November 22, 2007
Lincoln’s Plan to Battle the Electoral College IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:55 AM EST It would be interesting to contemplate what would have happened in 1860, had the scheme mentioned by Julie Fenster really happened, in which states agreed to award their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, rather than the popular vote winner in that particular state. (By the way, I have my constitutional doubts about this idea. It seems to me it would be “an Agreement or Compact with another State,” therefore requiring the consent of Congress under Article I, Section 10, a consent that would be very difficult to get through the Senate at the least.). As I understand the idea, since Lincoln won the popular vote, the Southern states would, under this agreement, have had to cast their electoral votes for Lincoln. Of course, they would have done no such thing, and the agreement would have broken down instantly. One of the great strengths of the Electoral College is that it has usually produced a clear winner, even when no one had a majority of the popular vote, giving that winner much needed legitimacy. Besides Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and Bill Clinton in both 1992 and 1996 failed to win a majority of the popular vote. But in all cases their right to the office was unchallenged. Only when the election was extremely close and charges of irregularities abounded, such as in 1876 and in 2000, has the legitimizing function of the Electoral College to some extent failed. I favor keeping the Electoral College as it is for numerous other reasons. They are best expressed by Alexander Bickel in a magisterial essay in his book Reform and Continuity. It’s long out of print, but any library that doesn’t have a copy can get one through interlibrary loan. It is well worth the time of anyone whose mind is not beyond the reach of reason on the subject. In this most democratic of countries, it is always hard to argue against anything that can be portrayed as “undemocratic,” because, the logic goes, since democracy is good, anything that is undemocratic must be bad. But as with anything else that is good, from candy to exercise to alcohol to sleep to butterfat to aspirin, there can be too much of a good thing. Many states still suffer from the excesses of Jacksonian democracy (the election of judges, for instance). One can make a very strong case that the reforms in 1975 that got rid of the undemocratic seniority system in Congress produced not superior democracy but an out-of-control spending machine building bridges to nowhere and tea-cozy museums. Then of course, there is the filibuster in the Senate, which effectively requires an extra-constitutional supermajority of 60 votes to get anything done there. Personally I have no problem with it in legislative cases. The point of the Senate, as Thomas Jefferson put it, was to function as the saucer in which to cool the coffee, by curbing the majoritarian passions of the House. The filibuster is a means of forcing the majority to compromise with the minority. (In cases of confirming presidential nominations, however, no compromise is possible, so no filibuster should be allowed. The Senate, not a minority of it, should give or withhold advice and consent.) It might be noted, of course, that one’s opinion on such matters as the Electoral College, election of judges, the seniority system, and the filibuster often depends on whose ox is being gored at the moment. I doubt the left would be so up in arms about the Electoral College these days had George Bush won the popular vote and Al Gore the College in 2000. They would instead be defending the astonishing political wisdom of the Founding Fathers, not trying to outwit them. (Good luck in that enterprise, by the way. They’re not an easy bunch to outwit.) As a classic example of this, I offer my favorite whipping boy, the editorial board of The New York Times. If you oppose the filibuster in the Senate as an unconscionable affront to democracy and majority rule, you will like this editorial of May 11, 1993, when there was a Democratic President and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. If, however, you favor the filibuster as one of the indispensable checks and balances that keeps tyranny at bay, you will like this editorial this editorial of November 28, 2004, when there was a Republican President and Republican majorities in both houses.
