[50 years ago this week, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned. That striking political moment was not only part of the deepening Watergate scandal, but one of the few times when an American Vice President has made major news. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Agnew and other noteworthy Veeps, leading up a weekend post on our current VP!]
On a
significant difference between the two VPs who resigned, and a linking thread.
When Agnew
tendered his resignation, he became (and remains to this day) just the second
Vice President ever to resign the office. The first, President Andrew Jackson’s
first Vice
President John C. Calhoun (who had also served as President John Quincy
Adams’ Vice President, making Calhoun the second
of two figures to date to serve as VP for two different Presidents),
resigned in a significantly less consequential way: Jackson had already won a
second term in the 1832
election with a new Vice Presidential nominee, Martin Van Buren; and so
Calhoun was a lame-duck Vice President (not a phrase we often use, but an
accurate one in this case) when he resigned
the office in late 1832. He did so in order to replace outgoing South
Carolina Senator Robert
Y. Hayne, who had resigned that position to become the state’s Governor; in
the resulting special election Calhoun was unanimously elected by the South
Carolina legislature (as was the plan to which all these parties had apparently
agreed) to fill Hayne’s Senate seat.
While
Calhoun’s resignation itself was thus largely symbolic (and strategic vis-รก-vis
these other positions), the reasoning behind it was nonetheless quite
significant, and represents a key distinction between Calhoun and Spiro Agnew. To
put it simply: Agnew resigned in large part because he was too closely
associated with his President and a
key scandal engulfing the administration (although the public explanation
for the resignation was a series of smaller
differences between the two men, as well as Agnew’s own
prior bad behavior); while Calhoun resigned because of a scandal of his own
making that divided him from his President. That scandal was the South Carolina
nullification debate that I wrote about in this
early post and that was a hugely important step on the multi-decade move
toward secession (for which Calhoun
became a direct inspiration) and Civil War. With all due respect to Monday’s
subject and a close contender for this title, Aaron Burr, I’m pretty sure a
Vice President was never more overtly at odds with their President than Calhoun
was with Jackson over nullification, and certainly Agnew and Nixon were never
anywhere close to so antagonistic.
Despite
those significant differences in their administration relationships and
resignations, however, there’s at least one way in which I would link Calhoun
and Agnew (and through which both men foreshadowed certain key elements of the
contemporary American Right). Calhoun’s racist support for the system of
slavery (which he called “a
good—a positive good”) led him to advance a mythic patriotic, blatantly
white supremacist vision of American identity and history, one that as I argue
in Of
Thee I Sing the Confederacy would later take up as a central founding
narrative. In his critique of journalists who opposed the Vietnam War as “nattering
nabobs of negativity” (among many other attacks, as that article traces), Agnew
became one of the 20th century’s most overt proponents of a mythic
patriotic narrative, one in which critics of an administration and its policies
became nothing less than enemies of the state. A white supremacist vision of
the nation and a narrative that critiques of America are treasonous are not
identical positions, but what they are, as I’ve argued
in many places for the
last few years, are two essential elements of mythic patriotism—a divisive and
destructive form that was embodied by both John C. Calhoun and Spiro Agnew.
Last
VeepStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Vice Presidents you’d highlight?
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