At 250, America Is Still Writing and Rewriting its Presidents

Right from the beginning, biographers have presented presidents as figures in a fable of democracy or as subjects weighed down by the vexatious facts of history. Parson Weems supplied the cherry tree, John Marshall buried George Washington in the minutia of public data in a five-volume unfolding of events that he begun in 1799. Washington Irving split the difference between Weems and Marshall in a lively, if lengthy, account of the Washington he met as a boy and through the eyes of Washington’s contemporaries, many of whom were Irving’s friends.In effect, the very first biographers managed to initiate the range of approaches to the presidency still in evidence today while maintaining a respectful distance from their subjects that would not be broken until Fawn Brodie published “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History in 1974,” outraging her fellow historians but nonetheless preparing the way for Annette Gordon-Reed’s revolutionary treatment of the presidency in “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” published in 1997.Andrew Jackson not only brought a more demotic style to his terms in office, he inspired the form of anecdotal biography, pioneered by John Eaton who had his subject straddle the divide between the obstreperous young man who defied a British officer and the mature Cincinnatus, the legendary figure of Roman virtue, sweeping away the corruption of Washington. Sound familiar? The genre of the campaign biography was born, mixed with encomiums of presidents as natural leaders and moral exemplars, and even as ordinary men inspired to the heights of achievement by their devotion to democratic values. Martin Van Buren and James K. Polk, unable to claim the military mantle of Jackson, found biographers to distinguish them as domesticated men of high principle. Even with a high dose of the apocryphal, campaign biographers attracted the likes of respected novelists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Dean Howells. Hawthorne wrote to his friend Franklin Pierce, that he understood the formula and would include scenes of gallantry coupled — yes, again — with the image of the presidential candidate as a Cincinnatus.Howells took a more astringent tack, presaging a greater realism in the presentation of presidents, when he began his biography ridiculing the genre he was contributing to, noting “It is necessary that every American should have an indisputable grandfather, in order to be represented in the Revolutionary period by actual ancestral service, or connected with it by ancestral reminiscence.” Lincoln, of course, had no such pedigree, and Howells made the most of portraying his man as the product of the poor, educating himself into public prominence. Howells’s book signals an awareness that the electorate was beginning to tire of the campaign biography’s well worn formulas. Let James Parton stand for the new breed of presidential biographer, engineering in “The Life of Andrew Jackson” copious archival work and interviews into a engaging narrative that began with a kind of summa of previous accounts, thus injecting a new rigor and energy. Published shortly before the Civil War, the three-volume work was singled out by an Atlantic Monthly reviewer who lauded the biographer for jettisoning pedigree and valuing his subject for what he had made of himself rather than who his grandfathers were. What Howells had begun in his Lincoln biography, Parton extended with much more lively detail, showing off his sources in a way that begins to look like the notes apparatus of present-day presidential biographies.Parton produced biographies well into the 1880s, and though the biographers of today never mention him, they nonetheless thrive on the techniques he invented: especially the well sourced, dense narrative of a president’s life and times. What was missing in Parton was the emphasis on the psychological, which Lytton Strachey injected into biography in the 1920s, and that Gamaliel Bradford built on in what he called “psychographies” about presidents as diverse as Andrew Jackson and Calvin Coolidge. Bradford helped to create what scholar Scott E. Casper calls the “culture of biography,” now familiar to readers of David McCullough or Ron Chernow.With the exception of debunking George Washington biographies in the 1920s inspired by Strachey, it is not until the 1960s, with Theodore H. White’s book, “The Making of the President 1960,” and Norman Mailer’s Esquire magazine essay, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” describing John F. Kennedy as having the personality of a “great box office actor,” that presidential biographies become reportorial investigations and exposés, as in Thomas C. Reeves’s “A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy.”David McCullough turned the genre of presidential biography not only into a bestseller but into a study of the American character. He wrote three blockbuster presidential biographies: “Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt” (1981), “Truman” (1992), and “John Adams” (2002). That long subtitle to McCullough’s Roosevelt biography says it all. The biographer knew readers would want to know how a puny and privileged boy made himself into both a cowboy and an American president. McCullough dispensed with creating the kind of cherry tree legends that Parson Weems thought indispensable to making George Washington an American hero. The actual facts, well told, required no embellishment.An anthology of three presidential biographies by David McCullough. Wikimedia Commons You would think that after Theodore Roosevelt, McCullough might have chosen to write about the other Roosevelt — or about Lincoln, if what he wanted was a sure fire bestseller. But he chose Truman, a president in the shadow of FDR, but, McCullough knew, a compelling human being whose size did not matter because of the character he built himself up to. That view of Truman as a man of character is what links him to McCullough’s Roosevelt. With the cranky John Adams, surely no one’s favorite president, McCullough won a second Pulitzer Prize (the first was for “Truman”). The biographer’s aim was to make an acerbic character indispensable to our understanding of American history. Modern media has presented conflicting views of presidential power, corruption, and conspiracy — notably in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK.” But even much earlier “Gabriel Over the White House” (1933), portrays an unscrupulous candidate who wins the highest office and with a mistress takes over a democracy on the verge of collapse. Independent producer Walter Wanger, bankrolled by William Randolph Hearst, no less, created a film that eventually saves the country with divine intervention — from an angel — but not before demonstrating how the powers of the presidency can turn dictatorial. The choice of Walter Huston to play the president, shortly after he had appeared in the iconic role of Abraham Lincoln in D. W. Griffith’s film, reflected screenwriter Stephen Vincent Benét’s radical perspective, first expressed in his epic poem, “John Brown’s Body,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929.In novels about Gerald Ford, Lincoln, Nixon, and Jefferson, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Robert Coover, and Barbara Chase-Riboud turned to fiction as a way to upset the staid narrative of presidential biography. Biographical fiction reveals what has been left out of the conventional presidential biography, and why Edmund Morris in “Dutch,” controversially created himself as a contemporary of Ronald Reagan for a more intimate view of his subject. Nigel Hamilton in “JFK: Reckless Youth,” published in 1992, transformed a presidential biography into an eighteenth-century picaresque narrative, and Robert Caro invented the multi-volume presidential biography as a melodramatic saga, challenging a perennial genre that continues to invite demythologizing, as in Alexis Coe’s recent, mischievous “You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington.”Edmund Morris promoting his Ronald Reagan biography ‘Dutch,’ in Austin, Texas, in 1999. John Anderson, Getty ImagesAs to our most recent succession of White House incumbents, no breakthrough or departure from the conventional practices of presidential biography has yet emerged. Perhaps it is too soon to expect a new form or style of presentation. It takes decades, it seems, for a biographer willing to be iconoclastic, to toy with the historical record in the way that the much excoriated Edmund Morris did in 1999 by portraying himself alongside Reagan. We may well have to look instead to our contemporary novelists, say someone like Colson Whitehead, author of the splendidly inventive “The Underground Railroad.” Only with the passage of decades, or even a century, do we get a novel like Ishmael Reed’s “Flight to Canada,” full of deliberate anachronisms and the conflation of popular culture and history in outlandish scenes that portray, for example, Abraham Lincoln waltzing through slave quarters to the tune of “Hello Dolly.” Reed’s point is that we get it all mixed up — our Presidents and their times and places — while sober-sided biographers try to keep things straight. They observe the pieties and proprieties that are expected of serious history and that has made of the American presidency, too often, a providential enterprise that every president has been part of, no matter how great or small his qualifications have been for the role.Mr. Rollyson’s “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History” will be published on Presidents’ Day in 2027.

At 250, America Is Still Writing and Rewriting its Presidents

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