Course description

Beginning with the contest between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson for control of national policy, conflicting ambitions and beliefs among key political figures have shaped and also reflected major developments in the history of the United States. This course, taught last spring, examined several such rivalries, including the Hamilton-Jefferson clash; Andrew Jackson versus John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster; Stephen Douglas versus Abraham Lincoln; Theodore Roosevelt versus Woodrow Wilson; Franklin Roosevelt versus Huey Long; and John Kennedy versus Richard Nixon.

Required books

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

(1997)

by Joseph J. Ellis

In framing the Constitution of 1787, the founding generation envisioned a republican form of government based on civility and consensus. Yet less than a decade into this experiment in self-rule, the United States was mired in political discord and partisanship over issues from national finance to foreign policy. The two men who led this descent (or ascent, if you believe in the creative properties of tension) were the Republican Thomas Jefferson and the Federalist Alexander Hamilton. The Virginia lawyer and planter who penned “all men are created equal” and who believed that the individual’s and the country’s “pursuit of happiness” were best carried out in rural surroundings and the New York City lawyer/entrepreneur who held that national glory, power, and security were best fostered by urban and industrial development began a debate over the country’s future that continues today.

Hamilton (left) and Jefferson. Photographs: Library of Congress

Previously when I taught this class, I assigned Ron Chernow’s monumental 800-page Alexander Hamilton (2004). To Chernow, the rivalry with Jefferson is central to the story of Hamilton’s life—and death. Ellis pays less attention to his subject’s archfoe. To him, the crucial battles of Jefferson’s life were largely internal.

American Sphinx is not a conventional biography. It examines five periods of Jefferson’s life—his service in the Continental Congress, his post-Revolutionary ambassadorship to Paris, his temporary political retirement to Monticello, his first term as president, and his final decade—to demonstrate the man’s tendency, in Ellis’s words, “to play hide-and-seek within himself.” This great champion of unalienable rights was a slaveholder; this apostle of frugal government was a spendthrift who amassed such tremendous debts that his heirs had to sell off Monticello; this consummate gentleman engaged in political dirty tricks that would have made Richard Nixon blush. The portrait that Ellis offers is not flattering, and yet in capturing the man’s paradoxes, Ellis captures also the nation’s.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

(2005)

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

For two decades in Illinois beginning in the 1830s, the “Little Giant” Stephen Douglas and the “Rail Splitter” Abraham Lincoln battled before the public over issues large and small, from the chartering of banks to the location of the state capital. Their seven debates on the slavery question during the 1858 contest for a seat in the U.S. Senate remained for a century the most dramatic electoral confrontation in the nation’s history. Just as the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 propelled the former to victory and the latter to (temporary) defeat, so too did Lincoln’s ability to stand his ground and go toe-to-toe against his nationally prominent opponent smooth his route to the White House. Lincoln failed to gain the Senate, but Douglas’s presidential ambitions were fatally compromised by positions Lincoln cornered him into taking (e.g., opposing a national slave code for the territories).

Douglas and Lincoln. Photographs: Library of Congress

Comparisons with the Democrat Douglas afforded Lincoln the opportunity for national prominence, says Goodwin, but the wide-open competition to head the Republican Party allowed him to demonstrate two traits the country sorely needed—political genius and instinctive compassion. Team of Rivals explores not only how Lincoln bested the better-known William Henry Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates for the presidential nomination in 1860, but also how he took the unprecedented step of appointing these three to his cabinet, harnessing their talents on behalf of the Union, the de­struc­tion of slavery, and his 1864 reelection.

More traditional biographies (David Donald’s 1995 Lincoln is the best modern one) offer a broader and deeper look at the country’s turmoil during Lincoln’s four years at the helm, but Goodwin’s book, set on political stages and in back rooms and Washington offices, demonstrates how conflicting personal political ambitions, deftly channeled, redounded to the public benefit.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

(1979)

by Edmund Morris

Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson shared much in common, but they became perhaps the bitterest rivals in American political history. Ivy League–educated, both produced scholarship that is still worth reading. Both advanced in the electoral arena by cooperating with corrupt political machines and then breaking free from them. Roosevelt and Wilson were equally propagators of the Progressive spirit, and each brought to the White House a dynamism that made the presidency the nerve center of government.

Roosevelt and Wilson. Photographs: Library of Congress

Nonetheless, in a fashion not seen since Hamilton and Jefferson, Roosevelt and Wilson presented the American people with two very different visions. The Republican Roosevelt (a New Yorker) wanted a powerful national government that would guarantee a “square deal” to citizens here at home and project American power abroad. The Virginia-born Democrat Wilson favored unleashing the energies of “the man on the make” and encouraging cooperation among the world’s nations.

The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (1983) by John Milton Cooper, Jr., examines the two men’s careers and conflicts more directly, raising provocative questions about who was the realist and who was the idealist; but as a complement to my lectures this year I chose Morris’s study of TR’s road to the presidency. In many ways Roosevelt’s first four decades make for a storybook tale of adventure (in the Dakota Badlands and as police commissioner on the crime-ridden streets of Gotham), tragedy (the death of his first wife in childbirth), and courage displayed on the military battlefield. Although Wilson is mentioned only once, and in passing, Morris’s volume conveys the passions and the convictions that catapulted Roosevelt into the presidency in 1901 at age 42 (the youngest person so far to hold the office) and suggests why he would seek to regain that post when he was 53. Wilson thwarted that restoration, TR thereupon sought to undermine his presidency at every turn, and the nation and the world suffered for it.

The Best Year of Their Lives: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in 1948

(2005)

by Lance Morrow

By the late 1950s, the trauma of the Great Depression, the political success of the New Deal, and the unique pressures of the Cold War had generated a national consensus on both domestic and foreign policy. But civility did not ensue; instead the country entered an era of harsh political conflict shaped by an emphasis on personality. The televised 1960 Kennedy-Nixon contest, featuring the first ever face-to-face confrontation between presidential candidates, marked the dawn of this era. With the two candidates almost indistinguishable on the issues, their physical appearance became paramount, and the Democrat Kennedy was able to overcome what should have been the Repub- lican Nixon’s trump card, his experience in the executive branch.

Kennedy and Nixon. Photographs: Library of Congress

Despite its age, Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960 (1961) remains the classic account. Lance Morrow—like White, a journalist—takes the conflict between Kennedy and Nixon both back in time and forward, seizing on 1948 as the moment when the men’s political courses were set. The pivotal year is something of a contrivance, but 1948 did witness JFK’s decision to hide his serious health problems from the public and forays into scandalous personal behavior that bespoke his sense of entitlement. That year, Nixon defied the Establishment, exposing the Harvard Law School–educated Alger Hiss as a likely Soviet agent. He paid dearly for his audacity, his name forever linked with unscrupulous political conduct, an association perhaps unfairly made with respect to this episode, at least.

More than four decades after Kennedy’s assassination and three decades after Nixon’s forced departure from the White House, the nation is still waiting for another struggle between individuals that can rivet its attention. Whether that new rivalry will focus on personality (with the conflict likely to be won in the gutter) or on policy (with the outcome a road map into the future) may well determine the fate of our continuing experiment in self-government.

Mark Gelfand is an associate professor of history and the author of Trustee for a City: Ralph Lowell of Boston (1998).