Lost Recap: The Substitute

 

In Finding Lost Nikki Stafford says one of the highpoints of this episode is Ben’s eulogy of Locke. I agree with her, but not in the context that is the craziest eulogy ever or Frank’s description of this as ‘the weirdest funeral I’ve ever been too.”

In a way there’s so much about John Locke being laid to rest that is fitting for Locke as we’ve known him for four and a half years on Lost. Just before they are about to put him in the ground, Ilana says: “We should say something. Didn’t any of you know him?: “Did anyone know him?” And there is this long, tragic pause before Ben finally says that he did.

What hurts the most is that, even if everyone who had survived the show to this point been standing over Locke’s grave, there would still be this long tragic pause. Because for all Locke’s brilliance as a character he spent the entirety of the series on his own journey, slowly but surely isolating himself from everyone else on the plane, then in the Others to the point that no one knew anything about him. It’s fitting that Ben gives the eulogy because the sad truth is, he’s the only character on the show who really knew John at all.

That’s why I find Michael Emerson’s performance in this moment perfect because it is awkward, genuine and remorseful – three things we’ve never associated with Ben for the entire series. "John Locke was... a believer. He was…a man of faith. He was…a much better man than I will ever be. And I’m very sorry I’m murdered him.”

Obviously that last sentence is very funny particularly as this shocking revelation is essentially a throwaway: it’s the nature of the show at this point that everyone at the funeral is just going to have to shrug and keep moving given the situation. But there’s a larger meaning to it particularly when it comes to Ben in the context of Season 6. He has taken responsibility for his action (though not yet for murdering Jacob) but as John’s murder basically served as an impetus to it, this is nearly as big a deal. And his eulogy does get to the core of who Locke was, and the real reason Ben spent so much of the series manipulating him, resenting him and finally killing him. Locke was everything Ben wasn’t and as a result of his actions, the island is facing the consequences.

Terry O’Quinn’s work as Locke was one of the great performances in television history as he created one of the most memorable characters from the moment we met him. From the moment we learned his secret in Walkabout,  John Locke seemed like he was the key to the entire series why he was special and why the island was. We have seen Locke’s life playout in a way that almost no other character on the show has: we saw his premature birth, we saw his death and almost every major moment in between. And what’s been clear from season after season is that Locke’s life was a story in tragedy, someone who was unwanted from the moment he was born and who died convinced he was a failure, not even getting to choose how he died.

We saw Locke’s story unfold essentially chronologically in the flashbacks: we learned he was raised in foster care, how his father reached out to him only to con him out of a kidney, how he found a woman how loved him but ended up losing her when he chose his father over her, how he went to a grow-up to find peace and let a cop in to destroy it, how he trusted his father one time too many and ended up a wheelchair. We’ve also seen before anyone else on the show that his destiny was the island and that he kept avoiding it because he didn’t trust himself. His entire life was built on never trusting his instincts or trusting the wrong people.

Then the moment he woke up on the island, he could walk and for the first time something had been given to him rather than taken away. He knew before anyone else why the island was a special place. But Locke had spent so much time trusting the wrong people in the real world that he chose not to share this reason and while everyone else who survived the crash formed alliances with other people, Locke’s only allegiance for five season was to the island. Everyone who survived the crash was stingy with information about their pasts but John’s was the most important. The only person he chose to share it with was Boone, and he died not long after. Sawyer found out in Season 3 but apparently he’s never told any of the other survivors (or anyone in Dharma) what he knew about Locke.

In a sense Jack’s belief in destiny is a little more unbalanced than John’s. We’ll get to why in the next episode but for now it’s worth remembering Locke’s belief in the island was based on a very specific reason. Jack’s faith, at least initially, is much more misguided and blind and its understandable that Kate has been resistant to it.

The other difference is as bad as a leader as Jack was, he always was willing to trust certain people overtime, even if he could be self-righteous. It’s worth remembering Locke’s last thought: “I don’t understand.” Locke believes the island will tell him what to do, even if he doesn’t understand why. In Season 1, he thought the hatch was his destiny and spent most of the season trying to open. When he finally got inside in Season 2 and found that it contained a button that needed to be pushed every 108 minutes, he thought that was his destiny but he was never as sure of that and by the end of the season he decided that the button needed to be destroyed –  and his final words before Desmond turned the failsafe key were: “I was wrong.”

In Season 3 he found his communion with the island again, and this time he decided his destiny was with the Others. Despite the fact that ‘Henry Gale’ had spent half a season lying to him about everything, when the Losties made it the barracks the first person John made a beeline to was Ben. Ben basically then picked up right where he’d left off in the hatch but the tide was turning from Ben to Locke and by the end of Season 3 Ben was no longer in charge and at the end of Season 4 Locke was leading the Others. For two minutes.

Finally in Season Five Locke had a mission: he had to bring the Oceanic 6 back to the island to save everyone on the island from dying. Again he didn’t understand and even though he only received very vague instructions he did what he always did and blindly followed. He then immediately allied with Widmore – the same person who’d spent all of Season Four trying to kill him – because Widmore said he was special.

He crossed the globe trying to convince those who left to come back, all of whom treated him with varying degrees of scorn, contempt and fear. In retrospect, that was inevitable considering everything Locke had done right up until the moment they left and how little an effort he had made to either to get to know them or even to treat them with respect. For all Jack’s flaws, he and the group had agreed to live together…which made it sadly fitting that John Locke died alone.

And yet even though after this episode John Locke is dead and buried, he is neither gone nor forgotten, not by the show and not by the characters. And while we may be wondering whether the writers are now keeping the Man in Black in Terry O’Quinn’s form simply because they don’t want to let go of him (though who could blame them) the fact remains there’s a critical reason that the Man In Black is now wearing Locke’s skin. For five seasons the one thing everybody thought they knew about Locke was that he wanted to stay on the island and that all of this was happening for a reason. This isolated him among all of the survivors who just wanted to leave the island.

Now UnLocke walks up to Sawyer and offers to tell him – with no mysticism or bullshit – what that reason is. Sawyer is the first of the surviving Candidates – a term we heard mention by Ilana at the end of Season 5 with no explanation was to what it meant – that UnLocke will approach and tell them that the island is not nor ever has been special and seems to hate it more than the rest of them ever did. And because of that change the characters will start to look at the perception of Locke differently even though none of them really knew him.

It's fitting that the first person UnLocke goes to among the survivors is Sawyer as he spent the last three years ‘waiting for him to come back.’ And it’s worth remembering several things. First that Sawyer, as gifted a con man as he is, was always the easiest man to con. Locke knew that as he conned Sawyer into killing Cooper for him. Second is that Ben and Richard both knew Locke far better than Sawyer did and both were completely snowed when UnLocke showed up at their doorstep.

Sawyer barely blinks when Locke shows up and tells him he’s dead. Part of it is due to his despair and drunkenness. But less than two minutes after being in his presence Sawyer says: “You sure as hell ain’t John Locke.” UnLocke is puzzled and asks how he knows. “Because Locke was scared. Even when he was pretending he wasn’t.” Richard and Ben both noted the difference between the Locke they’d known before but just shrugged it off. Sawyer knows  - without having to see his corpse – that this isn’t the Locke he knew.

