January 2011

There is, in Woodrow Wikon’s words, “a very holy and very terrible isolation” inherent in the Presidency of the United States. For all his power, indeed because of it, the President leads a singularly circumscribed life. Surrounded by Secret Service agents wherever he goes, his public movements preplanned and often rehearsed, he lives in an insulated, socially antiseptic world, apart from the very people he is called upon to serve.

But such is the nature of his office that no President can be isolated for very long if he hopes to be effective. Somehow he must make himself accessible to his constituents, convincing them that he is in touch and aware of their concerns. The problem is as old as the government, and we offer here a sampling of experience with Presidential accessibility in the past.

The man who paints his own likeness in a sense turns inside out the famous line of Robert Burns. He is given the gift to show others how he sees himself. This is a revelation of no small interest or importance. We see the man as he idealizes, romanticizes, or possibly disguises himself. And we see him in the mirror of his times. Every artist is to some extent a prisoner of the fashion, the aesthetics, and the painting idiom of his age. So in addition to revealing the appearance and personality, the style and technique, of the individual artist, a self-portrait gives us insight into its era and illuminates aspects of America’s social and cultural history with the settings and accouterments that embellish it.

As we approach the bicentennial of the American Revolution we find ourselves in a paradoxical and embarrassing situation. A celebration of some kind certainly seems to be in order, but the urge to celebrate is not exactly overwhelming. Though many will doubtless ascribe this mood to various dispiriting events of the recent past or to an acute public consciousness of present problems, I think this would be a superficial judgment.

The paradoxical and find tragic story of America’s most prominent Loyalist—a man caught between king and country— is the subject of a new book by Professor Bernard Bailyn of Harvard, who won both the Pulitizer and Bankcroft awards in 1868 for an earlier work on the American Revulotion. The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinsion has just been published by Harvard University Press. Our article is made up of excerpts from the first two chapters subtle and fascinating study.

In 1879 Jim McCauley lured his sweetheart onto Overhanging Rock at Glacier Point, California, and threatened to push her off if she didn’t marry him. This rather hardnosed method of popping the question worked, or so McCauley said. His German-born girl had spurned earlier marriage proposals, but this time she quickly promised “I vill, I vill, I vill.” That November the two were married, and together they operated for eighteen years the Mountain House, a two-story tourist stopover that McCauley built near the site. And ever since, that precarious perch—3,2,14 feet above Yosemite Valley—has been the scene of derring-do that would make any lady’s, or man’s, heart skip a beat.

Wars are more often lost than won, but in 1775 a man who predicted British defeat in the Revolution would have been taken for a fool. The mightiest, richest empire since Rome, Great Britain ruled the seas unchallenged; there seemed no limit to the power and resources that could be brought to bear against the uprising across the Atlantic. Yet after seven years of fighting, England withdrew from the contest, yielded up its sovereignty over thirteen American provinces, and left its lonely monarch to contemplate the wreckage of his hopes. “I shall never rest my head on my last pillow in peace and quiet as long as I remember the loss of my American colonies,” George in grieved years after the event.

Although Yorktown came to symbolize the king’s loss, many Englishmen felt that the final disaster had been foreshadowed by the first three years of war—the period between Lexington and Saratoga—and that the responsibility for defeat lay with the two commanders in charge of Britain’s army and navy during most of that crucial time.

Philadelphia’s vast Fairmount Park stretches acre after acre, plateau after ravine, all empty now under the brittle blue of a winter sky. The people that came here in crowds a century ago to celebrate the country’s centennial are hard to imagine, however many faded photographs and woodcut illustrations one has seen of them. The some two hundred Exhibition buildings they massed in front of and wandered through are gone—torn down or changed utterly. A basketball court and swimming pool have been installed in Memorial Hall, the one principal building that remains, and the aura of canvas shoes and chlorine surrounds the marble and the ornate moldings.