This review appears in the September
2008 issue of The American Spectator.
To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click
here.
Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and
America
By Walter R.
Borneman
(Random House, 422 pages, $30)
That’s “Polk” as in James K. Polk, if you please, 11th president
of the United States, long one of our more underrated chief
executives and also — full disclosure — a several times great
uncle of the present reviewer. Ahem….
In celebrating Uncle James over the generations since his death
in 1849, we diversely surnamed members of the clan like to affirm
the historical consensus. That consensus touts, first, Polk’s
extraordinary success in dispatching the business he outlined to
the nation before taking office; second, his principled refusal
to accept the second term he could easily have had. After which
refusal he receded from view — an example too little imitated in
our time. (Does any president of the 1990s come to mind as a
counter-example?)
As to “transforming” the presidency and the nation — well, it
probably depends on how you define transformation. That Polk was
a focused and aggressive chief executive no one could deny. By
pursuing with steady determination the goal of pushing the United
States to the Pacific, in fulfillment of the country’s “Manifest
Destiny,” he set us up for a greatness greater than any of his
predecessors had contemplated.
Merely bringing in California set us up for Los Angeles,
Haight-Ashbury, the Beach Boys, and, on a more cheerful note,
Ronald Reagan. The nation swelled by a million square miles in
consequence of the war that Polk waged with Mexico. Nor is that
taking into account the Oregon Territory, which he peacefully
gained through staring down the British and procuring peaceful
division of a territory the two countries had jointly
administered. It wasn’t taking Texas into account either. The
Lone Star State entered the Union partly on Polk’s watch, partly
on that of his predecessor, John Tyler.
So much land gobbled down in so short a time requires some
digestive faculties on the part of the nation doing the gobbling.
Even as Polk, in 1849, packed to leave Washington, D.C., tensions
over slavery were becoming ominous. Just a dozen years ahead lay
Fort Sumter.
WALTER BORNEMAN, author of several books on American history, and
head of a foundation that funds postdoctoral fellowships in
children’s health, in this readable and generally first-rate book
makes the standard case for Polk’s executive skills. As
historians began acknowledging a few decades ago, those skills
were of a high order indeed, due to personal discipline and rare
powers of concentration.
The office of president, even if he held it only four years,
exhausted and depleted Polk, who gave to the job everything he
had. Cholera apparently claimed him at age 53, a mere 103 days
after he quit office. Borneman says — I think correctly —
that Uncle James was “the most decisive chief executive prior to
the Civil War;” further, that he greatly expanded the office’s
powers.
His had been a large opportunity from the start, one he seized
with energy. There wasn’t the least chance in 1844, the year of
his election (following a congressional career that included the
speakership) that Americans’ pulsating energies would fail to
spill over into Mexico’s hardly inhabited territories east of the
Pacific and west of Texas.
Still, it was Polk’s way to push, and to insist. Like a
celebrated fellow Tennessean, Davy Crockett, he believed himself
right. Believing thus, he went ahead. It was the 19th century
spirit. Less delicacy was abroad in society concerning the
effects of actions clearly in the general if not the particular
interest. A few decades after Polk, the learned Master of Balliol
College, Oxford, and translator of Plato, Benjamin Jowett, would
give the matter a fine categorical twist: “Never retract. Never
explain. Get it done and let them howl..”
Polk got it done. He had promised that inside one term of
office — that was all he wanted and all he said he would
accept — he would assert American title to Oregon; he would
bring Texas finally into the Union; he would acquire California;
he would reduce the tariff; and he would provide for an
independent treasury. Wondrous to say, he did it all. There was
some howling: not enough to deflect the president from his chosen
course.
FEW IF ANY PRESIDENTIAL biographies come to us any more
unfreighted with parallels, spoken or silent, to the present
fractious and uncertain state of American politics. Nor does
Borneman’s book come thus unequipped. From Polk’s hands-on policy
toward Mexico we catch inflections of the 43rd president’s
undeflectable determination to oust Saddam Hussein and
democratize Iraq.
“Despite the near unanimity of the congressional vote to declare
war,” Borneman relates, accurately enough, “a good part of the
country was skeptical of — if not outright hostile to — the
Polk administration’s war program.” For one thing, the
administration seemed to have set up the confrontation by
belligerently challenging Mexico’s claim to that portion of Texas
between the Rio Grande and Nueces rivers. Polk sent Gen. Zachary
Taylor to occupy the contested area. When Mexican troops pounced
on a small American force, Polk was able to argue that Mexico had
“invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American
soil.” A Boston newspaper called the conflict “Mr. Polk’s War.”
Ummm-hmmm. Then there was Polk’s customary undauntedness in
meeting opposition to policies he had made up his mind to advance
or thwart. Further, “Many congressmen in both parties voted
appropriations to fund the call-up in troops but did not support
the war itself.” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même
chose. Or something.
Unlike the 43rd president when in domestic-policy mode, Polk
invited confrontation with Congress over matters of principle. He
vigorously vetoed a spending bill — the Rivers and Harbors Bill
— that he saw as a mass of unconstitutional pork. He warned
against “large and annually increasing appropriations and drains
upon the Treasury,” accompanied by local demands for equal
treatment in the dispersal of public booty.
Borneman, to his credit, writes straightforward prose, no
partisan varnish laid on, the composition as a whole sullied
chiefly by the unconscious appropriation of decidedly
post-Polkian locutions: e.g., “loose cannons like Nicholas
Trist,” “the document that would impact almost a third of the
future continental United States,” “The Tennessee Whigs were
quick to spin Van Buren’s recent message to their advantage.” The
age of crinoline and broadcloth knew not “spin.”
Jacksonian disciple though he was, and anointed heir to Old
Hickory himself, the sternly moral and non-effusive Polk stayed
true to his interior standards. There would be no demagoguing ,
no playing the crowd for whatever could be got out of it. It was
enough that he knew in his own mind the right thing to do, with
some accompanying sense of how to get the thing done well.
AN UNFAMILIAR flavor can fill the mouth of an American reader of
Borneman — the flavor of success. We win! Goals, during the Polk
administration, get set and met. The United States, in pursuit of
objectives that to many moderns would seem prideful or arrogant,
strides onto the stage, ready for action. It expands its borders,
opens new lands to exploration and development. A United States
shorn of its western portion due to political timidity would be a
different place from the nation that took shape under James K.
Polk.
In him, for all that, patriotism and personal confidence rubbed
elbows with an almost paradoxical humility. He would write, on
the final birthday of his life, “Upon each recurrence of my
birthday, I am solemnly impressed with the vanity and emptiness
of worldly honors and worldly enjoyments, and of the wisdom of
preparing for a future estate.”
Always a few stray movers, shakers, and arrangers of human
affairs share that complex and vital understanding of duty. Never
enough of them; never nearly enough. James K. Polk, as in his own
day, stands out from the herd.
(This review appears in the September
2008 issue of The American Spectator.
To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click
here.)
