has no means of compelling Congress except through public opinion."

• Rhetorical presidency and SOTU
• "New Freedom" Agenda
• Economic regulation:  Federal Reserve and FTC
• Racism: WW grew up in Virginia during and after the Civil War
• Segregated the civil service
• Promoted The Birth of Nation, which quoted one of his books:


• WWI and Versailles
• WWI and War Power
• Propaganda: The Committee on Public Information (CPI), or Creel Committee, drummed up support for World War I. with posters, films, and 75,000 "Four-Minute Men" speakers, to "sell" the war to Americans.  CPI strategist Edward Bernays wrote: “Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”
• Repression: arrest and imprisonment of opponents. About  2,000 prosecutions under the Sedition Act, and 6,000 arrests in the 1919-1920 Palmer Raids -- the first "Red Scare."  A rising star was young J. Edgar Hoover

   

First Assignment, Spring 2026

Pick one:

Option 1

Interview one person aged 30 or older (by phone, Zoom, or email). Ask that person to identify her or his favorite or least-favorite U.S. president from before Donald Trump’s first term, excluding Washington and Lincoln. (It can be a president from the interviewee's lifetime or one from the history books.) In your paper, reconstruct the logic of the interviewee’s judgment. Tell how that person’s background and formative political experiences plausibly shaped that view of the presidency and this president. Your goal is not to decide whether the interviewee is “right,” but to explain why that view makes sense for someone like that person, and how individual memory intersects with presidential performance and public opinion.

Ground your analysis in evidence. Quote directly from your interview (with the interviewee’s permission). Where appropriate, use survey data to situate the interviewee’s view within broader public opinion. Use the historical record (policies, crises, institutional constraints) to tell why Americans viewed this president  positively or negatively at the time and how those views have endured or changed.

Option 2

Pick one U.S. president who served before Eisenhower. Then find a pro-1960 high school or college textbook on American history, civics, or government. (At Honnold Library, textbooks are on the first floor of Mudd, under LOC code LT.) Compare how that book portrayed the president with what we know now.  Using modern historical scholarship, biographies, and primary sources now available, explain how scholars understand this president today. 

The specifications:

• Essays should be typed (12-point), double-spaced, and no more than four pages long. I will not read past the fourth page. 
• Please submit all papers in this course as Word documents, not Google docs or pdfs.
• Read Strunk & White and my stylesheet (with links to model papers). Watch my writing lecture.
• Cite your sources. Please use endnotes in the format of the Chicago Manual of Style.  Endnotes do not count against the page limit. Please do not use footnotes, which take up too much page space.
• Misrepresenting AI-generated content as your own work is plagiarism and will result in severe consequences
• Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you. Return essays to the Canvas dropbox for this class by 11:59 PM, Friday, February 20. (If you have trouble with Canvas, simply email it to me as an attached file.) I reserve the right to dock papers one gradepoint for one day’s lateness, a full letter grade after that.

See this page for Internet resources on the presidency.

Sprinting Through Presidential History: From Washington to Super Grover

For next time:

• Maija Harkonen on the DC Program
• First writing assignment
• Read: TR, Taft, and Wilson excerpts on presidential power.

Apocryphal quotation by George III:  He asked artist Benjamin West what Washington would do if American became independent. "He believed He would retire to a private situation.—The King said if He did He would be the greatest man in the world.”  If he did say such a thing, why?

Treasury Secretary, Washington's the President
Ev'ry American experiment sets a precedent

-- From Hamilton

Washington Inauguration

Presidential power:  Neutrality, Pacificus and Helvidius.  The Neutrality Proclamation set a precedent for presidential power in foreign policy?

The Whiskey Rebellion -- precedent for assertion of federal authority

Washington on religious liberty: 

May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.

May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.

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Farewell Address:

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government. the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.

The Election of 1800

Louisiana Purchase and implied powers

War of 1812

Monroe Doctrine:

In the discussions to which this interest has given rise and in the arrangements by which they may terminate the occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers

. . .

With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.

 Andrew Jackson

• Veto as policy tool
• Spoils system
• Stand against nullifcation
• Ethnic cleansing

Lincoln

• Civil War timeline
• Lincoln letter to Albert Hodges on presidential prerogative
• Acting Solo: In the 80 days between the start of the war and the convening of Congress, Lincoln increased the size of the Army and Navy and spent money without appropriation.
• Suspension of Habeas Corpus:  Ruled unconstitutional in Ex parte Merryman, Lincoln ignored the ruling, setting a precedent for executive defiance of the judiciary during wartime.
• Military Tribunals for Civilians: He authorized the trial of civilians by military courts in areas where civil courts were still operational, a practice later checked by the Supreme Court in Ex parte Milligan (1866).=
• Executive orders and the Emancipation Proclamation
• Rhetoric: Gettysburg Address and second inaugural

The Very Long Shadow of the Civil War

Between 1876 and 1892, no president won a majority of the popular vote:

1876 Hayes.......... 48.0*
1880 Garfield.......48.3
1884 Cleveland.....48.5
1888 Harrison.......47.8*
1892 Cleveland......46.1

What does it mean to "get right with Lincoln"?