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Guest Essayist: Andrew Bibby

FDR’s Third Term and the Twenty-Second Amendment

On November 5, 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the first and only U.S. president to be elected for more than two terms. A newspaper headline depicted the historic moment with a joke that captured the public’s ambivalence toward Roosevelt’s unprecedented break from tradition: “Safe on third!”

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Guest Essayist: Juliette Turner

 

Twenty-Ninth President of the United States

Nickname: Charming Harding

Terms in Office: 1921-1923

Fast Stats

  • Born November 2, 1865, in Blooming Grove, Ohio
  • Parents: George Tryon and Phoebe Elizabeth Dickerson Harding
  • Died August 2, 1923, in San Francisco, California; age 57
  • Age upon Start of Term: 55; Age upon Death: 57
  • Religious Affiliation: Baptist
  • Political Party: Republican
  • Height: 6 feet
  • Vice President: Calvin Coolidge

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Guest Essayist: Daniel A. Cotter

 

The 1916 Presidential election pitted incumbent Democratic President Woodrow Wilson against Republican Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes.  The election was a very close one and had significant ramifications for the “progressive” movement.

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Guest Essayist: Professor Joerg Knipprath

 

Dissenting from the Supreme Court’s 1905 opinion in Lochner v. New York that found unconstitutional a maximum-hour law for bakery employees, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., declared, “[A] constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire.” Holmes’s point is valid at least to the extent that the Framers–most of whom adhered to the then-dominant mercantilism–did not encrypt the grand contours of a particular system of political economy in the Constitution’s provisions aligning and balancing individual liberties and governmental powers. Yet, the Constitution also protects personal rights whose exercise is more likely to be realized in a political system premised on fundamentally liberal (in the classic meaning) conceptions of the role of the government and the individual’s relationship to the State than in a system that rests on a different view of such essential matters.

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Guest Essayist: Karl Rove

 

America’s politics leading into the 1896 election looks familiar. The political system was broken: In five presidential elections, no one received 50% and for 20 of 24 years, America had divided government and gridlock in which little got done. The animosity between the parties was beyond normal partisanship: they were still fighting the Civil War.

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Guest Essayist: Juliette Turner

 

Grover Cleveland

Twenty-second and Twenty-fourth President of the United States

Nickname: The Veto President

Terms in Office: 1885–1889; 1893–1897

Fast Stats

  • Born March 18, 1837, in Caldwell, New Jersey
  • Parents: Richard and Anne Neal Cleveland
  • Died June 24, 1908, in Princeton, New Jersey; age 71
  • Age upon Start of First Term: 47; Age upon Conclusion of First Term: 51
  • Age upon Start of Second Term: 55; Age upon Conclusion of Second Term: 59
  • Political Party: Democratic
  • Religious Affiliation: Presbyterian
  • Height: 5 feet 11 inches
  • Vice Presidents: Thomas A. Hendricks (1885) and Adlai E. Stevenson (1893–1897)

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Guest Essayist: Brion McClanahan

 

Portions of this essay are from the chapter “Grover Cleveland” in Brion McClanahan, 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America and Four Who Tried to Save Her (Regnery History, 2016).

Grover Cleveland lost the 1888 election to Benjamin Harrison through voter fraud, and it involved what may be considered the first major lobby group in American history, the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veteran’s organization that had deep pockets and the ability to swing elections in favor of the Republican Party, the real brawn behind the organization.

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Guest Essayist: Peter Roff

 

The election of 1884 was the first to put a Democrat in the White House since the Civil War. That it did, albeit narrowly was a testament to the way even the earliest stages of industrialization had transformed the country, setting it on the road to something far removed from its, rural, agricultural, protestant roots.

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