It’s worth noting that when UnLocke tells Richard that Locke was ‘a Candidate’, Richard has no idea what it means. We don’t know yet the history between Richard and UnLocke (or Jacob for that matter) but there’s something stunning about this. For three seasons Richard seems to have had all the answers and the fact that he’s been on the island for decades without aging would seem to indicate he was entrusted by Jacob with more wisdom than any of the Others. Now it becomes clear in a few lines by Richard that he’s no different from anyone else on the island: he has just been blindly following and never asking a single question. Even with Jacob dead and a man promising him the answers Richard stays firm to his principles.

Sawyer’s decision may be in part because he has lost everything he held dear within the last few days but we can’t ignore the fact that he’s also trying to find a way to recoup and adapt. Sawyer’s been able to do that his whole life. He did it after Cooper died; he did it when the island started blooping through time, and he sure as hell did it when he was part of the Dharma Initiative. He was dismissive of Jack’s talk of destiny only a few hours ago so it might strike some as odd when Locke offers to tell him why he’s here. When Richard tells him he can’t trust him and what his alternatives are, it’s hard to blame his dismissiveness: he’s spent three years dealing with the Others and he can only see the Temple as a step backward.

For the first time we get a hint as to what UnLocke might have been when he was the man in black. He speaks with longing of being ‘trapped…for so long he doesn’t remember what it was like to be free. I know what it means to know betrayal, anguish…I know what it is to lose someone you love.” It’s the first time since we knew that this wasn’t Locke that he’s seemed something resembling a human being and for the first time we doubt ourselves.

Because of the sideways world we get two John Lockes (three?) for the price of one. This John Locke seems far less broken then we saw in the original world. He’s still in his wheelchair, still working at the box factory (until the giant douche Randy fires him) and still frustrated. But while there are hints at the rage we saw occasionally, he’s more inclined to laugh at himself then before when things go wrong. He’s also managed to hold on to Helen (yea!) and they are about to tie the knot. There’s also some discussion that his father in his life, though based on what we know that’s hard to fathom even in an alternate universe. And perhaps more importantly, Locke seems to have accepted there are some things he can’t do. When Rose tells him that she wants to find a job he can do, he listens. He did go on the walkabout like in the original timeline and just like there he was turned away. But when he relays the experience to Helen, there’s a sense of acceptance in it that we never saw in the old John Locke. This John Locke doesn’t believe in destiny. This John Locke doesn’t believe in miracles. And this John Locke…seems fine with it.

John Locke has taken on the job of a substitute teacher. This is fitting because that’s apparently the reason the Man In Black chose him. Locke was never supposed to be the leader of the island or a Candidate; rather he was just a placeholder until the Man in Black could maneuver him so that he could kill Jacob. And why did he kill Jacob? Well, we do get a partial answer in the final scene – and a lot more.

The final scene of the episode does what I imagine many fans were hoping the entire final season would do: it gives one of the biggest revelations of the series. Two in fact. We’ve been wondering for five seasons if everybody on the plane was brought to the island and by who. Now we get the answer: Jacob brought them there. We also have spent years wondering what those six numbers that we’ve been seeing for all five seasons – 4,8,15,16,23,42 – mean in the context of the series. They did seem to have significance in regard to the button but now there’s a larger context.

It might seem dismissive when Locke says: “Jacob had a thing for numbers” but as we’ll see in the very next episode, there’s a reason he gave those numbers to the candidates. Across the cave wall, we see dozens of names and numbers, many of which are crossed out and many of which we’ve seen before. (We’ll get a view at several more in the next episode as well.) The names and numbers we see correlate with passengers on Oceanic 815, members of the Others, the Dharma Initiative, the freighter folk and even some pertaining to Rousseau’s team. And it would seem they are a fraction of the hundreds he has called to the island in who knows how long. These numbers and names are Candidates. And these candidates according to UnLocke have been drawn to the island to succeed Jacob. All of these seem to have been crossed off, except for the last six:

4: John Locke

8. Hugo Reyes

15. James Ford

16. Sayid Jarrah

23. Jack Shephard

42. Kwon (we will never know for sure whether it is Sun or Jin)

 

We saw Jacob touch all six of these candidates (Kate too) in The Incident and we are reminded of this by flashes every time we go to a number. UnLocke’s description of how Jacob got involve: “He came to you probably when you were weak and broken. And somewhere along the way choices that you thought were making were never really choices at all” would seem to fit every time we saw Jacob make contact with the Candidates in The Incident and there’s no reason to believe that was the only time Jacob met with them over their lives. (Again, we’ll get more evidence of that in the next episode.)  UnLocke may not be the bad guy but its increasingly hard to argue Jacob is the good guy. That he is trustworthy is a completely different story given everything we saw him do in the season premiere alone but given that Jacob’s pattern would seem to be never telling anybody what his plans are and only speaking in terms of some kind of vague good doesn’t exactly make him reliable. (He’s dead and he’s still not telling people everything he knows, for crying out loud!)

That may be the reason that the Man In Black has chosen Locke’s form. Ilana tells Ben that he’s stuck in this form but never gives a reason why. Perhaps Jacob’s death locked (pun sort of intended) the Man in Black in the body he was stuck in but there will be many reasons in the final season where its clear that Darlton never truly though through the reasons of both him and the smoke monster. However, from a dramatic standpoint it resonates in a way being in, say, Christian’s form wouldn’t. Locke spent his entire time on the island convincing everybody to stay because the island was special and needed to be kept safe. So when the man telling Sawyer that the island doesn’t need to be protecting from anything is using Locke’s form, it resonates in a way that it wouldn’t with any of the other hosts.

That said, we still can’t be sure to trust him. Consider the option he presents Sawyer:

First, do nothing and see how this turns out. As a result, your name may be crossed off the list. To emphasize this, UnLocke crosses off Locke’s name.

The implication is that the only way to get off the list is to die. That would make sense – but if you look at the cave walls Austen and Littleton are crossed off and as we saw in the last episode both are very much alive.

Second, you can choose to take the job of the next Jacob. UnLocke says the island doesn’t need protection and that it will be fine on its own. This goes against everything Sawyer has heard and experienced for the past five seasons; he knows it better than some of the people who left the island, in fact. But Sawyer never bought into anything the Others told him, he certainly never thought much of the adult Ben’s reasoning. And as we heard when UnLocke said at the start, he’s wanted to leave this island multiple times already and would have done so had not intervened at the end of last season.

So when UnLocke tells him that the third option is, we just leave you can tell he’s already made up his mind even before he knows how. It will be difficult to parse the motivations of everyone else who UnLocke is ‘recruiting’ but with Sawyer the reason is crystal clear. He wants off this rock. But Sawyer never trusted Locke when he was alive and as we’ll see very quickly, he doesn’t trust him any more now that he’s dead.

John Locke was murdered in a dirty hotel room but he is laid to rest in the one place that was truly his home: the island. We’ll occasionally get a hint that the old Locke is still in there – his uttering of ‘Don’t tell me what I can’t do’ to a teenage boy that has to be the ghost of Jacob makes that clear – but Locke as we know him is gone. His body is still walking around, scorning both the body he’s wearing and the island Locke loved so much. And even though he’s had dozens of chances to kill Sawyer already – including when they were climbing down ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ and it broke –  and hasn’t, we know already that there’s a lethal force in him that can kill whenever he wants to and has for the last five seasons. He claims that all he wants is to leave. Which gives us two more questions. How many people will he kill to do that? And why haven’t those candidates been among them?

 

IF YOU BELIEVE THE ENDING: It makes sense that Randy would be there. Randy was a part of Locke’s life before the island and as we all know he has a connection to Hurley before this. But why would the psychic who conned Hurley be at the temp agency Hurley owned? In the original timeline she was a psychic before Hurley got on the plane, so it would make sense if he saw her. But as good-hearted as Hurley is, I can’t see him wanting to have the woman who was a symbol of his father’s betrayal part of anyone’s story, least of all Locke’s. (Then again, Hugo always has been helping people…)

Rose’s presence isn’t out of the question because we never learned either what Rose’s job before she got on the plane. The fact that she’s the same person she was in the real universe actually tracks with both versions of the story: the island always affected Rose the least and she was always a caring person. Anyway, I never regret seeing her character.

The Military In The White House, Part 2: Andrew Jackson Become The First Unqualified Man To Become President and Ushers in The Modern Political System

 

 

A little personal history before we get started. My grandfather Richard Morris was a fairly well-known historian when he was alive and respected among his contemporaries to the point that many compared him with Arthur Schlesinger, best known for his job as ‘court historian’ to JFK and one of the major men responsible for establishing the Kennedy legacy.

During the 1950s and 1960s he and my grandfather had two very conflicting views of Andrew Jackson. Schlesinger believed firmly that Jackson was one of the greatest and most important President of all times. My grandfather held a much unkinder view of him. Schlesinger’s view was more prevalent at the time (and it must be said, before). Given the most recent ranking of Jackson by today’s historians – he has dropped from one of the near great to barely average in the most recent poll – as well as the controversies surrounding his racial views, it’s clear that the pendulum has swung to by grandfather’s opinion.

A little more personal history: even ten years ago, I would have been more inclined to consider Schlesinger’s view the correct one and argue that much of the prejudice against him didn’t take into account the era he lived in. However after reading more not only about Jackson but also his rivals and how he governed, I’m now inclined to agree that my grandfather was clearly ahead of his time.

If you’ve read some of my earlier articles you know I have a good reason for believing this and I’ll be reviewing some of them later on. But for the purposes of this series I’m going to focus on Jackson’s running for the Presidency: why he was far less qualified to be President than any of the men he ran against the first time, how the circumstances of his defeat may have had more due to his own temperament than any flaws in why he lost and how the circumstances of his eventual election led to ramifications when it comes to the power of the executive branch that we are still feeling two years later.

Let’s start with the circumstances of the 1824 election. This was the first Presidential election where the voters played their greatest role to date in electing the President. After the collapse of the Federalist Party, there was only one major party: the Democratic-Republican Party. However, there was no consensus as to who should be its President. More than a dozen men considered running for the job but ultimately it came down to four candidates.

John Quincy Adams was descended from the Founding Fathers and considering he’d been in public service since age 11 was practically one himself. He had served in multiple diplomatic positions under both Washington and his father’s Presidency, had been elected to the Senate as a Federalist but had resigned when he broke with them in 1807, had spent the next decade in diplomacy under James Madison and had been James Monroe’s Secretary of State. The previous three Presidents had all served as Secretary of State so Adams had been a contender to succeed Monroe even before his term began.

Henry Clay had been in Congress since 1811 and had been elected Speaker of the House that same year. He’d already served seven terms in Congress and had been Speaker for ten of them. He had done much to give the role the power that future Speakers have been holding to this day. He had developed the American system which called for investment in infrastructure, support for a national bank and a high tariff. Sometimes he abused his power, as when he had helped lead America in the War of 1812; sometimes he used it brilliantly. In 1820 he had helped bring an end to the greatest sectional crisis involving slavery when he had led the passage of the Missouri Compromise. He had the reputation of being one of the best orators in Congress. Election to the Presidency seemed inevitable, if not this election then eventually.

William Crawford had been elected to the Senate from Georgia in 1807. He’d served as President pro tempore and had been named Minister to France by Madison in 1813 and succeeded James Monroe as Madison’s Secretary of War. He’d been named Secretary of Treasury in the final months of Madison’s term and Monroe kept him on in that position for all of his term. A man of some capabilities at some point in 1823 he suffered a stroke. His health had improved and he had received a nomination from the Congressional Caucus. Despite that and the support of both Madison and Jefferson, many had doubts that he could survive his term if elected.

All three of these men were more than qualified to be President. But as 1824 drew on a fourth candidate emerged who by the standards of the past thirty years was severely underqualified – except in the eyes of the people.

Andrew Jackson’s political experience was negligible. He had been the first representative of Tennessee in Congress and became its first Senator, but he resigned from that position after just six months. In 1821 he had been named the first territorial governor of Florida but resigned after just two months. That was the sum of his governing experience.

In the twenty years in between Jackson had done little more than fight, both for his country and with other people. He’d been involved in two duels by the time he was thirty and in the second he’d killed a man. He’d been involved with Aaron Burr in his plan to conquer Florida in what was essentially a plot that would have made him a traitor to the nation. Jackson had set up a paper trail that insulated him and escaped charges.

He'd spent much of the next decade as a military leader, known for his slaughter of the indigenous people in scorched earth campaigns. In June of 1814 he was named Brigadier General and arrived in New Orleans in December of 1814. He managed a siege that led to a victory in the Battle in January of 1815. In February of 1815, he was given the Thanks of Congress and a Congressional Gold Medal.

The problem was by the time Jackson began his fighting, the Treaty of Ghent which negotiated the end of the war had been signed. Much of the decision to celebrate Jackson was done to boost morale at the end of a war that had been a disaster for the Americans in which Washington had been occupied and the White House burned to the ground. The treaty that had been negotiated basically gave the Americans nothing from two years of conflict. Jackson’s image as a national hero was basically done to save face by the administration in what had been a disastrous exercise.

After the war, he remained in command of troops in the South had spent the next five years displacing troops despite the resistance of men like Crawford. During the first Seminole War Secretary of War John C. Calhoun had ordered Jackson to lead a campaign. But Jackson exceeded his authority when after capturing two British subjects working with the Seminoles, he had them executed an action which divided Monroe’s cabinet. Calhoun demanded him censured for violating the Constitution. Adams defended him because he thought his occupation of Pensacola would cause Spain to sell Florida, which they did. He was cleared in a subsequent Congressional investigation.

In short Andrew Jackson was the kind of man who was prickly, ill-tempered, and constantly defied and even ignored authority. He was the worst kind of man to be President but by 1822 some people wanted him for the job. He was nominated by the legislature of Tennessee in July, originally as a stalking horse candidate to prevent Calhoun from getting Tennessee’s electoral votes. Calhoun was seen as a ‘Washington insider.” But Jackson began to gain popularity outside of Tennessee because of the expansion of suffrage of white males. He was seen as being ‘decisive’, ‘independent’ and ‘an outsider who stood for the people’, blaming the banks for a recent financial panic. Jackson took that personally because it had reduced the size of the military and he had lost his generalship.

Reluctantly Jackson ran for one of Tennessee’s senate seats and was elected in October of 1823. He spent little time debating, using his time form alliances and make peace with old adversaries – at least temporarily. When Calhoun dropped out of the race, Jackson eventually would win the nomination in six states.