November 21, 2007
Lincoln’s Plan to Battle the Electoral College III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:35 PM EST John Steele Gordon wonders what would have happened had the Electoral College not awarded Lincoln the Presidency in 1860, when the man who became our greatest President secured only around 40 percent of the popular vote but 60 percent of the electoral vote. Mr. Gordon points out that had the electoral vote for one reason or another reflected the 1860 popular vote but the Constitution’s mechanisms otherwise remained the same, the election would have been decided in the House. Mr. Gordon notes that “with each state getting one vote in the House, I very much doubt that Lincoln would have emerged the victor. Instead, Douglas would have led us through the nation’s greatest crisis (unless, of course, he managed to prevent secession altogether).” He then asks, “So would there be today a Douglas Memorial at the western end of the Mall in Washington? We’ll never know. But Douglas died in June 1861 (of typhoid fever, but he apparently was also suffering from throat cancer, which would have killed him soon enough), barely three months into the presidential term. So Herschel Johnson, former governor of, ummmm, Georgia, his vice-presidential running mate, would have probably inherited the White House, unless the Senate had chosen Lincoln’s running mate, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, which is highly unlikely.” This is an interesting counterfactual. Had Douglas become President the South might not have seceded, but if it had, there is no good reason to assume that Douglas would not have fought to crush the rebellion; in the last months of his life, he supported the Union with great passion. On the other hand, what does seem unlikely is that Douglas would have emancipated the slaves in the states in rebellion, as Lincoln did in 1862. It took Lincoln a long time to get there, and Douglas seems unlikely to have ever made it. He was profoundly deaf, dumb, and blind to the viciousness of slavery, and as late as Christmas 1860 he sought to head off secession by proposing the invasion and annexation of Mexico, to create another and vast slave state as a bribe to the South (Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829, and for my money Douglas’s proposal was on the approximate moral level of the Nazi invasion of Poland). Douglas might well have lost the war had he fought it; without Emancipation, it is possible to imagine decisive British and French intervention. Douglas might have secured the Union at the price of slavery, or at least tried, and succeeded for at least four years, maybe for eight, perhaps long enough for rebel trenches to be bolstered by barbed wire and defended with Gatling guns. The Electoral College is in some obvious respects an anti-democratic mechanism. So is the Supreme Court, at least after the innovation of judicial review of legislation, and so is the Federal Reserve system—all work to thwart the swiftest possible victory of majorities. I would not mourn the abolition of the Electoral College and the direct election of the President, but my guess is that Mr. Gordon is suggesting that people who detest all barriers to immediate majoritarian politics should think hard about precisely what they are wishing for.
November 21, 2007
Lincoln’s Plan to Battle the Electoral College II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:05 PM EST Julie Fenster’s post is very interesting. I had no idea that Lincoln invented political junk mail. But I can’t help wondering if Lincoln, four years later, changed his opinion regarding the Electoral College. In 1860 he won only 39.89 percent of the popular vote but carried 18 states and won 180 electoral votes, 59.4 percent of the total, making him the undisputed President. Had the Founding Fathers been “outwitted,” and electoral votes allocated according to the popular vote, the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives. There Lincoln would have had to battle it out with Senator Stephen Douglas, who had the second highest popular vote total (but, curiously, the lowest electoral vote total). With each state getting one vote in the House, I very much doubt that Lincoln would have emerged the victor. Instead, Douglas would have led us through the nation’s greatest crisis (unless, of course, he managed to prevent secession altogether). So would there be today a Douglas Memorial at the western end of the Mall in Washington? We’ll never know. But Douglas died in June 1861 (of typhoid fever, but he apparently was also suffering from throat cancer, which would have killed him soon enough), barely three months into the presidential term. So Herschel Johnson, former governor of, ummmm, Georgia, his vice-presidential running mate, would have probably inherited the White House, unless the Senate had chosen Lincoln’s running mate, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, which is highly unlikely. So would there now be a Johnson Memorial? My guess is no. He opposed Georgia’s secession but acquiesced in it and served in the Confederate senate. After the war he was disbarred from sitting in the U.S. Senate. So in at least one instance it is surely a good thing that the Founding Fathers weren’t “outwitted.” This seems to me a good example of why we should be careful what we wish for.
November 21, 2007
Lincoln’s Plan to Battle the Electoral College Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 10:40 AM EST “This is as plain as adding up the weights of three small hogs.”
With the offhand manner of the truly ardent salesman, Abraham Lincoln tried every trick he knew to convince opposition voters in 1856 that the Electoral College was a trap, that it would lead people into “throwing their votes away,” in his words, and that, in short, if they really wanted their man to be President, they would support his man.
