Two recent events have my mind on discussion of obscure presidents. One was a comment by BRUX in response to one of his correspondents on his letter to the president. The other was a President's Day panel televised on C-Span.

The C-Span show had four authors who had recently written biographies of Polk, Hayes, McKinley, and Harding. The latter three reminded me of recurring discussions on RMO, going back at least four years, in which either Pat Finley or G/P Dave -- I forget which; or perhaps it was both -- would discuss with me that string of presidents which consists mostly of several Republicans from Ohio and one Democrat who shares his name with a city in Ohio.

The fellow who wrote about Hayes, Hans Trefousse, peppered his comments with a bunch of demeaning remarks about President Bush, which I thought was totally inappropriate. I don't much like Bush, but even so I find this sort of smart-ass sniping is just irritating. Like so many, he compared Bush to Hayes, based on the fact that both became president after a close and contested election in which Florida was a swing state. I don't think it's a very good comparison, especially given how differently the subsequent presidencies went. (Most notably, Hayes was criticized by partisan Republicans for compromising too much with the opposition, whereas Bush did rather the opposite.) While listening to the discussion, it occurred to me that a better comparison would be to equate George W Bush with Samuel Tilden. There are a few obvious differences -- most notably, Bush became president and Tilden didn't -- but I think most things line up better that way.

I suspect that part of the temptation to equate Bush with Hayes stems from a misguided equation of Republican with Republican. In fact, on most of the key issues, Republicans now are more like Democrats then, and vice versa. That same connection of the party name might help explain my liberal friend Pat's admiration for Democrat Grover Cleveland. In the past I've been mildly pro-Cleveland, but I think I'm gradually coming more toward the view expressed forcefully and simplistically by Kevin Phillips as: Cleveland bad, McKinley good. Not being very informed on domestic policy of the time, my attitude has been based on foreign policy -- Hawaii, Philippines -- where McKinley was imperialist and Cleveland was not. I'm still unconvinced by Phillips' arguments that German and Japanese expansionism justified America's counter-expansion, but on everything else Cleveland is looking increasingly unattractive to me.

This Kevin Phillips is the same one who wrote American Dynasty and the earlier book about the Republican majority (and of whom Orcinus speaks so glowingly). Curiously, although the panel of four was equally balanced between Democrats and Republicans -- the moderator, Arthur Schlesinger, was also decidedly liberal, and while not nearly as rude as Trefousse he still didn't rein in his partisanship -- both Republicans are recent authors of anti-Bush books, giving the entire affair a decidedly anti-Bush feel. C-Span had some interesting shots of the audience, in which one could see a sizable minority of Republicans who were clearly disgusted by all the Bush-bashing at what the might reasonably have expected to be a non-partisan discussion of non-recent history.

The author of the Harding biography is John W Dean, the same guy who was Nixon's White House counsel. His new book, due out in April, has been sensationally titled "Worse Than Watergate". I'm guessing that the title was the publisher's idea, not the author's.

I've been a Harding apologist for quite a few years now, and it's been a fairly lonely mission -- including very recently on RMO, where a radical anti-American leftist was the only one to join me in praising Harding's foreign policy -- so I was surprised to see someone speaking even more favorably of Harding than I would have dared. Dean's book, apparently, intends to be a complete vindication of this poor man with the reputation of being the worst president ever.

I've known of the falsity of the "smoke-filled room" myth for quite some time. I think it was probably Gore Vidal's fictional account (Hollywood) that first got me on the track, but it's been the mainstream view among scholars since the 1960s (when a large collection of Harding's papers became public) that the idea of Harding being an ignorant pawn of Daugherty and the Republican Party bosses is a total fabrication.

My other defense of Harding is really more of a criticism of Woodrow Wilson, whom I consider hugely overrated. People make fun of Harding's call for "normalcy", but I firmly believe that normalcy is exactly what was needed then and exactly what is needed now. Wilson took advantage of legitimate national interest in time of war as a launching point for extending executive power beyond where and when it was called for, polarizing the nation politically, systematically limiting civil liberties for citizens generally and those who opposed his views particularly, and pursuing an aggressive activist foreign policy which was impractical and alienated the United States from other nations.

What Harding stood for was the desire not to artificially extend the war just for the sake of being a war president, drastically reducing our military presence overseas (as well as the budget for it), toning down the culture of adversarial politics, and restoring and increasing civil liberties to Americans at home. I fail to see what it so feeble or risible about these policies.

What Dean does beyond any of this, I gather, is to attempt to exonerate Harding for the whole Teapot Dome scandal and the alleged affair with Nan Britton as well. Well! This is new to me. I look forward to seeing his evidence.

I was at the library the other day, and although I wasn't really looking for any more books (I've got several going already...), Dean's book on Harding was there, so I checked it out. This is atypical. After trying out several local libraries, the one I've come to frequent regularly is the Shoreline branch of the King County Library System. Although KCLS has a reasonably large collection, most of it does not reside at the Shoreline branch, so my usual habit is to find something in the card catalog and then place a hold to have it sent to Shoreline. But this book happened to be at the Shoreline branch already.

