Grandpa Harrison, President for a Month

Posted on September 22, 2026 by smellincoffee

William Henry Harrison
“You could have read JEFFERSON’S HAMMER, which focused on my entire career, but instead you decided to read a biography which is prefaced by the author saying that she mostly wrote it because HER FATHER LITERALLY TORE DOWN MY SON’S HOUSE. Thanks. Thanks so much.”

Before I began this reading project, there was a short file in my head of presidents who governed too short a season, or who were too undistinguished, to merit thinking about. I did not know that Chester Arthur had anything but a set of muttonchops, or that Franklin Pierce maintained his friendship with Jefferson Davis despite the pressures of the Civil War, or that John Tyler basically established the precedent that vice presidents become president if the president is shot dead. The presidential precedent, if you will. William Henry Harrison was very high (or low) on that list of Presidents I don’t Know a Blessed Thing About: I could tell you his campaign slogan for some mysterious reason (Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too!), and I knew he died after making a very long speech, but that’s it. At least with Zachary Taylor I had a mysterious image of cherries and milk that floated up when I heard his name.

So, Grandpa Harrison. He was born in Virginia, moved west, served in the military, and really leaned into that part of himself. When he asked his future father-in-law for permission to propose to his daughter, Future Father in Law asked how Harrison expected to support a family. Harrison was name-rich but money poor, something that would persist throughout his life because his business savvy was so poor he managed to invest in a distillery that failed. How do you manage to lose money making hooch? — he struck a pose and declared “My sword is my means of support,sir!”. Personally, I think that’s a bit ambiguous — he could be professing to be a pirate or a highwayman as easily as a soldier — but martial feats did punctuate his life.When he was the territorial governor of Indiana, for instance, he personally parleyed with Tecumseh (a Shawnee who he was personally awed by, but forced to fight) and then rallied his troops after a dawn ambush. The story of the ambush itself is movie-worthy: the natives said “We’ll talk about this tomorrow, why don’t you and your army camp right over there, with a stream and woods and some nice hills for us to hide behind and then attack you at dawn?”. They did attack, but Harrison — for whatever his faults — does appear to have been blessed with the ability to keep a cool head during battle.

One would think being a governor was an open door to great and noble things, but Harrison continued to struggle: most of his now-grown sons were financial drains, and at one point he was working as a clerk and badgering John Quincy Adams for appointments. As soon as Quincy had given Harrison a good one, Andrew Jackson was elected and immediately recalled him. Jackson would inspire an Anti-Jackson party, the Whigs, and eventually they would elect Harrison in large part because they couldn’t agree on anyone else. (Rather like Garfield or Truman, when Truman was the veep.) Even with increasing suffrage, politics appears to have been very much an insider’s game, with Harrison being advanced on the grounds of being 3.6 — not great, not terrible. Then he died; people used to say he’d caught a chill because of his two-hour speech in the rain, but evidently there’s now arguments he died from ‘enteric fever’.

Grandpa Harrison’s life was one of constant struggle — reaching peaks then being knocked down again. He was an interesting fellow, I think — prone to florid speeches but also something of an everyman in actual company, and a touch obsessed with the Greeks and Romans. He had an idea of every man receiving military training, so that in an hour of need all men could take their place in the phalanx. His approach to slavery is complicated: he didn’t so much buy ‘slaves’ as he did buy their labor, long-term. He always changed their status to that of indentured servants who would be freed after a few years (nine appears to have been the longest term), giving them clothes and a Bible at the end of the term. Nevertheless, he resisted any attempt to quell the expansion of slavery into the western territories, probably because he was one of many southerners who had come west and brought slaves in tow. It was also good politics to say on the good side of Virginia and the Carolinas, even if in speaking to Northern states he pointed to his policy of freeing ‘servants’ after some time. He was also not a fan of hooch (…ah, now I see why the distillery failed), an oddity in a time when most people drank like fish because water could give you cholera or some other disease.

This was a surprisingly interesting book, though it didn’t rev up my engines and make me want to go on a Grandpa Harrison sidequest the way other presidents have. He’s far more of a character than his grandson, though Benjamin is more palatable to modern audiences because of his support for black Civil Rights, whereas Grandpa’s idea of progress was giving his personal slaves a contractual expiry. Harrison underscores one unexpected thing I’m enjoying about this project — how people from other eras are a lot more messy than history books give them credit for. Every so often you run into someone who plays a stereotype to the hilt, but the messy men and women are more numerous and far more interesting. Also, Gail Collins is fun Her personality really hooked me in the early parts, though she steps back a bit as the book progresses.

Up next: Well..um. I’m reading 1932, I should take a crack at Polk so I have a beautiful uninterupted stream of dead presidents from Washington to Cleveland 2: Electric Boogaloo, but I am also mindful of my promise to not make this a presidential sweeps week. In all likelihood it can’t: 1932 is huge, and none of my remaining reads are in the AP series. I’ve had my Polk book for a year and bought my McKinley this morning (on sale!), and have yet to decide on my FDR and LBJ treatments. And then…?

Sidebar: John Scott Harrison, the son of Grandpa Harrison here and the father of Benjamin Harrison is largely known for what happened to him after he died. Turns out his body was stolen, and it was found when investigators went looking for another body that had been stolen. One of the Harrison boys encountered his father’s corpse dangling from a rope in another city! How has a book not been written?! Netflix, get your Death by Lightning people on it!

William Henry Harrison looking disapproving
Desist. From Calling me. GRANDPA HARRISON.

Quotations

I am going to take a big historic leap and guess that if he had lived—if Anna Harrison had accompanied her husband to Washington and demanded that he carry an umbrella at all times— William Henry would still not have been the sort of chief executive who gets his head carved on the side of a mountain. He was living in a bad time for presidents, that long gray period between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln when the great cloud of slavery and approaching civil war would make everybody—even an effective president like James Polk—seem like a historic asterisk.

But it is my experience that there are not many Americans, or even many American historians, who are particularly interested in speculating on what it would have meant if things had worked out better for the Whigs.

[W]hen a British nobleman visited Berkeley after the conflict had ended, he noted rather snootily that while the exterior of the great homes of Virginia compared favorably to their English counterparts, their interiors lacked elegant furniture and decor. “I can account for my paintings and decorations, sir,” Benjamin [the Signer] roared. “Your soldiers burned them in my backyard.”

The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay to him is really astonishing, and more than any other circumstance bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order,” Harrison said. If fortune had not dumped him in the middle of the American progress westward, Harrison theorized, “he would, perhaps, be the founder of an empire that would rival in glory that of Mexico or Peru.”