In the election of 1824, Jackson would win 42 percent of the popular vote. He also won a plurality of the electoral votes. Of the four candidates running Jackson was the only candidate whose appeal was not regional, winning in the South, the West and several mid-Atlantic states including Pennsylvania carrying 99 electoral votes. John Quincy Adams finished second in the popular vote and electoral vote (with 84) but all of his votes were from New England and New York. Henry Clay finished third in the popular vote but fourth in the electoral college with 37 votes. Crawford finished last in the popular vote but because he carried Virginia one of the biggest electoral prizes, he was third in the electoral college with 41 votes. John C. Calhoun, who was supported by both Adams and Jackson for Vice President, won the Vice Presidency easily.

Because no candidate had won a majority in the electoral college, the House had to choose the President in accordance with Twelfth Amendment. The three candidates who finished in the top three in electoral college would be decided by each state delegation, each of which had one vote. 13 votes were needed.

Henry Clay hated Andrew Jackson, once saying: “I can not believe killing 2500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies for the various, difficult and complicated duties of the Chief magistracy.”  Considering that was the main reason for Jackson’s candidacy, he had a point. Clay was more in alliance with Adams’ policies than Crawford’s so he chose to ally with him. With Clay’s support, Kentucky, Missouri and Ohio’s delegations voter for Adams and with negotiation from the anti-slavery Illinois delegation, Adams took Illinois, Louisiana and Maryland. Martin Van Buren, the head of the New York delegation, tried to keep it divided between Crawford and Adams but eventually it went to Adams. Despite a non-binding directive from Kentucky that its delegation chose to Jackson, it voted for Adams. Adams won the Presidency on the first ballot with 13 states.

Not long after rumors from papers argued that Clay had sold Adams his support in exchange for the position of Secretary of State. Clay was offered the position and chose to accept it, knowing that declining the position would not help the rumors brough against him.

Jackson never forgave Clay calling him the ‘Judas of the West’. The irony is there are strong suspicions that James Buchanan offered Clay the same job in exchange for him supporting Jackson but he refused it. Jackson’s decision to frame Clay  as traitors was formed out of the concept of the corrupt bargain, more out of his sense of personal betrayal rather than national one. Adams was more than eager to mend fences: he offered Jackson the position of Secretary Of War but Jackson’s temperament which even then seemed directs all or nothing, declined it.

The campaign for the 1828 Presidential election essentially began the day after Adams was sworn in. Jackson and his followers campaigned on the idea of the corrupt bargain – what might well be considered the idea of ‘a rigged system’ and only accepting the results if he won. In a sense the two party system was founded based on the idea of being pro or anti Andrew Jackson, and for the next decade Jackson’s followers made it clear whose side they were on.

 By the end of Adams’ term, the structure for the two-party system was in place. Adams’ and his supporters were part of what was called the National Republican Party while Jackson’s were the Democrats. Because of Adams’ desire to remain above the fray of campaigning and to accept the reality of the new system, the Jacksonians portrayed him as an out-of-touch elitist. As a final insult Calhoun would switch parties and tickets to run with Jackson against Adams.

It's worth noting how the 1828 Presidential campaign was framed because it would set the standard for so much of our political discourse for the next two centuries. John Quincy Adams was an intellectual and as I mentioned above far more qualified to become President in 1824 than Jackson was. He had a harmonious and productive cabinet which he met with weekly. H e asked for many holdovers from Monroe’s cabinet to remain in place with his administration. He reached out to two of his defeated opponents Jackson and Crawford for his cabinet and both declined. All of the men who served in his cabinet were incredibly qualified and even the controversial choice of Clay was a wise one: he had a huge amount of interest foreign policy.

In his first message to Congress he called for an ambitious agenda. He wanted a national university, naval academy and a national astronomical observatory. He proposed the creation of the Department of the Interior and he wanted to fund these ambitions not through taxes or raising the deficit, but through sale of lands in the West. This system was known as the American system and was designed to unite the regional interests of the country under the idea of a thriving economy. Adams was trying to be a uniter.

He also worked to build the infrastructure of a country that was still developing. During his term, the Army Corp of Engineers had extended a National road from Maryland to Ohio, begun building many major canals and helped construct the first National railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio.

But none of this mattered to Jackson or his supporters, and as early as 1825 Jackson was being galvanized to run for President in 1828. By the time the first Congress of Adams’ administration was over, there was a strong anti-Adams coalition, made up not only of Jacksonians but supporters of Crawford and Calhoun. By the time of the midterm elections, for the first time in history, Congress was in the hands of a Presidents political opponents.

Jackson’s campaign was build on a party apparatus. It had nothing to do with the issues and only the popularity of Jackson and the supposed corruption of Adams and the federal government. Jackson described the campaign as a ‘struggle between the virtue of the people and executive patronage’ which is basically a nineteenth-century way of saying he wanted to drain the swamp. Adams was portrayed as an out of touch elitist, and Jackson as being too emotional and impetuous for the Presidency. The first modern campaign was not high-minded and had nothing to do with issues. It was driven by personality, mud-slinging and highly negative campaigning.

And it worked. Andrew Jackson was elected President in a landslide, with 56 percent of the popular vote and 178 electoral votes to Adams’ 83. Adams didn’t carry a single state in the South or the West, only carrying the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions of the country. The majority of Jackson’s vote was heavily southern – he carried over 72 percent of the votes in the slave states – but he won a majority of the votes in the free states as well. Not only did Adams become only the second one-term President to that point in history (his father had been the first) but it wouldn’t be until 1904 when a losing candidate would get a smaller percentage of the popular vote than him in defeat. Adams had refused to play politics, hoping to win on his record. Instead he had been humiliated by a man most Washington insiders considered unqualified for the White House. Elections learned this lesson early and they’ve never truly forgotten it: popularity and negative campaign will defeat intellectual discussion every time.

And it’s worth noting, for a man who campaigned on the principles of populism and the people, much of Jackson’s presidency was the most imperial to that point in history. Unlike Adams who had nominated people from various factions to his Cabinet, Jackson would fill his cabinet with his supporters such as John Eaton, his campaign manager as Secretary of War. He removed ten percent of all federal employees and replaced them with loyal Democrats. He claimed that this reduced corruption but it was effectively patronage and became known as the spoils system. It remained in place by both parties until Civil Service Reform was enacted more than half a century later.

His legislation was also among the most racist in our history. The South passed legislation extending their jurisdiction to Native American lands, a move he supported. In 1832, the Supreme Court ruled under John Marshall that when Cherokees declared a group of arrests by Georgia illegal that Georgia’s actions were unconstitutional. Supposedly when Jackson heard this he said: “Well John Marshall has made his decision, but now let him enforce him.” The quote might be apocryphal but Jackson made it clear he would not enforce the ruling. He would use the power of the federal government to enforce the separation of indigenous tribes and whites beginning the long and tragic history of our government deciding that the indigenous people of our nation were second-class citizens.

He faced another crisis involving a tariff when his Vice President John C. Calhoun, writing anonymously, asserted the Constitution was a compact of individual states and then when the federal government went beyond its duties, the state had a right to declare this action unconstitutional. Jackson was not so much bothered by this as the fact he needed the tariff to exist to accomplish one of his Presidential goals to eliminate the national debt. This developed into a personal rivalry between the two men, most famously shown at  a celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. Both men were present and gave after-dinner toasts.

Jackson was first: “Our Federal Union! It must be preserved.”

Calhoun followed: “The Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear.”

It is tempting to say that Jackson was taking a stand against slavery but that was not the case. Jackson was, like Calhoun, a Southerner, a wealthy plantation owner and owned several slaves for which he was known for treating cruelly. His views on race were certainly closer to the white supremacist views of Calhoun then the Northerners. And even though he argued this was about disunion and the Southern Confederacy, it is worth remembering his past allegiance with Aaron Burr when he was plotting disunion.

