Category Archives: History

Obscure, Unanticipated and Undistinguished Presidents

An increasing number of Americans – not just conservatives – are expressing the opinion that Barack Obama’s presidency is as calamitous for the United States as was that of Jimmy Carter. If so, then in the relatively short span of three decades, America has experienced two spectacularly flawed presidencies, each comparable to only a relative handful that have occurred over the life of the Republic. Could these two recent tragedies have been predicted? Are there any identifiable personality traits, past experiences or political trajectories that might enable voters to foresee impending abject failure in a presidential candidate?

In order to respond to that query, we must ask: who were our worst presidents? An immediate problem in addressing the question is that in most of the well-known surveys that rank our presidents, the overwhelming majority of the opinions were solicited from leftist historians and political science professors. Thus biased thinking skews the results. For example, Calvin Coolidge is typically cast as a horrible president, while Woodrow Wilson is extolled as a great one. It is said that Coolidge was: absent while business ran roughshod over the working man; complicit in the rich virtually escaping federal taxation; and indifferent to the plight of American minorities. Wilson was heralded for expanding the rights of women, modernizing America’s antiquated Constitutional structure and improving the condition of the poor.

These assessments are colored by the political tendencies of those providing the judgments. In fact, Coolidge presided over one of the greatest periods of prosperity in the history of our nation, and almost all of his actions – and in many instances, wise inactions – helped to steer the economy and social fabric of the country in a favorable direction. Wilson, on the other hand, led us into a gruesome world war that served only as an appetizer for a more horrific reprise; instituted Constitutional “reforms” that haunt us to this day; incarcerated innocent Americans for disloyalty; and bequeathed to us the Federal Reserve.

Surely, surveys that rank Wilson high and Coolidge low are hopelessly biased to the left and not to be trusted. Examples of such tainted surveys include: the Schlesinger polls (both père [1948, 1962] et fils [1996]) and the five Sienna College polls [between 1982 and 2010 – the last of which absurdly ranked Obama the 15th best president]. Somewhat less biased are two polls done by the Wall Street Journal in collaboration with the Federalist Society [2000, 2005].

Of course, any definitive ranking will be subjective, but for my money, our least distinguished presidents prior to 1900 were: Tyler, Fillmore, Buchanan, Johnson and Arthur.

  • Tyler. Not so much obscure as unaccomplished, Tyler resigned both House and Senate seats, and served an abbreviated term as Virginia Governor. As president, he was: referred to as “His Accidency”; unable to decide whether he was a Whig or Democratic-Republican; humiliated by the resignation of his entire cabinet; expelled from his party; and the first president to be the subject of an impeachment resolution.
  • Fillmore. His political career was largely confined to New York State, where he was as unsuccessful candidate for Governor. A surprise choice for VP, he: favored slavery in the territories annexed from Mexico; attempted to appease both sides in the slavery debate, achieving no success on either side; maintained a confused position on the Compromise of 1850; signed the Fugitive Slave Act; and failed to unite the Whig Party, with some considering him the proximate cause of its death.
  • Buchanan. According to many, one of the two absolute worst presidents. He was: a perennially ignored candidate; a doughface, i.e., a Northerner with Southern sympathies, who ultimately alienated both sides; unable to prevent the succession of southern states, thereby setting the stage for the Civil War.
  • Johnson. The other in the duo of absolute worst presidents, he was: a colossal failure as the surprise successor to Lincoln; a Democratic in a Republican administration; completely inept at implementing Lincoln’s reconstruction plans; unable to contain the Radical Republicans; and the first president to actually be impeached.
  • Arthur. Not a failure as much as arguably the most obscure president in our history. Having had almost no prior political career, he was an accidental choice as VP and a monumental surprise to America as President. His two biggest failings were a dismal record on supporting Jim Crow and his concealment that he was ill in office with Bright’s disease, which probably rendered him lethargic, ineffective and erratic.

More important than exactly which men comprise any list of worst presidents is the identification of a critical feature that many of these less than successful chief executives had in common. Before ascending to the presidency, they were relatively obscure, their ascendancy was unanticipated, and from an objective standpoint, they were not particularly well-qualified. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority ascended to the presidency via the death of the incumbent. In summary, I would say that those presidents who arrived in office from obscurity, marking an occasion that was unanticipated by the American people, and with precious little in the way of relevant experience – especially if they ascended from the VP position – are disproportionately represented among the worst presidents.