The King County library is a joyous discovery for me. The City of Seattle, which makes up about one-third of King County in population, has its own library system, the Seattle Public Library. SPL has a slightly larger collection, and a much better music collection (though still well short of both Oakland and San Francisco), but I don't like it. The main branch is in the heart of downtown, which I'm sure makes sense for most people but for me just means bad traffic (and no BART, which is how I usually went to San Francisco's main branch). Nearly half of the local branches, including the one nearest to my house, are simultaneously closed for reconstruction, which seems like horrible planning to me. Another branch within walking distance is open, but it's a tiny little place with not much books. It might still be a nice place to pick up holds, except that SPL's card catalog is unreliable and it is sometimes negligent in processing requests.

The King County library is everything that the Seattle library isn't. It serves all of the county except Seattle, which is to say most of the suburbs that surround the city. The nearest branch to me is Shoreline, about seven miles north on the freeway. Although that's slightly farther than downtown, it's a very easy drive. The building is spacious and beautiful. Along with most of the other KCLS branches, it is outfitted for wireless Internet, and since Karen likes me to get out of the house occasionally, I frequently take my PowerBook and spend an afternoon there. In theory there's a lot of wireless Internet service in Seattle, but I've found that nearly all of it requires either a service subscription or a purchase at the cafe. KCLS and the Apple Store, near the University, are the only convenient places I've found where wireless Internet is really free.

King County is the most automated library I've ever encountered. The online catalog is accurate. Online holds are processed promptly and conveniently shelved so that I can retrieve them and check them out at the do-it-yourself counter without ever speaking to a librarian anywhere in the process. On my last visit I did speak to a librarian, however, to inquire about interlibrary loan. To my delight, I was shown that these too can be requested online and there's no fee. Oh bliss, oh rapture. Now I'll never need to go to the Seattle library again. And one less reason to live in the more expensive housing market nearer to downtown.

If you look it up in the official records, you'll find that King County was named after Dr Martin Luther King Jr. This seems strange, given that the county had been around long before the good reverend was born. It turns out that King County was officially renamed in 1986. Not that you'd notice, though. The new name is "King County", after Martin Luther King. The old name was "King County", after William Rufus King. The latter King was a senator from Alabama and vice-president under Franklin Pierce. (Pierce is the name of the neighboring county to the south, where Tacoma is.) The reasoning for "changing" the county's name is that Senator King, like most wealthy Alabamans of his time, was a slaveholder. It was for this sin that he was diseponymized, not for his close relationship with Pennsylvania senator James Buchanan.

Like many presidential candidates of the era, Pierce gained the Democratic nomination in 1852 as a dark horse, after none of the leading candidates were able to secure a majority. Topmost of those leading candidates was Sen James Buchanan, a pro-slavery Northerner -- or rather, an anti-anti-slavery Northerner. When Northerner Pierce was chosen instead, the ticket was balanced by adding Buchanan's staunch Southerner ally William Rufus King as running-mate. Vice President King died in office shortly after being sworn in. He did not survive to join his good friend in the White House four years later, when Buchanan defeated the unpopular Pierce for the Democratic nomination and succeeded him as president.

Now I need to back up a little. As I mentioned before, the letter to the president from BRUX, reprinted here, was also sent to several of Brux's friends and colleagues. Many of them responded, and Brux collected most of the responses together for yet another mass mailing (which will not be reprinted here).

Among the comments was a reference to the prospect of electing a president "who is not a heterosexual white protestant male". To that, Brux replied, "If you slightly adjust your presidential prerequisites to read 'tall heterosexual white Christian male,' you'd be right on the mark, since we've never even had a short president." That judgment was overhasty. James Madison is commonly reputed to have been short. His height is usually reported as 5'4", though some dispute that and suggest 5'6" instead. Benjamin Harrison and Martin Van Buren were also 5'6". I don't know if that counts as "short", but it's not very tall either.

The other dubious claim is that every president has been heterosexual. Our one president who never married was James Buchanan. When Buchanan came to Congress in 1821, he made the acquaintance of Alabama senator William Rufus King. The two became intimate friends, socially inseparable, and they shared a home together for 16 years. The unusually close relationship of these two unmarried men gave rise to speculation -- both then and now -- that they were in fact a homosexual couple.

Numerous contemporary documents show political rivals (and even some allies) referring to Buchanan and King as a couple, calling Mr King "Mrs Buchanan", and such. This alone proves little. Plenty of presidents have been chased by slanderous rumors widely repeated. A few of them turn out to be true, like President Jefferson's affair with his half-sister-in-law Sally Hemings. Many others are almost certainly false, like Warren Harding's supposed one-quarter African-American heritage.

More persuasive is the curiously intimate language in some of Buchanan's letters. The most notorious was written after Mr King was named ambassador to France in 1844, leaving his friend on the opposite side of the Atlantic. To a friend, Buchanan wrote:

In Buchanan's "defense", many historians point out that the evidence fails to prove any actual homosexuality, and to call the boon companions a gay couple is merely speculation. They are absolutely right that Buchanan's sexuality remains unproved, but the tone of the argument usually assumes an attitude of "straight until proven gay". If we turn that around, to presume that Buchanan was gay and demand historical evidence that would prove otherwise, the task is even harder. When we look for a homosexual relationship, we find an obvious candidate where there is long-lasting companionship, ample private time together, and unquestioned affection. When we look for a heterosexual relationship, there is nothing at all.

So while it may be unwarranted to claim that President Buchanan was gay, it is even more unwarranted to claim, as Brux mistakenly did, that we've never had a homosexual president.

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