(image by Matt Brunson)

Why not pit these 1st 100 days against the grandaddy “100 Days” of them all?

I hope I can follow through & do all 100.

What I plan is this:

Each literal day of the Obama administration will be compared to the corresponding day of FDR’s 1st term. I don’t have exact data for each of the 1933 days but I’m sure it’s out there somewhere on the internets.

I will (try to) post on the day after the ‘day’ in question.

Meaning, yesterday, for both candidates, was Day 1:

Day 1, 1933

Click here to view the embedded video.

Day 1, 2009

Click here to view the embedded video. Click here to view the embedded video.

Both men have ‘groundbreaking’ presidencies - FDR’s for the disabled (though not disclosed at the time) & Obama’s for his skin color. So they cancel each other out there.

Both men came to power in times of great economic crisis, though folks were much, much worse off in March of 1933.

The U.S. was not at war in 1933, but is involved in 2 wars in 2009.

FDR’s line “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” does not, in my view, have a comparable line in Obama’s speech.

BUT–

FDR loses points - & Obama gets a head-start on this competition - for doing absolutely nothing to help address the crisis with his predecessor. For four months he literally avoided the pleas for help from President Hoover, in order to make his actions look far more consequential. But during that 4-month period (the last time such a gap between election & inauguration existed) the crisis only became worse. By contrast, the transition between President Bush & President Obama was by far the most seamless on record, & the two men bent over backwards to make it so, to both of their credit.

Therefore:

Winner of Day 1: Barack Obama

Further reading: compare several presidents’ “1st 100 Days” here.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Above: that horribly mangled & awkward Oath of Office.

NBC and ABC say the flub was Roberts’, while the AP says it was Obama’s.

Chris Wallace wonders:

Click here to view the embedded video.

But calm down, though.

Language Log parses:

“In the embedded clause of the oath, the adverb faithfully is properly positioned after the auxiliary will (1). If you miss the adverb as it is placed in the official wording, you have two more chances for inserting it in a coherent fashion: placing faithfully after the verb execute (2) or placing it at the end of the clause (3):

that I will 1 execute 2 the office of President of the United States 3

Roberts does indeed miss his opportunity to put faithfully in position 1, perhaps thrown by Obama repeating the opening phrase of the oath earlier than he expected. In Roberts’ first attempt, faithfully ends up in clause-final position 3. Obama seems to realize that the placement is wrong, but repeats the first part of the clause all the way through to the verb: that I will execute. There’s no possibility of getting faithfully back to position 1 at this point, but Roberts gets as close as he can by placing it in position 2, immediately after the verb, in his second attempt. Obama ignores the self-repair, however, and ends up repeating the misplaced version that Roberts originally supplied, with faithfully in clause-final position 3.”

Click on this link to learn about another botched oath; the world - or a presidency - didn’t end there, either.

ABC asked Obama about it last night; read what he had to say here.

FURTHER READING: Newsweek’s Dahlia Lithwick on the connection between the Bible used yesterday, two Presidents, & two Supreme Court justices.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Speechwars.com, says there are three words uttered yesterday that made their presidential inaugural address debut (h/t Marc Ambinder). See what they were after the jump.

1. Muslims

2. Nonbelievers

3. Data

The 1st two words I can understand.

The last is somewhat of a surprise to me.

So which words have presidents used most often? Check out this speechwars’ word cloud for the answer.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

[Above: Obama prepares his inaugural speech. Photo by Callie Shell, Time Magazine]

As Steve Clemons points out & I realized when he said it yesterday, there was a factual error in Obama’s inaugural speech:

“Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath.”

Wrong number. Find out why after the jump.

It’s 43. That’s because the man pictured above, Grover Cleveland, was sworn in as president on two separate (non-concurrent) occasions.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

An era is ending in presidential politics.

How will an historian in 2109 view that era?

I’ve been thinking it over this past weekend, & here’s my best guess.

The period ending tomorrow, January 20th, 2009, began in 1960, with the presidential election between the two men you see above, Richard M. Nixon & John F. Kennedy.

I would argue that every president, & every candidate who sought & failed the presidency, were doing so in the shadow of one of these two men.

The ‘culture war’ that we’re so sick of is a clash that truly began almost 50 years ago, with this election.

Each man represented a different thing to both their supporters & to the American story: one emphasized our aspirations & ideals, & the other claimed to represent the views of so-called “real Americans.” Both men affected the course of our nation’s history in positive & negative ways.

Here’s how this era will be looked at (on a purely presidential level) as a Shakespearean 5-act play:

Act I: 1960-1968

John Kennedy & Richard Nixon are the 1st men of the World War II generation. The torch was passed. Kennedy won a tight race - some would argue with the help of some funny business. Kennedy is assassinated about 1000 days into his presidency, but not before winning our nation’s biggest victory of the Cold War, & setting up our nation’s biggest defeat. LBJ continues the JFK legacy, & Barry Goldwater - while losing badly - outlines ways his side is marking its turf.

Act II: 1968-1972

Richard Nixon’s remarkable political comeback to win the presidency in 1968. His “southern strategy” reveals one way to win the presidency, a way that will be emulated & perfected for the next three decades, & which capitalized on the divisions created by the Vietnam War.