It might be more realistic to argue that this, like so many other things involving Andrew Jackson, was about personal grievances and settling scores. During the first two years of his office, Eaton’s wife was suspected of adultery and the wives of the members of his cabinet, with the exception of that of his Postmaster General William Barry, refused to socialize with her. So in the spring of 1831, Jackson demanded the resign of all of his cabinet members except Barry. In 1835 Barry would be forced to resign when Congress revealed he had mismanaged the post office.

It mattered little because his cabinet was so ineffective that he rarely called into session. Even after he formed a new cabinet, he preferred meetings with his ‘Kitchen Cabinet’. One of the few former officials was Martin Van Buren, who eventually became his vice President and several newspaper editors as well as most of his political allies. In other words Jackson was listening only to friends for political advice rather than the people he appointed for the job.

This led to his decision to wage a war on the Second Bank of the United States. When Jackson took office in 1828, the country was prosperous and the economy was stable but Jackson thought the bank a fourth branch of government run by ‘the elite’ that sought to control the labor and earnings of ‘the real people’. Jackson was also biased against paper money due to a personal event in his past based on land speculation. The struggle led to Henry Clay, in the Senate and Jackson’s eventual opponent in 1832, to seek to renew the charter for the bank two years earlier. After the bill was passed, Jackson vetoed it.

After his landslide victory over Clay in 1832, Jackson saw it as a mandate to continue his war on the Bank. He signed an executive order ending the deposit of treasury receipts. His secretary of the Treasury refused to obey so Jackson replaced him. After his replacement refused, his second choice Roger Taney implemented it.

By now Jackson’s action had become so dictatorial then his opponents (who called him King Andrew The First) formed the Whig Party. In March of 1834, the Senate led by Clay, Calhoun and Daniel Webster – three men who agreed on nothing but their mutual hatred of Jackson -  censured Jackson for taking authority from the Treasury department when it was Congress’ authority. They refused to confirm Taney to Secretary of the Treasury, so Jackson would repay the favor by naming him Chief Justice in 1836. Twenty years later, Taney wrote the majority opinion for the Dred Scott decision.

Jackson did win his war and the National Bank was dead in July of 1836. He deposited federal funds into banks that were favorable to his policies. This would lead to state banks that invested in land development and speculation and a relaxing of money standards. In order to balance it, Jackson created the Species circular which mandated western lands only be purchased by hard money. Rather then reduce speculation on credit, it led to a drain of gold and silver. His other act, the Deposit and Distribution Act transferred money from banks into east to banks in the west leaving them unable to pay back loans. As a result in 1837, the first national depression hit America and would last four years.

None of this ended up landing at the feet of Jackson, but his chosen successor Martin Van Buren. And just to make sure Jackson’s record were clear, the Democratic majority expunged Jackson’s censure after he left office.

Jackson’s entire record as President is that of man who basically ignored the standards of what a President did at the time, put his friends and supporters in positions they were completely unsuited for, engaged in contempt for his enemies whenever he felt like it, and doing what he thought was best for the nation rather than go through the channels of Congress. How people regard him has always been polarizing: some considered him a statesman who advanced the spirit of democracy; others an autocratic demagogue who crushed his opposition and trampled the law.

Schlesinger chose to define his legacy through the era of FDR’s New Deal, describing him as the common man, a member of the working class struggling against exploitation by business concerns. That seems a bit of reach, considering that Jackson was a member of both the military elite and the southern gentry. What is unquestioned is not only his racism but that he was a believer in ethnic cleansing, particularly in regard to the Indian Removal Act and the use of force, terror and violence to make an area ethnically homogenous.

It is easy to understand why Donald Trump would want to wrap himself in Jackson’s legacy: looking at every aspect of his campaigning and Presidency, you see a man who believes in every model of the Jacksonian way even if he know nothing else about him. But the fact that both the Obama and Biden administration wish to remove Jackson from the $20 bill and replace him with Harriet Tubman speaks to another flaw: no matter how you slice it, Andrew Jackson was a Democrat. He might not fit the model than leaders like Biden want to see the party stands for now, but it is the model that Democrats were more than fine with for over a hundred and fifty years. And his legacy with the South is one democratic progressives can’t pretend exists. When Democratic conventions began in 1840, the rule that they would enact was the two-thirds rule. This rule officially gave the South veto power over every candidate the Party nominated until 1936 and made sure the segregationist views – first involving slavery, then Jim Crow – were never to be challenged by their part either in the nominees or the platform.

All of this was done, it’s worth remembering, in the name of a man who had little use for governing in the traditional sense, separation of powers, or checks and balances. This should have been a lesson to both parties that politicians should be the only one who got nominated for the President. Instead, all the major parties that have come forth seemed to take the opposite lesson to various degrees.

In the next article, I will deal with the major military leaders who were nominated for President in the antebellum era, how their campaigns reflected the changing times and how their elections – or defeats – shaped the era that led to the Civil War.

 

 

 

I'll Take Lesser Known Jeopardy Greats for $600: For the Next Invitational Tournament, Some Players I Think Who Are OverDue A Return

 

Regardless of the endless postseason and the ‘tournament fatigue’ that Jeopardy fans have had to endure this season, it’s hard to argue that the first ever Jeopardy Invitational Tournament was a resounding success. Along with Amy Schneider, Sam Buttrey and Andrew He, it brought back twenty two previous great Jeopardy champions and two former Jeopardy players who had earned their places in game show lore. We engaged in a brilliant fourteen game tournament which had endless shocks and surprises and it let to an incredible final with the most unlikely of winners  - Victoria Groce. Given that this year’s Masters showed Victoria’s ability to utterly dominate so many of the greatest Jeopardy players of all time – including  the trouncing of self-proclaimed ‘Final Boss’ James Holzhauer -  this may be the most significant new tournament since the Masters was created.

It is an inevitability that, sometime in 2025, we will have another Jeopardy Invitational Tournament. Three of the invitees names are already written in stone: Amy Schneider, Matt Amodio and Mattea Roach: the three super champions of Season 38. According to the guidelines set at the beginning of this year’s Invitational, other players who competed in the previous two seasons will be eligible. This means we very well might see the return of many of the last two years other super-champions, including Cris Panullo and Ray Lalonde, eliminated in the first round of this year’s Tournament of Champions and Ryan Long and Johnathan Fisher, the ‘lesser’ super-champions of Season 38. That’s a great draw right there.

But the question is who else will fill the remaining twenty spots? It’s clear that winning a Jeopardy tournament or being a multi-day champion isn’t necessarily a disqualifier: neither Victoria nor Brandon Blackwell had done either and they were invited back. And while many of the most memorable players from Jeopardy’s first forty years were invited back for the first Invitational Tournament, there were several critical absentees. Among the most significant were Brad Rutter, Julia Collins and Roger Craig, many of whom believed would be the producer’s choice for the Masters this year.

I have written extensively in previous articles in the aftermath of last year’s Masters of many players I thought should be invited back for the next one. Many of them ended up being invited to the first Invitational Tournament. I could repeat myself and list several of the ones I left out and I could also go back further and mention some I suggested for other tournaments. But I’d like to change it up a bit in this article.

