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All Of It with Alison Stewart
A History of Presidents Who Threatened Democracy (Get Po-LIT-ical)
00:24:18
Author Corey Brettschneider talks about his book, The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It.
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Listener support, WNYC Studios.
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You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Let's turn now to the final installment of today's Get Political show on all focus on political books and writing. To end the show, we look at times when democracy was on the line. The book is titled the President and the Five Leaders who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens who Fought to Defend It. It's by Cory Brettschneider, who is a professor of constitutional law and politics at Brown University. The five leaders were John Adams, who waged war on the national press, Prosecuting more than 126people James Buchanan, who tried to deny rights to African Americans via the Supreme Court Andrew Johnson, who sought to guarantee white supremacy Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the government and Richard Nixon, who committed criminal acts. As Brett Schneider writes, each of these five presidents stoked the fire of a constitutional crisis. Each wielded the nation's most powerful office to undermine a core aspect of democracy. And each stands as a conspicuous example of the damage a single president can do. But as Brett Schneider notes, one thing that stands in the way of such a president the people who fought back. I began our conversation by asking what led him to write the book.
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This book really came out of a realization that something more serious was needed, a look at the danger of the office. And at the same time that I'm still an optimist, as you noted, about the people. I also want to be very real with people about what this office is and how if an occupant that is a problem that threatens democracy occupies it. Why, we're all in real trouble. Patrick Henry said at the founding, don't ratify the Constitution. If you ratify it, this document assumes a good person in the position of the president. What if you get a bad person of somebody at odds with democracy who lacks virtue? We're all vulnerable to such a person. He worried in particular about a criminal president. And that's what we're facing that possibility right now.
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A lot has been written about a couple of these presidents, about Richard Nixon, Andrew Johnson. There's a new biography of Wilson coming out this fall. Sometimes the writing has taken on a mythic tone to it. How did you go about looking at these candidates with clear eyes?
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That is part of what I wanted to correct was a sort of a praise of these presidents, of looking to them as heroes. And Adams in particular, you hear, just to start with, about him as how learned he was and he was a smart guy. He wrote books. He was a political theorist. But he also tried to shut down the opposition party by, as you noted, really imprisoning his critics, including a sitting congressperson and the editors who criticized him. So there was a danger from the beginning that this supposedly great president would have really destroyed democracy and its possibility by eliminating the. The existence of an opposition party. And when that is being done, that dangerous assault on democracy from the nation's highest office, there was a chance that we might not have recovered. So I really wanted to correct the record by thinking through the lens, partly recognizing the danger that we're facing now in the person of Donald Trump, but also to look back and kind of rethink a lot of these presidents. And Adams stuck out as the first.
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Yeah, we'll get to him in a second. You know that the presidents used the Constitution of the United States to bolster their arguments, but it was actually politics many times. Just give us one example of the five where it really was the politics of the situation.
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You know, the Constitution can be interpreted in a couple of ways. One is the democratic way that many of these citizens tried to reclaim the Constitution of we the People. But it's also a dangerous document with a long history of presidents emphasizing their authoritarian powers and using it to really undermine democracy. So when that combines with an egotistical view of oneself, as you sometimes get with these presidents, there's a real danger, and sometimes they're secret about it. So I mentioned Adams, I mentioned Buchanan. Secretly lobbies the Supreme Court to decide the Dred Scott case in the way it was decided to essentially deny black Americans all rights. Even the idea of legal personhood is denied in the Dred Scott case. So he's doing that secretly while pretending to be neutral about a constit. And, you know, there's a real danger in the office being used that way. And it's a combination of both a dangerous interpretation, reading of the document as authoritarian with politics that in his mind was devoted to security. And so that's a lethal combination, quite literally. In the case of Buchanan, you note.
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That our Constitution is the third shortest in the world. Is that good or bad?
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It's both. And that's part of the idea of the book, that the malleability of the Constitution both makes it dangerous because it's open to a president who says, as Donald Trump did, I have an Article 2. I can do anything I want with it, and really misreads it in this authoritarian way. And past presidents have done that. Adams read the document to essentially give him the powers of a quasi monarch. And at the same time, the Danger of the vagueness of the Constitution also is its hope because it's allowed citizens to fight back by saying against Adams. Look, we have a newly passed First Amendment right to free speech, and that means a right to dissent, a right to criticize, even a president, or in the case of Buchanan, Frederick Douglass, a view that was not well received at the time, although now I regard Frederick Douglass and this idea as the foundation of American democracy, the true founder of American democracy. Even though he wasn't writing in the 18th century, he said, it says, we the people, and in the preamble, not we the white people.
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The president who seemed to understand this perhaps the most was George Washington prior to John Adams. What did he understand about the Constitution?
