James Buchanan’s Bum Rap
Posted on February 21st, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Okay, I’m on a short break. Here’s a quick post.
George Will has fun at Hillary Clinton’s expense, concluding with this non sequitur paragraph:
The president who came to office with the most glittering array of experiences had served 10 years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia, then served 10 years in the Senate, then four years as secretary of state (during a war that enlarged the nation by 33 percent), then was minister to Britain. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan was elected president and in just one term secured a strong claim to being ranked as America’s worst president. Abraham Lincoln, the inexperienced former one-term congressman, had an easy act to follow.
Buchanan gets his bad reputation not for anything he did for almost his entire term, but for what he refused to do during the final months of his administration. Most people have no clue what Buchanan did during his term, but they all know that he did not mobilise an army to kill tens and hundreds of thousands of Americans. For this, he is judged an egregious failure, while the man who did just that continues to be revered as a deified hero. This follows the typical rule of nationalist historiography here and in almost every country: the politicians and rulers who are responsible for the most deaths are judged the greatest because they oversaw “great crises.” Even though these crises didn’t necessarily have to result in bloodshed, and even if the pols in question blundered or willingly made the crisis worse, the more blood that is shed the better for their posthumous reputations. Of course, when the same things are done by rulers of other countries, people are able to spot very easily the sketchy arguments for regarding them as wise and great leaders of men. French nationalists will revere Napoleon, while we see him as a blood-soaked despot, and the same used to be true of Germans and Bismarck before it became entirely impossible to be a German natonalist, and Chinese nationalists admire either the modern Mao or have reached way back to raise Shih huang-di on a pedestal. The general rule of such “great leaders” is that you probably didn’t want to live under their government, since the chances were good that you would be conscripted, killed or otherwise harmed by their policies.
As I read Will, he seems to be arguing on behalf of the least experienced contender in the presidential race, who happens to be Hillary Clinton at this point, which means that he has just compared her to Abraham Lincoln. So is he saying that Hillary Clinton’s election would usher in an era of mass fratricide, or is he saying that she is the next Great Emancipator? Maybe both?
Filed under: politics
Maybe I’m missing something, but how in the world can you read the Will piece and think he’s comparing her to Lincoln? He’s obviously comparing her to the “experienced” James Buchanan and her opponent,with barely two years of Washington experience, to Lincoln. Not to say that her election won’t lead to mass death; that’s probably a pretty good bet in the event of the election of any of the 3 frontrunners. None of them has a clue on how best to combat terrorism and reduce the threat in the long term. And any of them is quite likely to sanction a mass bombing or two of some recalcitrant country or another.
Perhaps I misread Will, but it seemed as if he was making the argument that she didn’t really have that much experience, despite her claims to the contrary, and then turned around and belittled the President who had a lot of prior experience. So the message I took away from it was, “Clinton isn’t experienced, but she pretends to be, but experienced politicians are, like Buchanan, a disaster, while the inexperienced might be like Lincoln.” I see your point that he *meant* to align her with Buchanan and Obama with Lincoln, but I’m not sure that this what he ended up doing.
By the way, I agree completely with your final sentences.
Perhaps I too misread Will, but I didn’t take his closing to be an attempt at outright allegory (which your ostensibly clever flipping of Hillary into the “inexperienced” slot assumes)…rather, the example illustrates the foolishness of using “experience” (i.e., experience qua experience) as the primary criterion for choosing a president. (As Obama has correctly said all along, experience is a proxy for sound judgment.)
As for the merits of Buchanan, a glance at Wikipedia reveals arguments that in a single term Buchanan 1) supported, and perhaps solicited, the Dred Scott decision; 2) terribly mishandled Bleeding Kansas by throwing all his weight on the side of the proposed pro-slavery state consitution; 3) generally hastened the national schism by simultaneously a) painting free-soil Republicans with the same brush as radical abolitionists; and b) fully passing the buck of constitutional interpretation to the Supreme Court, rather than recognizing the role of the Executive in determining constitutional meaning.
If these things are even half-true, I’d say that Buchanan’s reputation is deserved. Events stood still for no man, yet he tried to just…wait them out. And in the final months of his presidency – as critical a moment as this country has ever seen – he openly abdicated responsibility, waiting for Lincoln to arrive and do, uh, something.