“[Harrison’s] thirst for lucrative office is absolutely rabid,” President [John Quincy] Adams wrote. “Vice-president, major-general of the Army, Minister to Colombia—for each of these places he has been this very session as hot in pursuit as a hound on the scent of a hare. […] “Harrison wants the mission to Colombia much more than it wants him, or than it is wanted by the public interest.”

Webster and virtually everyone else who might have been a first choice rejected a post that had traditionally been regarded as meaningless at best. The vice president had so little to do that the men who occupied the job often never even bothered to come to Washington during their term of office.

Posted in history, Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

The Hoover Experience

Posted on September 21, 2026 by smellincoffee
“As God as my witness…….as God as my witness….they’re not going to lick me. I am going to live through this, and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again! No, nor any of my folks!
The Great Depression: Fiddle-dee-dee!

“Life is worth more, too, for knowing Hoover. But for him Belgium would now be starved … . He’s a simple, modest energetic little man who began his career in California and will end it in Heaven, and he doesn’t want anybody’s thanks.”

When I opened this book, I had some faint appreciation of Herbert Hoover as an accomplished engineer and disaster-relief organizer, a man who intervened after Black Thursday far more than is generally known, and who is unfairly blamed for the Depression. Twenty minutes into this, I had to shake my head. Herbert Hoover was…extra.

We begin in complete sympathy for a near-orphan who grew up in poverty, whose mind impressed a series of men who helped him get into higher education despite his writing skills being atrocious for the time. These days, of course, he’d be considered a master of the craft for writing a complete sentence. Hoover developed an interest in geology, its most practical application being mining — and that took him far, to Australia and China and England, there and back again. Young Hoover was despite his impoverished beginnings not a friend of labor: he prided himself on increasing hours, firing striking workers, and then hiring replacements at lower wages. It made the company money, though, and that made him money. (Pbtttt on being poor!) Although he began to dabble more in mine-financing than engineering, he still regarded himself as an engineer, first of all, and as he started feeling a vague sense of unease about the whole getting-and-spending-and-laying-waste-to-all-our-powers thing, he began looking at engineering as a noble service instead of simply a path to wealth. Now with pelf and place secure, he could begin talking about the importance of unions and the sanctity of the eight hour day — his hunger was now for meaning, not money. (He had $4 million in the 1910s, so…) He would find it in government service, making a reputation for himself as an organizer of relief for the Belgian people during World War 1 (annoying both Churchill and the Kaiser in the process) and then later being Coolidge’s man on the ground during the 1927 Mississippi floods.

I have previously commented that the AP series seems to have brought on writers with a particular shingle to address certain presidents — a surgeon for Garfield, a legal historian for Taft, etc. In Leutchenburg’s case, they brought in a New Deal Historian to analyze Hoover, which steadily eroded the book’s trust for me. Leutchenburg cannot restrain himself from personal potshots at Coolidge, who he calls a sourpuss who “wanted to shirk” from duties. Coming off a biography of Coolidge and seeing how very seriously he took service, these remarks got on the fightin’ side of me. Leutchenburg also fires at prior presidents who took no action during economic hiccoughs, dismissing them not as men who viewed intervention as outside their Constitutional prerogative, but as men who did not care. I do not trust, and do not respect, an author who turns historic personalities into his strawmen and imposes motives on men who are not allowed to speak for themselves. I doubt I will be reading him again. He is at least a better writer than finkleman, the turd-with-a-pen who began a biography of Millard Fillmore purposely to defame him. But, I digress.

The main reason I continued in this volume is that Hoover is so confusing: he begins as this hardass who is consumed by making a success of himself, and then he transforms into something I don’t quite understand — a man who, in any public offices, hoovers up any responsibility he can to expand his name, while at the same time beating his breast and talking about the importance of the individual. One minute he can sound like Obama and the next minute Ayn Rand: choose a lane! Lord knows I have enough conflicting opinions of my own to not sit in judgement if a man has conflicting values, but I’m not imposing those on the body politic and taking a salary for it: I’m just writing sometimes cranky but hopefully entertaining book reviews. By the time he was elected president — rather handily — he seemed more reluctant to embrace intervention than to embrace it, which would make for bad optics when the global economy endured the equivalent of being hit by a freight truck. Although FDR had shook his head in wonder at the outrageous expansions of government Hoover tried to instill as Commerce Secretary — and though he called Hoover’s policies socialistic — FDR could now castigate Hoover for not doing enough, or (in the case of the Bonus March suppression) doing too much. “That’s me elected,” FDR said in response to Hoover’s decision to put down the Bonus March by force. After being summarily dumped from office, Hoover became a strident critic of the New Deal, but Harry Truman began engaging him as a consultant for global food aide: his experience in World War 1 made him too valuable an asset to ignore. He would live to see the rise of Goldwater and the triumph of LBJ, taking solace only from the fact that he’d outlived his enemies.

So, who is Herbert Hoover? I don’t think I really know, because his opinions and his works offer testimony and opposing evidence: even though he’d grown so vocally conservative that Truman referred to him as being “to the right of Louis XIV”, once he was placed on a board for improving the Executive branch, he immediately began trying to magnify the authority said branch. It would be very easy to dismiss him as a hypocrite for continually saying one thing and then acting to the contrary, but during the crisis of the crash and depression, he didn’t act as dramatically as one might expect a hypocrite to do: he did in fact take actions that FDR’s New Deal would continue and expand, but his desire to expand his reach was not nearly as aggressive as when he was commerce sec. I found his cantankerousness as he aged endearing, but I leave his company –for the moment — still finding him a bit of an enigma.

Coming up: I solemnly swear this will NOT be another presidential-sweep week. For one thing, I don’t have that many left. (Grandpa Harrison, Polk, McKinley, LBJ, and Reagan.) For another, even I want to read something else. Right now I’m starting a book on the rise of Hitler and FDR in 1932 —

…well, baby steps.

Quotations

Not until Herbert Hoover was twenty-two would he see the country east of the Mississippi. West Branch was churchgoing, sober, Republican. The sole Democrat was the village drunk.

But for Hoover that was not enough. “If a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty,” he said, “he is not worth much.” And, by his lights, he was getting on in years. He was thirty-three.

