Print
In the aftermath of the Iowa Caucuses, Barack Obama’s stunning win has the pundits seeking parallels. The problem is they are all looking in the wrong places. They need to go back 100 years. In keeping with this blog’s reputation for original analysis, I offer a historical analogy that you will read here and nowhere else.
It seems inherent in the nature of language that words may appear concrete as their definitions lie solidly on the pages of a dictionary as if engraved in stone, but when you seek to fathom their meaning they become as hard to grasp as quicksilver. Take irony, for example. Its root suggests something solid and unbending and yet the synonyms it generates have the solidity of a wisp of fog, terms like incongruity, discordance, and paradox that suggest reality itself can turn upside down and inside out.
No one has used the word irony to describe Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa, but it seems particularly appropriate, especially if you take the long view of history. That a black man should come in first in a Presidential primary in a state whose percentage of African Americans hovers around two percent stands as a particularly American irony whose significance lies in the double–even multiple meanings–that have been a part of African American culture for centuries.
You can find that irony in much that people have written about Obama since then, for at the same time the nation pats itself on the back for this historical moment in which for the first time a genuine possibility exists that a person of color may sleep in Abraham Lincoln’s White house bedroom, millions of African Americans still see equity and justice as promises not reality. That irony revives what may stand as the most profound question in American history and certainly the most profound of our times–will the words in the Declaration of Independence translate into a truly revolutionary moment, a moment that bears out Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted observation in a letter to James Madison:
A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
That I should even mention Jefferson–a man Federalists ironically termed the Negro President–in association with Obama adds to the irony.
But it is not Jefferson, but John Kennedy that the pundits evoke to describe Barack Obama. Ever since the 1960s, the pundits have compared the latest rising young candidate to JFK in the political equivalent to the hunt for the next Dylan or the next Michael Jordan. True Obama is young, articulate and has run a campaign that evokes the generational passing of the torch that was one of the key themes of Kennedy’s famous inaugural. That people should compare Obama to a President whose brother authorized the wiretapping of Dr. Martin Luther King is yet another irony.
Actually if you want to find an even more apt historical comparison–and a richer irony–you need to go back almost a century to none other than Woodrow Wilson. Barack Obama has the potential to become the Woodrow Wilson of this new millennium. I say potential because although he has yet to pull it off, Obama could accomplish one of Wilson’s singular achievements: unify the Democratic Party.
Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Democrats were split, as they are now, between two competing factions, one representing progressives and another advocating a more middle of the road approach. William Jennings Bryan was the acknowledged leader of the progressives, while Grover Cleveland carried the banner of the middle-of-the-road Democrats.
Cleveland’s supporters earned the nickname of Bourbons, not because of what they drank, but what they believed. Grover Cleveland may have been the first modern Democratic Party triangulator, for he favored a laissez-fair philosophy that sought an accommodation with the tycoons of the Gilded Age. An 1896 Campaign Text-book of the National Democratic Party issued by the Bourbons stated some of Cleveland’s essential principles:
He profoundly disbelieved in the ability of government, through paternal legislation or otherwise, to increase the happiness of the nations.
He believed in the greatest measure of freedom of trade and industry compatible with the necessity to obtain by constitutional means an adequate revenue for the support of the government. (p.10)
These two statements could just as easily have been made by William McKinley, the Republican nominee in 1896, who also opposed “paternal legislation” and advocated “the greatest measure of freedom of industry.” The only disagreement between McKinley and the Bourbons was over trade, with McKinley advocating protective tariffs. Fittingly debates over tariff policy–like today’s debates over taxes–took center stage in many of the elections in the late nineteenth century.
Enter William Jennings Bryan, who voiced an entirely different philosophy. As I wrote at some length in a previous essay:
Bryan opposed our intervention in the Philippines as “imperialism,” advocated for a federal income tax and women’s suffrage before either of them became law, defended trade unions, demanded that candidates reveal the source of their campaign contributions, proposed labor have a cabinet position, championed the idea of insured bank deposits and a precursor to the federal reserve system, and spoke out for the popular election of Senators decades before the Seventeenth Amendment.
The Bryan and Cleveland forces had no love for one another, resulting in some of the most tumultuous conventions in the history of the Democratic Party. At the root of these differences lay two conflicting views of government: one which believes government should play a role in keeping the playing field level and another which opposes government intervention as “paternalism.”
At the 1912 Democratic Party Convention, as these two forces grappled for control of the party, Woodrow Wilson was the only candidate who had the respect of both factions. Yet Wilson came into the convention as a long shot against Speaker of the House Champ Clark, who was the front runner in part because of the very same experience debate currently occurring between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. On the tenth ballot, Tammany Hall boss Charles Murphy threw his support to Clark, giving him a majority of 556 votes. In every previous convention, once a candidate had a majority, the delegates quickly moved to provide the necessary two-thirds to clinch the nomination.
But on the fourteenth ballot, none other than William Jennings Bryan threw a wrench into this well-greased machine, asking to speak to the convention. As Bryan rose, the crowd grew silent, anticipating a moment of high drama and the power of Bryan’s fabled oratory. Many thought Bryan would again seek the nomination–and the feeling persists today that Bryan may have purposely tried to deadlock the convention.