Between Arthur and Carter there were four more instances of a VP assuming the presidency upon the death of the president: Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman and LBJ. The first and last were certainly not obscure. The second and third were to some extent, but neither proved to be a failed president (both were reelected, as was Roosevelt). LBJ was an awful president (the legacy of the Great Society and the Vietnam War continue to corrupt America’s soul); but he was certainly a well-known commodity with, in principle, excellent credentials.

That said, it is the case that (depending on exactly who is on your list), from sometime in the late nineteenth century until the latter part of the twentieth century, there was no individual who ascended to the presidency from (relative) obscurity, in an unanticipated fashion, without sufficient credentials. Perhaps this was because America became a major world power and the scrutiny of presidential candidates grew more intense. Perhaps it was because of the growing mass media, rendering it much more difficult for a dark horse to emerge. Perhaps it was because of increasing party control of the nomination process. Whatever the reasons, they have had less effect in recent decades. In the last 35 years, it has happened twice – sans the death of an incumbent to abet it. What changed after 1960 that allowed the American people to twice usher an obscure, unqualified, inexperienced and ultimately fatally-flawed candidate all the way through the nomination process straight to the White House?

Here is an abbreviated answer: the cultural revolution that swept over America, most intensely from 1963-1974. Among other unhelpful effects, it engendered a loss of faith among the American people in the social, political and economic principles that undergirded the fabric of our nation for nearly 200 years. In particular, we questioned previously accepted axioms about what America stood for, how it should be governed and the nature of the leadership it required. This left the door open to the selection of obscure and unqualified candidates who promoted radical change in the nature of the country. Snake oil salesmen like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama marched through that door. Not surprisingly, their presidencies proved disastrous.
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This article also appeared in The American Thinker under the title, ‘Learning from the Worst Presidents’; see
and in The Intellectual Conservative (under the title here) at:

Is Death an Unintended Consequence of Liberalism?

A Review of J.R. Dunn’s “Death by Liberalism”

It has taken a long time for the American people to catch on, but it is now widely recognized that when well-intentioned liberal policies are implemented, the consequences – both intended and unintended – are hardly beneficial. Representative examples include: the aggressive promotion of ethanol, which has resulted in higher corn prices and the removal of arable land from food production; boosts in minimum wage rates, which have repeatedly caused higher unemployment among teens and lower income workers; and an obsessive emphasis on removing religion from the public square, which has contributed to increased teen pregnancy, drug use and other forms of moral decay. And these are some of the more benign consequences of liberal governance run amok.

It’s not like these deleterious outcomes of core liberal principles had not been predicted; but neither the predictions nor the outcomes have diminished liberal enthusiasm for these harmful policies. In fact, this is a well-known story that has been told many times. But in his book, Death by Liberalism: The Fatal Outcome of Well-Meaning Liberal Policies, J.R. Dunn raises the level on the nature of the accusation to a height that is far above the usual critiques. In his study of the effects of liberal social and fiscal policy, Dunn seeks to establish that the ultimate product of most core liberal policies easily eclipses negative agricultural, monetary or social consequences; he claims that the ultimate result of supposedly benignly intentioned, but misguided liberal programs is in fact death. In a passionate and scathing description of how liberalism leads directly and indirectly to the death of scores of its beneficiaries, i.e., US citizens, Dunn charges that the actualization of numerous liberal policies amounts to democide – the murder of a nation’s citizens by its own government.

While the underlying thesis of Dunn’s book is rather unappetizing, the presentation is quite compelling. His research is thorough, his grasp of detail is encyclopedic and his command of economics, sociology and political theory is impressive. He is at ease discussing a wide variety of topics: from nuclear power to illegal immigration, from crime prevention to lustration, from social security to DDT. He marshals a far-reaching roster of “crimes” for which he indicts liberalism as the primary culprit. Many of these are well-known and a few reflect new insights on his part. Together, they comprise a damning indictment of twentieth century liberalism for crimes against humanity.