In the first Invitational there were quite a few players who would not necessarily have been my first or even second choices to come back for a tournament of this magnitude. However many of them played well and many of them were reminders of a different era in Jeopardy. And for all of the most famous and well-known Jeopardy champions in the post Ken-Jennings era, there have been many others who never quite got their due, despite having set records of their own in their original run that have since been overshadowed or were great players who missed a chance at greatness in Jeopardy history. I’ve written a lot about Jeopardy but I’ve never written about them.

So in this article I’m going to discuss ten former Jeopardy greats from the post Ken Jennings era, many of whom had moments of greatness but for whatever reason have been forgotten by Jeopardy fandom. I believe they have earned the right to be invited back to the next tournament and in this article I will make my case.

 

Vinita Kailasanath

Technically Vinita’s original run was in 2001, but because she qualified for the Battle of The Decades as part of the 2000s I think she counts.

Vinita won the 2001 College Championship, the last one before dollar figures were doubled. Indeed, it happened a week after her victory. She was also one of the last winners of a Jeopardy tournament to receive a sports car along with her $50,000 prize.

A sophomore in 2001 she was unavailable to compete in the 2003 Tournament of Champions so Jeopardy allowed her to participate in the 2004 Tournament. She did quite well finishing as a semi-finalist and was ahead of the eventual winner of that tournament, Russ Schumacher, before losing in Final Jeopardy to him. Several months later she competed in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions and got to the second round before being trounced by Brian Moore.

She was invited to compete in the Battle of the Decades: The 2000s but had the misfortune of going up against Ken Jennings in his initial appearance. As was the case, she was trounced by him. Considering her connection to Ken, that is an additional reason to invite her.

 

 

Chris Miller

Chris Miller was, technically speaking , the only five game winner in Season 20. It was an impressive run, he won $123,697, small potatoes now; but in 2004, the sixth highest total any player had won in Jeopardy history. He finished as a semi-finalist in the 2004 Tournament of Champions, losing to seven game winner Tom Walsh in a very close semi-final match.

Less than six months later, he began an impressive run in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions making it all the way to the semi-finals and facing off against Brad Rutter. He was tied with him for second after Game 1 and was briefly ahead of him in Game 2 before Brad utterly tore the place down. He still finished with an impressive $93,844.

He hasn’t been invited to another super-tournament since then which means he’s more than overdue. He’s also a very gregarious personality and I want to hear how he dressed up as Ken Jennings for Halloween. I think Ken would too.

 

Maria Wenglinsky

Maria has earned her invitation for being part of those groundbreaking female champions that have led the way for such women as Julia Collins and Amy Schneider. In November of 2005, she became the first female contestant to cross the $100,000 threshold in earnings, winning $122,300 in five games. One of just two female contestants to qualify for the 2006 Tournament of Champions, she would make it to the semifinals before losing a tough semi-final to Michael Falk, the eventual winner of that year’s Tournament.

Maria was invited to compete in the Battle of the Decades and would appear in the very last game in the first round. In a very tough fight between her and Dan Pawson, she managed to move ahead of him going into Final Jeopardy but lost on a tough Final Jeopardy clue that no one came close to getting correct. It came down to wagers and Maria bet too much. Considering that Dan was invited back to the first tournament it would be fair to invite Maria back this year.

 

Vijay Balse

Yogesh Raut shocked the world when he won the 2024 Tournament of Champions and finished second in this year’s Jeopardy Masters. I think it would be fitting if we invited back to the next tournament a man who lay the groundwork for Yogesh and in many ways came from an even more unlikely background to win.

Jeopardy is an American game show and players who are not born in the United States or Canada often struggle to do well. Vijay was born  in Mumbai before he moved to New Jersey to work as a chemical engineer. He was living in Chatham when he won four games and $82,400 in March of 2010. Not impressive figures by today’s standards they were more than enough to get him into the 2010 Tournament of Champions less than two months later. That year, the winningest player was Justin Bernbach who won seven games and just over $155,000. Vijay defeated him in his semi-final match to go to the finals.

There were occasions in the finals he struggled again finals but he managed a closely thought two game final to win the Tournament of Champions. He would be invited to participate in the Battle of The Decades but would lose in the first round to Roger Craig, albeit by $1.

 

Tom Nissley

In the winter of 2010, Tom Nissley put together one of the most impressive runs a Jeopardy player had since David Madden’s 19 game streak. He would win eight games and $235,405. Tom was only the third player to win that many games since Madden’s run: the other two were Tom Kavanaugh in Season 22 and Dan Pawson, who won the 2009 Tournament of Champions and at the time the total was the third highest any Jeopardy champion had won in regular season play since the dollar figures had been doubled and the five game limit removed. He was trailing only Ken Jennings and Madden.

But his thunder had been stolen at the start of the season by Roger Craig who’d won $230,200 in six games and had broken Ken Jennings’ one day record of $75,000 on the second day of Season 26. Both Roger and Tom would waltz to the finals of the 2011 Tournament of Champions but all of the suspense was gone by the end of Double Jeopardy round of the first game as Roger already had $43,200 in front of him to Tom’s $9400. Roger cruised to victory and Tom finished second.

Despite having played so well in his original appearance, all of the players I mentioned above received invitations to the Battles of the Decades: 2000s and Tom was not. He was voted to compete as a fan favorite via Facebook, something that seems somewhat strange considering his performance and insulting when you consider David Madden had declined the offer to attend  before the original invitations were sent out. Tom performed well in the first round even though he didn’t advance to the quarterfinals; he was one of only four of the fifteen participants in the first round to give a correct response in Final Jeopardy that week.

Given how good he was in his original run I think Tom needs to be invited back without any additional strings.

 

Elyse Mancuso, 2012 Teen Tournament Winner

Full disclosure: on YouTube I found Elyse’s triumph in the Teen Tournament under the subheading ‘Best Final Jeopardy ever.” That’s hyperbole, obviously but there are valid reasons to invite Elyse back.

When she was a junior Elyse participated in the 2012 Teen Tournament and won a tight game in her quarter-final and an even closer one in her semi-final. She faced off against Rose Schaefer and Catherine Briley in the finals. She went into Game 1 with $23,200 and a big lead over both of her opponents. Then she played well in the semi-finals and had locked up the tournament with $28,400 at the end of Final Jeopardy. But that wasn’t why she went viral.

The Final Jeopardy category was AMERICAN HISTORY: “When the future state of Iowa became part of the United States, this man was President.” All three players knew the correct response: “Who was Jefferson? When it came to Elise, she had wagered $28,000. That brought her total to $79,600.

At the time the payoff for winning the Teen Tournament was $75,000. Elyse is the only player during that period to surpass the maximum total. (I should mention her fellow challengers also significantly passed the totals for second and third place respectively.)

It was the kind of performance that deserved an encore but Teen Tournament winners had not been allowed in the Tournament of Champions since 2000. However after last year’s Teen Reunion Tournament, I think the time has come for another reunion. And I wouldn’t mind if they invited Rose or Catherine back as well.

 

Jason Keller

Jason is one of those Jeopardy champions who should have been listed among the annals of the great but missed his window.

As 2011 came to an end, Jason embarked on one the most successful runs any Jeopardy champion had since David Madden’s streak. He won nine games, tied with Dan Pawson for the third most to that point in Jeopardy history and $213,900 in those nine games. At that point it was the sixth highest total any player had won in their original run.

He then had to wait more than fourteen months to appear in the Tournament of Champions which took place in February of 2013. In his quarterfinal match it didn’t seem like there was much rust: he romped to a quarterfinal victory.