In one of the more dramatic moments in convention history, Bryan utilized all his rhetorical skills to explain why he would switch his vote from Clark to Wilson. His hatred of Murphy and his anger at Clark’s cutting a deal with Tammany lay behind every word. The Democratic Party seemed in danger of imploding upon itself.
Wilson biographer Arthur Link believes Bryan’s switch had no impact (p. 13), yet, according to Bryan biographer Michael Kazin Champ Clark went to his grave believing Bryan’s betrayal had cost him the nomination and most newspapers at the time gave Bryan credit for handing Wilson the nomination (p. 190). A clue to the importance of Bryan’s switch is the reaction of the delegates themselves, who broke into fistfights even as Bryan was finishing what may well have been the second most important convention speech of his life.
Curiously, relations between Woodrow Wilson and Bryan had been strained, with Wilson at one point writing a letter which Clark forces discovered and leaked to the press in which Wilson wished:
Would that we could do something to knock Bryan into a cocked hat. (Kazin, p. 182)
But Wilson would mend fences with the Bryan wing of the party, naming Bryan Secretary of State. At the same time, he also appointed Cleveland supporters such as Agriculture Secretary David Houston to his cabinet. As he writes in his book Eight Years in Wilson’s Cabinet, Houston saw Wilson in the Cleveland tradition:
It was significant that the first Democrat to follow Grover Cleveland was a man, who I believed, would illustrate Cleveland’s best qualities and add a few admirable ones of his own. (p. 29)
Woodrow Wilson had pulled off two feats no one believed possible, he had won the Democratic Party’s nomination just when all seemed lost and he would go on to unite the Bryan and Cleveland factions. Fittingly House saw Wilson’s term in office as “illustrating Cleveland’s best qualities,” while Kazin observes:
Wilson’s “New Freedom” translated the Bryanite rage against monopoly into an optimistic brief for a stronger anti-trust act, lower tariffs, and a more elastic currency. (p. 191)
For at least two decades, the Democratic Party has also been split into factions that echo those of Wilson’s time: one a progressive wing that has advocated a modern version of Bryan’s reforms, the other represented by the New Democrats and Bill Clinton that has supported a modern version of Cleveland’s Bourbonism.
Fittingly, Barack Obama found himself seated between those two factions at Saturday’s New Hampshire debate, with John Edwards on one side and Hillary Clinton on the other. Meanwhile the man who many see as the most honest heir to the Bryan tradition, Dennis Kucinich, advised his followers in Iowa to support Obama if they did not have enough votes to be viable.
In the New Hampshire debate, John Edwards also seemed to side with Obama as Hillary Clinton took off the gloves and attacked him in a fashion that moved Bill Richardson to comment he had been in negotiations more mannered than the debate. On the other hand, it is no secret that many former Bill Clinton staffers are now working for Obama. My DC son also informs me that one of Hillary Clinton’s former high level staffers now supports Obama.
The Iowa results, the New Hampshire debate and the seeming support of both Clintonites and progressives argues that Obama may be the only candidate in the field who can pull off what Woodrow Wilson achieved in 1912. The question on everyone’s mind is whether Obama will not only emulate Wilson’s electoral victory, but also bring to America a modern version of the Wilson Presidency.
While much of what William Jennings Bryan advocated became the foundation of the Democratic Party in the twentieth century, it was Woodrow Wilson who actually wrote into law many of policies Bryan fought for, in turn laying the groundwork for Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy, one Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal.
The values that drove Woodrow Wilson can be summed up in one phrase: he believed in the level playing field. As I noted in an earlier essay, it is the main theme of his First Inaugural:
This is the high enterprise of the new day: To lift everything that concerns our life as a Nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man’s conscience and vision of the right. It is inconceivable that we should do this as partisans; it is inconceivable we should do it in ignorance of the facts as they are or in blind haste. We shall restore, not destroy. We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in the spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek counsel and knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of excursions whither they can not tell. Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto.
Obama still has yet to deliver a speech like that in this campaign. Many of us are eying him much as Bryan progressives must have eyed Wilson, wondering whether he truly offers the promise of a new beginning or whether the promise is business as usual. Until Obama makes equity and justice more prominent themes of his campaign, he will remain a bit of a cipher. Maybe Obama will take a cue from another Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt, who delivered his famous “Forgotten Man” speech after many accused him of running a lackluster campaign.
Currently Obama’s failure to more visibly embrace Wilson’s values is why the New York Times reports Edwards thinks if the two of them can knock Hillary Clinton out of the race, he will prevail. And why Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson will continue to press harder on the experience issue.
Obama’s entire campaign is built around the word “hope.” Here is one writer who hopes that he can channel the voice of Woodrow Wilson.
If he does a large historical irony would lie in Obama’s duplication of Wilson’s feat, because for all his greatness Woodrow Wilson had one notorious blind spot–race. A Southerner who witnessed the destruction of the Civil War as child, Wilson allowed the segregation of government offices including the Post office and the Departments of Treasury and Navy. He also expressed his admiration for D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which was based on Thomas Dixon’s racist, pro-Klan novel The Clansman.
Maybe the idea of a black man uniting the Democratic Party in the manner of Woodrow Wilson is what hope is all about and irony is something we will have to better learn to acknowledge and understand.
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