To give a flavor of the indictment, I supply here a few of the grenades that Dunn lobs at liberals, their beliefs, policies and “achievements.”

  • Totalitarian Mass Murder. Dunn first reminds us that in the past century, democide in the form of mass murder was committed by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China and by Pol Pot in Cambodia. In the first three, the deaths numbered in the tens of millions. Of course, the victims were not US citizens, but Dunn emphasizes that the brutal statist policies imposed by those regimes were extreme versions of domestic liberal inclinations.
  • Silent Spring. The only other modern mass murderer with tens of millions of victims notched on her belt is Rachel Carson – although again the slaughter occurred overseas. The ban on DDT that resulted almost exclusively from Carson’s work allowed the resurgence of malaria, which had been nearly eradicated worldwide. The governments that acceded to the demands of various, leftist-oriented international health organizations are responsible for the deaths of millions of their citizens – but the source for the tragedy is Rachel Carson.

With these as preamble, Dunn goes on to describe numerous domestic liberal programs that resulted in American deaths.

·        Crime. Liberal policies intended to alter how our society deals with crime gained preeminence in the 1960s. By emphasizing rehabilitation over punishment; by ascribing criminal behavior to a reaction against social injustice in lieu of evil impulses; by enhancing criminal rights over police responsibilities; liberal policies spawned a 30-year crime spree that resulted in needless death and injury. Says Dunn: “The great crime wave of the late twentieth century is a disaster that did not have to happen. For three decades, this nation’s criminal element…held the country hostage. Crime rates skyrocketed, increasing several hundred percent across the board. Criminals ran law-abiding citizens off their own streets, gained effective control of many neighborhoods, and violated the peace of many cities. The number of victims is incalculable, the amount of damage – financial, social, and personal – beyond reckoning…As a frontier culture, Americans knew how to handle crime. Justice was swift, punishment was certain, and if formal law enforcement faltered, the citizenry was prepared to act. Each of those elements failed during the great crime explosion. The criminal justice system broke down completely. The police were constantly undermined. The citizenry were actively restrained and threatened with legal sanctions if they made the most basic effort to defend themselves or their property… the crime explosion didn’t just happen. Like urban renewal and welfare, it was the result of policy, a deliberate attempt to remake the criminal justice system in the image of an ideal.”

·        Abortion. Once again, I let Dunn speak for himself: “Liberals have long claimed a monopoly over compassion in the public sphere. Self-styled empathy is basic to liberal identity. Liberals are the Good Samaritans of American political life. No opportunity to display humanity is too small, no effort too great. They nest in trees for months to checkmate the logger. They travel to northern Labrador to defend baby seals. They walk the meanest streets to hand out clean needles. Threatened species, ethnic minorities, the homeless, refugees, migrants, professional criminals…virtually no outcast group finds itself beyond liberal protection. With one exception: the millions of unborn children aborted over the past four decades. They alone fail to qualify. They alone found themselves outside the circle of liberal compassion. How can this be explained? …A major flaw of liberal thinking…lies in what G.K. Chesterton termed ‘chronological snobbery,’ the contention that the more ancient the concept, the more it is based on irrationality and ignorance, and the easier it can be set aside. Nothing could be further from the truth. A precept with millennia of practice behind it is one based on the firmest foundation imaginable. You meddle with it at your peril, and with due regard for the consequences. Roe v. Wade challenged exactly such a precept, and the consequences were dramatic. There is not a single aspect of American life that does not bear its mark. Roe distorted the relationships between men and women, husbands and wives, parents and children, politician and voter, clergy and worshippers, government and people… Roe set a blaze that to this day still ravages our culture.”

·        Gun Control. The communities in America that have the least restrictive carry laws enjoy significantly lower crime rates than those with the most severe restrictions. As John Lott has demonstrated in numerous studies, gun control laws – a favorite of liberal politicians – needlessly get people killed or maimed.

·        Homelessness. The 1970-1980s combination of the emptying of the nation’s mental hospitals together with irresponsible urban renewal projects that destroyed lower income neighborhoods has rendered the mentally challenged of America prey to disease, crime and weather.