It was as plain to Lincoln as adding up the weights of pigs.
The distorting influence of the Electoral College is just as obvious 151 years later, with 42 states actively considering changes to their system of presidential voting.
Lincoln gave the subject of electoral voting a great deal of thought. Perhaps too much. In the drive to make people understand, he grew desperate. He stooped low: He invented junk mail. (It is one of the more shocking revelations I was forced to make in my book The Case of Abraham Lincoln.)
In Illinois, at any rate, junk mail had never been seen before—a printed letter carefully disguised as a handwritten one and distributed in bulk to unsuspecting voters. The subject was the electoral outlook, and the theme was that either people played the system’s game or risked wasting their votes.
“Be not deceived,” Lincoln exhorted each recipient. (They already were—if they believed they were holding a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln.)
The people who received the form letter ought to have heeded the message anyway. Lincoln cared passionately about the three-way campaign for the White House, it being the battle that succeeded in drawing him into the Republican Party.
He decided that the most cunning strategy against the electoral college was to take advantage its very essence, proxy voting. To salvage hope for the other candidates, the election in Illinois had to mean something, its electoral votes had to be up for grabs.
States such as New York and Texas haven’t known that sensation in years. In 1856 Illinois wasn’t any different. James Buchanan seemed to have it sewn up.
Most people, then or now, groused a little and then went through the motions of casting a vote in a state with a foregone conclusion.
Lincoln was different. A man comforted by logic, he was actively annoyed by the Electoral College. His plan in the three-way race of Buchanan, Frémont, and Fillmore was typical of his objective thinking.
“Fremont and Fillmore men,” Lincoln wrote, “unite on one entire ticket, with the understanding that that ticket, if elected, shall cast the vote of the State, for whichever of the two shall be known to have received the larger number of electoral votes, in the other states.” It may not have taken hold, but it was incisive.
The kind of frustrations that Lincoln felt toward the Electoral College during the campaign haven’t faded, nor has the spirit behind his solution. A plan circulating in state legislatures today, and already passed in Maryland, echoes the Lincoln scheme. When states representing at least 270 electoral votes adopt the same law, each will be pledged to give its entire electoral vote to the candidate winning the popular vote nationally. The bill does require a leap of faith in the belief that the majority should rule—a concept known in the past as democracy.
Neither Lincoln’s plan nor the one currently under discussion dallies with the mere abolition of the Electoral College. They each endeavor instead to outwit it, as it has outwitted voters, as well as some very good candidates, ever since its inception.
November 20, 2007
Who Was the Real Buffalo Bill Cody? An Interview with Robert E. Bonner (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 01:30 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. How did Buffalo Bill get along in his declining years? And why has the memory of his colossal business failures been erased from our national memory? Assuming his declining years would be his sixties (he died just before his seventy-first birthday), we are talking about 1906 to 1917. In Wyoming those were not especially hard years. He did suffer the final loss of all his development prospects and had to endure the ignominy of being sued by everyone who farmed under the Cody Canal, but he probably did not lose any more money. His show continued to bring in reasonably good money until 1912, but he got involved in a gold mine in Arizona where an unscrupulous partner bilked him of just about every dollar he earned. In 1913 he fell prey to Henry Tammen, publisher of the Denver Post, who broke up his show and took Cody into a kind of debt peonage that had him riding into arenas every summer for the rest of his life, no matter how sick or exhausted he became. He came back to Cody every winter and enjoyed his time in town and at the ranch. The town would hold big parties for him whenever he returned, but he had very little to do with its growing or running. Sometime after 1910 his wife, Louisa, returned to him and lived with him when he was in Cody. She also, as I pointed out in the book, became the owner of his ranch and the Irma Hotel, to protect them from being seized for debt. There were occasional bursts of the old energy, and he was never living in actual poverty, but he was obviously fading out. As for the second question, I am not sure the national consciousness ever grasped how seriously he had failed as an entrepreneur. He continued to advertise the town of Cody in the Wild West and promote Yellowstone tourism. He kept his face before the public, and by