Act III: 1973-1980

Richard Nixon discovers the limits of presidential power the hard way. He once again campaigns successfully against his opponent (a Democrat who failed to tap into the Kennedy charisma). But Watergate reveals the dark qualities of his psyche. Jerry Ford is unable to keep the presidency because he doesn’t live up to Nixon’s example, & Jimmy Carter wins the presidency because he is no Richard Nixon. Because Carter is no JFK, though, he himself fails to win re-election.

Act IV: 1980-1992

Richard Nixon was the John the Baptist to Ronald Reagan’s Jesus (extending the analogy further, one could say Goldwater was Reagan’s Isiah. Reagan combines Kennedy’s charisma & the divisive, “regular folks vs. the other” electoral techniques of RichardNixon to win 2 presidencies, & assure election for his Vice President, George W. Bush. Walter Mondale & Michael Dukakis fail to win the presidency because they lack Kennedy’s charisma.

Act V: 1992-2008

The rise (& fall) of the boomer presidents. Clinton & Bush appear as two sides of the same coin. Both reflect their generation’s solopsism in ways they don’t realize. Clinton is elected because his charisma comes closest to Kennedy, but his oversized ego & sexual amorality (like Kennedy’s) led to his downfall. By the same token, George W. Bush uses the tried-&-true Nixon method to win the White House, but the presence of two Nixon-era pols (Cheney & Rumsfeld) who are out to restore the presidency to Nixon’s vision of executive power & secrecy, ultimately lead to one of the worst presidencies in American history.

For the first time in almost 50 years, we have a president taking office who is not shaped by one of these two men (or one could argue that he’s learned the right lessons from both & left the wrong lessons behind). I find it quite remarkable - especially since I believed baby boomer presidents would dominate the White House for most of my adult life.

It’s the end of an era.. this era, anyway.

What do you think?

Would you chop up history in a different way?

Post a comment!

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

President Bush delivers his farewell address tonight.

[How do you think he did? Grade his performance in our webpoll here at the NewsChannel9 main page. I'm taking this poll down late this afternoon. You only get one vote per computer.]

After the jump, clips of three other presidential farewell addresses, so you can compare notes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#43

Click here to view the embedded video.

#40

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#34 (2 parts)

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

[Sure, I'd guess he'd fly a plane. This is from a couple years back when his wax likeness flew to DC. It's one of my favorite pictures ever.]

Above: Sean Hannity, last night, who said:

“Well, one of the other things that I found pretty interesting is, you know, where would Abraham Lincoln be as it relates to Gitmo? Didn’t he put aside civil rights and even shut down press outlets and issues of habeas corpus as it relates to those issues? I think he’d be on a very different side on the Gitmo issue, don’t you think?”

No, I don’t think.

I’m on the side of this week’s Newsweek piece by another conservative, Christopher Hitchens:

“Until the Union itself could be considered safe and whole again, the Constitution—written for the entire Union and, in a sense, representing it—did not really apply, even though the president’s “inherent powers” most certainly did. (I give this as my own interpretation, as well as to distinguish Lincoln’s drastic emergency measures from some later and more recent ones. Hateful and menacing as it is, Islamic terrorism does not immediately threaten us with secession and disunion and the reduction of millions of Americans to involuntary servitude.)”

Emphasis mine.

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

[Sky over northwest Missouri, 1970s. Photo by my father.]

“I pride myself that I’m a prudent man, and I believe that patience is a virtue. But I understand that politics is, for some, a game and that sometimes the game is to stop all progress and then decry the lack of improvement. But let me tell you: Far more important than my political future and far more important than yours is the well-being of our country.”

Who said it?

George H.W. Bush, from his 4th & final State of the Union address, January 28th, 1992.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

[above: Birds in a tree in northwest Missouri, January, 1971. photo by my father.]

“Each public officer who takes an oath to support the constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, & not as it is understood by others.”

Who said it?

The 7th president (& greatest, by/so far, from Tennessee), Andrew Jackson, who on this date in 1815 had a celebrated victory over the British, as Johnnie Horton explains:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I just started reading Jon Meacham’s American Lion (thanks to a loaner copy from Gran’pappy Welch).

More later.

FURTHER READING:

1. the former president allegedly has a blog, but be warned! despite the fact that the language he uses is very, very salty, I’m not entirely convinced that it is him.

2. I’ve added the (much, much saner) Andrew Jackson Democrats blog to my blogroll.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Above: October 6th, 1981. The last time all current & former presidents met at the White House.

Read a good account of this encounter here.

It’s happening again today with President Bush, the President-Elect, & the surviving presidents having a White House lunch.

Read more about that here.

& this reminds me of one of my favorite Presidential jokes:

Q: Which 4 U.S. presidents aren’t buried on U.S. soil?

A: The four that are currently alive.

(this joke changes to “5″ at 12pm, January 20th)

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

“Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.”

Who said it?

President Theodore Roosevelt, who on this date 107 years ago received well-wishers (pictured above) at the White House. (PDF file)

Happy New Year!

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

[above: Sky, Chattanooga, August 2nd, 2008, 8:25pm. Photo by my wife.]

