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.