that time he had built such a triumphal myth around himself that there was probably little room for people in general to attach any idea of these failures to his familiar form on horseback. He had made a place for himself in a comfortable version of American history. Nobody wanted to have their visions of him complicated by facts that might have pointed elsewhere. Our modern-day experience of Ronald Reagan might be somewhat similar. In your conclusion you write that Cody was “a complex and conflicted man, one who failed to realize his imperial ambitions in Wyoming but who nevertheless left an enduring mark on the country. His legacy is as complex as his personality.” Who, then, would you say is the real William Cody—the performer and Wild West impresario or the ambitious but failed businessman? If you don’t mind, I will expand the choices a bit, because in my mind he is not finally either of these. Louis Warren (author of Buffalo Bill’s America) thought that the real Buffalo Bill was the performer, and given the point and scope of his book, that makes sense. He was also, on the strength of my own research, an ambitious but failed capitalist. I came to think in the course of my work, however, that he was most himself when he was out hunting, or taking other people out hunting, in the mountains above his ranch or along the eastern border of Yellowstone Park. The life of the performer, while he wore it well as a young man, came increasingly to drag him down. His venture into the world of business and development seemed to have chastened him. His hunting trips were refuges from those things, where he could turn his mind back to his youth and happier times. They also showed him (and others) that there was money to be made in tourism, particularly tourism based on hunting and the outdoor life of those up-country ranches. I think tourism as Cody saw it was continuous with his Wild West shows, in that it was presenting to people from the East a packaged vision of life in the West. The venue had shifted from Eastern arenas to Western ranches, but the goal was the same. I think I would say that the real Bill Cody was the genial host who presided over the meeting of East and West.
November 20, 2007
Who Was the Real Buffalo Bill Cody? An Interview with Robert E. Bonner (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 11:55 AM EST The trail blazed by William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody has been traveled by so many biographers, historians, and debunkers that there wouldn’t seem to be anything new signposts on it. Robert E. Bonner’s William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows (University of Oklahoma Press, 318 pages, $32.95) examines an important part of the Buffalo Bill story that has been virtually forgotten, Cody’s attempt at becoming a Western land developer and town promoter in Wyoming. Bonner, a professor of history emeritus at Carleton College, answered these questions for us from his home in Northfield, Minnesota. The interview is appearing in two parts It would be hard to find a figure of the frontier west more mythologized than William F. Cody. There have been several books on him this decade alone, including Joy S. Casson’s Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Larry McMurtry’s The Colonel and Little Missie. What’s the essential difference between William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire and those books? The first and most fundamental difference is that both Kasson and McMurtry look at Buffalo Bill through the lens of the Wild West show. Both of them are concerned with his self-creation through that medium and—Kasson to a greater extent than McMurtry—the effect his celebrity had on ideas of the West and American history in general. I have tried, insofar as it is possible, to keep the Wild West out of my account. Obviously the show was the source of most of the money that went into Cody’s Wyoming ventures, and his need to appear every summer in arenas away from Wyoming affected the way he did or did not attend to business there, but I am not concerned with what he did in the Wild West, and they are. The fact that he was a great celebrity I take as given, and I attempt to understand how that celebrity played out in his enterprises in Wyoming. McMurtry appears not to be interested at all in what Bill Cody did when he was not the star of the Wild West. He mentions some of the things Cody did in Wyoming more or less in passing, but it is the show and the relationship with Annie Oakley that occupy most of his time. He locates Buffalo Bill’s Wyoming life entirely in Sheridan, where he spent one or two off seasons before the Cody venture got going, and more or less ignores his work around the town of Cody. Kasson is not especially interested in his work in Wyoming either. Both of them have interesting things to say about Cody as a celebrity guide and hunter, but mostly as a young man prior to the Wild West. I have chosen to concentrate on his work in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin, because it is there that we can