“Legislation can neither be wise nor just which seeks the welfare of a single interest at the expense and to the injury of many and varied interests.”

Who said it?

Our 17th President, Andrew Johnson, who was born two hundred years ago today.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Above: not the picture that’s been burning up the web in the last 24 hours of Barack Obama shirtless in Hawaii. That, of course, is Gerry Ford.

You can see the actual photo (which I can’t legally re-post) here.

& read more about the frenzy the photo has caused here.

Now, I saw that photo late yesterday & debated whether or not to do a story on it - I kind of tend to shy away from the tabloid stuff.

But my boss just insisted I do something, saying it’s the ‘water-cooler talk of the internet.’

& it’s true, the reaction to this paparazzo’s pic has been funny - the Huffington Post’s over-the-top headline -

“O!”

- was particularly laughable, in an avert-your-eyes kinda way.

But, then again, I’m a heterosexual male. They’re male nipples. What’s the big deal?

So I polled several female NewsChannel9 employees about the pic, & was surprised at the answers I got:

As I expected, several swooned.

“Mmmm!” said one. “Oh, my..” said another. A third said “If my husband looks like that at age 47, I’m a happy woman.”

But you may be surprised to learn - as I was - that the reaction wasn’t nearly unanimous.

About half of those I polled weren’t turned on at all.

One employee made a reference to his prominent ‘man-boobs.’

Another said that the top half & (somewhat paunchy) bottom half didn’t match as well as they could. “He needs to do some more curls,” said one.

All interesting.

To each his own, I guess!

What do you think? I’d love to hear your opinion.

Obama’s certainly not the only president who’s been photographed half-naked. Help yourself to some more shirtless presidential eye-candy here.

…you’re welcome.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

..& thus I will be off until Sunday.

In the interim: enjoy President Richard Nixon tickle the ivories, in a composition he wrote. (the sound, inexplicably, cuts off halfway through, & for that I am sorry)

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

It sort of makes more sense to me now.

From Gawker:

“In 1980, a vacationing Rod Blagojevich camped in front of Richard Nixon’s home, with a friend, until the pariah ex-president emerged and this picture was taken.”

…

Just before he was arrested, Blago told reporters, “Those who feel like they want to sneakily and wear taping devices… I would remind them that it kind of smells like Nixon and Watergate.””

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Above: listen to FDR’s speech following the attack on Pearl Harbor, 67 years ago today.

Beth Dempsey of the Schlager Group outlines 5 things you may not realize about this momentous speech:

    1. No speechwriters, please. FDR dictated virtually every word of his
    address to his secretary, Grace Tully. The only exception was the
    next-to-last sentence, the phrasing of which was suggested by his close
    adviser Harry Hopkins.

    2. The facts speak for themselves. With the exception of his dramatic
    reference to "infamy" and one mention of "treachery," FDR never offered a
    personal opinion on the Japanese attacks in his address. Instead, he
    solemnly detailed the facts of the event, relying on listeners to draw
    their own conclusions.

    3. A foreshadow of things to come. FDR's call for "absolute victory"
    presaged the later decision to wage war until the Japanese surrendered
    unconditionally. This grand call for total victory also helps to explain
    why the United States later decided to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.

    4. Short but powerful. The address to Congress contains just 25 sentences,
    fewer than 500 words, and was delivered in about 7 minutes. In that brief
    address, FDR was so persuasive that within 33 minutes, a declaration of
    war passed unanimously in the Senate, and in the House of Representatives
    only one dissenting vote was cast (Jeannette Rankin, a pacifist from
    Montana, the first woman elected to Congress).

    5. Defining a historic moment. "But always will our whole Nation remember
    the character of the onslaught against us," said FDR, positioning the
    attack as a defining event in the country's history. Roosevelt's use of
    the future tense - "always will" - reflected a sense of moral certainty
    that reinforced his role as commander in chief.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

“On May 3, 2007, ten aspirants to the Republican presidential nomination kicked off the long campaign with a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. The candidates disagreed about the issues and their respective qualifications–but each claimed Reagan’s mantle.

“I think it’s important to remember,” said Mike Huckabee, “that what Ronald Reagan did was to give us a vision for this country, a morning in America, a city on a hill.” John McCain talked about Reagan’s fiscal austerity: “Ronald Reagan used to say we spend money like a drunken sailor.” Tommy Thompson threw in a stilted but apposite observation: “We forgot to be coming up with new ideas, big ideas like Ronald Reagan.”

Given the venue–and with Nancy Reagan in the front row–the candidates were being polite. They were also being sincere. Chiefly, though, they wanted to gain legitimacy with Republican factions that believed their politics were unsound. Tellingly, the candidates only once mentioned George W. Bush, who, until his popularity collapsed during his second term, had been touted within the party as a born-again Reagan. Instead, they all looked backward, beckoning to the restoration of a conservatism that had somehow lost its way.”

[photo credit: My Dad, December 1977]

Read the rest of the article here, then come back & tell us if you think its premise is correct in the comments section.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

From the Seattle Times: “The omnipresence of “God bless America” as a political slogan is an entirely recent phenomenon. We know because we’ve run the numbers.