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Yeah, we really start off strong because in his second inaugural in particular, which happens to be the shortest ever given, he says, look, I just took the oath of office. It binds me to the rule of law, to the Constitution. If I violate it, I want you to claim, criticize me, upbraid me. If I really violate it, subject me to constitutional punishment. What a great idea. What a great explanation of the idea that the office of the President has something above it. And that's the law and the Constitution itself. And that's the thing to which we could all appeal to. We could appeal to its values. When a president threatens democracy, is there.
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A more modern president who seemed to get the idea of what the Constitution was about?
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I think throughout American history, thankfully, we've had these major moments of recovery. So I mentioned the horrible, dread, evil Dred Scott case, denying all rights and all, even legal personhood to black Americans throughout the country. And when Frederick Douglass resists Buchanan, he has to flee the country to the UK where he's giving speeches about this broader democratic idea of we the people. And he is eventually vindicated in his alliance with Ulysses Grant, who not only supports passage of the 15th Amendment, refusing to allow discrimination based on race in voting, but more importantly, passes and supports the enforcement acts leading to the prosecution of more than a thousand white terrorists throughout the United States. So, Douglas, really, these recoveries happen and that we the people, these citizens sticking up for democracy, find recovery presidents to take on their cause. After Adams, there's Jefferson, who says, we're all Federalist, were all Republicans. Meaning I'm not going to allow the restoration of a sedition act. I'm not going to prosecute my political opponents. I mentioned Grant. The hero of the third cluster of the threat to democracy that you mentioned from Woodrow Wilson is Harry Truman, who is prevailed upon by members of the civil rights movement, some known like Thurgood Marshall, some unknown like Sadie Alexander, to really get rid of the idea of second class citizens for black citizenship for black Americans. And he begins as a racist. And he's won over by these constitutional constituencies, these citizen readers. So I think of him as another hero of the book.
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We're talking about the president and the people. Five leaders who threaten democracy and the citizens who fought to defend it. My guest is Brown Professor Cory Brettschneider. All right, let's dive into John Adams, second president, founding father. What kind of presidency did he face? Let's not even talk about what he did wrong. What was he facing?
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He's, of course, it's so early on in the republic. And as he saw it, he's facing a threat of disloyalty of opposition party. He's a member of the Federalists and he thinks the Democratic Republicans have their allegiance to France and that there really is a kind of civil war going on in the United States. And so from his perspective, the job of the president is security, security, security. And if you have the gall to insult the president, United States, he thinks, I can shut down the opposition party. The issue is how he did it. The Sedition act allows for criticism of the vice president, a member at the time of a different party, Thomas Jefferson, but makes it a crime to criticize the president, John Adams. So yes, he claims he's facing instability and demanding security, but really he uses it as an opportunity to really shut down the essence of free speech. Brown Professor Alexander Meiklejohn said, look, free speech isn't just any right. It's the right of democracy to hear all arguments and to make all arguments. Without the right to dissent, to criticize our leaders, we're not a democracy. And that's why Adams was such a threat. He really did shut that right down.
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So he considered the threat to the country the separation between France and England. Yes, yes.
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He thought the French, in particular loyalty to France, was a kind of civil war threatening American stability on the part of the opposition party.
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What was the threat to him?
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Well, I guess he sort of identified himself as president with the task of stability. And the way he would have seen it is that this opposition party, in criticizing him, was, you know, threatening his leadership, threatening his ability to control the country. And so he needed to shut down the opposition party. The truth is, it was also personal. He was a deeply egotistical person.
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Thin skinned.
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He was thin skinned, I say, right. He mocked Washington because he thought he wasn't as learned and as Great as Washington was, as you noted, when he saw these criticisms of his family in particular and Abigail Adams worried about criticism of their son, he equated that to a threat to the country. And so, you know, it's sort of the personal and the political merge. I think in the case of Adams.
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There was a man who entered, Benjamin Bosch, who was Ben Franklin's grandson, who ran a paper called the Aurora. What did he criticize?
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There's a myriad of criticisms of Adams. One of the ideas is that he's really pretending in the one hand to care about democracy and you know, at the same time not respecting it. And he's critical too of his shutdown of the opposition party. At one point, the editors, and this is the most controversial, they use various language to criticize his wishy washiness and his, on the one hand, pretending to be even handed but being deeply partisan.
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How many people did he put in jail?
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It's one of the most interesting things about the Adams story is that it was underreported for generations. And it's how we sort of said, oh yeah, there was this sedition act, but it wasn't a big deal. But the most recent research puts it at about 126 prosecutions. I mean, it wasn't a small number, including the sitting congressman I mentioned, Matthew Leon, including three newspaper editors who really fought back and were effective in fighting back. But yeah, 126 is not a small number.