see the man off his horse and on the ground, working (or not working) with other men to build something more substantial than an entertainment. How did Cody use his fame from the Wild West shows to promote his business interests? Was he shy about his own celebrity? In the first instance, he used his celebrity to horn in on the big irrigation project that George Beck and Horace Alger, two Sheridan businessmen, were planning. As Beck said later, Cody came to them and asked to join in, and, as they knew he was the “best advertised man in the world,” they not only let him in, they made him president of the company. Celebrity was perhaps more to the fore in his dealings with officials of the government of the state of Wyoming. He presented to them the prospect of having their state advertised across the nation by the most popular man in America, and they went out of their way to accommodate him. Cody patronized Elwood Mead, the state engineer, to smooth the way not only for the Cody Canal but for several other projects he conceived. Mead was not quite an errand boy for Buffalo Bill, but he took care of just about anything Cody wanted, and he ultimately certified the Cody Canal as completed when it would not reliably hold water, because he had hitched his wagon to Cody’s star. Cody employed his small army of press agents to fill newspapers in Wyoming with glowing descriptions of his plans for the Big Horn Basin. He dropped the names of Theodore Roosevelt and General Nelson Miles whenever he had a chance, to remind governors and others just who they were dealing with. He was never shy about reminding people in Wyoming how well-connected he was in the East. He was so full of himself that he identified the state’s interests with his own, and important state officers came to accept this identification. You write that “William Cody, addicted to the spotlight, seemed to choose undertakings with at least one eye on reputation. He also attempted to use the weight of the reputation he had earned in the Wild West arena to swing money and authority his way in economic transactions in Wyoming. He had convinced himself of the truth of his ‘frontier imposture’ and built fame and fortune on it.” Did Cody really see himself as on a par with the great capitalist businessmen and political leaders of his era, or was he simply a confidence artist on a colossal scale? I don’t believe he thought for a minute he was in the same league with Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frick, or those guys. He did rub shoulders with wealthy capitalists of somewhat lesser rank in clubs in New York like the Rocky Mountain Club, and he cultivated relationships with people like George Perkins of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. He made personal calls on Presidents Cleveland and Roosevelt, and hosted Generals Nelson Miles and Leonard Wood in Wyoming. I think he thought he belonged in the company of wealthy men and political leaders on terms other than those of a visiting showman, and he expected his undertakings in Wyoming to gain him that status. Unfortunately, the tools he found at hand for this job were the tools of show business, and as a result he became vulnerable to the charge that he was only a large-scale con artist. I developed the term “capitalist imposture” as a more polite way of pointing to that. The entire story of his second land development in the Big Horn Basin, the Cody-Salsbury project, reveals this most painfully, but the cold-eyed observations of the Burlington’s men in the field regarding the conduct and prospects of the Shoshone Irrigation Company on the Cody Canal show how real businessmen regarded him. This interview concludes here.
November 19, 2007
I’d Rather Be Wrong Than Corrected Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 05:10 PM EST I am drawn to the work of Charles and Ray Eames, which astonishes me, actually, because they were designing furniture in the modern days of the mid–twentieth century and I generally place the cutoff date for worthwhile furniture at about 1802. I often remark, in fact, upon the fact that Federal furniture seems completely at home with an Eames lounge chair—and when I often remark upon that fact, I know enough to pronounce the name Ames chair. In the chatter of antique-furniture collectors, I have never heard it otherwise. Last week, I watched a documentary about the Eameses’ California house, with narration by their grandson. He, however, pronounced the name Eems. If history conspires on an untruth, it has to be corrected, of course. And with ferocity. But, more specifically, if I run around referring to Eeeems chairs, I will look unlettered and uncouth, until someone nearby takes pity and nudges a little Ames into the conversation. I think I’ll stick with Ames. But then, one day, some super sophisticate will pronounce it Eeeeeems in my presence, sophisticates tending to drawl, and I will be the dumbbell trying to explain that I knew how to pronounce—but—too lazy—why bother—funny isn’t it? I’m going back to Federal furniture, and this time, for good.
