Introduction to the Presidential Biography Series
Over the past 3 years, I’ve read biographies of every United States president in order from Washington through Reagan. This comes as no surprise to anybody in my life as every conversation inevitably loops back to the collapse of the Federalist party or John Tyler’s “betrayal” of Henry Clay, and trivia nights become high pressure situations when the word President shows up on the clue board.
Who am I?
I’m not a historian, but I do a lot of reading. I am not an authority on historical fact, and although I am very careful to avoid providing misinformation I am only human. The purpose of this history blog is to provide my impressions along my journey in an informative (and hopefully entertaining) format.
Why presidential biographies?
Do I really care that much about the personal lives of US presidents? No, not really. I chose presidential biographies as a lens to view the history of the US, my home country, as it’s a linear continuity throughout the country’s entire lifespan. We have never been without a president since 1789 (save the brief moments between deaths and the swearing in of the successor) so that leaves no gaps. Compared to many other countries the United States has had a very brief life, so I took advantage by studying presidential biographies as a complete history of the US from a national-political lens. 200 years of reading - easy peasy.
In my reading, a few themes started kicking around in my head:
The single most important job a president has is appointing capable men and women. The president, especially in the modern era, cannot be expected to personally handle all aspects of running the country; as such they are tasked with appointing the people who do. Some presidents are better than others - Monroe struck gold when he appointed the thoroughly qualified John Quincy Adams to be his Secretary of State, but Grant fumbled the ball with his hopelessly corrupt Chief of Staff Orville Babcock.
Some presidents were very capable men, but were placed in the wrong job. Woodrow Wilson is an example of this - brilliant diplomat, abysmal leader. In the closing chapters of WWI he alone was thinking in terms of preserving peace. France wanted to punish Germany, England wanted to leave the war with more territory than it started with, and Japan wasn’t even invited. On the home front, however, he shrugged his shoulders as his allies brought racial segregation to the federal government and inflamed labor tensions across the country.
The presidency was a fundamentally different job depending on the era. In Washington’s time, the president was primarily a diplomat charged with leading national relations with international powers (with a veto stamp in his desk drawer in case of emergency). Presidential power in the 19th century peaked with Lincoln, valleyed with his successor Johnson, and never reached those Civil War heights until Theodore Roosevelt in 1901. Since then, the nature of the office expanded and evolved until the modern day where the president’s purview seems to be limitless.
Each of these themes will be explored in separate, in-depth posts. I hope that you enjoy them, and that they spark your curiosity about US history.
Special thanks to Stephen Floyd, curator of the site thebestbiographies.com. Without him doing the tedious work of reading and reviewing each biography and cataloguing their strengths and weaknesses, the quality of this project would be severely diminished.
No AI was used at any point in the creation of this blog.