An organization with no legal standing and no stable source of funds, the Commission for Relief in Belgium crossed national frontiers in the midst of the world’s first global war, plunged into markets on two continents, and spent unheard-of sums. Nothing daunted Hoover. He seized control of railways, took over factories and warehouses, and commandeered five hundred Belgian canal boats. When the kaiser’s armies occupied northern France, Hoover extended his realm there too. The [Committee for the Relief of Belgium], said a British Foreign Office functionary, was “a piratical state organized for benevolence.”

 A man who wore scuffed suits (always of the same dreary design) and shoes with broken laces, he could not see why anyone should covet luxuries or want to dine out. “Afternoon tea,” the Kansas editor William Allen White wrote later, “was not in his social lexicon, and when he appeared at a tea he was like a Great Dane at a cat show—sniffy, but not so savage as evidently he wished to be.”

To lessen congestion, he ordered all amateurs off the airwaves; he empowered himself to issue licenses; and, in contravention of both domestic and international law, he assigned frequencies. In 1925 the department suspended the license of Aimee Semple McPherson’s radio outlet in California for straying from its assignment. The popular evangelist wired Hoover: “Please order your minions of Satan to leave my station alone. You cannot expect the Almighty to abide by your wavelength nonsense. When I offer my prayers to Him, I must fit in with His wave reception.” But Hoover prevailed, even though Congress denied him “the Napoleonic powers,” in the phrase of one critic, that he sought.

His conception of the need for long-range planning exceeded that of some progressives. “We had better let God run it as in the past,” said Senator George Norris of Nebraska, “and not take power away from him and give it to Hoover.”

“Acts and ideas that lead to progress are born out of the womb of the individual mind, not out of the mind of the crowd,” he argued. “The crowd only feels: it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams—but it never builds.”

 “Mr. Hoover has always shown a most disquieting desire to investigate everything and to appoint commissions and send out statistical inquiries on every conceivable subject under Heaven,” Franklin D. Roosevelt complained to an industrialist. “He has also shown in his own Department a most alarming desire to issue regulations and to tell businessmen generally how to conduct their affairs.”

“If the election was held tomorrow,” a former Oregon governor said, “any Democratic candidate who had not been convicted of anything more than rape or murder would defeat Mr. Hoover.”

Commentators have often said that FDR always ignored his actual opponents and campaigned each time against Hoover until he ran against Hitler—but even in 1944 Hoover remained a target. “We ought to be eternally grateful to Herbert Hoover, who has been our meal ticket for twelve years,” a sassy New Dealer remarked.

Asked how he managed to endure the many years when leaders of both parties treated him as a pariah, he replied, “I outlived the bastards.”

Asked by an acquaintance bound for Europe whether there was anything he would like done, Hoover replied, “Well, you can tell the British to take their hands out of our pockets.” Nearly blind, toothless, and confined to a wheelchair, he stayed feisty to the last. He was so hard of hearing that his secretaries had to shout. That was all right, Hoover told a visitor. “I’m used to being hollered at.”

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Top Ten Books on Autumn 2026’s TBR

Posted on September 21, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT topic is Books on our Fall TBR. As always, let’s check in with the last quarter’s TBR to see how I did, and — oh. Oh, dear. I wish I hadn’t done that, as I only managed four of the ten items: Bad Blood, on the RFK/LBJ feud; Rupture, a friend’s new fantasy release; End of the Road, on the plight of American truckers; and Communion, JD Vance’s memoir of converting to Catholicism after a few years of being agnostic/nonreligious. But first, the Tuesday Tease!

“General Wayne, I am afraid you will get into a fight yourself and forget to give me the necessary field orders,” [William Henry Harrison] told Mad Anthony.
“Perhaps I may and if I do, remember the standing order for the day is, charge the damned rascals with the bayonets,” Wayne replied. WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, Gail Collins

To those who knew him and followed him he was something beyond the mere demonic shouter and hater we recall from newsreels, something very different. The devil, after all, does not corrupt souls by being repulsive but rather through charm and by being oh-so-very reasonable. 1932, David Pietrusza

So this quarter’s list:

(1) GIRLS, for the third TBR TTT post in a row. (And Elvis said, “Girls! Girls! Girls!”) It’s a reflection by a Gen-Z woman on the commodification of girlhood — how growing up on social media made them turn themselves into brands. Her writing is really good.

(2) …But At Least They’re Human, Bill Kauffman. BILL HAS A NEW BOOK OUT! Well, sort of. Technically it’s a copy of his keynote speech (75 pages, good lord Bill) supplemented with hand-drawn illustrations and notes pages, prepared as a ‘pocket stack’ printed volume by School of the Unconformed, one of the many anti-Machine substacks I follow. I entered a giveaway for it, but if I don’t win I’ll buy my own copy if only to support School of the Unconformed and print culture.

(3) An FDR biography, either Jean Edward Smith’s FDR or HW Brands’ Traitor to his Class. While I have No Ordinary Time listed as an FDR book for my Hail to the Chief series, my review indicates it was less a biography and more a study of his wartime administration. At any rate, it’s been 20 years since I read it, so I need to touch base with Franklin again. They’re both beefy bois, alas.

(4) Some Arthur C. Clarke, maybe Rendezvous with Rama or Childhood’s End. Considering how much SF I’ve read over the years, the Golden Age master is conspicuous in his absence. This would be for SF Month in November.

(5) Monsters of Ohio, John Scalzi. This title will be released on November 3rd, just in time for SF Month!

(6) Delta-V, Daniel Suarez. Have been meaning to read this for years, and I really enjoyed my return to Suarez via Influx…um, three years ago. That tempus be fugiting.

(7) William Henry Harrison, Gail Collins. “You can’t TBR a book you’re already reading!” Just try and stop me.

(8) McKinley: Architect of the American Century, Robert Merry. Maybe. I know I need to give McKinley a more considered look than say, William Henry Harrison, but six hundred pages?

(9) The Outlier, Kai Bird. A biography of Jimmy Carter. I mentioned possibly reading this after my short AP bio of Carter, and then someone came into the library wanting to ILL it!

(10) Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, Walter Borneman. I was a bit weary with the 1840s a year ago and moved on to the 1960s, but I need to circle back to ol’ Polk here. Few presidents can go into office, say “I’m after these four things”, do said four things, and then refuse to run again.

A bit homogeneous? Yes. But given the way this year has gone, I think by December I will be able to pat myself on the back for hitting at least .600.

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Keep Cool with Coolidge!

Posted on September 18, 2026 by smellincoffee
“I am for economy. After that I am for more economy. At this time, and under present circumstances, that is my conception of serving the people.’’