November 18, 2007
The Fair Tax Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:15 PM EST Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and current Republican presidential candidate, was on Fox News Sunday this morning. According to two polls, he is suddenly a contender in Iowa, despite having spent only a tiny fraction of what Mitt Romney has spent there. He is now running an amusing ad. One of his signature issues is the “fair tax.” For a short run down on its provisions see here. Basically, it junks the federal income tax, social security tax, corporate income taxes, gift taxes, estate taxes, self-employment taxes, etc., and replaces them all with a retail sales tax of 23 percent on goods and services. Because sales taxes are inescapably regressive (i.e., they impact the poor more than the affluent, because the poor, by definition, spend most of their income on necessities while the rich bank most of their income), the fair tax would rebate monthly to everyone 23 percent of poverty-level income. I have not, by any manner of means, looked at the fair tax proposal in depth. But almost anything that would replace the current income tax would have to be an improvement. The federal income tax code, as originally passed in 1913, was only 14 pages long. Today, 94 years later, it is tens of thousands of pages long and quite literally nobody really knows all of what is in it. After the original tax was passed, the rich—the only people who had to pay it in 1913—naturally looked for ways around it, and their well-paid lawyers and accountants quickly found “loopholes” to allow them to do so. Ever since, the government and the lawyers and accountants have been engaged in an evolutionary arms race: Lawyers find loopholes, Congress either plugs them or, just as often, regulates them, leading the lawyers to find new loopholes, and so on ad infinitum. Worse, Congress regularly passes out goodies in the form of amendments to the tax code that benefit only a favored few and often only a single individual. In recent years the tax code has been amended at a rate of about 4,000 times a year. This allows members of Congress to sock it to the rich—-”these people must pay their fair share!”—in public, while quietly letting them off the hook in private. As a result, the so-called progressivity of the tax code is an utter sham. The poor don’t pay incomes taxes, and neither do the rich, who shelter their incomes in trusts, corporations, and a thousand fiddles. It is the middle class, those dependent on a regular salary, that get socked. Warren Buffett has said he pays a lower tax rate than most people who work in his office. Teresa Heinz Kerry, the very rich wife of Sen. John Kerry, reported during her husband’s 2004 presidential campaign that her income was over $5 million but her taxes were only about $600,000, or 12 percent. I don’t know about others, but my income, at least, was a lot lower and my tax rate a lot higher. The fair tax certainly has great advantages. The IRS would go out of business. The vast underground economy would no longer escape taxation, because the earners of that unreported and sometimes illegal income would get taxed when they spend it instead of when they earn it. The huge compliance costs of the current system, for both corporations and individuals, would disappear, going into their respective pockets to be spent (and taxed) or saved (and not taxed). Prices would decline as the passed-along costs of the corporate income tax and payroll taxes were taken out. It would encourage savings and discourage consumption. It would, to be sure, not be nearly as apparently progressive as the current income tax. But it would be even more progressive in fact, which is what should count, even for ideologues. Who would be hurt? Tax lawyers would be hurt badly, and tax accountants would be devastated. Tax bureaucrats would be out of a job. So would tens of thousands of Washington lobbyists. And members of Congress would be hurt in two ways. First, they would no longer be able to hand out dark-of-night tax fiddles to the well-heeled. Worse, they would no longer be able to play the game of “Don’t tax you and don’t tax me/ Tax the man behind the tree.” They could still raise or lower taxes, but only for everyone. Taxation for reasons other than raising revenue would be much more difficult. Social engineering via the tax code would be, effectively, impossible. Such idiocies as an estate tax that has been declining for years and will disappear entirely in 2010, only to arise, like the phoenix from the ashes of its own cremation, in 2011 at the original rate would vanish. If Mike Huckabee should win in Iowa in early January, or even come close, the major issue of the 2008 election might very well not be Iraq. It might be taxes. The Democrats wouldn’t like that one little bit.
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