http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32741802
A Point of View: Is the US president an elected monarch?
15 May 2015
>From the section Magazine
President Obama has been accused of acting like a monarch. But the US
presidency has been an elected kingship since 1776 in all but name,
argues the historian David Cannadine.
After five weeks of campaigning, which may have seemed unending and
interminable at the time, but which in retrospect passed relatively
quickly, the British general election is over, and David Cameron is
once again ensconced in 10 Downing Street. But although the votes will
not be cast until November 2016, the battle for the American
Presidency has already begun, as several Republicans and Democrats,
with varying degrees of plausibility, have recently declared
themselves as candidates for their party's nomination. Yet there are
18 months to go until that election, and Barack Obama will not
actually vacate the White House until his successor is inaugurated in
Washington DC in January 2017. This is, to put it mildly, a much
longer period of campaigning than that which characterises British
elections, and it's often observed that the abilities required to win
the long-distance race for the American Presidency are very different
from those that are subsequently needed to govern the country from the
Oval Office.
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A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50
BST and repeated Sundays 08:50 BST
David Cannadine is a British historian, author and professor of
history at Princeton University
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There are, no doubt, many reasons why Americans spend so much longer
choosing their next president than we spend in deciding upon our next
prime minister. But one explanation might be that, whereas in Britain
we are merely settling on the next head of government, Americans are
not only doing that, but they are also, and in the same person,
selecting their head of state as well. But what sort of a presidency
is it that, unlike many of those existing in Western Europe, combines
these two jobs? According to some of Barack Obama's Republican
opponents he has not been doing the job the way it should be done.
Last November, for example, when Obama sought to shield millions of
undocumented immigrants from deportation by issuing an executive order
allowing them legally to remain in the United States, he was denounced
by his critics for exceeding his legitimate constitutional authority.
Andrew Jackson's statue in Washington DC's Lafayette Park
Yet Barack Obama is far from being the first American president who
has been accused by his opponents of behaving like a sovereign of the
European old regime, or as an oriental despot lording it, unchecked
and unrestrained, over his subservient subjects.
For such criticism of assertive and determined American presidents,
whether Democrat or Republican, for their regal presumptions and
monarchical pretension is almost as old as the American republic
itself. During the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson occupied the White
House, some Americans became increasingly worried about the growth of
executive power centred on the President, and there were critical
cartoons of King Andrew the First, who was caricatured as being clad
in royal garb, and with the royal veto in his hand.
Theodore Roosevelt was accused of being a kingly president
During the American Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln was the strongest
and most decisive President since Jackson, criticism resurfaced that
he, in turn, was acting too much like a king. And these concerns
re-emerged in the early 20th Century, during the presidency of
Theodore Roosevelt. He was the most upper class American leader since
Thomas Jefferson - through his mother he could boast the blood of the
Royal house of Scotland pulsing through his veins. He expanded and
aggrandized his office by exploiting the potential of what he called
its "bully pulpit", and as an exponent and practitioner of American
imperialism, he was eager to take up the "white man's burden", as
Rudyard Kipling exhorted him to do. And it was in wary recognition of
such peremptory behaviour that the novelist Henry James suggested that
the President's initials, TR, did not so much stand for Theodore
Roosevelt but rather for Theodore Rex.
TR's distant cousin and eventual successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
was no less kingly a president. He possessed a powerful sense of
dynastic identity, taking another relative, Eleanor, to be his wife.
Having first been elected president in November 1932, he would be
re-elected three more times, which was not only unprecedented in
American history, but also meant that FDR effectively held the job for
life, dying at his post in April 1945. During the heady years of the
New Deal, when he attacked the bankers and big business, Roosevelt was
regularly denounced as a traitor to his class, as a communist or as a
fascist dictator, or as a another president of unconstitutionally
regal ambitions. And FDR genuinely seems to have enjoyed meeting such
crowned heads of state as King George VI of Britain, and the deposed
Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, monarchs whom he regarded, in Roy
Jenkins's vivid and delightfully oxymoronic phrase, as "slightly
inferior equals".
Franklin D Roosevelt on a dime coin
So there's nothing new in the recent denunciations of Barack Obama as
a president misguidedly behaving as a king or as an emperor. And such
criticisms, whatever their merit, are scarcely surprising, for the
American nation was brought into being on the basis of extravagant and
exaggerated monarchical denunciation. According to the Declaration of
Independence, King George III's reign was characterised by "repeated
injuries and usurpations". Among other things, he'd obstructed the
administration of justice, refused to assent to laws "the most
wholesome and necessary for the public good", and had "plundered our
seas, ravaged our coasts, and burnt our towns". He was, the
Declaration concluded, "a prince whose character is thus marked by
every act which may define a tyrant", which meant he was "unfit to be
the ruler of a free people". Small wonder that at the constitutional
convention, which met in the aftermath of the War of Independence, the
delegates agreed that America's new head of state should be an elected
president rather than an hereditary monarch.
Theodore 'Teddy' Roosevelt 1858-1919Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) 1882-1945
Republican president 1901-1909Democratic president 1933-1945
Introduced "square deal" based on consumer protection, conservation
and control of corporationsInstituted the "new deal", a set of
economic reforms to lift the US out of the great depression
After presidency, went on African safari which killed 11,400
animalsTook the US into WWII in 1941, and died in office a month
before VE Day
"Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far""The only thing
we have to fear is fear itself"
But this was far from being the whole of the story. To begin with, the
denunciation - and the demonisation - of King George III in the
Declaration of Independence was based on a seriously misleading
exaggeration of his royal prerogatives. Those powers were increasingly
being claimed by the politicians, and insofar as George III did
re-affirm Britain's right to rule, to tax and to legislate for the
American colonies, he believed he was asserting the sovereignty of the
British parliament rather than that of the British crown.
But ironically, when the leaders of the American Revolution tried to
work out what powers they should give to the newly created American
presidency, the only models available were those of contemporary
European monarchies, and especially the British. And so the founding
fathers gave to the American presidency just those powers they
erroneously believed King George III still possessed - to appoint and
dismiss his cabinet, to make war and peace, and to veto bills sent up
by the legislature. From the outset, then, the American presidency was
vested with what might be termed monarchical authority, which meant
that it really was a form of elective kingship. So when Henry Clay,
the leader of the American Whig Party regretted that, under Andrew
Jackson, the presidency was "rapidly tending towards an elective
monarchy", he was in error because it had been an elective monarchy
from the very beginning.
King George III - a tyrant?
Indeed, better-informed Americans fully understood this. "We elect a
king for four years", Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State once
observed, "and give him absolute power within certain limits, which
after all he can interpret for himself". Some commentators went even
further, insisting that although America claimed to be a republic,
because it had no hereditary sovereign, it was in reality a disguised
monarchy - whereas Britain might claim to be a monarchy, because it
had a royal head of state, but it was in fact a concealed republic,
because the politicians rather than the sovereign were actually in
charge. In the words of one late 19th Century American newspaper:
"Great Britain is a republic, with a hereditary president, while the
United States is a monarchy with an elective king." That may not have
been the whole truth of things then, and it is not the whole truth of
things now, but it should certainly give both President Obama, and
also his Republican critics, some food for thought - to say nothing of
the occupants of 10 Downing Street and of Buckingham Palace.
A Point of View is broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and
repeated Sundays 08:50 BST or listen on BBC iPlayer.
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Received on Sun May 17 2015 - 11:47:46 EDT