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Change and Continuity: The Presidency in Historical Perspective
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14169 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1988 |
5,557 Words |
| Author
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Leo P. Ribuffo
Leo P. Ribuffo is professor of history at George Washington
University and author of The Old Christian Right: The
Protestant Far Right From the Great Depression to the Cold War
(Temple University Press, 1983). |
When Ronald Reagan cast his first vote for president in 1932, the major party nominees were Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. We can, with less arbitrariness than usually characterizes historical demarcations, view Roosevelt's election that year as the beginning of the contemporary presidency. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who voted for Roosevelt are still among us in the 1980s. The techniques presidents use to rally friends, harass foes, manage the federal government, and deal with other nations resemble those inherited from Roosevelt in 1945. Perhaps most important, controversies that marked FDR's long presidency--over the welfare state, the limits of presidential authority, and Soviet-American relations--remain current.
The office Hoover held and Roosevelt sought in 1932 was already formidable. Indeed, the presidency has changed less in the past half-century than in the previous century and a half. By 1932, an energetic president could be legislator in chief and diplomat in chief as well as chief executive and commander in chief. Whether he wished it or not, he was unavoidably symbol in chief of national success or failure.
Many, perhaps most, of the men who drafted the Constitution and served in the ratifying conventions held in the various states would have been surprised by the growth of presidential power. The office sparely described in the Constitution was subsequently shaped not only by the ingenuity and ineptitude of presidents themselves, but also by domestic conflict, foreign war, party politics, and chance. Some major changes occurred during the terms of presidents now venerated, other during the terms of presidents now obscure.
No bit of chance was more fortunate than George Washington's willingness to serve as the first president. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention who favored a powerful presidency shaped the office to fit Washington's character, and skeptics who remembered the imperious acts of colonial royal governors were soothed by the prospect of his election. A strong but conciliatory and accessible chief executive, he set precedents that in some cases endure to this day. Following Alexander Hamilton's broad construction of the Constitution, Washington supported legislation to assume state debts and establish a semipublic Bank of the United States. He called militia into federal service to defeat the Whiskey Rebellion, a serious threat to national unity. Assuming primary responsibility for foreign policy, he sent emissaries abroad to negotiate treaties and declared America neutral in the war between England and France. Despite his austere temperament, Washington entertained
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