Dear Reader,
Today is President’s Day.
In token of this high and exalted day, we reflect upon the United States presidency.
Historians heap vast praise upon presidents of energy and of action (the sitting president excepted).
In brief, upon presidents who expand their own powers… and the powers of the United States government.
Over whom do historians slobber and swoon — a Millard Fillmore or an Abraham Lincoln?
A Grover Cleveland or a Theodore Roosevelt?
A Calvin Coolidge — or a Franklin Roosevelt?
I mention Calvin Coolidge. Allow me to lift a hymn of praise in his honor.
For he was not a man of energy and action. He was rather a man absent of lethargy and inaction.
And He Was Not a Nuisance
In H.L. Mencken’s telling, Mr. Coolidge:
- Slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night… There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.
Note: Old Henry Louis did not say, “He had no ideas, but he was not a nuisance.” He said rather:
“He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.”
Is loftier praise for a president conceivable? I do not believe it is.
He had no ideas and he was not a nuisance.
(Upon fresh consideration, I prehumously instruct my obituarist to describe my existence in these precise words. I further decree that the sentence appear on my tombstone, unadulterated.)
Being a nuisance, alas, is how presidents shoulder their way onto the history pages.
My central grievance with the president’s initial term was that he was not nuisance enough.
By all appearances he is presently correcting that error.
He is making quite the nuisance of himself. Will he sustain his furious pace?
We shall see.
The Worst President Ever?
The abovesaid Mr. Mencken certainly hooked onto something when he wrote:
“We suffer most when the White House bursts with ideas.”
In contrast to Mr. Coolidge, we find his predecessor once removed — Woodrow Wilson.
For he was a man bursting with ideas.
Woodrow — for example — was the only doctor of philosophy to ever seize the White House.
He presided over Princeton University before he presided over the United States.
And the nation is still afflicted with his beautiful ideas.
Who signed the Federal Reserve Act into law? The answer is Mr. Wilson.
Who signed the federal income tax into law? The answer is Mr. Wilson.
The same Mr. Wilson ordered the doughboys “over there.” 116,000 of them will remain forever over there.
And the Versailles Treaty that closed the “war to end all wars” spawned the “peace to end all peace.”
WWI was “the Great War” until an even greater war imposed a Roman numeration upon it.
Could It All Have Been Prevented?
Here former Reagan budget director David Stockman hauls Wilson into history’s dock. Does Mr. Stockman exhibit clemency?
No. He instead indicts Wilson for every crime on the calendar:
- Had Woodrow Wilson not misled America on a messianic crusade, the Great War would have ended in mutual exhaustion in 1917 and both sides would have gone home battered and bankrupt but no danger to the rest of mankind.
- Indeed, absent Wilson’s crusade there would have been no allied victory, no punitive peace and no war reparations; nor would there have been a Leninist coup in Petrograd or Stalin’s barbaric regime.
- Likewise, there would have been no Hitler, no Nazis, no Holocaust, no global war against Germany and Japan and no incineration of 200,000 civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- Nor would there have followed a Cold War with the Soviets or CIA-sponsored coups and assassinations in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil and Chile to name a few. Surely there would have been no CIA plot to assassinate Castro, or Russian missiles in Cuba or a crisis that took the world to the brink of annihilation.
- There would have been no domino theory and no Vietnam slaughter, either.
- Nor would we have had to come to the aid of the mujahedeen and train the future al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Likewise, there would have been no Khomeini-led Islamic revolution and no U.S. aid to enable Saddam’s gas attacks on Iranian boy soldiers in the 1980s.
- Nor would there have been an American invasion of Arabia in 1991 to stop our former ally Saddam Hussein from looting the equally contemptible emir of Kuwait’s ill-gotten oil plunder — or, alas, the horrific 9/11 blowback a decade later.
- Nor would we have been stuck with a $1 trillion Warfare State budget today.
Does Mr. Stockman simplify events? Perhaps so.
Too Good to Be True
I do not propose the 20th century would have remained bloodless absent Mr. Wilson’s botchwork.
The world was — as it always is — to its neck with fools.
These fools would have certainly gotten themselves up to some mischief or other.
Yet I believe the hottest hells of the 20th century may have been averted.
Averted, that is, had Mr. Wilson simply sat upon his hands in April 1917 — and confined the doughboys to their barracks.
From Modest Republic to Vainglorious Empire
Messieurs Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin authored a work, presently in its third edition, named Empire of Debt.
Here these gentleman relay the “evolution” of the United States presidency — from its modest origins — to its imperial present:
- Many years ago, when the United States was still a modest republic, US presidents were available to almost anyone who wanted to shoot them. Thomas Jefferson went for a walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, alone, and spoke to anyone who came up to him.
- John Adams used to swim naked in the Potomac. A woman reporter got him to talk to her by sitting on his clothes and refusing to budge. But now anyone who wants to see the president must have a background check and pass through a metal detector.
- The White House staff must approve reporters before they are allowed into press conferences. And when the US head of state travels, he does so in imperial style; he moves around protected by hundreds of praetorian guards, sharpshooters on rooftops, and thousands of local centurions…
- Today, the president cavalcades around Washington in an armored Cadillac. The limousine is fitted with bulletproof windows, equally sturdy tires, and a self-contained ventilation system to ward off a biological or chemical attack…
- Everywhere the president goes, his security is handled — by thousands of guards and aides, secure compounds, and carefully orchestrated movements…
- Institutions have a way of evolving over time — after a few years, they no longer resemble the originals. The United States in the first quarter of the 21st century was no more like the America of 1776 than the Vatican under the Borgia popes was like Christianity at the time of the Last Supper, or Microsoft in 2024 is like the company Bill Gates started in his garage.
- Still, while the institutions evolve, the ideas and theories about them tend to remain fixed; it is as if people hadn’t noticed. In America, all the restraints, inhibitions, and modesty of the Old Republic have been blown away by the prevailing winds of the new empire. In their place has emerged a vainglorious system of conceit, deceit, debt, and delusion.
I declare for the modest Old Republic — and the presidency of the modest Old Republic.
The imperial presidency I do not like.
Thus I am with Adams — John Quincy Adams.
In 1821, he feared America’s potential transition from republic to empire:
“She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit….”
Down with the imperial presidency, I say.
Let America once again rule her own spirit…
Regards,
Brian Maher
for Freedom Financial News
