The Unprecedented American Presidency by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030378806
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

A Party Solution

The framers’ intentions notwithstanding, the “great” presidents of nineteenth century—Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln—all led popular insurgencies into control of the national government. Each in his turn mobilized voters into opposition parties with transformative ambitions. What made presidential power expeditious in each instance was exactly what Publius feared, a political determination to upend the prior course of government and to reconstruct national priorities. Jefferson led a movement to break the grip of “the Anglomen” on federal power; Jackson, to break the grip of bankers and protectionists; Lincoln, to break the grip of slave-holding interests. It is from these exemplars that we get that constitutionally-confounding connection between authentic national leadership and an order-shattering assault on the powers that be.

Still, there is little indication that the followers of Jefferson or Jackson or Lincoln were interested in going much farther with the development of presidential power. On the contrary, once the great leaders of the nineteenth-century presidency cleared away the governmental arrangements that supported their political adversaries, fellow partisans took care to cabin the mobilizing energy of the presidential office in institutions that they could control. Congress took charge of Jefferson’s nomination to a second term, and in due course, the congressional party caucus was said to be the real “King.” In the aftermath of Jackson’s presidency, national conventions of state-party delegates assumed control over presidential nominations, and soon, the leaders of the state-party organizations were recognized as the real “bosses.”

The party-based presidency of the nineteenth century connected political mobilization more directly to governmental management, but it did so by creating a strong overlay of collective controls that closely regulated both spheres of presidential action. Organizing the system from the bottom up, the parties of the period cast the president as the titular head of a national aggregation of local machines. They corralled and controlled the independence of the executive office by enlisting it in their own wide-ranging communities of interest. In the process, and by extension, these parties thoroughly politicized management. They actively exploited the disruptive consequences of presidential elections by laying claim to the administrative offices of the federal government. The presidents of the party state were expected to offer up the largess of the executive branch to the state and local organizations that had secured their election. The order-shattering effects of national elections registered routinely in a periodic purge of the placeholders—the rotation en masse of the civil service.

The best to be said for the “spoils system” of administration may be that these effects were decentralized, depersonalized, and dispersed. That kept the parties strong and executive independence in check. By the same token, the party state had clear time horizons as a solution to the problem of the presidency. It worked only so long as service to the localities sufficed as a governing formula for the nation.

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