“Analysis of more than 15,000 public communications by political leaders from Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 - the beginning of the modern presidency - through six years of George W. Bush’s administration revealed that prior to Ronald Reagan taking office in 1981, the phrase had passed a modern president’s lips only once in a major address: Richard Nixon used it to conclude an April 30, 1973, speech about Watergate.

But Reagan brought “God bless America” into the mainstream by regularly using it to conclude his speeches. Since then, presidents and other politicians have used it nearly to death. Like Nike’s “Just Do It” or any other ubiquitous catchphrase, the words eventually lose their meaning. “God bless America” has become the Pennsylvania Avenue equivalent to consumerized Madison Avenue staples.

That’s the problem with the “God bless America” test: Like most of the other tests that constitute modern political discourse, it doesn’t mean anything.

If a willingness to profess one’s faith and patriotism and to conclude speeches with “God bless America” were accurate indicators of presidential prowess, Bush family members would have long ago secured their places among the nation’s greatest leaders. Both George H.W. and George W. used it to conclude more than 80 percent of their major addresses, with the son often offering this important twist: “May God continue to bless America.”

Asking candidates to demonstrate their God and country bona fides by parroting a political catchphrase is insulting and unnecessary. Journalists’ and pundits’ time would be far better spent interrogating the actual beliefs of those candidates so willing to ask God to bless America. After all, had the phrase not been rendered all but meaningless through overuse, “God bless America” would have to be taken as a serious theological proposition.

Today, it’s just more of the noise that passes for serious political matters.”

What do you think? Post a comment!

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

We got a distinct sense yesterday that several of the pundits at ABC News don’t see anything wrong with the way they handled last Wednesday’s debate. [Watch the roundtable of George Stephanopoulos, George Will, Cokie Roberts & Sam Donaldson here.] Blogger MediaGirl called their denial a “let them eat cake” mentality & I tend to agree.

So does a particularly conservative NewsChannel9 colleague, who hadn’t seen my criticism, but forwarded me several pieces that criticized the way the debate went.

Not all conservatives feel this way, though. Check out Michelle Malkin’s take here.

The blog Publius has a humorous take on “The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (Slight Return)”:

Presidential candidates Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held this debate on April 16, 1858 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

MODERATORS:
CHARLIE GIBSON, ABC NEWS
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC NEWS

MR. GIBSON: So we’re going to begin with opening statements, and we had a flip of the coin, and the brief opening statement first from Mr. Lincoln.

LINCOLN: Thank you very much, Charlie and George, and thanks to all in the audience and who are out there. I appear before you today for the purpose of discussing the leading political topics which now agitate the public mind.

We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m sorry to interrupt, but do you think Mr. Douglas loves America as much you do? LINCOLN: Sure I do.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But who loves America more?

LINCOLN: I’d prefer to get on with my opening statement George.

STEPHANOPOULOS: If your love for America were eight apples, how many apples would Senator Douglas’s love be?

LINCOLN: Eight.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Proceed.

LINCOLN: In my opinion, slavery will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Excuse me, did an Elijah H. Johnson attend your church?

LINCOLN: When I was a boy in Illinois forty years ago, yes. I think he was a deacon.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you aware that he regularly called Kentucky “a land of swine and whores”?

LINCOLN: Sounds right — his ex-wife was from Kentucky.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Why did you remain in the church after hearing those statements?

LINCOLN: I was eight.

DOUGLAS: This is an important question George — it’s an issue that certainly will be raised in the fall.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you denounce him?

LINCOLN: I’d like to get back to the divided house if I may.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you denounce and reject him?

LINCOLN: If it will make you shut up, yes, I denounce and reject him.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you denounce and reject him with sugar on top?

LINCOLN: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: No takesies-backsies?

LINCOLN: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Whoa, so you would consider a takesie-backsie?

LINCOLN: That’s not what I meant…

DOUGLAS: When I was 11, my grandpappy and I chopped wood and shot bears.

LINCOLN: Ahem, I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect slavery will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you love America this much (extending fingers), this much (extending hands slightly), or thiiiiiis much (extending hands broadly)?

LINCOLN: I think we covered this…

GIBSON: If I may interrupt…

LINCOLN: Please.

GIBSON: I noticed, Mr. Lincoln, that your American flag pin was upside down…

LINCOLN: Yes, the wind caught it. Now, as I was saying…

GIBSON: We get questions about this all the time over at Powerline and on Hannity’s talk show. Mr. Douglas has said this is a major vulnerability for you in the fall. So I’ll ask again - do you love America?

LINCOLN: (scowling with a forced smile). Yes.

GIBSON: If your love for America were ice cream, what flavor would it be?

LINCOLN: (pausing with disgust and turning back to camera) Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.

DOUGLAS: He didn’t answer the question Charlie. This fall, that question is going to be on the minds of the American public. I’ve proudly stated that my love for America is Very Berry Strawberry.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me ask it another way. If Elijah Johnson were chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, would you eat it? Or would you decline to eat it?

DOUGLAS: Personally, as for me, I would decline to eat it.

LINCOLN (shaking his head): Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination — piece of machinery, so to speak — compounded of the Nebraska doctrine, and the Dred Scott decision.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We’ll get to Dred Scott in the second hour, time willing, but I want to get back to the ice cream question. And that’s what we’ll do, after the break.