Calvin Coolidge has long been one of my favorite presidents; I think as a child I was drawn to his nickname of Silent Cal, with its reputation for taciturnity; later on, I respected his approach to government — keep the government working efficiently on the few problems within its Constitutional aegis, and let the people otherwise tend to their own lives. Amity Shlaes’ Coolidge is similarly admiring, opening with an “Under Coolidge,” passage that underscores how the economy grew as the government continued to be scaled back, with annual surpluses being applied against the debt of World War 1. Part of the excitement of the Coolidge age owed somewhat to technological progress — the growth of telephones, electricity, and radio — but Coolidge’s policies and interests were part and parcel. While I thought I knew the general gist of Coolidge’s life, there were quite a few surprises in here — and now that I see Shlaes has written other books I’ve already been interested in, I suspect she’s going to appear here again.

Coolidge’s life begins the way a lot of presidential biographies around this time did, the blue-blooded Roosevelts excepting: farmer, law school, public life. Coolidge cut a fairly thorough streak across the range of public offices: city councilman, state legislator, mayor, etc. While Mayor Coolidge had already demonstrated his preference to keep budgets trim and the government clean, it wasn’t until he was Governor that Coolidge achieved a name for himself. Following an attempt of the Boston police to unionize, most of Boston’s cops left their patrols completely, walking off the job. Hooliganism soared in the Hub City, as businesses began being broken into and set fire to seemingly for sheer amusement. Coolidge allowed local authorities the chance to take action first, but eventually — as the threat of solidarity strikes reared its head and people began dying — he would act decisively, arranging for militia troops to restore order in the city and issuing the dictum — “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.” Ultimately all of the striking cops would be fired and replaced — by officers now receiving higher wages. The strike had been broken, but managed to achieve one of its aims — if not for the actual participants. As governor, he maintained his focus on keeping the government on a firm financial basis.

One thing that struck me as interesting about Coolidge was how seriously he took business and economy. He was fascinated by trade and its power, and — as he was elected vice president and then became president — he considered seriously the arguments for free trade. The Republican party at that time was extremely pro-tariff, maintaining that they protected American enterprise and generated healthy income for the State. They did indeed do that, as my last President read (on Benjamin Harrison), indicated: one attack on him was that the government was making too much money from tariffs. However much he was tempted, though, Coolidge ultimately chose to keep using the horse that worked. He was also obsessed with proper budgeting: he paid an enormous amount of attention to the government’s budget and to tax structures and incentives, and was aware of how many politicians thought the laws of economics stopped working if there was an emergency. Even Coolidge’s interest in aviation was dressed up in budget economy: he mused that using airplanes might allow for cost-savings in the navy. (I’m assuming the line of thinking is that if scout planes can survey a wide range of territory, fewer ships are needed to patrol and existing ships can be deployed to where they’re needed — just speculation, though.) Coolidge’s interest in new technologies also applied to the radio, which he made ready use of — to the surprise of modern readers who expect “Silent Cal” to recoil from microphones in horror. The only time he distanced himself from a microphone was at a wedding that was being recorded; presumably he had no interest in his table chatter being saved for the ages.

Midway through his time in office, Coolidge experienced a dreadful loss when his youngest son Calvin Jr died of a blood infection. While I’ve read in other accounts that this destroyed Coolidge’s interest and energy: Shlaes doesn’t give that impression, as the saddened president simply goes back to work fighting Congress over finances. Worst was to come, at least for the nation, as great floods broke out along the Mississippi and the government was hounded for relief. Although Coolidge did dispatch Herbert Hoover to assess the situation, he firmly believed that disaster relief was the province of the State governments, not the national one, and to date most presidents had supported that measure. The scale of this was different, though, as thousands in multiple states were displaced and hard-pressed. Hoover did an impressive job moving some government resources to where they could help, and in organizing private-sector charitable contributions — work that would lay the stage for his own run. (The amount of immediate Federal relief — through military operations and supplies — totaled about $7 million.) When his own Vermont was similarly hit by floods, Coolidge had to take the same policy: he couldn’t do for the goose what he wouldn’t do for the gander. This was consistent and showed integrity, but people in need tend to care less about precedent and principle and more about not dying. He would ultimately endorse federal response at the infrastructure level, just not the “Throw money to say you’re doing something” level. Coolidge chose not to run in 1928, perhaps because between his son dying and the pressures of office — he’d witnessed two men destroyed by it, Wilson and Harding — the Federal City held no more joy for him. Shlaes comments that he also deeply mistrusted the Wall Street boom and suspected a crash was on the way — I may have to read 1929 to see if it remarks on that aspect. He died shortly before the Roosevelt administration took charge, living a quiet life broken only by his frequent shock at Hoover’s deficits.

I don’t want to give the impression that this book is 600 pages of Calvin Coolidge, Frugalimus Rex. The human Calvin frequently shows up — bringing his ailing son Calvin Jr a rabbit to admire from his sickbed, the man patently delighted by airplanes even as he pretends he’s only interested in their efficiency prospects, his patented brand of dry humor — but fiduciary responsibility was a major priority for him, from his days as a mayor on. (Interesting, that — Coolidge has to join Grover Cleveland on the list of POTUSes who have served as mayor and governor, a kind of executive cursus honorum!) At any rate, I greatly enjoyed this and am playing with the idea of reading a Hoover biography, then 1929 or Shlaes’ history of the Depression, THEN reading a proper FDR biography because No Ordinary Time doesn’t quite do it for me.

Yes, dear reader, this year will remain solidly in the hands of History for the moment. But be of good cheer! We all know easily I find other windmills to go a-tilting at.

Quotations

“The great majority of Americans,” continued Barton, “are neither radicals nor reactionaries. They are middle-of-the-road folks who own their own homes and work hard and would like to have the government get back to its old habits of meddling with their lives as little as possible. […] “It sometimes seems as if this great silent majority had no spokesman. But Coolidge belongs with that crowd, he lives like them, he works like them, and understands.”
Nixon: ‘Great silent majority’? Kind of…rolls off the tongue. Yes, I like that.

“Isn’t it a strange thing,” he asked Barton, “that in every period of social unrest men have the notion that they can pass a law and suspend the operations of economic law?”

“I do not think that human existence is quite so much on the basis of dollars and cents as he puts it. . . . He nowhere enunciates the principle of service.”

In this strange interregnum period, Coolidge found comfort, and even humor, in humility. One early morning in the Willard bedroom, a sound woke Coolidge. A strange young man had broken in and was going through his clothing. In the morning light, Coolidge could see that the burglar had taken a wallet, a chain, and a charm. “I wish you wouldn’t take that,” Coolidge said. “I don’t mean the watch and chain, only the charm. Read what is engraved on the back of it.” The burglar read the back: “Presented to Calvin Coolidge . . . by the Massachusetts General Court”—and stopped dead in shock. He was robbing the president. It emerged that the burglar was a hotel guest who had found himself short of cash to return home. Coolidge gave the burglar $32, what he called a “loan,” and helped him to navigate around the Secret Service as he departed.

One day, as they walked together down the street, Coolidge held his silence, then finally said to Starling, “Well, they’re going to elect that superman Hoover, and he’s going to have some trouble. He’s going to have to spend money.” He went on, “But he won’t spend enough. Then the Democrats will come in and they’ll spend money like water. But they don’t know anything about money.” They would want Coolidge to come back again, but he wouldn’t be available.

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Benjamin “I’m More than the Guy Between Cleveland Terms” Harrison

Posted on September 17, 2026 by smellincoffee
Chris Hemsworth saying "Is he, though" and making a mocking face

What do I know about Benjamin Harrison? Well, he was a core part of the Cleveland Hero Sandwich, the thin bit of meat between two enormous Cleveland halves. And his granddaddy was president for a month before dying and giving John Tyler the chance to go “Look at me. I’m the captain now.”

It’s a bad sign that this review is 100% memes, right? I just felt the need to inject some personality, because this book is so Inside Baseball it took me days to read it. Usually I can knock out these American Presidents books in a day, because they’re all 200 pages or fewer. The only other AP book I’ve dragged my heels on was Woodrow Wilson and we all know how I feel about him. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve noticed these AP books have an author whose particular interests add a certain dimension to the text — a surgeon writing about Garfield, a legal historian discussing Taft, a presidential candidate writing about presidential candidates (that’s Lincoln by George McGovern — I may circle back, we’ll see) — but in Calhoun’s case, it’s exhaustive political wonkery. This has come up before; one of my JFK reads spent a ludicrous amount of time following JFK during his 1960 primary season, and I wondered about the author’s priorities. Is it interesting that Richie Rich from Bahston went into West Virginia mining towns? Yes, but is it worthy of that many pages? By the same token, is it interesting that Harrison —

An author sleeping. (Not THE author, THE author has a proper beard and not a three-day beardlet.)
zzzz

I’m sorry, I bored myself to sleep. Something about precinct maps? The author has done a full BOOK on Harrison’s election, I’m not sure why he decided to rewrite it in miniature. Part of the problem with this book is that I’m binging on Gilded Age politicians, and their resumes are like AI-generated “I Want to Be a Gilded Age President with Fine Facial Hair”. Grow up a farmer, become a lawyer, fight in the Civil War, get into politics, work with James Blaine and watch the poor guy AGAIN fail to be president despite being within grabbing distance. (Blaine is very much the Henry Clay of the Gilded Age: always the bridesmaid (or the priest), never the bride.

One thing that does mark Harrison is his full-throated defense of African-Americans, particularly in the South. A cynical soul might scoff and say “Of course he was courting them, they were the only hope Republicans had of winning in the South!”). This is far too cynical: Harrison appears to have been a sincere antagonist of slavery from the word GO, and a consistent champion of African-American rights. While this was in line with Republican policy at the time, Reconstruction ended in large part because the north was tired of dealing with the South, and his continuing to hold the line was, I think, a mark of integrity. He wasn’t just making speeches, but striving for legislation that would counteract the voter-suppressing measures of the Bourbons, and squelch the horrific enthusiasm for lynching. Some of the measures he advocated for in the ‘Force’ bill later became part of the Voting Rights Act, specifically Federal supervision of elections.

He was also a bit of a harbinger for going forth in search of monsters to destroy — or at least, markets to create, getting the US deeply involved in Samoa. The fever that possessed many in DC in the Gilded Age — that America had ARRIVED, and must needs make itself a world power with all the coaling stations The Influence of Sea Power Upon History might suggest.Was the Constitution made for such a Colossus? Could the “Empire of Liberty” remain a friend of Liberty after grasping the fasces of Empire? Do I like rhetorical questions? (Answers: no, no, and ‘mildly but only in moderation’.) Another ‘sign of the times’ was his interest in reigning in corporate power, supporting the Sherman Anti-Trust act, and if you’re really into monetary policy he also had opinions on the silver-and-gold argument. (I’m a libertarian with strong opinions about the Federal Reserve, and even I only have a faint appreciation of the silver vs gold argument. Basically the gist is that the gold-only standard was better for monetary integrity, buuuuuuuuuuuuut working silver into the currency was easier on the poor folk.)

Putting Finkelman’s treatment of Millard Fillmore aside (into the trash), this may be the most underwhelming biography I’ve read as part of this project. Part of that surely owes to repetition, but there’s such a tight focus on the political machinery that I don’t see the man, and that’s a strong part of why I’m doing this series. Yes, I’m absorbing a lot of American history via it– Whigs and Know-Nothings and Stalwarts, oh my! — but the most interesting biographies I’ve read have let me get an insight into the man. Pierce, seeking out his old friend Jefferson Davis in prison; Cleveland, embracing a woman who was scorned for having a child out of wedlock; Arthur, rising from infamy to become a real stalwart man, not merely a Stalwart Republican. I don’t really GET that from this book, though I do get inklings. Benjamin Harrison is there, but you have to storm into the Cabinet room, throw all the papers onto the floor, and make him present. I can see giving Benjy here a second chance once I finish the first run. (And yes, I know I read three books on Lincoln before moving on, but is Benjamin Harrison Lincoln? No. He’s a good egg, but Lincoln is one of the pivotal figures of America’s story.)

Next up….keepin’ cool with Coolidge! The taciturn Vermonter has just been made president so I probably won’t finish him before tomorrow, but 4/5 ain’t bad.

Quotations

Harrison convinced himself that a prolonged engagement would accelerate her decline. With a typically nineteenth-century mixture of romance and morbidity, he asked, “Shall I marry Carrie now and thus relieve her of those harassing doubts and fears which wear away her life, or shall I agree to stand aside and let her hasten to an early grave?”

Harrison gave an eloquent appeal for such action in his annual message. Blacks, he observed, “have their representatives in the national cemeteries, where a grateful Government has gathered the ashes of those who died in its defense.” In civil life, African Americans were “now the toilers of their communities, making their full contribution to the widening streams of prosperity which these communities are receiving.” And yet, “by various devices,” those same communities barred blacks from exercising their political rights.

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Jimmy

Posted on September 16, 2026 by smellincoffee

What do I know about Jimmy Carter? Carter is, interestingly, the first president who ever appeared on Reading Freely. I read his Peace Not Apartheid and Our Endangered Values in the very early months of the blog, possibly following up on my having read Gerald Ford’s A Time to Heal only a year or so before, pre-blog. I regard Carter, along with Ford, as a good, ordinary man who took high office and perhaps was not quite up to the task. I listened to his “Crisis of Confidence” speech many times when I first began obsessing over presidential rhetoric , and I still appreciate his earnestness and humility — his simple actions like wearing sweaters and trying to make the White House less of an energy hog — despite adult me realizing that people respond more readily to ‘vigah’, or at least the image thereof. As someone who slaloms between libertarianism and paleoconservatism, I appreciate Carter’s deregulation of the airline and telecom industries: getting soft-handed and softer-minded bureaucrats out of the way of doers and inventors is generally good policy. Does Carter deserve more than one little 200 page book? Very possibly, but this will be my first consideration of the man; let us sit down with Jimmy and see what he has to say.

Well….to be honest, I still don’t know what to say. Zelizer’s book didn’t substantially change my reading of Carter, though it made me realize he was a little grittier than his Mr. Rogers myth indicates — he said he’d “whip [Ted Kennedy’s ass]” if Kennedy ran, and he had to be a serious operator to unseat the prevailing Georgian establishment. The biography also makes it clear that Carter really was something of an outsider: that was an asset when he was running against Ford, who was still marked by the Nixon pardon and a struggling economy, but Carter’s desire to be his own man — sometimes relying more on Republicans in Congress than Democrats! — meant that he never built a secure seat of power among national Democrats. He enjoyed strong approval ratings early on, but continuing economic issues sapped that. Then, the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Grumpy Big-Beards happened, after which student followers seized the American embassy and kept 66 Americans hostage for 444 days. While Carter did plan a rescue mission, weather and happenstance made it turn SNAFU, and the Big Beards spitefully refused to release the hostages until Carter was out of office. I’d had some vauge impression that they were responding to an overt or implied Reagan threat that he’d get western on them if they didn’t release the hostages, but evidently it was Carter who made the deal, releasing some Iranian money back to them in exchange.

I definitely don’t feel satisfied with this as a Carter read; it was interesting, but I think Carter’s reputation as a maverick needs more plumbing. Will return to Jimmy via The Outlier once I’ve made more progress with Hail to the Chief as a whole. My plan for September has been to knock out some smaller fry (Taft, Carter, the Harrisons, etc) so I can give LBJ a good working-over in the last quarter of the year. He’s basically the Final Boss of presidential biographies.

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Hail to the WWW Wednesday

Posted on September 16, 2026 by smellincoffee
TWONKS cartoon. Panel one: Blue character says to REd Character, "This book club is really intense". Panel two: camera pans out to reveal a church, wherein a preacher is preaching from the Bible

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Jimmy Carter, Julian Zelizer.

WHAT are you reading now? Coolidge, Amity Schlaes.

WHAT are you reading next? Benjamin Harrison, Charles W. Calhoun

My aim this week is to post a POTUS review….every single day. As of this writing (12:28 AM on Tuesday), three days are secured and two books are well on the way.

LBJ giving Dick Russell "The Treatment"
LBJ: Dick, I’m counting on you to make sure that boy gets around to readin’ ME! Now he spent all summer on Jack and his little brother, I expect MOVEMENT.

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TRUMAN

Posted on September 15, 2026 by smellincoffee
” I am here to make decisions, and whether they prove right or wrong I will make them.”

A new reader to this blog might ask, “SC, after cheerfully dismissing president after president with 200-page biographies from the American Presidents series, why did you decide to read a twelve hundred page treatment of Harry S. Truman?”  There are two reasons. One, David McCullough.  McCullough’s work on John Adams completely revolutionized my appreciation of the president; Mr. A has become one of my absolute favorite historic personalities, let alone presidents, and I’ve enjoyed McCullough in general.  Secondly, Truman is interesting in himself:   he was tapped as vice president because he was the least objectionable possibility, and he was forced into the big show after only a few months serving as vice president – and then asked to drop the Bomb, and to deal with the Soviet Union who had decided that the endgame of World War 2 was an excellent opportunity to recreate the Russian Empire, with secretary-generals and ugly uniforms instead of the tsar and fun ones. As huge as it is, Truman is eminently readable and exposes readers to a lot of detail about the game of politics, from county commissioners paving roads to deciding who would succeed Truman and carry on the legacy of the New Deal.

“If Harry Truman can be president, anyone can be president! Hell, my next door neighbor could be president!”   Such was exclaimed after Truman succeeded Roosevelt after FDR’s death early into his fourth and final term in office.   A common theme of this book is of Truman as Everyman – thoroughly middle class, forthright and plain-speaking. No one who heard Truman talk would refer to him as ‘melodious’ the way they did of FDR.  But Truman was a hard worker, and more – a fighter. A scrapper.  We meet Truman as the son of a struggling farm, who inherits his father’s labors both in the field and then in local politics.  Truman’s intelligence and reputation as a thorough worker caught the attention of the local Who’s Who, and he soon landed himself a position as a county judge – or rather commissioner –  and achieved success in bringing more paved roads to his county.  The outbreak of World War 1 took young Harry away from the farm, never to return again;  when he returned, he would work first in business and then in politics, relying on the local machine to propel him further. Truman, however, was not a machine-man despite what he owed to them: once in office, he refused to give out contracts and such to those who were affiliated with the machine on anything less than merit, and his integrity provoked admiration rather than retaliation.  Truman would eventually pursue politics into the Senate itself, and achieve acclaim chairing a committee to monitor defense spending.  There, his reputation would be enough that when FDR was looking for another VP placeholder, he was deemed acceptable given that the other candidates inspired partisan rejection. The new vice president was just getting used to the office when he was informed he’d inherited a new one – and all the problems of the world.

Thus Harry Truman – farmer, haberdasher,   hardworking politician – suddenly became President,  and at the worst possible time. World War 2  was ending.  Truman was about to learn about the Bomb, and was forced to decide whether he should use it:  he had to look to the Russians, who didn’t know him and didn’t respect him. Heck, Churchill didn’t trust or respect Truman, why would Stalin?   And so the average Joe suddenly began dealing with decisions that would impact not only Americans of his generation, but people the world over. How much to push back against the Soviets?  How much presidential authority to exercise here, or there? Can we defend South Korea against the Chi-Coms and their Russian allies without provoking World War 3?    

The amount of issues that beset Truman in his first term would send most ordinary men running for the hills, but Truman liked the fight and was particularly concerned that his kept going. He didn’t want someone like Robert Taft in office –  Taft didn’t believe in the international systems FDR had in mind and that Truman was carrying forward. The Republicans chose Eisenhower, a man Truman personally admired – and had even approached as a potential Democrat –  but who he did not think had the chops to go head to head with Stalin, et al in international affairs.  I think Eisenhower’s record demonstrates otherwise,  as he and Nixon were both more internationalist than Truman gave them credit for. (He did not, however, forgive them for tacitly supporting those who claimed his administration had “lost” China or been penetrated by Commies.) 

It’s not hard not to like Harry Truman, though this biography didn’t make me an Admirer of him the way McCullough’s treatment of Adams did.  I do admire Truman in many ways,  I just wouldn’t go to bat for him the way I will with Adams.  Part of the interest in Truman is how he never stopped being Harry S. Truman even when he was Mr. President;  he’d have his Army buddies visit him, slapping him on the back and calling him Harry, but then retreat into a room with Dean Acheson to make decisions changing world history.    If he was changed at all, I think his office simply made him more serious and dutiful – he seems to have avoided being dyed with the imperial dye,   and died as he lived – Harry S. Truman, an ordinary man who lived an extraordinary life.

Quotations

Looking at Truman, Churchill said slowly, “The last time you and I sat
across the conference table was at Potsdam, Mr. President.” Truman nodded.
“I must confess, sir,” Churchill went on, “I held you in very low regard
then. I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt.” He paused. “I
misjudged you badly. Since that time, you more than any other man, have
saved Western civilization.”

“They want us to play Russian roulette with the foreign policy of the United States—with all the chambers of the pistol loaded.”

“I never gave ’em Hell! I gave ’em the Truth and they just THOUGHT it was Hell!”

On St. Patrick’s Day, he wrote again to tell Acheson he was thinking still
about the relationship between history and government. “Our tribal instinct
has not been eliminated by science and invention. We, as individuals, haven’t
caught up physically or ethically with the atomic age. Will we?”

Hearing that the Democratic Party, at Kennedy’s suggestion, was going to put on a $l,000-a-plate dinner, Truman was appalled. “If as and when that happens we’ll just quit being democrats with a little d.” Nobody had consulted him on the matter. “To hell with these millionaires at the head of things.”

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Top Ten Authors I’ve Met

Posted on September 14, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s prompt is….authors I’ve met! Well, this will be a short list. but first, a Teaser Tuesday!

On the morning of the first trip to school, it was icy, which meant a fast ride but a cold one. Coolidge and his father climbed into the sleigh while it was still dark. A calf happened to ride with them, going to market in Boston; John admonished his son that the animal would reach the great city now, but the boy would have to wait for years to be ready. COOLIDGE.

(1)  Tom Woods, sort of.   I mean, I’ve seen him in person and I’ve talked to him on Zoom, so by those powers combined….I have met Tom Woods?   Tom Woods is an historian, libertarian advocate, and podcaster who I’ve been listening to since 2013-2014.   I’m not sure how I found him, but his show is so varied (history, politics,  literature, etc) that he’s been a long habit. In 2015 I attended a Young Americans for Liberty conference (back when I qualified as young) where he spoke, and later I became a Supporting Listener of his show, so I get invited to monthly zoom chats and such. I’ve read most of Woods’ books, from Real Dissent to Diary of a Psychosis.  

(2)  Rod Dreher. Dreher is unique in that I’ve met him on multiple occasions,   first at a book launch event for Paul Kingsnorth, and then for the first public airing of a series based on his book, “Live Not by Lies”.  Dreher is a journalist, author, and substacker who has written for a variety of American and European institutions; his books focus heavily on meaning, religion, and culture. 

Dreher and Kingsnorth

(3) Paul Kingsnorth. I hadn’t actually read much of Kingsnorth beyond his preface to The World Ending Fire, a collection of Wendell Berry Essays, when I met him. I soon remedied that, though: I’ve since read all of his nonfiction.

(4) Wayne Flynt.  Flynt is an Alabama historian who has visited my library numerous times; my favorite work of his is Poor but Proud, on Alabama’s poor whites. 

(5) Jason M. Baxter. Author of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, I met him at the same Dreher-Kingsnorth event  and later read his book.

(6) Mike Bunn. Author of numerous works about the colonial Gulf, including Early Alabama and The Fourteenth Colony. Fun fact: I met him before I knew I’d read his books, because his name hadn’t registered in my memory. I arrived at an event he was doing in town (associated with America @ 250) and said “Huh, I’ve read some of the books on his table!” He does boat tours of the Mobile-Tenesaw delta, including one to a large Mississippi-culture mound, so I may see him again in future. 

(7) John Sledge, author of The Mobile River, Cities of Silence, etc. He visited the library for research and later did an author event here.

(8) Chuck Fager, author of Selma 1965.   I didn’t get to pester him with questions, but he spent a lot of time researching in the library when he was working on a third edition of his book, and we talked a bit.

(9) Susan Besser, author of Selma: An Architectural Field Guide.  I helped with fact-checking for her, and later met her when she did an author event. She also makes jewelry and gave me a necklace to give to my girlfriend! 

(10) Al Benn, author of Reporter. I didn’t know Al was an author when we met; he was just a guy at the church breakfast table with a lot of stories and a manner that some describe as ‘direct’ and others ‘abrasive’. He had worked as a reporter since the end of the Korean War, and loved talking about his adventures or misadventures. He was also a huge cinephile and would often have me over to his house to watch movies with him and his wife.

(11) I attempted to meet Frederica Mathews-Green at the Kingsnorth-Dreher event by hanging around the coffee urns. (I think I managed a hello at one point, but not an actual conversation.)

(12) I literally sat behind James Howard Kunstler eating breakfast but hadn’t  attended a lecture he’d give that night, so  I didn’t know who he was. Manalive, if I could go back –

Okay, that list wasn’t as short as I thought, and frankly more names are popping up as I sit here and reflect on how many authors have come to the library for research!

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William Howard “Chief Magistrate” Taft

Posted on September 14, 2026 by smellincoffee

Early on in the American republic, the office of president was referred to as the chief magistrate; William Howard Taft must have taken that on as a challenge, because after serving as President, he later became the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Taft is not a name known to most Americans today, unless it’s for fat jokes (he was a hefty boy, struggling with weight all his life and generally ranging from 270 to 340 in his adult life), but like Cleveland he was the last of his kind — a president who truly believed in his role as a protector of the Constitution. For Taft, who loved the law more than politics, who had been aspiring toward the Supreme Court since his 30s, the Constitution was sacrosanct. Fittingly, then, this biography is only half-over when Taft surrenders the One Ring to Woodrow Wilson: the rest is taken up with Taft as Chief Justice, since Warren Harding offered him the seat for the third and final time.

One thing I’m noticing about the American Presidents series is that authors are sometimes chosen for a unique vantage point — a surgeon writing about Garfield, who was killed by surgeons, for instance. Jeffrey Rosen is a lawyer and legal scholar who approaches Taft from a lawyer’s eye, and as such his childhood is almost entirely omitted save for learning that he was an overhealthy baby (by which we mean a porker) and that he was an accomplished student despite having attendance issues. Young Taft started in politics early, developing a contempt for corruption and a healthy respect for the horrors of mob violence. He became a man who put great stock by the rule of law, which would make him a cautious but superbly Constitutional executive: unfortunately for his close friendship with Teddy Roosevelt, it would also make him in Teddy’s eyes a dismal successor. Taft and Teddy agreed on some abstract things, like the need for the government to keep corporations from becoming overweening in themselves — but whereas Taft wanted to continually use constitutional powers to keep the corpos from growing large, Teddy wanted to expand the government so that it could keep pace with the corporations. Teddy was so irritated at Taft wanting to retroactively make Roosevelt policies lawful, and then moving cautiously in office, that he challenged Taft for election. This led to the triumph of god-king Wilson and ruptured their friendship. They barely reconciled before Roosevelt’s death, but not to the degree that Adams and Jefferson did in the “You were my brother, Anakin! I loved you!” sense.

There is more to Taft, however, than his presidency. His extreme interest in lawful constitutions and even temper made him an excellent civil governor of the Philippines when McKinley began the age of American Empire by planting the Flag all over creation. He worked with Filipinos to create a government that largely reflected the Bill of Rights, though not entirely: Americans did not view Filipinos as quite up to the labor of being self-governing, and so suffrage and gun ownership were both restricted. That said, Taft’s sincerity in creating a just state for the Philippines was such that when he was finally recalled to the states — after turning down Supreme Court appointments twice, despite his interest in the seats — the Filipinos cried out, “Queremos Taft!”. After his presidency, Taft finally achieved what he wanted: Chief Justice of the US of A. Having long idolized Judge Marshall, Taft became his first true successor — radically reforming the court and leading the charge to evacuate it from the Senate’s basement and create its own Temple of Justice, the present SCOTUS building. His love for the court and justice was such that decisions tended toward unanimity — 70-80% of the time. Today the average lingers around 30%. He greatly enhanced the Supreme Court and federal courts overall with an eye towards institutional integrity, independence, and efficacy.

I found Taft a very appetizing figure, a man who believed the Law transcends the government, and who took Constitutional limits seriously; he happily exercised his veto when he thought Congress was violating the Constitution, regardless of their good intentions. (They overrode the veto a few times, but it’s the thought that counts.) Unfortunately, this book was incredibly short, barely over a hundred pages: the rest were notes. I may have to read The Bully Pulpit, on his and Roosevelt’s relationship, to get closer to the man. (But….not immediately. I’ve got books on hand for Carter, the Harrisons, and Coolidge. September is going to be a “concentrate all firepower on the Presidential starship!” kind of month.)

Related:
Taft 2012: a speculative novel in which Taft, who mysteriously disappeared after his POTUS term, wakes up on the White House lawn during the Obama administration.

Quotations

Taft was always an excellent dancer and sometimes waltzed alone on the White House veranda.

Nellie especially remembered Will in a burlesque of The Sleeping Beauty, where he played the title role.

Their first lovers’ quarrel, remarkably, was on a constitutional question —Nellie pressed her policy views on abolitionism, and Will opposed her on constitutional grounds—and his early missives read less like billets-doux than judicial opinions. “I am prepared to submit a few questions of this tenor to the high court of friendship wherein let Mr. Justice Taft and Miss Justice Herron to determine such questions,”34 he wrote playfully. (Will was seeking Nellie’s advice about whether it was ethical of him to have voted for a friend’s father who sought a judgeship.

Why, I am not the man you want,” Taft declared. “To begin with, I have
never approved of keeping the Philippines.”
“You don’t want them any less than I do,” McKinley replied, “but we have got them and in dealing with them I think I can trust the man who didn’t want them better than I can the man who did.

“If only there were three of you!” Roosevelt added flatteringly. “Then I would have put one of you on the Supreme Court … one of you in Root’s place as secretary of war, when he goes out; and one of you permanently governor of the Philippines.”

Later that year, Taft and Nellie joined the Roosevelts for an intimate dinner at the White House, after which Roosevelt threw himself into a chair in the library and closed his eyes.
“I am the seventh son of a seventh daughter and I have clairvoyant powers,” he intoned melodramatically. “There is something hanging over his head. I cannot make out what it is.… At one time it looks like the Presidency, then again it looks like the chief justiceship.”
“Make it the presidency,” said Mrs. Taft.
“Make it the chief justiceship,” said Mr. Taft.

Taft insisted, “We have a government of limited power under the Constitution, and we have got to work out our problems on the basis of law. Now, if that is reactionary, then I am a reactionary.”

“Next to my wife and children,” the Court “is the nearest thing to my heart
in life,”he wrote. “The truth is,” he observed in 1925, “I don’t remember I ever was president.”

Taft’s judicial presidency was less successful than his presidential chief justiceship because, in attempting to govern the United States in the early twentieth century along the lines that the Framers clearly preferred, Taft was unable to grapple with forces that the Framers would have abhorred— including the democratization of politics and the increasing power of political parties. By creating an executive with energy, to use Hamilton’s term, the Framers left the office open to alterations that ran against their basic conceptions of how the entire federal government should operate.

Today, however, as new populist forces in America and around the world threaten principles of constitutionalism, limited government, democratic deliberation, checks and balances, and the rule of law, Taft’s conception of a vigorous but constrained presidency checked by similarly vigorous but constrained courts and Congress looks increasingly appealing. Taft would have been distressed by the spectacle of tweeting presidents and representatives: like Madison in Federalist 10, he believed that direct communication between representatives and their constituents was the democratic vice most to be avoided, since it promoted faction and discouraged reasoned deliberation.

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