plorentz's Full Review: Ted Widmer - Martin Van Buren: The American Presid...
Here's a true, totally geeky story about me and Martin Van Buren: As an overachieving sixth-grader, I once presented an unsolicited term paper on the man, the eighth President of the United States, to my teacher Mrs. Popma, and asked if I could read it to the class. Understand: I didn’t do this for extra credit, or to make up a bad test grade. I had merely been browsing a book I’d checked out of the school library about the U.S. Presidents (I remember, it only went up to Nixon), and was taken with an especial curiosity about Van Buren in particular. I can’t pinpoint it exactly – maybe it was his Cabbage Patch Doll face (indeed, one of his many opponents once referred to him as looking like a “wilted cabbage” - a jab at his looks as well as his ethnicity), but more likely, the very Euro-ness of his name, combined with the fact that I’d never heard of him before and neither (I assumed) had most of the grown-ups in my life, except (I also assumed) for Mrs. Popma herself – like Van Buren, she was of proud Dutch ancestry, only a generation or so removed from the Motherland. And typical of me at any age, with my presentation of this paper – one full side of wide-ruled loose-leaf paper filled with thesaurus-assisted verbiage, the bright-and-shiny product of two whole evenings’ worth of research, two long nights spent poring the hallowed pages of the Funk & Wagnall’s Encyclopedia by candlelight (okay, well, by electric lamplight – my flare for the dramatic affectation already in full bloom at the ten age of 12) – I fully expected my teacher to swoon with academic delight
Mrs. Popma may very well have saved my life (or at least my long-term emotional well-being) by softly disallowing me my a propos of nothing-much moment with Mr. Van Buren in my classroom’s spotlight. And eventually, my brief dalliance with this little known ex-prez was little more than another embarrassing nerd-story from school.
But my interest was recently rekindled, when, browsing the local library’s recent arrival biography section, I found a relatively thin volume devoted to none other than the Little Magician of Kinderhook himself: I snatched it up without a moment’s hesitation.
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Like the composer Salieri in Peter Schaeffer's play Amadeus, Martin Van Buren was an extremely high profile figure during his lifetime; and despite his general obscurity today, it could be argued (as Ted Widmer does in this biography) that, to an extent, Van Buren was a founding father of both of our current political parties (not to mention one of the country's first great third party movements); a shrewd political architect who built the Democratic party (then, known more grandly as The Democracy) from a scrappy alliance of working class politicians, farmers and immigrants against what was essentially a modified version of European feudalism - political power concentrated squarely in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy old-money landowners along the Hudson River - ultimately ascending to power in New York State and extending his influence to alliances with the South (alliances which would seem inconceivable almost as soon as Van Buren first set foot in the Oval Office in 1837, and still do today).
Indeed, to build such unlikely alliances, Van Buren would have to play both sides of the fence, and his slick political maneuvering would earn him a good measure of distrust both in the North and the South, both sides convinced that he was secretly in cahoots with the other - especially on the issue of slavery. Indeed, his stance on slavery was the very definition of moderate (at least until he was no longer President); like John Kerry on the issue of the Iraq War (or just about anything really), Van Buren never articulated a black-and-white response to the issue, aside from an equal political ambivalence for both the horrific institution itself and the Abolitionist movement attempting to destroy it.
Later on, he would alienate the party he'd helped to build when, in his attempt to win their nomination for President in 1844, he would take a hard-line stance against slavery, and in so doing, commit a spectacular political suicide. Still, it wouldn't be the last time he set his sights on the Presidency: in 1848, largely at his son's urging, Van Buren would win 10% of the nation's popular vote (though not a single electoral vote) running on the radically anti-slavery Free Soil Party, a one-issue pre-cursor to the Republican Party Abraham Lincoln would take to the White House in 1860.
The first President to be born after the Declaration of Independence ("I belong to a later age", he would declare in his inaugural address), he died in 1862 when the country was in the midst of Civil War, and presided over one of the nation's most devastating economic crises ever; and throughout his career, he dedicated himself to pushing this young nation through some nasty growing pains with a potent combination of patriotic fervor, populist empowerment, and good old-fashioned tough love.
It's hard to believe such a charismatic and adaptable leader, someone who inspired wild extremes of love and hate in both his colleagues and constituents, someone who played such a crucial role in the early history of our nation can be so forgotten. Then again, most of Van Buren's greatest political achievements came before and after his Presidency. His Presidency itself, marred almost instantaneously by the Panic of 1837, was dreary.
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Part of Times Books' ongoing The American Presidents series of books, Ted Widmer's brief but lively biography breaks Van Buren's life into nine neat sections, tracing his youth in Kinderhook, New York (where, on the first day of his apprenticeship to a lawyer, he's scolded for his slovenly appearance), to his partying Party days slowly building the Democracy one tavern engagement at a time, to his disastrous Presidency and the vicious election campaign of 1840 which brought him down (a campaign so dirty, it gave even many of Van Buren's enemies pause - not out of sympathy for Van Buren, but fear of what direction the country was moving), all the way through his slow, steady retirement into Elder Statesmanhood.
Along the way, Widmer details Van Buren's encounters with Presidents past (his reverence for Jefferson, the scorn reserved for him by John Quincy Adams, his uncomfortable love/hate friendship with Andrew Jackson) and future. In one particularly promising (but infuriatingly brief) encounter, Van Buren spends an evening getting drunk and exchanging political stories with a young (and, at the time, politically opposite) Abe Lincoln, twenty years before Lincoln's Presidency.
We also experience Van Buren's life (since he was not a diarist, and his autobiography, for all its girth, deals with very little of much interest) through the eyes of his spectators - newsmen, cartoonists, colleagues and political rivals. Of particular note is a speech given by conservative (Whig) Pennsylvania Senator Charles Ogle regarding a recent budget proposal to pay for improvements to the White House. In wildly foppish language, Ogle not only mocks Van Buren's person (he was only 5'6", with bald head, and bounteous, flowing gray sideburns), but refers to his "French" tastes in decor at least a half dozen times.
Widmer's stylishly conversational prose makes the stories in this book feel utterly contemporary; his brisk pacing makes the book delightfully readable and his fascination with (and respect for) his subject is both obvious and contagious throughout - kinda like a sixth grader just stumbling upon this little-known historical sidebar of a life, and wanting to tell his class about it, regardless of the consequences it might have for his future social status.
Not only did I come away with a newfound respect for Van Buren, but Widmer's book made me want to check out other volumes in this series. (Look out, Chester A. Arthur!)
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