In his semi-final match things were going well for him as he led in the Jeopardy round and well into the second half of Double Jeopardy. Then Keith Whitener went on an incredible run that included a Daily Double which netted him $10,000. He had an insurmountable lead going into Final Jeopardy in which Jason knew the correct response but Keith didn’t.

 Now Keith was a good player – he’d won seven games himself that season – and he finished second to Colby Burnett in the Tournament of Champions. But it had a ripple effect. In the Battle of the Decades the following year three players were from the 2013 Tournament of Champions were invited to participate but Keith was invited and Jason wasn’t even extended a fan favorite entry. And by the time the Battle of the Decades was over Arthur Chu had finished his eleven game run and Julia Collins was halfway through hers. The new breed of super-champions was about to leave Jason’s remarkable run in the dust and he has not been invited to another tournament since.

 

Andrew Pau

Andrew Pau had a similar set of misfortune, though in his case it was a different set of circumstances. The field in the 2017 Tournament of Champions was arguably the most impressive in the post Ken Jennings era. Buzzy Cohen, Austin Rogers and Alan Lin, who were the three finalists in that tournament are among the most superb players in the past decade and all were deservedly invited to participate in the Jeopardy All-Star Games the following year. Also invited was Seth Wilson, who’d won twelve games and participated in the All-Star Games and $265,000 and Lilly Chin, that year’s College Champion who was offered an alternate spot.

The thing is  almost 0the entire field was at that level and I could make an argument for at least four of the other players to be invited back. But I think the one who deserves it the most is Andrew Pau because he was not only a great player but his paths crossed with two of the best.

Andrew had already won six games and over $170,000 when he faced off against Buzzy Cohen, who defeated him. Buzzy managed to win nine games – but he actually won less in his original run than Andrew did in his.

Andrew was dominant in his quarterfinal match and drew Lily and Austin in the quarterfinal. It was a hard fought battle in the Jeopardy round but in Double Jeopardy Andrew caught fire and got the first five clues correct before he found the first Daily Double. Sensing a chance to put the game away early he wagered $8000 in WORLD PLACE NAMES – and it went wrong. He dropped to third place.

Now it didn’t end there: no one played well in Double Jeopardy and Andrew was still within striking distance at the end of the round even with Austin in the lead. But in Final Jeopardy Austin got the clue correct and went on to the finals.

Andrew deserves to come back much for the same reason Jason does – he was this close to a place among the Jeopardy greats and it backfired.

 

Emma Boettcher

Anyone who is a fan of Jeopardy knows who Emma Boettcher is. James Holzhauer will never forget. She is the contestant who stopped his incredible run the day before he was likely to pass Ken Jennings for all-time money won. Emma ‘only’ one three games but she won $97,002 in them and in 2019, that was enough to get her invited to the Tournament of Champions. (She actually won a bit more than some players managed to in five games.)

It was perhaps inevitable that Emma would end up facing off against James in the finals of that year’s Tournament. But it must have come as a shock to those who watched just how close Emma came to defeating James in that Tournament. She had a chance to cause a major upset had she got Final Jeopardy right and he had gotten it wrong in the climatic game of the Finals. It didn’t turn out that way but James knew going in how lucky he’d been.

Considering that we’ve just seen a three game winner not only win the Tournament of Champions but beat James Holzhauer several times in this past year’s Masters I think that its well past time for Emma Boettcher to return to the Alex Trebek stage.

 

Karen Farrell

In Karen’s case I want her invited back on the principle of equal time. She was one of three female eight game winners who appeared on Jeopardy in the truncated 2019-2020 season. She won far less money that the other two - MacKenzie Jones and Jennifer Quail – and her performance in the Tournament of Champions was in between those two: she got to the semi-finals before she was trounced by the eventual winner Sam Kavanaugh.

Now in the first invitational, Jennifer and MacKenzie were both invited back as was Sam Kavanaugh and Jason Zuffranieri. I don’t deny they all should have been invited ahead of Karen; they all won more money then her in their original runs. But especially since the other two eight-game female champions have received invitations, she deserves one as well.

 

I honestly think if the Invitational Tournament is to become a regular occurrence we must allow back some of the ‘lesser known Jeopardy Masters’ as well. I think some of the names I’ve listed are more likely than others but I think its long past time all of them came back. I’d sure like to see them again, and I bet they have their own cheering sections as well.

Historical Series: We've Always Elected Celebrities To The Presidency. They Were Called Generals: Introduction and Part 1

 

 

Even before the 2016 election, I had been hearing a variation on the same argument over and over from pundits, historians and supposedly educated people.

The argument was that for a long time Americans had chosen their leaders through logical reasoned debate on issues and political context. Then at some point, the type of Presidential candidate Americans got began to meet a much lower standard, one of performance more than qualifications. There’s no consensus as to when this happened exactly: some argued it started with Obama, some traced it back to Reagan, some argued in came with the rise of television for reducing complex arguments to sound bites or the rise of selecting Presidential candidates in primary campaigns. But it’s a truth now agreed upon by all of these talking heads that in the past the voters made informed decisions and didn’t let such things as celebrity guide them.

It's a nice story. It’s also a complete falsehood and one that even a casual student of American history should know well enough then to argue as the truth.

The reality is, since the start of the election of our Presidents by direct vote and arguably since the founding of the republic, the men who have served as President more often then not been far more well known to the public even before they were sworn in as President. The critical difference is that was the nation had a different definition of what a celebrity was, particularly what made you a national name.

That definition was military service. Very early in our nation’s history, there was a direct correlation between fame in battle being a qualification for the White House. As we increasingly developed a two-party system no matter how much the parties changed in the first century of direct elections, both parties came to realize that most voters equating prowess on the battlefield as the qualities that would make great leadership. Frequently in the nineteenth century, when this mindset was at its peak, this would turn out to be a false equivalence for our country but both parties would increasingly lean on this because it would lead to electoral success and they would worry about governing after the fact.

As celebrity has increasingly taken a hold in our electoral system at practically every level, it’s worth looking at how the United States decided that our leadership at the executive level was frequently tied to those who had held positions at the highest military level. From this we frequently get the conclusion that the best political leaders should have little, if no political experience, and no matter how many times we are proven wrong by history,  it seems this is a lesson we are unable to unlearn. So this series will take a look at why we decided the military would frequently be are best choices for the Presidency, when America was right with its choices and when it was wrong, and why we seem to have abandoned it. And we might as well start at the very beginning.

It’s generally known that George Washington was reluctant to serve as our nation’s first President. After leading America through the Revolution and presiding over the Constitutional Convention, he had wanted to go back to a quiet life in Mount Vernon. But America had other plans.

Despite the fact that he was chosen unanimously by the first ever electoral college, there were many who thought it might not be the best idea for a military man to be our first President. Some wanted Benjamin Franklin to be the first leader, and some had wanted John Adams. But the reason Washington was chosen was in part due to his national fame as well as the fact that he did not have the political baggage that men such as Adams and Franklin did.

Washington had been reluctant to serve but he took on the mantle of Cincinnatus, the legendary Roman who was a citizen soldier. He was twice granted supreme power but he didn’t hold it a day longer than absolutely necessary, constantly demonstrating great honor and integrity. Like the majority of the Founding Fathers Washington had studied the Romans and the Greeks and held it high-esteem. Washington had done so when he had relinquished control of the Continental Army and he would refuse to use his power to establish a monarchy or assume the powers of a king. This was exactly what our country, which already had one failed form of government behind it, needed to begin when it got started.

