Abstract
The reputation of the “Gilded Age,” the years from the end of the Civil War to the century’s end, is dismal. The stereotypes are wrong. Recent work demonstrates that they misrepresent Reconstruction and exaggerate corruption while maligning the period’s presidents (especially Grant), most of whom were strong and able leaders (including Grant). The misinformation began early, coming from reformers who resented leaders who did not recognize their superior wisdom, from former Confederates with axes to grind, and from misreading the works of Woodrow Wilson and Lord Bryce. Theses such as the “modern presidency” and “rhetorical presidency” contributed, making too many scholars too quick to assume that there was a sharp divergence between recent presidents and their predecessors, or that earlier presidents avoided political rhetoric.
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Notes
See, e.g., Ari Hoogenboom, “Civil Service Reform and Public Morality,” in H. Wayne Morgan, ed., The Gilded Age, rev. ed., New York: Syracuse University Press, 1970, pp. 77–95;
H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1969;
and Charles W. Calhoun, From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail: The Transformation of Politics and Governance in the Gilded Age, New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.
Thomas C. Reeves, Gentleman Boss: The Life and Times of Chester Alan Arthur, Newtown, Connecticut: American Political Biography Press, 2013 [1975], p. xv.
Ari Hoogenboom, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988, p. 59.
See Yanek Mieczkowski, The Routledge Historical Atlas of Presidential Elections, New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 32–82.
Michael J. Gerhardt, The Forgotten Presidents: Their Untold Constitutional Legacy, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 114.
Peri Arnold, Remaking the Presidency: Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, 1901–1916, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009, p. ix; one also can applaud Arnold for ending his study of Wilson as a “Progressive icon” in 1916.
Brooks D. Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998, p. 2.
See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the 20th Century, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 445.
Clinton Rossiter, The American Presidency, 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1960, p. 106.
David C. Whitney, The American Presidents, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967, p. 162.
See, e.g., Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents, pp. 67 and 127; see also the seminal work of Douglas Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014.
Justus D. Doenecke, The Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1981, p. xi.
Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents, Rev ed., New York: Free Press, 1991; originally published in 1960, Neustadt’s approach long dominated the study of the presidency.
Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government, A Study in American Politics, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2006 [1885]; available in numerous editions.
John Morton Blum, Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality, Boston: Little Brown, 1956, pp. 17–18.
Roger H. Davidson, “Growth of the ‘Legislative Presidency’,” in James P. Piffner and Roger H. Davidson, eds, Understanding the Presidency, 6th ed., Boston: Longman, 2011, pp. 256–272; quotation on pp. 256–257.
Sidney Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2011, 6th ed., Washington: CQ Press, 2011, chapter 7.
Joseph Pike and Jon Maltese. The Politics of the Presidency, revised 6th ed., Washington: CQ Press, 2006, pp. 3–4.
The Online Library of Liberty has made the 1914 edition of James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth (2 vols., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995) readily available at http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/809. The material cited here is from chapter 8, “Why Great Men Are Not Chosen Presidents, vol. 1 [1888]; retrieved 1 April 2011.
See Joan Waugh, U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009, p. 153.
See the thoughtful assessment of the Monroe presidency in Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and its Aftermath, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Frank J. Scaturro, President Grant Reconsidered, Lanham, Maryland: Madison Books, 1999.
Max J. Skidmore, Presidential Performance: A Comprehensive Review, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2004.
Jeffrey Cohen and David Nice, The Presidency, Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003, p. 118.
Richard M. Pious, The Presidency, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996, pp. 56–57.
James Ceaser, Glen Thurow, Jeffrey Tulis, and Joseph Bessette, “The Rise of the Rhetorical Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 11:2 (Spring 1981), pp. 158–171.
Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
US House of Representatives, “Articles of Impeachment” (March 7, 1868), Andrew Johnson National Historic Site http://www.nps.gov/anjo/historyculture/article-xi.htm; Retrieved February 24, 2014.
Philip Abbott, “Do Presidents Talk Too Much? The Rhetorical Presidency and its Alternative,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 18:2 (Spring 1988), pp. 347–362.
Karen Hoffman, Popular Leadership in the Presidency, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2010, p. 2.
Mel Laracey, Presidents and the People: The Story of Going Public, College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2002; see esp. pp. 4–7.
Calhoun, From Bloody Shirt; see also Charles W. Calhoun’s other works, including most prominently: Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006; Calhoun, ed., The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
William S. McFeely, Grant, New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.
Brooks Simpson, “Butcher? Racist” An Examination of William S. McFeely’s Grant: A Biography, in Civil War History, 33:1 (1987), p. 83 (quoted in Scaturro, President Grant, p. 3).
See, e.g., Betty Medsger, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, New York: Knopf, 2014.
Gene A. Smith, Lee and Grant, New York: Promontory Press, 1984, p. 218.
H. W. Brands, The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace, New York: Doubleday, 2012, p. 2.
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Skidmore, M.J. (2014). Introduction. In: Maligned Presidents: The Late 19th Century. The Evolving American Presidency. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438003_1
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