·        Environmentalism. From CAFE standards that force Americans into tiny, unsafe cars to the banning of fluorocarbons that has condemned asthma patients to needless suffering, the pursuit of mindless environmentalism has resulted in unintended harm and death.

·        Child Welfare. Child Protective Services are unresponsive and unaccountable bureaucracies that lose children when they are not placing them in environments that prove dangerous – and often lethal.

·        Illegal Immigration. The refusal to enforce immigration laws has resulted in crimes – often murder – that would not have occurred if liberal attitudes on “undocumented workers” had not prevailed.

·        FDA. Dunn recounts a familiar story in which FDA incompetence and delay led to the tragic death of an afflicted individual. It is impossible to estimate the number of patient deaths caused by FDA ineptitude and adherence to bureaucratic rules.

·        Euthanasia. Liberal pursuit of a “right to death” and “death with dignity” has fostered the occurrence of predictable deaths – e.g., in the back of Kevorkian’s van.

·        Health Care. Not surprisingly, Dunn believes that Obamacare will lead to rationing of health care and the premature death of seniors who are short changed.

Here’s how Dunn wraps it up: “In the final half of the twentieth century, up to 262,000 Americans died of crimes that would not have been committed but for liberal interference with the criminal justice system. Up to 121,000 died in automobile accidents directly attributable to the CAFE standards. Unknown thousands have perished due to the failure of other forms of government activity. (It would be a surprise if the numbers weren’t somewhat murky – it’s not as if we can find this information on a USA.gov website.) A large number of children have died under the ’protection’ of DYS and similar agencies. Many of the ‘homeless’ – the chronic mentally ill thrust out into the streets – have died in miserable circumstances. Individuals from all social levels have died due to various forms of environmental legislation. Others have been killed by rogue illegal immigrants. Many sick individuals have suffered premature death from being denied necessary medical drugs thanks to the FDA’s convoluted certification process…We scarcely know how to even estimate the total [number of deaths]. The best we can say is that between 400,000 and 500,000 Americans have in the past century died prematurely thanks to government policies, victims of the American democide. That number is a match for all our fatalities in the past century’s wars. It is greater than all American deaths from epidemic disease. [But] the total doesn’t amount to much in the blood-soaked history of the Age of Massacre. It scarcely compares to the numbers achieved by Nazi Germany, the USSR, Red China, or any of the other champions of extermination. It has required half a century for the US to achieve that figure. The Hutu mobs of Rwanda, using only machetes, surpassed it within weeks. It scarcely rates an asterisk in the past century’s long record of atrocity. But it happened in our country. It happened in America [emphasis added].”

Wow! Now readers of this journal will know that I am as fervent as Dunn in my assessment of the harm that the liberal hegemony has inflicted on our country over the last century. But murder? Normally, the dastardly deed manifests in two varieties – premeditated or spontaneous (i.e., 1st or 2nd degree). In both cases, an element of malice must be present. Failing that, the taking of a human life is usually classified as manslaughter. That too comes in two flavors – voluntary and involuntary. The distinction is whether the deed followed a purposeful act by the perpetrator or whether it occurred incidental to an act by the killer.

It seems to me that it is incorrect to call any of FDR, LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama a murderer. That would imply that they pursued their mad dash to liberal nirvana completely cognizant of the fact that their policies would inevitably result in the death of US citizens – i.e., of those whom they were sworn to protect. I doubt for an instant that any of the fab five that I identified would accept any of Dunn’s list of horrors as being caused by any of their programs – and even if by some miracle they did, they would surely plead surprise rather than malignant intent.

Manslaughter is a more makeable case – especially of the involuntary kind. Even voluntary manslaughter is a bit of a stretch. It implies a purposefulness that is difficult to discern. In their utopian myopia, it is inconceivable to hard core liberals that their well-intentioned policies could cause harm to unintended beneficiaries – much less their death.

The arguments in Dunn’s book are persuasive; they trace a plausible trajectory from liberal programs to the death of innocents. But labeling these deaths as democide – the murder of people by their government – is exceedingly inflammatory and not justified. If I must coin a term, I’ll say incidentalcide – the death of citizens from unintended consequences of their government’s actions. Of course, that does not mean that it shouldn’t stop. However, the effort to bring about its cessation is not aided by overly flagrant accusations that cannot be substantiated.
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This review also appeared in The Intellecrual Conservative at

Danger in the Census Numbers

The Census Bureau just issued population data compiled from last year’s national decadal census. The data reveals that the Hispanic population has grown much faster than anticipated. The reasons attributed are birthrate and immigration – both legal and illegal.

I can already see some readers frothing at the mouth: the word ‘danger’ appears in the title of an article citing a drastically increased percentage of Hispanic residents in the US – ergo, the author is a racist. I hope that a careful reading of what follows will allay that fear.

In one decade, the Hispanic population of the US has surged by 43% and now numbers over 50 million. Projections are that by midcentury the white population will decrease to less than 50% and the Hispanic population might top one-third. So what! As long as the new and recent Hispanic immigrants buy into the American philosophy of freedom, rule of law and limited government, they will melt into American society and the grand American experiment in individual liberty can continue. After all, that is exactly what happened with previous waves of immigrants over the last 125 years.

Not exactly! In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the large Protestant white majority of US citizens worried that the incoming flood of southern and eastern Europeans – Italians, Greeks and Slavs; Catholics and Jews – would alter the character of the United States. Then, as now, the argument embodied in the italicized words above was made. And to many, it appears that that argument has been borne out. I would argue not. Those immigrants and their children and grandchildren have been in the vanguard of the progressive movement that has drastically altered the classical character of American society. It may be that progressive/socialist ideas originated in central and western Europe, but the virus was caught and brought by the eastern and southern European immigrants to our land; and it has infected a large percentage of the population.

Much of the progressive program is subscribed to by the Latinos who are cascading down upon our shores. Moreover, while it is also true that the more virulent strains of leftism such as multiculturalism, one world government, denial of American exceptionalism, denigration of Western Civilization and rabid environmentalism did not originate in Latin America; like their eastern and southern European precursors, the Latinos are infected by these philosophies, and by the sheer weight of their numbers, they will help to steer America further away from the historical path established by our Founders.

Most of my grandparents and their friends and relatives who came to America a century ago were good people seeking to escape European Jew hatred and to build a better life in America. But they and most of their descendants were susceptible to the progressive/socialist ideas of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, FDR and LBJ. Unwittingly, they have helped to loosen the moorings of our great American heritage. The current Hispanic immigrant population is also filled with good people looking to escape poverty and, by dint of hard work and dedication, build a better life for themselves and their children. But they are steeped in the ways of Western Civilization and the American creed even less then were my grandparents. It does not augur well for the continued success of the American experiment.
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This post also appeared in The American Thinker at
 

Thoughts on Immigration – Illegal and Otherwise

My four grandparents immigrated to the United States from Poland at different times, but all approximately a century ago. They and most of their siblings – a few stayed behind and were eventually consumed in the Holocaust – were part of a massive 40-year wave of immigration from Eastern Europe to our shores. Over the past century, my immigrant ancestors spawned four generations of American Jews who now reside all over our great country. By absolutely any measure, the immigration tale of my family is an American success story. My cousins and second cousins and their progeny are doctors, lawyers, businessmen, scientists, artists, educators, students, soldiers, athletes, journalists and IT specialists. (However, I have no knowledge of any politicians.) Of course, no family history is perfect – there are a few miscreants and at least one jailbird. But there can be no doubt that the United States of America made an excellent investment when it opened its doors to my ancestors. The deal was outstanding for us as well – after nearly two millennia of persecution and pain, these Jews found a land where they could be free, prosperous, worship without fear, and rise to any heights that their abilities afforded them.

I have friends and colleagues of Italian, Irish, Greek and Chinese ancestry whose family history traces a similar trajectory. Aside from a tiny percentage of the population that is descendants of indigenous people, everyone else in America is an immigrant or the descendant of one. And yet the vast majority of us see ourselves as thoroughly American – whether our ancestors arrived on the Mayflower, in steerage on a turn-of-the-century boat from a Baltic port, or via an unseaworthy vessel off the coast of Vietnam. How can that be?

