Profiles in Insignificance
With centuries of warfare, slavery, and struggles for civil rights to chronicle, there’s usually not much room for cheap laughs in the annals of American history. Perhaps the most reliable source of comedy comes somewhat surprisingly from the second-most powerful office in the land, the scandal-plagued, mediocrity-ridden, largely irrelevant position described by its first holder, Vice President John Adams, as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”
This is the tawdry, tragic, often hilarious tale told by Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance, by Bill Kelter and Wayne Shellabarger. From Aaron Burr’s arguable treason to Charles Dawes’s notorious napping to Spiro T. Agnew’s cash kickbacks in the White House basement, the legacies of the men the authors describe as “a heartbeat or lower intestinal obstruction away from the Presidency” are revealed here in all their dubious splendor.
One of the more shocking facts revealed in Veeps is the number of years our glorious nation has managed to survive with a literal empty chair where most often there simply sat an empty suit. Since the death of James Madison’s Vice President, George Clinton, in 1812, the United States has somehow muddled along for a total of 37 years and 290 days without a Veep in office. Keller and Shellabarger’s chronicle convinces readers that this was not necessarily a major bummer for American democracy.
Veeps is handsomely illustrated with a series of slightly caricatured portraits that, like the cover image of William Almon Wheeler, reveal the frustrated ambitions and utter hopelessness of so many of the men tabbed for second place:
“Theodore Roosevelt planned to enroll in law school to fill the time he would surely have on his hands. Wheeler, of course, donned his displeasure like a death mask. John Nance Garner would have traded the job for a tepid receptacle of an expelled bodily fluid had he not thought the lopsided bargain would have been unfair to his fellow barterer.”
While Garner famously described the gig as “not worth a bucket of warm piss,” Kelter and Shellabarger’s entertaining account of this rogues’ gallery of American history ought to convince voters to pay a bit more attention to the second name on the Presidential ticket. After all, a rather impressive number of these “incompetents, empty suits, abysmal spellers, degenerate golfers, and corrupt Marylanders” have ended up assuming the highest office in the land thanks to assassins’ bullets, the odd case of food poisoning, or on exceedingly rare occasions the will of an actual majority of American voters.
The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days
Reports during the Presidential transition period noted Barack Obama was reading Jonathan Alter’s 2007 study The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope as he began planning his own administration’s course. Alter’s book is a record of a pivotal moment in American history where President Roosevelt redefined the relationship between the American people and their government and began steering a course out of the Great Depression.
Alter argues that FDR’s combination of inspirational leadership, open-minded risk-taking, and activist government policies ultimately saved both American democracy and capitalism itself. The book is a useful counterpoint to recent criticisms of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, and it’s also a gripping read that documents one of the most precarious moments in American history.
Alter paints a vivid portrait of the country in winter 1933 as Roosevelt took office. At the absolute low point of the Great Depression, when Fascism was wildly popular in Italy and Hitler had just gained power in Germany, Alter reveals the temptations Roosevelt faced from advisors who advocated similarly dictatorial steps to solve America’s economic disaster. The book tells the riveting story of Roosevelt’s rejection of this path and the seat-of-his-pants qualities of the interventionist New Deal programs that Alter argues ultimately saved capitalism.
The book includes seldom-told tales like the pre-inauguration assassination attempt that nearly took Roosevelt’s life. Alter also describes the most acrimonious transition in American history, during which President Hoover and Roosevelt barely communicated and FDR’s son claimed his father nearly punched Hoover in the face.
One of the most interesting stories is Alter’s description of the first “Fireside Chat,” on March 12, 1933. Roosevelt’s revolutionary use of the relatively new medium of radio brought the voice of the American President into citizens’ homes for the first time. His warm, conversational style was literally unheard of from previous politicians who had to shout to be heard in un-amplified speeches to large crowds, and Alter compares the effect to the similarly reassuring tones of Bing Crosby’s crooning voice over the radio.
The real revolution was, in fact, Roosevelt’s first two words of the Fireside Chat: “My friends.” The Defining Moment goes a long way toward explaining FDR’s achievements and filling in interesting psychological details of his complicated personality, but those two words, and the resultant redefinition of American government’s role in the lives of its citizens, reveal perhaps the most significant moment of all.
How the States Got Their Shapes
I’ll admit up front to having a dangerously unbalanced obsession with all things geographical. At last count I have over twenty globes in my office, with a slightly smaller number of maps hanging around for good measure. I’ve been known to stare at atlases for way longer than it really takes to plot a trip to Tulsa and back, and I avidly collect a vast variety of the kinds of coffee table books full of wildly inaccurate ancient maps often found on bookstore discount shelves.
Having said that, Mark Stein’s How the States Got Their Shapes was one of the most fun books I’ve read all year.
Stein devotes five or six pages to each of the fifty states in alphabetical order, telling the surprisingly fascinating story of how each of their boundaries was negotiated, surveyed, and finally accepted. Each chapter is supplemented by clearly drawn maps that illustrate exactly what controversies and challenges faced the bureaucrats who attempted to build rational boundaries between contentious, occasionally warring territories.
Each chapter starts with a series of questions the author will tackle, such as this example for Alaska: “How come Alaska slips out beneath its straight-line eastern border with Canada? In fact, why isn’t Alaska just a continuation of Canada? Were the Canadians suckered? Or did we threaten them? And why is Alaska’s straight line border where it is?”