& finally, CBS’s Bob Schieffer pretty much nails our opinion in his commentary yesterday on the faux “flag pin” issue.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Flag pins & “support our troops” bumper stickers are both ways to make yourself feel good without really doing anything concrete to help America. There’s nothing wrong with sporting either or both of them - provided you do more than just that. & anyone who chooses not to publicly display these should not have his patriotism or support for U.S. troops questioned.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

What did the founding fathers have in mind for how religion is treated in this country?

Did they want us to be faithful to their faith?

Jill Lepore of the New Yorker had a thought provoking review of several schools of thought, as laid out in several recent books. We hope you read this & then weigh in with your view:

“A wise man adheres not to his religion, because it was that of his ancestors,” a smooth-tongued mullah says to a tongue-tied American in Royall Tyler’s 1797 novel “The Algerine Captive.” The American, a luckless New Englander named Updike Underhill, had been sold into slavery among Muslims after Barbary pirates captured the ship on which he served as a surgeon. At the hands of his captors, he had been whipped, beaten, and bastinadoed-the soles of his feet caned to pulp-and he had borne it all. The terms of his terrible bondage: he will be freed only if he converts to Islam. Stoic, and secure in his Calvinism, Underhill agrees to a debate.

Tyler, a Vermont lawyer, found inspiration for “The Algerine Captive” in an American foreign-policy quagmire. In 1783, when the Peace of Paris ended the Revolutionary War, American seamen lost the protection of Britain’s treaties with the so-called Barbary States: Algiers, Tripoli, Morocco, and Tunisia. Over the next decade, more than seven hundred American sailors were captured and held as slaves in North Africa. When Congress was slow to respond, the public rallied, raising money to pay for the captives’ ransom, and giving con men the idea for a new ruse known, in the trade, as the Algerian Prisoner Fraud. In 1794, the American novelist, playwright, and actress Susanna Rowson starred in a benefit performance in Philadelphia of her play “Slaves in Algiers.” American emissaries finally secured the release of the prisoners in 1796. “The Algerine Captive,” published the following year, wasn’t a fund-raiser; it was a polemic about religious freedom. Royall Tyler had something to say about the liberty of conscience: Faith answers to reason.

Underhill’s debate with the mullah lasts five days. “Our religion was disseminated in peace; yours was promulgated by the sword,” Underhill insists. This the mullah contradicts: “The history of the Christian church is a detail of bloody massacre.” But Christianity must be the one true religion, Underhill counters, else how had so much of the world been so persuaded by the teachings of a few fishermen, so quickly? “If you argue from the astonishing spread of your faith,” the mullah answers, remember that “Mahomet was an illiterate camel driver,” born nearly six centuries after Christ, and yet his faith had spread through Arabia, Asia, and Africa and a great part of Europe: “In a word, view the world.”

Above all, the mullah, himself a convert, asserts that Underhill, who had inherited his faith, had never examined it. “Born in New England, my friend, you are a christian purified by Calvin,” he observes. “Born in the Campania of Rome, you had been a papist. Nursed by the Hindoos, you would have entered the pagoda with reverence, and worshipped the soul of your ancestor in a duck. Educated on the bank of the Wolga, the Delai Lama had been your god. In China, you would have worshipped Tien, and perfumed Confucius, as you bowed in adoration . . . of your ancestors.”

You won’t read about this debate in a crop of new books on religious liberty and the founding of America, an omission that can’t be charged to Royall Tyler’s obscurity. He wasn’t always obscure. He was a prolific and talented satirist, and “The Algerine Captive” was popular enough that it was reprinted in England, becoming only the second American novel to achieve that distinction. It’s overlooked for lots of reasons, not least among them that Royall Tyler, however distinguished, wasn’t a Founding Father, but also because novels don’t make law.

On the subject of religious liberty in America, there are four indispensable, foundational texts: Jefferson’s 1786 statute (”Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry”); Madison’s 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” (”The Religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man”); Article VI of the Constitution (”No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”); and the First Amendment (”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”). These are at once statements of political philosophy and legal documents; philosophers argue about them within a specific intellectual tradition, and legal scholars read them to trace precedent. Martha Nussbaum takes both of these approaches in “Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality” (Basic; $28.95). But because these documents long ago rose to the status of American scripture, another way to read them is to conduct an exegesis, which is more or less what Garry Wills does in “Head and Heart: American Christianities” (Penguin; $29.95). Politicians tend to use them genealogically, naming their authors as forebears or, as the case may be, glaringly omitting them. (”My faith is the faith of my fathers,” Mitt Romney declared in a speech last December, skipping over Jefferson and Madison in favor of Brigham Young, John and Samuel Adams, and the seventeenth-century Puritan dissenter Roger Williams.) The legal, the exegetical, the genealogical-each centers on the Founding Fathers: What did they intend? What did they mean? What would they make of us?