The answer is simple. Unlike in France or Sweden or Cambodia, the citizens of our nation do not derive their national identity from a specific piece of land or a religion or an ethnic heritage, a race or even a language – although it is possible to argue about the last one. To be an American is instead to subscribe to an idea, which comprises a philosophy of government, a means of organizing society and an economic system. The United States of America did not come into existence slowly over eons through the gradual, natural congealing of a people via one or more of the above categories. No, it was created essentially ex nihilo at the end of the eighteenth century by means of two founding documents – the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution – as well as through the writings and speeches of the men, and their associates, who penned those documents. To be an American is to accept, practice and promote the ideas in those documents. It is to acknowledge the uniqueness of this nation in world history as one in which: individual liberty is the highest ideal; those who govern do so only with the consent of the governed; and our rights to – as Mr. Jefferson so eloquently put it – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are bestowed upon us by our Creator, not by any government. Those who come to our shores with these beliefs are welcome to join us in the magnificent journey upon which our Founders propelled us. It is our great fortune that most of those who have immigrated to this land came with those ideals or adopted them soon after their arrival.

That being said, our nation’s formal immigration policies have varied over the last two centuries. Immediately after Independence, we were not particularly encouraging of it – feeling as we did that most of the European population did not share our uniquely, freedom-worshipping ideals. But as the nineteenth century unfolded – needing more people to conquer a vast continent and to participate in a great Industrial Revolution – we encouraged it more and more. Then, as those two great adventures came to a close in the early twentieth century, we returned to more restrictive policies. We threw open the gates again after WWII and they have remained so ever since.

Our specific immigration schemes have also varied. Which countries we favored; what criteria we sought (relatives, specific work skills, educational level, age) – these too have not remained constant. Nevertheless, I don’t think that any of those critically affected the end result. Most of the people arriving at our borders were “yearning to breathe free.” It would not be unreasonable to expect that a hundred years hence the descendants of today’s immigrants will recite the same story as I did in the opening paragraph. And yet there is a great unease in the country about immigration today. Too much of it is illegal. But I suspect that that is not the main cause of the unease. It is because we fear that too many of today’s immigrants do not share our ideals, as did our ancestor immigrants. We worry that too many new immigrants are not here because they believe in the principles of 1776 and 1787, but because they heard from a relative living here that there’s some free booty lying around and they’d like to get some. Moreover, unlike in previous generations, we seem to be making no effort to inculcate the Founders’ ideals into our new immigrants.

Indeed, the latter is the key point. It is not that the new immigrant is from Latin America or Asia instead of Europe; it is not that he speaks Spanish instead of German or French; it is not that his work ethic is weaker than those of previous immigrants – it’s not; and it is not that she is not steeped in American history – my grandmothers couldn’t distinguish John Adams from Samuel Adams. It is that we the people – or at least a sizeable segment of us – have lost faith in our own ideals. You cannot inculcate newcomers into your way of life if you no longer subscribe to its tenets. So we make no effort to ensure that new immigrants possess or are given the ideas that quickly grant them access to an American identity.

The success of the progressive movement in America over the last century has eroded the people’s belief in the fundamental principles that formerly defined our national identity. The government has grown beyond acceptable boundaries and no longer seeks the consent of the governed; individual liberty as our highest ideal has given way to the pursuit of an artificial equality; property is no longer sacrosanct; and our nation is no longer viewed by many of its citizens – especially the “elite” – as unique. Those immigrating to a nation founded on ideas, which no longer believes in those ideas, are rightly confused and unassimilated. They serve only to hasten the nation’s downfall. It is therefore not surprising that some blame the nation’s ills on immigrants – illegal or otherwise.

