AMERICAN LEADERSHIP – SUBSTANCE OR STYLE, RHEORIC OR RITUAL?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 30, 2010
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The History Channel has created a series of biographies of American presidents. Watching these biographies, having had an interest in presidential biographies for a good part of my life, I must say I was amazed at what liberties were taken with the so-called biographical truth.
I’ve also had an interest in leadership over the span of my working and reading life. Both biography and leadership have much to do with myth. They reflect the needs of the times, the quality of the people, the quality of life, the structure of society at that moment in history.
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George Washington was painted as a “great general” on the History Channel. He was not a great general, having only one significant victory in the entire Revolutionary War, but he was a great leader.
Style, not substance was the meter of the man. He looked like a leader, like a general. He was tall, stately, and impressive in his uniforms many of which he himself designed. He had many peculiarities; one was he did not like to be touched. His chief quality, other than his unassailable integrity was his courage. To his credit, he recognized his intellectual limitations and left much of the thinking to the great minds of his time.
Americans have a nascent affection for monarchy, for the pomp and circumstance of leadership, although they would be the first to deny this. They like their presidents to be presidential which means somewhat imperial.
Washington was presidential. The new nation needed a symbol and he qualified in every respect. John Adams thought he was more qualified, which he was, but lacked the size, glamour and mythical stature of his contemporary. Style won over substance.
Washington was however a wise man. He declined the invitation to be “president for life,” and scoffed at the idea of being the new nation’s monarch. Alexander Hamilton and many others were of such a mind.
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John Adams, like Alexander Hamilton, liked the European model of leadership. A little man with a big brain, Adams was a man who made friends with men of substance and ideas such as John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and James Monroe. The Federalist Papers, the basis of our American Constitution and authority were created in this intellectual climate. This coterie of men believed in a strong central government. Adams was a quintessential leader of substance.
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Even in those early years of the New Republic there was the matter of slavery. Adams never owned slaves, never believed in slavery, and that was one reason he was president for only one term. His archenemy, Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves. A slave counted three-fifths of a vote, and Jefferson earned 82 percent of the electoral slave vote. Even then, he only squeezed into office with a narrow margin. It is safe to say he could not have been elected president without the slave vote.
Never a popular president in the same sense as Washington, Jefferson was nonetheless the quintessential Renaissance man as leader and president. Evidence of this was the creation of his own Bible at variance with his Christian Bible.
Jefferson was advocate of an agrarian society with states rights taking precedence over central federal authority. He had a utopian vision of an expanding America, commissioning Lewis and Clark to explore the Pacific North West. He also made the Louisiana Purchase that doubled the size of the United States.
Jefferson like Washington lived in a regal estate while Adams never was so inclined. Hundreds of biographies have been written on Washington and Jefferson but few on Adams. Yet the United States today looks more like the nation Adams envisioned. Adams and Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, our Nation's birthday. They were both leaders of substance but Jefferson's style has lived on to this day, and Adams lack of style has left him largely forgotten.
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The first six presidents were members of the American gentry, part of the American aristocracy and ruling class. Andrew Jackson changed all that.
Jackson was actually robbed of being the sixth president when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. Although winning the popular vote by a wide margin, he lacked the electoral votes, where his opponent, John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, was chosen as president.
John Quincy Adams was a remarkable man in his own right and became more famous after his presidency. He defended the slaves on The Amistad, who had mutinied on the Spanish slave ship, and won their acquittal.
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Whereas Jackson's six predecessors were well schooled in European traditions and culture, Jackson had no formal education. He fought in the American Revolution as a teenager, was taken prisoner by the British, and demonstrated bravery from the beginning.
Jackson was a man of the frontier, became a frontier lawyer, military man, slave owner, property owner, and in every sense the quintessential American self-made man.
He identified with the people and the people identified with him. Jefferson thought him the most calloused uncouth man he had ever met and a danger to society. Jackson thought Jefferson a pompous ass and hypocrite. He was never impressed or intimidated by culture, erudition, reputation or symbolic power.
Jackson was Scotch Irish with ancestors from Northern Ireland. He was in no way a European but the quintessential American from the expanding frontier.
Every chapter of his career was bold, brutal and unforgiving. There is an Irish saying it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission. He personified this saying. He won the Battle of New Orleans, the last great battle of the War of 1812, where the British tried to take back the American colonies. He also marched into Florida destroying the British and Spanish colonies and taking the state for the United States without permission from President Monroe.
Jackson loved the frontier and the people of the frontier but loathed the Eastern Establishment. He couldn't abide their fine manners, palatial estates, and what he considered senseless posturing. He took on the heavyweights of his time such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John Calhoun, as well as the American Bank, and obliterated them all.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called his time, “The Jackson Age." He did so because he saw that Jackson had placed his peculiar stamp on the presidency, on executive authority, indeed, on the modern presidency and its imperial character that exists to this day.
Jackson’s was an American president that historians find something of a rascal for lying to Native Americans, taking their land, and relocating them to the Pacific North West in what became known as “the trail of tears.”
Historians also note that he energized the common people into an identity that was uniquely American. Love or hate him, he was a man of substance with little patience with points for style.
What is easy to forget is that he saved the nation from division when John Calhoun promoted the Nullification Act, which would have allowed states to pay the taxes they wanted, and not to pay the taxes they didn’t. It would have compromised the presidency, federal authority, and the role of Congress. By successfully fighting this act, he postponed the Civil War for a generation.
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Abraham Lincoln, who was very different than Jackson in many ways, but very much like him in so many others. Both were self-educated lawyers, self-made men soaring to prominence on their plebeian origins and their virtues, both from the hinterland. That is where their commonality ends, or does it?
