[Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'Martin Van Buren': The Original Party Boss

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The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'Martin Van Buren':
The Original Party Boss
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/27/books/review/27KAZINL.html
February 27, 2005
By MICHAEL KAZIN

[Here are two campaign songs from 1840:

Let Van from his coolers drink wine
And lounge on his cushioned settee.
Our man on his buckeye couch can recline,
Content with hard cider is he.
The iron-armed soldier, the true-hearted soldier,
The gallant old soldier of Tippecanoe!

Or, more briefly:

Farewell, dear Van,
You're not our man;
To guide the ship
We'll try old Tip.

[I got these from my favorite book on American history, whose title is exact, 
Herbert Agar, The Price of Union (Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1950).

MARTIN VAN BUREN
By Ted Widmer.
189 pp. Times Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $20.

    POOR Martin Van Buren. A short, bushy-sideburned New Yorker, he was
    the chief architect of the Democratic Party, the first mass body of
    its type in the world. But as president of the United States, he had
    to succeed Andrew Jackson, a handsome warrior with more popular appeal
    than anyone since George Washington. Then, just weeks into his tenure,
    a bank panic struck the nation; the effects bedeviled Van Buren, an
    apostle of laissez-faire, throughout his administration. In 1840, he
    was defeated for re-election by another military hero, William Henry
    Harrison.

    Van Buren spent the remainder of his long life vainly attempting to
    hold the Union together. He also struggled to complete a memoir so
    dreary it found no publisher until almost six decades after his death.
    In 1997, Little Van surfaced in Steven Spielberg's ''Amistad'' -- as
    the scoundrel who yearned to send African rebels back to their cruel
    owners.

    Fortunately, this Rodney Dangerfield of presidents has landed a
    splendid biographer. In remarkably few pages, Ted Widmer, director of
    a research center at Washington College in Maryland, rescues Van Buren
    from what E. P. Thompson once termed ''the enormous condescension of
    posterity,'' by subsuming a failed presidency within a more momentous
    career. Widmer deftly explains how the pioneering party boss built a
    formidable machine, using the trick bag of personal contacts and
    legislative reforms perfected by Lyndon Johnson over a century later.
    Van Buren grasped that the political future lay more with leaders from
    booming New York -- the wealthiest, most populous, most ethnically
    diverse state in the nation -- than with the grandees of Virginia and
    Massachusetts who had been in charge since the days of the Continental
    Congress.

    Widmer points out that ''the Little Magician'' from Kinderhook was as
    much a social upstart as the brawling Jackson himself. Van Buren came
    from a family of Dutch-speaking small farmers; he remains the only
    president raised in any tongue but English. He had to leave school at
    13 and supported himself as a gofer to a local attorney until he could
    qualify for the bar. Widmer suggests that this background helped
    inspire Van Buren to topple the deferential network of power left over
    from colonial days. With the rise of mass parties, ''there would be no
    more uncles arranging favors for nephews with nosebleeds.'' The
    Democrat's respect for fellow outsiders was such that he retained on
    his ticket a vice president, Richard M. Johnson, who was living quite
    openly with a black mistress and his two children from an earlier
    affair with a slave woman he'd inherited from his father. Now there's
    the germ of a screenplay.

    Within the ascetic span of a short-biography series, Widmer keenly
    evokes the environment that enabled Van Buren to thrive. A commercial
    revolution swept through antebellum America, forcing both politicians
    and businessmen to dance to the same ferociously competitive tune. One
    entrepreneur, Widmer notes, turned Independence Hall into a clothing
    store, vowing that since ''all men are created equal,'' they ought to
    be able to purchase garments ''as rich, as cheap and as durable as at
    any other establishment in the nation.''

    Widmer also lends a certain dignity to Van Buren's post-presidential
    attempts to resolve the sectional crisis. While no racial egalitarian,
    he sternly opposed the South's plans to expand the empire of slavery.
    In 1848, he ran for president again as the nominee of the Free Soil
    Party. In that insurgent campaign began gathering the coalition of
    working- and middle-class Northerners that would elect Lincoln
    president and then fight and win the Civil War.

    Van Buren, as Widmer wisely concludes, was one of those
    ''not-quite-heroic'' figures without whom no democracy would operate
    for long. He didn't achieve greatness, but he set a great insight in
    spin: without vibrant opposition parties, self-government becomes a
    mockery of its ideals. For that alone, Little Van deserves to be
    remembered as a big man indeed.

    Michael Kazin teaches history at Georgetown University. His biography
    of William Jennings Bryan will be published early next year.