The book really functions as an alternative way to look at American history, and the author finds several recurring themes in the shaping of the fifty states. Most prominent is a Jeffersonian insistence on the equality of states’ sizes whenever possible, which resulted in chunks being taken out of corners of states and crooked lines being drawn where a straight line would seem far more obvious. Interesting exceptions to the attempts to equalize the states are found in California and Texas, and Stein explains the different ways each convinced the U.S. government to accept its unusually massive boundaries.
Another recurring theme is the influence of slavery on the shapes of many states. Oklahoma’s own panhandle is a fascinating example of this, as Texas was Constitutionally prevented from retaining any land north of its current panhandle border without violating the mandated dividing line between slave and free states. Stein notes, “Congress was trying to turn its eyes away from the fundamental inequality of slavery (by giving the choice to the states) and fix its gaze on an idealized (indeed, mathematical) vision of equality among the newly forming western states. All this is preserved in the borders of Oklahoma’s panhandle, in one-half of one degree of latitude.”
Beyond the pressing issues of slavery and power politics, other surprising factors influenced the lines that now seem so established on our landscape as to be almost literally carved in stone or earth. Religious communities influenced the borders of Delaware and New Hampshire, issues of language dictated the boundaries of Louisiana and New Mexico, and the patchwork border of Kentucky and Tennessee was pieced together with the significant assistance of local moonshining operations.
Stein invests these map-making stories with unexpected drama and intrigue, revealing many obscure tales that account for state boundaries’ massive but often overlooked influence on American life to this day. His conclusion to the story of New Mexico’s borders is an excellent example of the book’s themes: They may “look pretty square, but in fact they preserve stories of fears and compassion, of shrewd political savvy, and of objective planning for the future. In a sense, New Mexico’s borders contain a kind of mural of what goes on in the halls of Congress.”
Sarah Vowell
Hipster historian Sarah Vowell spins her admittedly quirky personal obsessions into bestselling popular history books like 2006’s Assassination Vacation and her newest work, The Wordy Shipmates.
In her personal and historical essays, Vowell occasionally notes her Oklahoma roots and Cherokee heritage. Born in Muskogee, Vowell began working in radio while at college in Montana, and her distinctive voice first gained national attention on the beloved public radio show This American Life. Movie fans will also recognize her endearingly pinched, humorously intellectual tones from her role voicing the character of Violet in The Incredibles.
Vowell’s books are entertaining side trips into weird Americana, obscure historical tales, and the author’s own unapologetically nerdy social commentaries. In 2002’s The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Vowell traveled across the United States to apply her skeptical, questioning brand of patriotism to the post-September 11th landscape. In Assassination Vacation, she narrowed her focus to consider the murders of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley in a breezy travelogue occasionally interrupted by serious ruminations on America’s often violent political history.
Vowell is a master at unearthing strange quirks of history, as in Assassination Vacation’s tale of Robert Lincoln, the President’s son who was present at all three Presidential assassinations from 1865 to 1901. Robert Lincoln, described by Vowell as “some kind of jinxed Zelig of doom,” is one of the author’s ideal subjects. His weird cameo appearances in history are reconsidered with her acid wit and genuinely insightful commentary to illustrate larger insights about the oddities of our history.
These same qualities are on display in her newest book, The Wordy Shipmates, which studies the “messy but endearing” quest of the Puritans, led by John Winthrop, to found an ideal “city upon a hill” in 1630s Massachusetts. Vowell finds much to admire in the radical efforts of Winthrop, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson to create a new kind of society apart from England, and she finds the roots of many recognizably modern American characteristics in the backwater colony.
“The Massachusetts Bay Colony becomes . . . a sort of republic–the most severely limited, totalitarian, closed-minded, vindictive, hard-ass republic possible. But the democratic impulse is a mutating virus that adapts and changes, quickens and grows; it is contagious, and the (Massachusetts Bay) Charter is one important sneeze.”
Team of Rivals
As the new Presidential administration begins to fill out cabinet positions, the term “Team of Rivals” seems to have been used in every media account of the decision-making process. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 book of the same name describes President Lincoln’s essential “political genius” as he balanced the competing egos of the 19th century political titans he assembled to advise him.
Goodwin’s lengthy but rewarding work provides informative biographies of Lincoln’s key cabinet members, each of whom had sought the Presidency for himself and no doubt believed he could do a better job than the Illinios lawyer and former one-term Congressman. Goodwin argues that while Lincoln’s team may have been more politically accomplished than the President they served, Lincoln himself possessed a capacity for empathy and psychological insight that tamed the internal rivalries and ultimately preserved a unified nation.
Lincoln described his cabinet as “the very strongest men . . . . I had no right to deprive the country of their services.” As Goodwin notes, “(I)n the end it was the prairie lawyer from Springfield who would emerge as the strongest of them all.”
Goodwin is a fascinating character in her own right, having served as an aide to Lyndon Johnson in the last year of his Presidency and an assistant in the writing of his memoirs. Her first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, contains rare insights on Johnson’s complex political and personal life and his ruthless pursuit of power.
Like Team of Rivals, Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning No Ordinary Time portrays the inner workings of a White House engaged in a titanic war while riven by internal struggles. Its intimate portraits of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt reveal the humanity of these iconic figures and the deeply troubled marriage that barely survived a crucible of ambition, infidelity, and wartime tragedies.
Looking beyond her slightly dotty public persona as a frequent guest on political talk shows, as well as the allegations of plagiarism that once tarnished her writing career, Goodwin’s books are rich with psychological insight and valuable research. Her writing has consistently illuminated the inner lives of legendary figures whose human characteristics are so often obscured by mythologized history.
