The President of the United States has many responsibilities. He is at once head of state, commander in chief, “leader of the free world,” party leader, and moral authority. But as a new collection of essays shows, “POTUS” is also his country's “historian in chief.” That is to say, by way of speeches and interviews, he expresses his version of US history. In so doing, the President teaches fellow citizens about the past, acting as history professor to the nation. But for him, unlike actual history professors, historical expediency trumps accuracy. POTUS is a biased national biographer – a calculating opportunist who uses history as means to an end: to aggressively promote his political agenda.
So is the argument advanced by historian Seth Cotlar and political scientist Richard J. Ellis in Historian in Chief – an edited collection that brings together leading Americanists and tasks them with a bold objective. To “highlight the ways that presidents use the past to control the future but also to scrutinize the accuracy of the history that presidents tell” (2).
Historian in Chief comprises eleven chapters (plus a superb introductory essay by editors Cotlar and Ellis). Each chapter focusses on a different President, from George Washington to Barack Obama, and articulates with detail and nuance his historical sense. How did this President mine American history for inspiration? Of whom – or what – did he declare himself heir? Was he successful in deploying history as political strategy, and was his history factual or riddled with half-truths and full-blown lies? Such questions animate the authors, who are either specialists in the President they are analysing or experts in his political era.
The result is a lively mix that should interest not only presidential scholars but also Americanists at large. Historian in Chief fizzes with ideas and insights. It is like a kaleidoscope of the US presidency in book form. Presidents recur, their legacy evolving over time as each new occupant of the Oval Office puts his own twist on the past, sharing his own version of history with an often gullible public. Reading Historian in Chief brings to mind Napoleon's scathing pronouncement – “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” In this edited collection, leading authorities, including John Milton Cooper Jr., Kathleen Dalton, James T. Kloppenberg and David Sehat, set out to unravel the American fable, shining an objective light on the historical narratives that US Presidents have crafted.
As with any edited volume, some chapters are more pertinent than others, more revealing and incisive. Nonetheless, the collection as a whole is strong and engaging – aptly interweaving political history with intellectual history. The appeal of the essays lies in deciphering how each President “interpreted” the past, often remaking it to fit his political aspirations. David Waldstreicher persuasively casts John Quincy Adams as “the first revisionist” (57), while Elvin T. Lim recalls how Martin Van Buren rewrote the history of the founding moment to “create an informal constitution” (81) that convinced Americans that the party system was inherent to their constitutional system (despite the Constitution actually never mentioning political parties). What is more, Jeffrey L. Palsey shows how, in the late 1950s, John Kennedy, thanks to his book Profiles in Courage, turned centrist politicians of yore into icons – all to serve his own maverick image. Meanwhile, Rick Perlstein does a powerful job scrutinizing Ronald Reagan's speeches for historical accuracy – concluding that the “Gipper” quite simply, and shamelessly, made history up.
But not every President was, to the same degree, a historical fabulist. For instance, Jonathan Earle's excellent essay “Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Archives” spotlights the extensive (and admirably rigorous) primary research “Honest Abe” put into crafting his Cooper Union address of 1860. Then a presidential candidate, Lincoln sought to refute Democratic archenemy Stephen Douglas's assertion that the Founders had always intended to let states, not the federal government, decide for themselves about the future of slavery. In order to challenge this flawed belief, Lincoln pored over primary sources at the Illinois State Library. His diligent research led him to construct a powerful (and influential) historical argument that suggested that the Founders had actually wanted the federal government to be a vehicle for equality, not oppression. Earle opines that Lincoln “displayed considerable nuance as a historian” since he emphasized “the contingency of events [and] the contextual politics of historical actors” (116). By adopting a sophisticated, and mostly accurate, approach to history, Lincoln was able to win the political argument of the day and move America to a fairer tomorrow.
Historian in Chief asks an important, fresh question: how have US Presidents interpreted the past to shape the future? With essays on eleven Presidents, this collection provides illuminating answers. But so compelling is the notion of the “historian in chief” that one suspects even more answers are coming – as scholars further wrestle with the concept.