“History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead,” Voltaire once quipped. The Founding Fathers had their own pack of tricks: they turned their backs on the past. If they had meekly inherited the faith of their fathers, they would have written a constitution establishing Christianity as the national religion. They did not. Nearly every American colony was settled with an established religion; Connecticut’s 1639 founding document explained that the whole purpose of government was “to mayntayne and presearve the liberty and purity of the gospell of our Lord Jesus.” In the century and a half between that charter and the 1787 meeting of the Constitutional Convention lies an entire revolution, not just a political revolution but also a religious revolution, as Frank Lambert, a historian at Purdue, argued in his 2003 study, “The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America.” Far from establishing a religion, the Constitution doesn’t even mention God. At a time when all but two states required religious tests for office, the Constitution prohibited them. At a time when most states still had an official religion, the Bill of Rights forbade the federal government from establishing one.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were controversial when they were written and they’ve been controversial ever since, but Article VI and what is known as the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment have been controversial in the last half century because of the Supreme Court’s 1947 decision in Everson v. Board of Education, which reaffirmed the Fourteenth Amendment’s extension (or “incorporation”) of the Establishment Clause to the states and, citing both Jefferson’s Virginia Statute and Madison’s Remonstrance, interpreted the Establishment Clause to mean that the Framers intended there to be a “wall of separation” between church and state: “Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion to another.”

The debate that ensued has not been confined to the courts, as Lambert illustrates in his new book, “Religion in American Politics: A Short History” (Princeton; $24.95). Any serious challenge to Everson requires an alternative explanation of those four foundational texts, an explanation usually supported by other writings of Jefferson and Madison, the records of the Constitutional Convention and the papers of its delegates, and the records of the state ratifying conventions and of the first Congress. Opponents of Everson have argued that the Founders were Christians. “Any diligent student of American history finds that our great nation was founded by godly men upon godly principles to be a Christian nation,” Jerry Falwell insisted in 1980. The Founders never meant to drive religion from “the public square,” some insist. Mitt Romney used his reading of history to accuse modern-day secularists, “at odds with the nation’s founders,” of having taken the doctrine of separation of church and state “well beyond its original meaning” by seeking “to remove from the public domain any acknowledgement of God.” Against this argument stand scholars like Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, whose 1996 “The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State” was republished in 2005, with an added chapter on George W. Bush’s first Presidential term. Whether the mail should be sorted on Sundays, whether “In God We Trust” belongs on our coins, whether the Pledge of Allegiance should include “under God,” whether our children should pray at school, whether we can have crèches on town commons at Christmas, everyone wants to know: What would the Founders do?

It’s a question Thomas Jefferson found ridiculous. In 1816, when he was seventy-three and many of his revolutionary generation had already died, he offered this answer: “This they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. . . . Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” The Founders believed that to defer without examination to what your forefathers believed was to become a slave to the tyranny of the past. Jefferson put it this way: “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.”

Treating the Founders like saints has made for some pretty wacky books, none more so than the 1987 “Faith of Our Founding Fathers,” by Tim LaHaye, an Evangelical minister who went on to co-write a series of bestselling apocalyptic novels. LaHaye attempted to chronicle the “Rape of History” by “history revisionists” who had erased from American school text-books the “evangelical Protestants who founded this nation.” Documenting this claim is no mean feat, not least because even those members of the Constitutional Convention who called themselves Christian lived in a decidedly irreligious and anti-clerical age, the most secular age in American history, both before and since, as Garry Wills observes in “Head and Heart” (a book that is both a close reading of founding texts and a sprawling history of Christianity in the United States). Most of the Founding Fathers were deists, although not all of them were as skeptical as Jefferson, who crafted a custom copy of the Bible by cutting out everything but the words of Jesus. LaHaye, to support his argument, took out his own pair of scissors, deciding, for instance, that Jefferson doesn’t count as a Founding Father, because he “had nothing to do with the founding of our nation,” and basing his claims about Franklin not on evidence (because, as he writes, “there is no evidence that Franklin ever became a Christian”) but on the bald, raising-the-Founders-from-the-dead assertion “Many modern secularizers try to claim Franklin as one of their own. I am confident, however, that Franklin would not identify with them were he alive today.”

Wills and Nussbaum counter these claims. Wills argues that the history of religion in America is the history of a productive tension between the head and the heart, between enlightenment (which he counts as a religion) and Evangelicalism, a balance kept in check by the separation of church and state. Nussbaum, in a careful, nuanced, and compelling analysis, identifies religious equality as the crucial American tradition. Two more new books by members of the “religious left” adopt a more strictly biographical approach. “So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State” (Harcourt; $28), by Forrest Church, the minister of All Souls Church in Manhattan, considers the first five Presidents: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. “Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America” (Random House; $26), by Steven Waldman, the editor of the Web site Beliefnet, chronicles the “spiritual journeys” of the first four Presidents and one more Founder, lopping off Monroe in favor of Franklin.

It’s probably impossible to discover precisely what the Founders believed about God, Jesus, sin, the Bible, churches, and Hell. They changed their minds and gave different accounts to different people: Franklin said one thing to his sister Jane, and another thing to David Hume; Washington was a vestryman at his church, but, as he lay slowly dying, he never called for a clergyman. This can make them look like hypocrites, but that’s unfair. They approached religion in more or less the same way they approached everything else that interested them: Franklin invented his own; Washington proved diplomatic; Adams grumbled about it; Jefferson could not stop tinkering with it; and Madison defended, as a natural right, the free exercise of it.