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Let's move on to James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. They kind of were a one, two punch. James Buchanan, what was his view of the presidency?
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He pretends in his inaugural address that the most important constitutional questions have to be answered by the Supreme Court. And he pretends to model himself on Washington and that he has this modest idea of the office, but secretly what he's doing is lobbying the Supreme Court for this awful, evil decision. So it's a kind of fake modesty that he's presenting, while at the same time he's using the power of the office to try to really decide the question of the enslavement of other human beings by spreading it nationally.
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You write that Buchanan considers slavery a great political and a great moral evil. What does that mean?
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Buchanan, on the one hand, is at least proclaiming that there's a moral evil of slavery. And, you know, he knows it's not good for the country. But in the end, what he decides, I think, is that the real evil is the division over slavery. And that's the worst thing about it. And so the way he tries to End it essentially is by becoming one of the most, if not the most pro slavery president in the United States history.
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How did he impact the Supreme Court's decision about Dred Scott?
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He's sending, I would say more than signals, letters to one of the justices who he knew before and really saying, I favor the most extreme decision in the Dred Scott case. The decision could have been decided in a very narrow way that didn't have an impact on the nation. But he's really urging an extreme decision, which is to say that Congress should not have the right to abolish slavery in new territories and new states and that instead we should say that because black Americans are not citizens under the federal Constitution, there is essentially a property, right to national property, right to own other people. So that's his solution that he, you know, usually he blamehe does and did succeed in blaming the court for the Dred Scott decision. We still blame the court and I'm trying to say no, behind the scenes something very different was going on. And we know that from contemporary politics that the court really isn't operating on its own. And here we have the evidence that he was secretly conspiring for this evil decision, pushing it.
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Andrew Johnson, I think a lot of people know about Andrew Johnson, but basically he wanted to keep the south happy after the Civil War, we'll put it that way. What in the Constitution said keep the south happy? What was it about the Constitution that he could interpret that?
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Yeah, I think in Johnson's case it's partly this theme of security. And that's the running theme that I care about security. And that's the job of the President. And that of course leads to authoritarianism around the world and it's led to it in the United States. But I do think he was a true racist, a true white supremacist in the case of Johnson, unlike Buchanan, and saw himself as not going to bring us back to a point where enslavement was a legal institution. But he wanted a country that was first, second class citizens. And you know, Frederick Douglass at first, who in each of these clusters, it's the citizens who fight back. In that first cluster, as talked about, it's the newspaper editors who use their own trials to put President Adams on trial. And in this case it's really the hero of that second cluster is Frederick Douglass, who pushes back against Buchanan, has some progress with Lincoln, who he meets with and persuades to move closer to his view, a view of equal citizenship for all people regardless of race. And when it comes to Johnson he trusts that maybe Johnson will be on board, that he can persuade him too. And what he learns from a meeting and he leaks the deal details Douglass brilliantly. So we all know what happened is that this president is both egotistical, he talks about himself as Moses, Andrew Johnson. And really when Douglass pushes the idea that black people to defend themselves need a right to vote, he sees the white supremacy in clear form and lets the rest of us know about it. So it's not just that he's devoted to stability, it's that he is a truly devoted to the warp morality of white supremacists.
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I'm going to read you a piece from an op ed that was in the Times called what Woodrow Wilson Cost My Father. It was written by Gordon Davis. He wrote by 1908 he was earning a considerable salary, my grandfather, for an African American of $14,000 a year. But only months after Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as president in 1913, my grandfather was demoted. He was shuttled from department to department in various menial jobs and eventually became a messenger in the War Department where he made only $720. By April 1914, the family farm was auctioned off. John Davis, a self made black man of achievement and stature in his community at the turn of the 20th century, was by the end of Wilson's term, a broken man. He died in 1928. What did Woodrow Wilson do that would affect so many black Americans? And beyond that, black generational wealth?