Immigrants once understood that they had embarked on a tough road, but that there was a pot of gold at the end – if not for them, then for their children. Today’s immigrants are taught to demand the gold immediately without earning it. But immigrants – illegal and legal – are not the main source of America’s ills. Like most of our ailments, the immigration problem will be cured if we return the country to the principles upon which it was founded.
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This post also appeared in The American Thinker on 2/19/11 under the title ‘The American Immigration Problem’; see

The High Tide of American Conservatism

Since the dawn of the 20th century, the United States has experienced four presidential elections in which a true liberal squared off against a true conservative. These elections took place in 1900 (McKinley-Bryan), 1920 (Harding-Cox), 1980 (Reagan-Carter) and 1984 (Reagan-Mondale). With one exception, every other presidential election between 1904 and 2008 pitted a liberal Democrat[1] against a Republican who could at best be described as centrist, but more often than not would be more accurately characterized as a big-government, moderate progressive with few real conservative or libertarian inclinations. Of the Republican bunch, T. Roosevelt, Hoover, Nixon and the Bushes were (as I have labeled them elsewhere[2]) faux conservatives who expanded the size and scope of the Federal Government in ways that surely would have appalled Thomas Jefferson.[3] Such an appellation, that is, faux conservative, also suits all of the past century’s unsuccessful Republican candidates – from McCain and Dole back to Dewey and Wilkie. The only legitimately conservative Republican presidential candidates in the last 110 years, beside the successful ones named above, were Coolidge and Goldwater.

The sole exception to all of the above, that is, the only time that two conservative candidates faced off, occurred in 1924 when the incumbent Republican president, Calvin Coolidge, took on the last conservative nominated by the Democratic Party, John W. Davis. The story of that election and the men who contested it is told in a fascinating new book, The High Tide of American Conservatism by Garland S. Tucker, III. As Tucker details conclusively, both men were bedrock conservatives, with deeply held convictions. Tucker briefly describes the post-bellum United States (1865-1900) as one of unbridled conservative philosophy. It heralded the unparalleled blooming of the most prosperous, powerful, dynamic and self-confident nation in modern world history as the US adhered faithfully to the laissez-faire, individual freedom, limited government model laid down by the Founders. Tucker explains how it was the young Republican Party that motivated and steered this development; he points out that in that era, the Democrats elected only one president, Grover Cleveland, and he was as conservative as any Republican of the time.

Matters began to change as the progressive movement – whose basic philosophy has deep European roots in Marxian socialism[4] – began to take hold in the American electorate, and especially in the Democratic Party. Their nomination of William Jennings Bryan three times was rather dramatic testimony to that fact, but the movement gained presidential power for the first time only with the ascension of Teddy Roosevelt to the office upon McKinley’s assassination. It erupted in full bloom with the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912, an election in which more than 95% of the total vote went to progressive candidates (Wilson, Taft, Roosevelt). However, in a reaction that would be duplicated several times over the coming century, the people were horrified by the excesses of the progressives, and they through them out of power in 1920. Harding and the Republicans returned the nation to its conservative roots. But Harding died in office and Calvin Coolidge ascended to the presidency. Not surprisingly, he secured the Republican nomination in 1924. And then, through a confluence of coincidences, which – as Tucker describes – revolved around Prohibition, the KKK and the League of Nations, the Democrats, at the conclusion of a hopelessly deadlocked convention – nominated a true conservative to oppose Coolidge, John W. Davis. They would never do that again.

Tucker devotes most of his book to the two men – Coolidge and Davis – and the decade (the Roaring Twenties) in which their contest occurred. Eighty seven years later, it makes for fascinating reading. Tucker has a fluid and engaging style. His prose is crisp and enlightening. His research is thorough and as one pours through the pages, one cannot help but be transported back to the Coolidge family farm in Vermont or the Clarksburg, W.VA home of Davis. Both men’s origins were in small town America and their progress through the American landscape to the pinnacles of political power trace somewhat similar paths: Coolidge’s puritanical, agrarian youth, then a stint at Amherst College, followed by a Massachusetts law practice and eventually local and national politics; Davis’ large and loving family, his formative years at Washington and Lee College, followed by a varied law practice in Clarksburg and then also into politics. Furthermore, the men’s personas were also remarkably similar in many ways: humble, gracious, unfailingly polite, solicitous of others, men of great integrity and above all, of a Jeffersonian liberal persuasion – meant in the classic 18-19th century sense of the term. Tucker writes of them with affection and the reader is hard pressed not to admire both men. The book provides an unusual glimpse into the America of four score and seven years ago and is well worth the read.

