Fall 2008
Presidents 101
University Forum offers historical look at leadership
During this hotly contested election season, political science professor Steve Parker is looking at what history tells us about presidential leadership. Parker is one of the featured speakers during this fall’s University Forum lecture series. Here he is on the risks and innovations that defined past presidential administrations:
George Washington: In 1794 Washington was confronted with an insurrection in Pennsylvania and elsewhere that became known as the Whiskey Rebellion. (The rebels were resisting a law that had established a national tax on whiskey.) Rather than letting a state governor deal with it, Washington assembled an army of 15,000 men to quickly restore order. In so doing he established the precedent that the president, not governors, are to implement national laws (national supremacy).
Abraham Lincoln: While many other national figures counseled “letting the South go,” Lincoln persevered in his goal of keeping the nation together. He did this in spite of the fact that the Civil War cost 620,000 lives — almost as many as all U.S. battlefield deaths in all other wars combined. With our current population of 300 million, a comparable calamity would have to cause nearly 7 million deaths to equal it in scale... and yet Lincoln continued to pursue his goal.
Franklin D. Roosevelt: The consummate innovator, FDR tried some conservative policies (like the National Industrial Recovery Act) before hitting upon more liberal ones that worked better and that the Supreme Court allowed him to keep. He was a risk-taking experimenter more than he was a static ideologue.
Harry Truman: When he fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur for insubordination during the Korean War, Truman knew that he was taking on one of the most popular men in the nation. Standing up for the principle that the president is commanderin- chief, the stubborn man from Missouri would not back down. The general repeatedly disobeyed orders, so Truman sacked him.
Andrew Jackson: Because the Constitution is vague about the grounds for using the veto power, the first six presidents did so only when they thought that a bill was actually unconstitutional. Today we know this idea as the concept of judicial review. The man on the $20 bill was the first to veto a bill (the reauthorization of the Bank of the U.S.) just because he disagreed with it and thought that it was bad policy. When he took this risk, he made the president the most important participant in the legislative process.