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Great. It's well known and this hotbed does beautiful job of bringing this out, that he resegregated the federal government while pretending not to do it, but he secretly did that. It's also well known, of course, that he showed Birth of a Nation, a film, horrendous film celebrating the Ku Klux Klan and the White House. But what the book shows is that he was so much worse than even we've known because it was really a philosophy of white supremacy combined with an idea of an increasing power of the national government. And really he was the original white nationalists in this country. The white supremacy of Johnson, for instance, had largely been about the right of states. And now what you get with Wilson is this nationalization. I went into the archives in Princeton and found his lecture notes from his students. And you see how deep this philosophy is. They hadn't been looked at, but they wrote down what he said and some of them are in these leather bound books. And what he says is that the most important thing in our Constitution is about the President as a leader in charge of a nationally Efficient government. And the most inefficient thing there is is what he called friction. Now, what was going to cause friction? Integration. And so segregation nationally turns out to be the key to the growth of an efficient national government. In terms of Birth of a Nation, what I show is I go back to his textbook. He was a writer, of course, and a professor and a president of Princeton and wrote a pretty popular textbook. And when you read it, you see the scenes in Birth of a Nation. That's not a coincidence. He knew the author of the Klansmen that Birth of a Nation is based on from Hopkins, where Wilson did his PhD and really there are scenes taken in the Klansmen and in Birth of a Nation almost directly out of the textbook. What Wilson says about the Klan, like the film, is that the Klan was a kind of necessary evil. Like, yeah, they were bad, but they were necessary for efficiency, for stability. And he really spreads that idea in his speeches. For instance, in the midst of what becomes the worst racial, some of the worst racial violence. Violence, Red summer, he's stoking that violence by talking about the danger of disloyal or hyphenated Americans. And the same way these other presidents are called out, we're not just realizing this now. I talk about how Ida B. Wells and William Monroe Trotter called them out at that moment.
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Nixon thought the rules of private citizens did not pertain to him. When you thought about this, the case of Nixon, it was obvious what was done. What was less obvious about his opinion.
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Of the Constitution, both how vast the crimes were? I talk about his plot, for instance, to blow up a safe at the Brookings Institution. When he said, oh, if they have documents, and he thought they had documents showing his secret dealings with the Viet Cong to try to prolong the war before he was president, he thought they might have those documents. And Henry Kirzinger says to him, well, why don't we get them through legal means? He says, no, I want it done on a thievery basis. I interviewed Daniel Ellsberg shortly before his death for the book. And Ellsberg talks about the plot to murder him on the Capitol steps, which was being investigated by prosecutors before the pardon. So part of it is how vast it was. But it was also the ideas of Nixon that when Nixon said, famously in an interview that when the president does it, it's not illegal, that was not a mistake. He had a thought out idea that America was in a civil war with protesters, Vietnam protesters, in particular. Daniel Ellsberg, who he considered enemy number one and that war, like Adams, gave him the ability to really use what would otherwise be criminal methods. And that for the president it was legal to do it.
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Why would Nixon have been so bold?
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He thought he could get away with it. He really did think that he was empowered by the Constitution. And he saw Ellsberg as such a threat and really was focused on this one person that he said, we need our own Ellsberg, that this is the only way that we could save the country. So again, we come back to the beginning. This idea of stability the nation requires me obligates me. He thought it was a matter of duty to shut down the opposition with these vast crimes. And of course, unlike the other instances, Ellsberg and the members I talk about of grand jury one, including a postal clerk, a legal secretary, tried to indict that president. Unlike in the other clusters, we really never recovered from the Nixon presidency. We're still in the midst of his crimes and his lack of accountability. And I warn about the immunity of a sitting president. And of course, that's only gotten worse with the recent decision saying that even former presidents are immune. So part of the book is a call to action, that these past figures aren't just heroes. They should be examples to us now in trying to recover our democracy and our Constitution.
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It seems like in the book, there's the overreaching by a leader and then people who say, hey, not so fast. And that may not be an accident. That may actually be written into the Constitution, into the design of the constitution. How so? And does it mean it's going to happen again and again?
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It's a great question. I mean, I think the framers really thought there were formal checks that would work. You'd have a court that would enforce the Constitution against a president who went wrong. And you'd had impeachment against a really bad president. That's part of what that Washington is referring to in that second inaugural. But the thing that worked, I think, is something very different. It's we the people, through elections, through popular organizing, reclaiming our democratic Constitution. And we can, on the one hand, have hope and take solace in the newspaper editors who fought back against Adams, in Douglas, who I've mentioned repeatedly, who fought back against Buchanan and Johnson, and in William Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells and Sadie Alexander who fought against 20th century white supremacy. But it's not inevitable. I think that's what I'd want to emphasize. That's the point of the book, that we have not recovered from Nixon, Ellsberg, the members of this grand jury didn't succeed in indicting that president. He stepped down, but he was never prosecuted. And so it's not inevitable. It's really up to us as we the people to take inspiration, to see the possibilities and the hope. But we also might fail. And that's also the lesson of the book, that that warning that I began with of Patrick Henry, revolutionary hero who thought about the danger of the presidency, we might fail and democracy might collapse if we don't take seriously the example of these previous heroes.
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That was my conversation with author Cory Brettschneider about his new book, the President and the Five Leaders who Threaten Democracy and the Citizens who Fought to Defend It. And that is all of it for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time. Time NYC now delivers breaking news, top headlines and in depth coverage from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday and evening. By sponsoring our programming, you'll reach a community of passionate listeners in an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship wnyc. Org to learn more.