Waldman, Church, Nussbaum, and Wills have written very different books-Wills and Nussbaum range both farther and deeper-but each, striving for evenhandedness, wants to save us from the errors of partisans and zealots. “The culture wars have so warped our sense of history that we typically have a very limited understanding of how we came to have religious liberty,” Waldman writes. They also generally agree about the source of the myths that plague us: “the cherry-picking of Founding Father quotes to prove almost anything,” as Waldman puts it. “Champions on both sides,” Church writes, “will claim the words and actions of the founders as proof texts for the righteousness of their moral, political, and religious agendas.”

The four books achieve a kind of consensus in four related lines of argument. First, the United States was founded neither as a Christian nation nor as a secular one. Second, by the standards of Evangelicals of both their day and ours, Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison were not Christians; they wrestled, often profoundly, with religious questions, but, as Church points out, “they all doubted the divinity of Christ.” Third, the disestablishment of religion is itself responsible for Americans’ unusual religiosity, which (these writers all believe) is something to celebrate. Fourth, notwithstanding the Founders’ own remarkable secularism, the liberation of religion from government as much as the reverse was their aim. “The separation of church and state has greatly benefited religion, as Madison and Jefferson predicted that it would,” Wills writes. Nussbaum argues that because “the separation of church and state is, fundamentally, about equality, about the idea that no religion will be set up as the religion of our nation,” in the end “separation is also about protecting religion.” Waldman writes, “Madison, I suspect, would . . . be delighted by surveys showing that, compared with most developed nations, Americans believe in God more, pray more, and attend worship services more frequently.”

Because this debate is an argument about how the Supreme Court should interpret the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, people who enter it begin their investigation with the Founders; quite often, they end it there, too. Somewhere along the way, they almost always fall to wondering what James Madison would make of the latest Gallup polls or whether Benjamin Franklin would get along with Christopher Hitchens. That’s how this debate works; that’s the pack of tricks this history plays on the past. The problem is that constitutional jurisprudence, however essential it is to the rule of law, will always tend to produce a history in which the entire eighteenth century is reduced to the intellectual lives of a handful of men. And, because our tradition of constitutional jurisprudence is so important, that history can be all the history most Americans get. Needless to say, it’s a history that leaves out a lot-not least, every other American who ever spread, advanced, or challenged the idea of religious liberty: people like printers turning out newspapers, mothers rearing children, pastors preaching to small towns, and, even, now obscure novelists. Maybe it’s time for another pack of tricks.

Royall Tyler was not a Founding Father. He was a prodigal son. But he spoke and wrote about religious liberty all his life-from the pulpit, from the bench, and from his desk. Some scholars argue that the idea of a “wall of separation” between church and state wasn’t built until the eighteen-thirties and forties; Tyler was dead by then, but he seems to have thought that wall had been built at the Constitutional Convention. Nor was Tyler’s life a battle between reason and faith, head and heart. Early and easily, he reconciled his Enlightenment rationalism with his Episcopal faith, although his convictions about both may have been tried during a dissipated youth plagued with disappointments. (His reputation as a rake was not without foundation.) In 1782, when Tyler was twenty-five, he courted John Adams’s daughter. Abigail was charmed. “I am not acquainted with any young Gentleman whose attainments in literature are equal to his,” she wrote to her husband. “I am not looking out for a Poet,” Adams wrote back. The courtship was quietly ended.

Tyler made more of himself than Adams predicted. In 1787, his comedy “The Contrast” was performed in New York while delegates to the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia. Overnight, Tyler became a literary celebrity. But in an age when no one wanted a poet for a son-in-law he had to earn his keep as a lawyer. He set up practice in Vermont: “If writing for the public is attended with no more profit, I had rather file legal process in my attorney’s office, and endeavor to explain unintelligible law to Green Mountain jurors.”

Tyler often wished he had chosen the ministry instead of the law, but he was sure that his sinfulness would have been a blot upon the church. (What he meant by his sinfulness is suggested by his 1793 “The Origin of Evil,” a shockingly blasphemous poem about the Garden of Eden.) In Vermont, where ministers were few and far between, he often served as a lay preacher. (After recovering from the Adams fiasco, Tyler married, happily; he and his wife had eleven children, and four of their seven surviving sons became clergymen.) In a sermon that he delivered on Christmas Day, 1793, he offered this prayer: “It is our Blessed Saviour who has caused His day spring of religious liberty from on high to visit us and that we may now worship every man according to the dictates of his own conscience.”

