This book makes a notable contribution to the exploration of a fascinating historical question: How, so very soon after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, did a conception of the office of the presidency arise that was fundamentally at odds with the philosophy of most of the authors of that Constitution—and then became the dominant conception of the office?

As is well known, most of the framers were Federalists. As Green so aptly describes it in The Man of the People: Political Dissent and the Making of the American Presidency, the Federalist political philosophy involved several key precepts: “the obedient, compliant citizenry; the aloof executive; [and] the insistence that direct public civic engagement began and ended with voting in elections” (p. 98).

Yet just 12 years after the ratification of the constitution in 1788, Thomas Jefferson rode into office on a wave of democratic populism that represented an entirely different, “plebiscitary” conception of the office that has been described and analyzed by scholars including Theodore Lowi, Bruce Ackerman, and Stephen Skowronek. In this conception, “the American people were not the complaisant, deferential servants that Federalists insisted they should be,” writes Green. Instead, “they were a dynamic engaged people, united by … a belief that they ruled over the government and not the other way around” (p. 98). In other words, they believed the federal government “should directly reflect who the people were, rather than act as a tyrannical force subordinating them to its arbitrary authority” (p. xxviii). This meant that presidents, as the heads of this continuously responsive government, had the “essential duty to be intimately attuned to the majority of the citizenry, to recognize public criticism as a legitimate voice, and to work assiduously to facilitate their will into government action” (p. 89).

Today in America, there is no other viable conception of the office. Yet Jefferson described his election in 1800 as a “revolution in the principles of our government” and declared that this revolution had been just as profound as the American Revolution in 1776 (p. 202).

So how did this enduring, “second revolution” happen so quickly? Green’s answer is found in the title of his book: it was the work of an extraordinary upwelling of dissent that started almost as soon as the new federal government began functioning with George Washington as president. The dissent was a reaction to a series of actions by Washington, his “prime minister” Alexander Hamilton, and the Federalist majorities in Congress. They included Washington’s proclamation of neutrality in relations with the warring countries of France and England, Hamilton’s bold federal economic proposals, and Washington’s secretive efforts to ram the Jay Peace Treaty with Great Britain through the U.S. Senate with as little public involvement as possible (chapter 3). Then came the final straw: the presidency of ultra-Federalist John Adams, with its blatant attempt via the Sedition Act to stamp out any popular criticism of federal government officials (chapter 5).

In a unique contribution to scholarship in this area, Green shows, in engaging detail, how that dissent was manifested through the political newspapers of the time that circulated throughout the country. In issue after issue, in newspaper after newspaper, usually anonymous or pseudonymous commentators railed against the popularly disconnected, undemocratic tenor of Washington’s presidency that seemed to be taking no account of national public opinion. When Washington, in 1795, cordially but airily publicly dismissed a respectfully worded letter of complaint to him about the Jay Treaty from some prominent Bostonians, these “Republicans,” as they had begun calling themselves, became enraged and embarked on a five-year crusade against Federalist rule that culminated in their victory in 1800. In doing so, Green writes, “They made the presidency the possession of the American people, the young democracy’s most powerful national symbol, its most coveted political prize” (p. xxiv).

Notably, Green also shows how this conception of the role of the president in American democracy was advocated for by a “broad American public, not merely elite white men cloistered in halls of government power” (p. xxix). As he points out, there was a nationwide flow of political information and commentary generated not just by top governmental leaders but also by more localized political operatives and elites. The messaging they produced both inspired and was inspired by the sentiments of otherwise voiceless “non-elites” who still managed to express their views via “public assemblies, written petitions, and even civil unrest.” These “out of doors” actions would then be reported in the newspapers as evidence of the strong popular support for a popularly responsive federal government headed by a popularly responsive president (pp. xx, xxx).

Green’s book presents chapter-length case studies of the presidencies of Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Andrew Jackson. It is in the accounts of the Washington and Adams presidencies that we see the vigorous promotion of the “modern” conception of the presidency by Republicans in response to the decidedly “non-modern” conception exhibited in those presidencies. Aided by the massive spread of Republican newspapers spawned by the adoption of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, that modern conception prevailed via Jefferson’s election in 1800.

With that story told, Green shifts to another story in the chapters on Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson. That tale chronicles the constant streams of often vitriolic political criticism and attacks that each of these presidents endured. Although less analytically oriented than the first half of the book, this part is a good education in the time-honored techniques of political argumentation. With dissent over the popular role of the presidency in the American constitutional order having largely been resolved with Jefferson’s election, the criticisms endured by Jefferson and his successors are, as portrayed in this book, more electorally oriented. The accounts show that, just like today, partisan critiques of presidents are generally grounded in one simple premise: presidents are good and above reproach if they are of one’s own party, and quite the opposite if they are not.

Until fairly recently, the key role played by newspapers in political life in the early American republic had been mostly neglected by scholars. Jeffrey Pasley’s “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2002) showed brilliantly how these newspapers and their editors were effectively the “political lifeblood” of organized politics in America. My work, as seen in Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public (2002) and Informing a Nation: The Newspaper Presidency of Thomas Jefferson (2021), has focused on how presidents themselves were able to use their own sponsored administration newspapers to promote themselves and their policies while still avoiding obvious conflict with the fading, Federalism-inspired view that presidents should be “above popular politics.”

Green’s book is a welcome addition to this area of scholarship. With its wide-ranging sampling of the political rhetoric found in these early newspapers, it also provides an opportunity for interested readers to compare the rhetoric “back then” with what we have today. The phrasing may have been more flowery or convoluted, but otherwise one comes away with the impression that, as Green says in his epilogue, not much has changed. Dissent, as he shows, has always been an integral aspect, both positive and negative, of the American presidency.