Retaining Fort Sumter seems to have been Buchanan’s best move.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering Dan, I am proudly Virginia-born and raised, educated in the universities of our Commonwealth, and now live in Richmond.
It seems to me that he is comparing Clinton to Buchanan and Obama to Lincoln, but he is also making an obvious – and true – point that experience can mean much or nothing. You never know how that will turn out and world histroy is filled with examples. The experienced cabal of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Powell, etc. being a recent case in point. Or since we are alluding to the War Between the States – contrast an inexperienced but natural warrior like Forrest with the prepared, trained and mature military disaster that was Braxton Bragg. But we often ignore what should, for real conservatives, be the Hypocratic Oath of politics – “first do no harm,” don’t make things worse and there is much to be said in favor of sleepy, stolid governments concerned about filling potholes and saving owls and not seeking grand national crusades in exotic climes.
What the hell is the role of the executive in determining constitutional meaning? Is that some kind of neocon unitary executive garbage?
” b) fully passing the buck of constitutional interpretation to the Supreme Court, rather than recognizing the role of the Executive in determining constitutional meaning.”
The way I read the constitution, constitutional interpretation is precisely the role of the judiciary, not the executive, although you are correct that Buchanan did a terrible job of handling the Kansas situation.
RE: Will
Abe = Obama
Buchanan = HRC
He’s arguing against experience.
Of course, the whole experienced vs. inexperienced meme is absurd, since neither Democratic senator is remotely fit to take office, especially in comparison to John McCain, who literally has a lifetime of service in the military and on Capitol Hill (for better or for worse…).
All right, I guess my reading will have to remain the eccentric one.
As for Buchanan’s “buck-passing” on the Constitution, it’s true that all three co-equal branches of the government could interpret the Constitution separately, but the executive wouldn’t take action contrary to the Court’s ruling (as Jackson did) unless he disagreed with the ruling. In the modern era with such a powerful executive it seems perverse to us to grant the President even more interpretive latitude, and understandably so, but no one branch had the final interpretation over the acts of the others.
Even with all of the things that Buchanan did do during his presidency, that marks him as an ineffectual and rather weak President, but hardly one who ranks down among the worst of all. The assessment of Buchanan seems to me to be tied to that of Lincoln very closely, and so long as the latter is glorified to excess Buchanan will be damned in the same way. I am not trying to say that Buchanan was a success, since he obviously was not, but at least he fulfilled that fundamental duty that all Presidents are supposed to fulfill, which is to uphold and protect the Constitution, better than several others including his successor.
Daniel, I know you’re busy the next few days, but your favorite essayist has just done his due dilligence on Kosovo.
http://www.slate.com/id/2184997/
Who sees Bismarck as a blood-soaked despot? Maybe the French and Poles (and Bavarians) do, but I don’t think you have to be a German Nationalist to regard Bismarck as one of the great statesmen of the 19th century. He left Prussia far stronger than when he started. The wars he started were all minor by 18th or 20th century standards, and he certainly recognized his limits and the dangers of unbridled militarism. He was no utopian idealist, but generally a very practical politician who was able to be flexible as circumstances required. He also realized overseas colonial entanglements were a bad idea. I think the comparison with Napoleon, Mao and Shuang-Di is rather overstating the issue. I suppose the true paleo position may be to idolize the comfortable tradition-bound pastoral Catholic Austrian Empire, but I can’t think of any real crimes Bismarck ever committed that would put him in the pantheon of bad guys.
Myself, I’m a little uncomfortable with insinuating Napoleon — and Bismarck, for that matter — into a group that also includes the likes of Mao.
My point is not to say that each of these is comparable to the other in the *scale* of destruction. Of course, Mao is vastly worse than Napoleon, and Napoleon much worse than Bismarck, but my general complaint is that reputations for “great leadership” are frequently associated with men who propelled their countries into great and unnecessary wars and/or slaughtered large numbers of their countrymen in a revolutionary cause. Of all of these, Bismarck is probably the least objectionable, because he had limited strategic goals and engaged in short, sharp campaigns that achieved them with relatively little upheaval, and unlike the devastation wrought on southern Italy by the Italian nationalists Bismarck forged a united Germany by attacking other countries. Of course, to the extent that 20th century European history was plagued by the backlash against German unification, a lot of very bloody unintended consequences can be traced back to Bismarck.