Lincoln had been a soldier but not one of great distinction. When his generals failed him in the Civil War, however, he was in fact commander in chief in a military as well as presidential sense.
Lincoln extols the virtues of the autodidact. It is reflected in his eloquence and temperament, his courage and vision. He is the quintessential leader of substance.
That said style seems to interest historians and most Americans. Perhaps this is because he was never able to complete the substance of his presidency. He was a man with demons, a melancholy man, perhaps a clinically depressed man in the modern psychiatric sense, a sick man like many artists of substance.
One can only imagine what the modern press would have done with the likes of Lincoln and Jackson, two of our greatest presidents, two men of great substance and leadership, two men with little in common with the European model.
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Fast-forward again to the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Kennedy came into prominence in the television age where Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan coined the expression “the media is the message," or "it's all about style, baby!"
Kennedy was quintessential style with little acquaintance much less interest in substance.
He was made an iconic hero of World War Two in a book called “PT 109,” a torpedo book he commanded that sunk largely due to his incompetence, or was it a lack of attention to detail? In any case, he nearly fell into Japanese hands.
Later, he reached celebrity proportions with his book, “Profiles in Courage,” a book largely written by a devoted aid. It became a national best seller by his father purchasing hundreds of books across the nation in major markets to get it on the bestseller list.
Kennedy was an indifferent senator from Massachusetts with no prominent legislation to his credit while a US Senator. Yet, he ran and won a controversial presidential election – controversial because he had to win Illinois to have the necessary electoral votes, and Mayor Daley of Chicago saw that he got them by hook or by crook.
Kennedy won the 1960 presidential television debates with his opponent, Richard Milhous Nixon. He didn't have to win on debate points but on style, presence, charm, and being more photogenic than five o’clock shadow Nixon.
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Kennedy proved that leadership had moved into a new zone, a new nomenclature, and a new identity with the led. From the beginning, his wife Jackie saw them right out of the pages of King Arthur and his Noble Knights. She envisioned her husband's presidency as Camelot, and the American people loved it.
It was “American Idol” only a couple generations early. Kennedy was master of the media and cultivated close relationships with the Washington, DC press corps. He had them eating out of his hand at his table, and they adored him for making them feel something other than scribblers.
This found them suspending criticism of his presidential dalliances turning a blind eye to his affairs with women as diverse as Marilyn Monroe, a 19-year-old intern, and an East German spy. He became a “what if” president, safely in the arms of history without having to enact sweeping change in Civil Rights, to deal with Vietnam, violence across American cities, or an ambivalent economy. He failed to show any of the legislative skills to brokering such initiatives when a US Senator.
He proved that leadership in the age of mass television communication had become as much symbolic as real, as much rhetoric as ritual, a carefully orchestrated phenomenon that need have little to do with real substance. What you see is not what you get. McLuhan said television was a cold medium with its only warmth what the viewer puts into it.
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With Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Baines Johnson took office as the quintessential dealmaker, which was his previous role in the US Senate. He attempted to take care of Kennedy’s “what if” unfinished business, using his legislative skills to rally a tax reduction bill through Congress, and to free up his Civil Rights Bill from the quicksand of the House of Representatives.
Johnson was the great force that brought disenfranchised African Americans into the mainstream with voting rights and access to affordable higher education.
Johnson was the quintessential leader of substance without the symbolic clout necessary for the age. He was in the imperial presidency that Jackson had so carefully created, and which Kennedy had made his own breathing new life into it.
Johnson was handicapped from the first. He had contempt for the media, undermined it, and was incompetent in dealing with it. His Great Society, which was a grand scheme, fell on the sword of massive military expenditures in an unwinable war in Vietnam. He literally starved the Great Society of the funds critical to its success by a policy of “guns and butter.”
One of the low points of his presidency which conveyed his lack of the imperial aura of Kennedy was when he lifted his shirt to show his gallbladder operation scar to the Washington press like a decadent Roman emperor.
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Leadership has always been high drama. It is the reason for the appeal of Shakespearian plays. Leaders today as leaders throughout history have pivoted on the horns of the dilemma between tragedy and comedy, actors in the realm of rites, ritual and symbols, performers who must know the media in which they operate or the play cannot but end as tragedy.
Johnson dwarfed Kennedy in the realm of legislation, he dwarfed him in substance with an ability to translate ideas into actions, but he was out of his depth when it came to the world of symbolism, the world of Camelot, the world of myth and media, where sound bites are the medium of the message.
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Fast-forward again to the presidency of Barak Obama.
Obama is the Internet darling of the times, the face on FaceBook, and the technological wind up doll of text messages, BlackBerrys, iPhones, iPads, Kindles, and laptops.
Obama is the trained intellectual that wants to be seen as just folks like those across the street, who is the quintessential symbol of rhetoric as reality, ritual as performance, open shirt, no coat, no tie, easy gate like that of the jock with the insouciance of having all day to just hang out, the possessor of the memory and eclectic omniscience of a Charlie Rose, the everyman with a synthetic identity as an African American when he more resembles the United Nations, a man who has come to power when power means radically different things than it has ever meant before.
Power is entering the end of the age of hierarchies, of infallible authority, of regal deference to the once powerful, and to the beginning of a new age where a few no longer decide for the many, but the many decide for themselves.
It is obvious that this is not clear to President Barak Obama, but time will make it so. Will he have the prescience and luck of Jackson, the deep pondering depth of Lincoln, or will he be a celebrity president of the X, Y, and Z generations? Stay tuned because leadership is a changing.
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