Apparently, Tyler agreed with Madison that to establish a Christian religion would be “to foster in those who still reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.” In “The Algerine Captive,” Updike Underhill’s faith, far from being weakened, is strengthened by his trials. He refuses to convert, even at the cost of his freedom. Nevertheless, one reviewer complained that “in the dialogue with the Mollah, the author too feebly defends that religion which he professes to revere.” Tyler was blindsided by this charge. Invoking Islam to argue for religious liberty was an eighteenth-century commonplace, practiced by writers as different as Johnson, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. “The Author was prepared to meet severe criticism on his style,” Tyler later wrote, “but certainly he never imagined it was objectionable on the score of infidelity, or even skepticism. The part objected to, as far as the Author recollects, was written with a view to do away with the vulgar prejudices against Islamism.” Tyler used Islam as an object lesson in the importance of religious tolerance and the dangers of theocracy. Underhill is both fascinated by and sympathetic to Islam. Even before travelling to Mecca and Medina, he concludes, “I cannot help noticing it as extraordinary, that the Mahometan should abominate the christian on account of his faith, and the christian detest the Mussulman for his creed; when the koran of the former acknowledges the divinity of the christian Messias, and the bible of the latter commands us to love our enemies.” Above all, Tyler used Islam to argue that faith, all faith, must answer to reason. In his view, this was Islam’s great failing: that every Muslim is “tenaciously attached to his own creed, makes his faith a principle in life, and never suffers doubt to disturb, or reason to overthrow it.”

Yet Tyler made his mullah both generous and broad-minded. After weeping for Underhill, a man he can see only as an infidel, the mullah becomes his fast friend and, eventually, helps him escape. The actual end of Algerine captivity was more complicated, but it, too, depended on eighteenth-century ideas about religious tolerance. In June of 1797, just three months before Tyler’s novel was published, the American captives in North Africa were freed by the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by President John Adams. The treaty’s Article 11, an assurance that the United States would not engage in a vengeful holy war, read, “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

In 1801, Tyler was elected to Vermont’s supreme court. (He subsequently served as chief justice.) In a case brought before his bench the following year, he rejected as legally invalid an out-of-state bill of sale for a slave. (In 1791, Vermont had been the first state to adopt a constitution prohibiting slavery.) “Would your honor be pleased to tell us what would be sufficient evidence of my client’s ownership of this man?” the lawyer asked the judge. “Oh certainly,” Tyler answered wryly. A bill of sale “from the Almighty.”

In 1817, galled by the debate in Connecticut, a state still clinging to an established religion, Tyler prepared for publication a treatise titled “The Touchstone; or a Humble Modest Inquiry Into the Nature of Religious Intolerance.” Here, again, he argued, “A State Religion always has, and ever will be intolerant.”

Toward the end of his life, Tyler began an autobiography. He addressed it to a reader two centuries in the future, in the year 2025: “I cannot but fancy that some profound antiquary of your superexcellent age, while groping among the rubbish of time, may from some kennel of oblivion fish up my poor book.” We would make of it, he was certain, at once too much and too little. It would be as if only his left shoe had made it down to the twenty-first century, “to be gathered as an invaluable treasure into the museum of the Antiquarian.” Some historians, “after vainly essaying to fit it to the right foot, would gravely declare that the anatomy of their ancestors’ pedestals differed from those of their day.” But just because we’ve only found the one shoe doesn’t mean eighteenth-century Americans had two left feet. Having fished up his book, what should we, in our superexcellent age, make of it? Tyler conjured a future reader who smiles at

The sprawling letters, yellow text,
The formal phrase, the bald stiff style . . .
And in the margin gravely notes
A thousand meanings never meant. ♦

ILLUSTRATION: BARRY BLITT

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

This is a great piece on how one well-placed phrase or speech, or one badly-placed sentence or misstep can determine the outcome of a presidential campaign.

Has a ‘make-or-break’ moment already happened this year? Post a comment & give us your thoughts!

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Any talk about his personal faith.

Full story after the jump.

The Politico has an article out today about how any talk of personal faith is absent on McCain’s current biography tour:

In an Oprah Winfrey-era where soul-baring and expressions of faith are the norm for public figures, the presumptive Republican nominee, open and candid about much else, retains a shroud of privacy around his Christianity.

Raised Episcopalian, McCain now attends a Baptist megachurch in Phoenix. But he has not been baptized and rarely talks of his faith in anything but the broadest terms or as it relates to how it enabled him to survive 5 ½ years in captivity as a POW.

In this way, McCain, 71, is a throwback to an earlier generation when such personal matters were kept personal. To talk of Jesus Christ in the comfortable, matter of fact fashion of the past two baby-boom era presidents would be unthinkable.

What drives him - at least outwardly - is precisely what he has been talking about this week: a love of country and sense of duty instilled by a military family with a long legacy of service.

supports McCain’s right to keep silent on the issue. The fact that he goes to church & has demonstrated sufficiently he is not “secular” should be more than enough for voters for whom these issues matter.

Bill Clinton & George W. Bush both broke from presidential tradition in discussing matters of their own personal faith (one could make an argument Jimmy Carter belongs in this set, too).

As we’ve said before, we believe what’s most important is not a candidate’s personal approach to religion, but rather how a candidate believes how the issue of faith should be treated in the public square for all Americans of all religious stripes, including those who claim not to be religious.

Here’s what Barack Obama has had to say about faith matters, from his website. Those of you who would never consider voting for a Democrat based on issues of faith & Christianity might be surprised at how he approaches the issue.

Hillary Clinton does not mention on her website how she views issues of religion.

What do you think? Should McCain be more forthcoming about his religious principles? Post a comment!

(come on, folks, please post a comment.. it’s been a while since we’ve had any) (UPDATE: thanks!!)

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08