Washington went out of his way to form a cabinet with the most qualified people at the helm. Thomas Jefferson was his secretary of state, Hamilton his secretary of Treasury. The two men had been arch-rivals for a long time, putting them in the cabinet was a stroke of brilliance. Henry Knox served as his secretary of War and Edmund Randolph was his Attorney General. When Jefferson left as his position, Randolph took over as Secretary of State.

He also had to take the job of essentially forming the Supreme Court from scratch. John Jay, the first Chief Justice, was one of his best choses as was John Rutledge. Rutledge briefly succeeded Jay before he was replaced by Oliver Ellsworth in March of 1796.

Washington is considered one of the three greatest Presidents in history but he almost always is ranked behind Lincoln or FDR when it comes to being considered the greatest. Perhaps it is due to the fact that being first we give him less credit than his successor and maybe its because compared to all his manifold other accomplishments, calling him the greatest President might be a bit much. But he managed superb leadership at the founding of our republic and though he could have gotten a third term, like Cincinnatus he chose to return to Mount Vernon and let the first real Presidential election proceed in 1796. He believed neither in political parties – he only took on the label of Federalist because John Adams was – and famously warned about foreign entanglements in his farewell address. Both were noble ideas even if neither was likely to be sustainable.

Most historians don’t want to consider Washington – nor indeed the Founding Fathers themselves – as celebrities, no doubt because they believe it would diminish them in their eyes. But the fact remains that not only he but most of those who served in the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention and indeed the first five Presidents of the United states were the dictionary-definition of it. They were known throughout the known world for what they had achieved and who they had achieved it against. And I think it’s worth reminded those on the left as well other the minorities just what men like Washington were risking when so many of them, particularly minorities, dismiss them as ‘racist white men’.

To be clear, most of these scholars dismiss everybody in the West – Britain, France, every country except Russia – under the labels of colonialism and imperialism. That’s true. Then they tend to frequently disdain America as being a product of imperialism and falling under the racist, genocidal tropes of these Western nations. That’s also true. However, the question I have for those same leftists is would they have preferred the alternative when they denounce America as not a real democracy. Would they prefer to still be under the yoke of the British, who they will never waste an opportunity to call an imperialist nation? Would they prefer to still be singing ‘God Save The King’ and saluting the Union Jack?

This is the thing about those ‘racist white men’ that I think the left loves to ignore: the bravery it took for them to make their stand. Yes the soldiers were all doing the fighting for them, but let’s not kid ourselves. If the revolt had failed, the British would not have treated these revolutionaries kindly. We know this from how the Empire reacted to this both before and after the American Revolution to nations that tried to revolt and failed. When Ben Franklin said, “We must all hang together or we will all hang separately,” he wasn’t being rhetorical. He and every member of the Continental Congress who signed the Declaration of Independence were committing treason in the eyes of a ruling nation. They would have all been made examples of by the Crown and they would not have died swiftly or painlessly. When Patrick Henry said: “Give me liberty or give me death,” he knew far too well both options were equally possible.

This applied to Washington as well. If he had been captured by the British at any point during the battles he led, there is a good chance he would have been executed or at the very least, sent back to Britain to face a lifetime of imprisonment. Many of these men were indeed rich and plantation owners. If Jefferson or Madison had been imprisoned, the crown would have taken over their plantations and I assure you, the treatment of the slaves would not have improved and they sure as hell wouldn’t have been set free.

The same is true when Washington and the delegates at the Constitutional Convention tried to work out a government for the New Republic. The previous version, the Articles of Confederation, had ended in disaster and they knew if they failed again, this young country might die before it was born. So for five long, hot months they spent debated, compromising, yelling at each other, and indeed quite a few of them walked out altogether before they produced the Constitution. To this day, millions of Americans regard it and the people who helped create with contempt, primarily because it didn’t take into account what seemed obvious to those who have the fortunate benefit of more than two centuries of hindsight.

Well, the founders knew that when they were doing it. The  opening phrase of the Preamble includes the words: “in order to form a more perfect Union.” They’re not saying that they got it right the first time, that it’s perfect now, or perfection is even possible. All they were trying to do was do a better job than they had previously done, by themselves or everyone who had come before them. They did this, for the record, with no discernable road map for a democracy: there wasn’t a clear example of what before and many of them made several debates during the convention as to what to try to do just to get this far – many of which looked like it might cause the Convention to dissolve

Yes they did so in a time of slavery, with no acknowledgement of rights for women or acknowledgement of other minorities. They also had no idea the railroad, the telegraph or the electric light was going to become part of our society. They weren’t Gods the way the right sees them, or racist thugs the way the left sees them. They were ordinary men doing the best they could with what they had at the time.

And its worth noting they were all infinitely more educated than so many of those who run for political office even a century later. They had studied Latin and Greek; men like Jefferson were architects and mathematical prodigies, Washington had been a surveyor. I mention this because not merely Washington but the first five Presidents – all of whom fall under the heading of Founding Fathers – were all so overqualified for their positions its practically insane.

Washington had served as general of the Continental Army and presided over the Constitutional Convention. Adams and Jefferson had played critical roles in the creation of the Declaration of Independence and had key roles in the diplomatic corps; Adams had been Envoy to France, Minister to Britain and the Netherlands before returning to America. Jefferson had been governor of Virginia and Minister to France before becoming Secretary of State. James Madison essentially wrote the Constitution, used the Federalist Papers to defend it and helped create the Bill of Rights. He’d served under Washington as part of the Virginia Militia, was a Congressmen in the first House of Representatives and Jefferson’s Secretary of State. James Monroe’s wasn’t quite there at the start, but he had a remarkable resume: one of the first Senators from Virginia, Minister to France and Britain, Secretary of War and Secretary of State under Madison.

For that matter most of the men who ran in the first elections for the Presidency were similarly more than qualified. Charles Pinckney, who Jefferson defeated when he ran for reelection and Madison’s first term., had signed the Constitution, served in the Senate for two terms for South Carolina and was Jefferson’s Minister to Spain. Madison defeated DeWitt Clinton for reelection in 1812, who from 1802 to 1828 held every conceivable elected office for the state of New York. Rufus King who Monroe trounced when he won the Presidency in 1817 signed the Constitution, served as minister to the U.K. and Senator from Massachusetts.

None of these men, it should be admitted, ran for President in the sense that would be true by the middle of the century or even with the force of a two-party system. The Federalist Party was in decline by the end of Jefferson’s term and by the time of Monroe’s election it was dead. But they were all more than competent leaders and figures in the electoral process. As America moved more into a direct democracy system at the end of the Era of Good Feelings, it was unlikely this peace would have lasted – there were other problems, including the slavery question that were becoming a national issue. And bringing the right of suffrage to the many was something that needed to be done for democracy to truly flourish.

Unfortunately when it occurred in the first Presidential election in 1824, it was done in the name of a man who was by far the most unqualified Presidential candidate to that point in history and whose temperament and rabid populist following would lead to the balance of separation of powers beginning to tilt far more in favor of the executive branch. And it did so in the name of a military figure whose national reputation was built on a shaky foundation.

In the next article in the series I will deal with the rise of Andrew Jackson, and how the man who brought about Jacksonian Democracy himself had little use for the term as it traditionally existed.