But I have one major quibble with Tucker. He highlights the fact that the 1924 election did not at all spell the death knell of American progressivism. In particular, he describes at some length the third party candidacy of Robert La Follette who ran on the Progressive Party ticket. Tucker acknowledges that, although La Follette did poorly in the vote total, he commanded a passionate following. Tucker goes further and asserts that one of the prime consequences of the campaign was the acceptance by the Democrats of the progressive program and its ultimate rejection by the Republicans. He claims that in the years following the 1924 election, the Democrats became the party of liberals (or progressives) and the Republicans became the party of conservatives.

While La Follette’s 1924 run for the presidency fell short, it was a transformational event in American political history. The major party realignment marked by the 1924 election was significantly influenced by the La Follette candidacy. Progressive Republicans were shaken loose from their historical party moorings of more than a generation and ultimately found a home in the Democratic Party, which turned away from its Jeffersonian roots in the years following 1924. As the victorious Republicans held steady on a conservative course, the Bryan Democrats determined to guide their party leftward to claim the progressive banner.

That quote is as close as Tucker comes to explicitly claiming it, but it is clear from many other portions of the book that he believes that the election of 1924 solidified the role of the two parties in the American political future:

Since 1924, the Republican Party has generally been the conservative party while the Democratic Party has not even seriously considered nominating a conservative candidate…By 1924, progressivism was still a nonpartisan issue, with both of the major parties having sizeable progressive wings…After 1924, the Republicans remained on a rightward course, while the Democrats steered leftward; and there has been no major realignment since. The philosophy of La Follette and the Progressives was essentially that of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and now Obama, and the twenty-first century Democratic Party, while the philosophy of Davis and Coolidge was essentially that of Reagan and the twenty first century Republican Party. [And finally, as Fred Barnes sums up in the Introduction:] The 1924 race also foreshadowed the political struggle between an increasingly conservative Republican Party and an unflinchingly liberal Democratic party that has endured ever since

In short, it is Tucker’s thesis that after 1924 – and as a consequence of what transpired in that election, the Democratic Party became and remains the party exclusively of the left or liberal philosophy and the Republican Party became and remains the party exclusively of the right and conservative philosophy. In this he is, alas, only half right. While the Democratic Party certainly, increasingly became – and today almost exclusively remains – the party of the Left, the Republican Party has hardly followed the contrapositive path. The litany of Republican presidential candidates that I recited in the opening paragraph should serve as proof of that observation.

In some sense, American politics in the eighty years from 1928 until 2008 has not been a fair fight. Not only did the progressive movement come to completely dominate the Democratic Party, but as has been amply documented, it also dominates the media, the educational establishment, the legal profession, government bureaucracy, unions and the major foundations. Conservatism in America was, if not dead, then totally dormant for a generation following Coolidge until it was revived by Bill Buckley (and a few others) in the 1950s. Since then it has made agonizingly slow and fitful progress in trying to achieve equal status with the liberal, progressive movement. True, it has won a few presidential (1980, 1984) and congressional (1994, 2010) elections. But it is absolutely false to assert that the conservative movement took control of the Republican Party in any way similar to how the progressive movement captured the Democratic Party. There are some recent signs that this might be happening at last. Time will tell. But Tucker’s assertion that the election of 1924 cemented the Republican Party as the party of conservatism in America is unfortunately and patently untrue.

That quibble aside, the book could serve as an excellent introduction to the vast majority of Americans who, if they were taught anything about the era, have learned that Harding was a crook, Coolidge was an obscure, insignificant lightweight and the conservative policies of the Harding-Coolidge administration caused the Great Depression – from which the progressive movement in the person of FDR rescued the country. Three quarters of a century later we are slowly uncovering the truth – all of this narrative is a pack of lies that has abetted the hijacking of the Founders’ country by the progressive movement. Tucker’s book is one of many (e.g., that of Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man) that is helping to set the record straight.

This review also appeared in The Intellectual Conservative at

[1] Except that some considered the Democratic nominee in 1904, Alton B. Parker, to be conservative.

[2] See e.g., my book Liberal Hearts and Conservative Brains, http://home.comcast.net/~ronlipsman/index.html

[3] Eisenhower was a centrist who made absolutely no effort to roll back FDR’s New Deal.

[4] It also borrowed heavily from Italian Fascism, as is explained in Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism.