[October 4th marks the 200th birthday of Rutherford B. Hayes, a good-looking young man who went on to be a very bad-governing president. So this week I’ll contextualize Hayes and four other under-remembered bad (in the least good sense) chief executives, leading up to a weekend post on the worst we’ve ever had.]
On a bad
president who helps us resist destructive narratives of historical
inevitability.
One of the
more complicated but more crucial arguments at the core of my
new book project concerns the importance of resisting the idea that history
was always, inevitably going to unfold in the ways that it did. The specific context
for that argument in this project is the hugely frustrating way in which Irish
Americans, themselves the subject of pretty intense xenophobia
and discrimination in the early 19th century, became by the mid-
to late-19th century one of the communities most consistently and
fully upholding white supremacy in America, often through violence like the New
York City draft riots, the Rock
Springs massacre, and many more events. Moreover, the Irish American
immigrant on whom that half of the book focuses, labor leader turned face of
the anti-Chinese movement Denis
Kearney, embodies that shift even more blatantly: not only as an immigrant
who became a leading anti-immigrant voice, but also as someone who briefly
fought to protect San Francisco’s Chinese American community and then became
its most aggressive adversary (for more, read the book!).
Those
histories happened, and it’s certainly crucial that we remember that they did,
not least so we can explore and understand why and how they did. But I believe
a corollary goal is to recognize that they could have gone differently, that
history is contingent upon countless actions and choices, that individuals,
communities, and the nation as a whole have distinct paths in any and every
moment (and thus in our own). Otherwise, if we give in instead to a sense that
the way our history went was inevitable, it becomes almost impossible to resist
pessimism or even fatalism, to imagine the possibility of such alternative
paths, such choices and changes, in our own moment. One of the most striking
historical tests of this perspective has to be the Civil War—not only because
in hindsight all the events that led up to it seem so inevitable (and perhaps
rightfully so, since despite the war’s tragedies and horrors its most crucial
outcome was the
end of slavery), but also and especially because even in the contexts of their
own era it’s quite difficult to see how things could have (or, again, perhaps
even should have) gone differently.
There’s a
lot more to those questions and ideas than I can address in one blog post, of
course. But I think it’s pretty important to note that the president whose term
directly preceded and in many ways precipitated the Civil War, James
Buchanan, wasn’t just a bystander to unfolding histories. In his March
1857 Inaugural Address, Buchanan called “the territorial question” (whether
newly admitted territories would be slave or free states, that is) “happily, a
matter of but little practical importance,” as the Supreme Court was about to
resolve the issue “speedily and finally.” When that truly awful 1857
Supreme Court decision did not in fact resolve any of the issues or debates
around slavery, Buchanan took the further step of putting the full
force of the presidency behind admitting Kansas to the United States as a
slave state, directly exacerbating the unfolding conflicts and violence in that
territory. Buchanan wasn’t responsible for any of those issues, but each of
those statements and positions, actions and policies, he and his administration
both supported the slave South and fueled the fires that would become a full
conflagration by the end of his disastrous term. None of that was inevitable, making
James Buchanan a very bad president indeed.
Next bad
president tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other baddies you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment