"America First"

 Sarah Churchwell at WP:

Popular memory, as captured by Wikipedia, currently credits Woodrow Wilson with coining the phrase “America First” during his 1916 presidential campaign. Wilson certainly popularized it, in a 1915 speech urging native-born Americans to view hyphenate immigrant Americans with suspicion and to demand of naturalized citizens: “Is it America first, or is it not?” But he didn’t originate it.

At an 1855 “American convention” held in Philadelphia, the American Party adopted a platform that would have sweepingly denied political and civil rights to immigrants. Speaking during a downpour, a nativist politician from New York told the crowd, to cheers: “American as I am, I decidedly prefer this rain to the reign of Roman Catholicism in this country … I, as an American citizen, prefer this rain or any other rain to the reign of foreignism … I go for America first, last and always.”

“America first, last and always” may sound simply patriotic, but since the 1850s it has consistently invoked nativist restrictionism and economic protectionism, and often urged isolationism. It has often accompanied anti-immigrant violence and conspiracy theories. In 1876, an anti-Catholic editorial called on every American “in this Centennial year, to renew the declaration of independence, to declare himself and the nation free, as it ought to be, from the thraldom of every foreign power — whether England or Rome — and to begin again where our forefathers began, with America first, last and always.”

During the latter decades of the 19th century a widespread belief developed that Britain supported free trade as part of a secret plot to thwart the growth of American industry; Republicans responded with a protectionist tariff and “America First.” Well before Wilson, in 1888, Benjamin Harrison promised home labor and protectionism under the “Republic Banner” of “America First, the World Afterwards!” in an election fought over tariff policy.

Civic Nationalism v. Ethno-Nationalism

 Colin Woodard at Zocalo Public Square:

[Historian George] Bancroft’s vision—laid out over four decades in his massive, 10-volume History of the United States—combined his Puritan intellectual birthright with his German mentors’ notion that nations developed like organisms, following a plan that history had laid out for them. Americans, Bancroft argued, would implement the next stage of the progressive development of human liberty, equality, and freedom. This promise was open to people everywhere: “The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine,” Bancroft told the New York Historical Society in 1854. “Of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.”

...

But Bancroft’s vision of American civic cohesion was not the only national narrative on offer from the 1830s onward, or even the strongest one. From the moment Bancroft articulated his ideas, they met a vigorous challenge from the political and intellectual leaders of the Deep South and Chesapeake Country, who had a narrower vision of who could be an American and what the federation’s purpose was to be. People weren’t created equal, insisted William Gilmore Simms, the Antebellum South’s leading man of letters; the continent belonged to the superior Anglo-Saxon race. “The superior people, which conquers, also educates the inferior,” Simms proclaimed in 1837, “and their reward, for this good service, is derived from the labor of the latter.”

Slavery was endorsed by God, declared the leading light of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederacy, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, in 1861. It was one of many Anglo-Saxon supremacist ideas he imbued on his loyal son, Woodrow. The younger Wilson spent the 1880s and 1890s writing histories disparaging the racial fitness of Black people and Catholic immigrants. On becoming president in 1913, Wilson segregated the federal government. He screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House—a film that quoted his own history writings to celebrate the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during Reconstruction.

Simms, the Wilsons, and Birth of a Nation producer D.W. Griffith offered a vision of a Herrenvolk democracy homeland by and for the dominant ethnic group, and in the 1910s and 1920s, this model reigned across the United States. Confederate monuments popped up across former Confederate and Union territory alike; Jim Crow laws cemented an apartheid system in Southern and border states. Directly inspired by the 1915 debut of The Birth of a Nation, a second Klan was established to restore “true Americanism” by intimidating, assaulting, or killing a wide range of non-Anglo Saxons; it grew to a million members by 1921 and possibly as many as 5 million by 1925, among them future leaders from governors to senators to big-city mayors, in addition to at least one Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black. The Immigration Act of 1924 established racial and ethnic quotas devised to maintain Anglo-Saxon numerical and cultural supremacy.

Woodrow Wilson and the Pandemic

The 1918 pandemic was even worse than COVID.  And it infected Woodrow Wilson when he was in Paris for WWI negotiations.

Meilan Solly at The Smithsonian:

Wilson’s bout of influenza “weaken[ed] him physically … at the most crucial point of negotiations,” writes Barry in The Great Influenza. As Steve Coll explained for the New Yorker earlier this year, the president had originally argued that the Allies “should go easy” on Germany to facilitate the success of his pet project, the League of Nations. But French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, whose country had endured much devastation during the four-year conflict, wanted to take a tougher stance; days after coming down with the flu, an exhausted Wilson conceded to the other world leaders’ demands, setting the stage for what Coll describes as “a settlement so harsh and onerous to Germans that it became a provocative cause of revived German nationalism … and, eventually, a rallying cause of Adolf Hitler.”

Whether Wilson would have pushed harder for more equitable terms if he hadn’t come down with the flu is, of course, impossible to discern. According to Barry, the illness certainly drained his stamina and impeded his concentration, in addition to affecting “his mind in other, deeper ways.”

Presidential Illness

Jessica Pearce Rotondi at History.com:

Woodrow Wilson nearly died of the 1918 flu pandemic during sensitive negotiations with world leaders at the Paris Peace Talks. With the flu decimating civilians and soldiers in World War I—20 million people eventually died from the disease worldwide—Wilson’s doctor lied, telling the press the President had caught a cold from the rain in Paris.

Wilson’s illness depleted him, and aides became worried it was hindering the president's ability to negotiate. Ultimately, Wilson relinquished his demands on French leader Georges Clemenceau, accepting the demilitarization of the Rhineland and French occupation of it for at least 15 years. The resulting Treaty of Versailles was so harsh on Germany that it contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the outbreak of World War II.

It wouldn’t be the last time a doctor lied about Wilson’s condition: In 1919, he suffered a series of strokes that prompted his cabinet to suggest the vice president take over. First Lady Edith Wilson and the president’s doctor, Cary Grayson, refused.

 Joel Achenbach and Lillian Cunningham at WP:

The public had limited information about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s physical condition when he ran for president in 1932. The press corps avoided mentioning that Roosevelt used a wheelchair. By the time he ran for a fourth term in 1944, he had heart disease, was constantly tired and had trouble concentrating. Frank Lahey, a surgeon who examined Roosevelt, wrote a memo saying FDR would never survive another four-year term. The memo was not disclosed until 2011.

Harry Truman, FDR’s final running mate, was shocked when he saw Roosevelt for the first time in a year, because, as he told an aide, “physically he’s just going to pieces” — a moment recounted in Michael Beschloss’s book “The Conquerors.” When a friend told Truman to take a close look at the White House because he would soon be living there, Truman answered, “I’m afraid I am, and it scares the hell out of me.”

But the public didn’t know any of this, Beschloss writes. Roosevelt’s opponent, Thomas Dewey, derided “tired old men” in the White House, but Roosevelt sailed to victory that November. He died just months later, in April 1945, leaving Truman to close out World War II. Truman had known nothing of the Manhattan Project and had to make the difficult decision about dropping atomic bombs on Japan.

Robert Dallek at The Atlantic:

But the full extent of Kennedy’s medical ordeals has not been known until now. Earlier this year a small committee of Kennedy-administration friends and associates agreed to open a collection of his papers for the years 1955–63. I was given access to these newly released materials, which included X-rays and prescription records from Janet Travell’s files. Together with recent research and a growing understanding of medical science, the newly available records allow us to construct an authoritative account of JFK’s medical tribulations. And they add telling detail to a story of lifelong suffering, revealing that many of the various treatments doctors gave Kennedy, starting when he was a boy, did far more harm than good. In particular, steroid treatments that he may have received as a young man for his intestinal ailments could have compounded—and perhaps even caused—both the Addison’s disease and the degenerative back trouble that plagued him later in life. Travell’s prescription records also confirm that during his presidency—and in particular during times of stress, such as the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in April of 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis, in October of 1962—Kennedy was taking an extraordinary variety of medications: steroids for his Addison’s disease; painkillers for his back; anti-spasmodics for his colitis; antibiotics for urinary-tract infections; antihistamines for allergies; and, on at least one occasion, an anti-psychotic (though only for two days) for a severe mood change that Jackie Kennedy believed had been brought on by the antihistamines.

 

Princeton Cancels Wilson

At WP, Princeton president Christopher L. Eisgruber tells why he changed his mind and now supports the decision to remove Woodrow Wilson's name from the university's public policy school.  As a political scientist and president of the university, Wilson did much for higher education, but...

Wilson was also a racist. He discouraged black applicants from applying to Princeton. While president of the United States, Wilson segregated the previously integrated federal civil service, thereby moving the United States backward in its quest for racial justice and contributing to the systemic racism that continues to damage black lives and our country today.
...
Wilson’s genuine achievements, I thought, gave Princeton sound reasons to honor him. He is a far different figure than John C. Calhoun or Robert E. Lee, people whose pro-slavery commitments defined their careers and who were sometimes honored for the purpose of supporting segregation or racism. Princeton honored Wilson without regard to, and perhaps even in ignorance of, his racism.

And that, I now believe, is precisely the problem. Princeton is part of an America that has too often disregarded, ignored and turned a blind eye to racism, allowing the persistence of systems that discriminate against black people. When Derek Chauvin knelt for nearly nine minutes on George Floyd’s neck while bystanders recorded his cruelty, he might have assumed that the system would disregard, ignore or excuse his conduct, as it had done in response to past complaints against him.

Very, Very Early Campaign Spots

From PBS:

"The Oldway and the New" is a 1912 campaign film put out by the Democratic National Committee on behalf of candidate Woodrow Wilson. The video portrays Republican challenger William Howard Taft as a tool of special interest and Wilson as a champion of working class citizens. Housed at the Library of Congress, it is the earliest known example of a political party or candidate using the medium of motion picture to communicate with voters.

In 1934, socialist author Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination for governor of California. Conservative studio bosses sought to defeat him.  In 1988, Greg Mitchell wrote at American Heritage:

[Louis B.] Mayer and the movie establishment knew that to defeat Sinclair they would have to reach the masses beyond Hollywood with the message that he was a dangerous radical, and they would have to do it in a novel, exciting, and at the same time subtle way. Variety had issued a call: “With theatres available to provide Sinclair opposition, so far as propaganda is concerned, let the picture business assert itself.”

With only weeks remaining until the November election, an MGM director named Felix Feist, Jr., took a camera crew from Hearst Metrotone News (one of the leading newsreel companies of the day) up and down the state, filming interviews with prospective voters. Feist was following direct orders, it was later revealed, from MGM’s “boy wonder” producer Irving Thalberg. The raw film was processed through MGM’s lab, edited down to a few minutes, and added to the Metrotone newsreels, which were sent free of charge to theaters throughout California twice a week.

Louis B. Mayer and the movie establishment knew that to defeat Sinclair they would have to convey the message that he was a dangerous radical, and do it in a novel, exciting, yet subtle way.

Because newsreels had heretofore maintained a nonpartisan stance in election races, these shorts, based on an innocuous inquiring-reporter format, had an enormous effect. Well-dressed couples and prim, elderly ladies invariably endorsed Merriam. Disheveled, wild-eyed citizens with thick accents stood up for Sinclair. One man observed that Sinclair was “the author of the Russian government, and it worked out very well there, and it should do so here.”

This Day in Woodrow Wilson's Racism

From the Equal Justice Initiative:

On April 11, 1913, recently inaugurated President Woodrow Wilson received Postmaster General Albert Burleson's plan to segregate the Railway Mail Service. Burleson reported that he found it “intolerable” that white and black employees had to work together and share drinking glasses and washrooms. This sentiment was shared by others in Wilson's administration; William McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury, argued that segregation was necessary “to remove the causes of complaint and irritation where white women have been forced unnecessarily to sit at desks with colored men.”

By the end of 1913, black employees in several federal departments had been relegated to separate or screened-off work areas and segregated lavatories and lunchrooms. In addition to physical separation from white workers, black employees were appointed to menial positions or reassigned to divisions slated for elimination. The government also began requiring photographs on civil service applications, to better enable racial screening.

Although implemented by his subordinates, President Wilson defended racial segregation in his administration as in the best interest of black workers. He maintained that harm was interjected into the issue only when black people were told that segregation was humiliation. Meanwhile, segregation in federal employment was seen as a significant blow to black Americans' rights and seemed to signify official Presidential approval of Jim Crow policies in the South.

Segregated lavatory signs were eventually removed after backlash that included organized protests by the NAACP -- but discriminatory customs persisted and there was little concrete evidence of actual policy reversal. The federal government continued to require photographs on civil service applications until 1940.

The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

Kelly Ann Holder at the Census:

The “War to End All Wars” came to an end on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918.

A year later on Nov. 11, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first Armistice Day, the precursor to what we now call Veterans Day. This commemoration was dedicated to the cause of world peace in honor of those who served in World War I.

”To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations”
— President Woodrow Wilson

Over 30 nations were at war between 1914 and 1918. World War I was the first truly modern war, with the introduction of air warfare and tanks, while 65 million troops worldwide fought in its battles.

The United States entered the war in 1917. Nearly 5 million men and women served our country during the conflict, with 116,516 lives lost.

In 1954, Armistice Day became Veterans Day, which now pays tribute to all veterans who served our country in peacetime and in war. Today, 18.2 million veterans live in the United States and Puerto Rico, according to Census Bureau data.

In fact, the first post-war decennial census to include a veteran status question was in 1930. Twelve years after the end of the war, we counted 3.7 million veterans of The Great War.

The 1990 Census, 72 years after the war’s end, was the last time World War I was included as a period of military service. At that time, roughly 62,000 veterans remained.

The last known surviving U.S. World War I veteran, Frank Buckles, died in 2011.

 

Public Administration

At The American Interest, Francis Fukuyama laments the decline of the study of public administration.

This then brings us back to the crisis in public administration as a field. After a period of innovation and creativity driven by the economists, the field seems to have lost its way again. Since the heyday of principal-agent theory (which was largely driven by scholars outside traditional public administration) there has been no dominant approach to public sector reform generated by administrative scholars. Public administration programs have either disappeared or have been folded into public policy programs, with increasing focus on policy analysis rather than practical skill-building. The field has relatively little interchange with the other discipline that provides training for government, administrative law, and it is increasingly hard to get tenure as a public administration scholar. There is no clear path from a public administration school to a job in the Federal government.

One individual who is trying to push against this tide is former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who established the Volcker Alliance to push back against these trends. Volcker, whose background is in public administration, likes to tell the story of a conversation with a very prominent Princeton economist. Volcker lamented the decline of teaching in public administration, to which the economist replied, “But public administration isn’t even a field!” Volcker went on to point out that some prominent public administration scholars have gone on to great prominence, even rising to be presidents of major universities. The economist professed not to believe this, and wanted an example. The example Volcker gave was Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton University.

Wilson v Madison

Yuval Levin at NYT:

Is Congress’s purpose to implement the agenda of the majority party most effectively, or is its purpose to compel and enable accommodations in a divided country? Today’s Congress does neither very well. But which failure is a bug and which is a feature?

Those two visions of Congress’s purpose (which the political scientist Daniel Stid labels “Wilsonian” and “Madisonian,” respectively) generally point in opposite directions when it comes to strengthening Congress, but they are too often confounded. The Wilsonian vision would have Congress function more like a European parliament, with stronger centralized leadership and fewer choke points and protections of minority prerogatives. It would enable the party that won a majority of seats to enact its agenda and see what voters make of it in the next election.

The Madisonian vision would recover the purpose of Congress in our larger constitutional system but would mean slow going, greater cacophony, less centralization and more opportunities for coalitions of strange bedfellows to form. It would have Congress serve as an arena for continuing bargaining and compromise, on the premise that greater social peace is better for the country than either party’s bright ideas.

Trump v. Madison

At The Washington Post, Aaron Blake reports on Trump's view of our constitutional system:

In an interview with Fox News airing Friday night, Trump dismissed the “archaic” rules of the House and Senate — using that word four times — and suggested they needed to be streamlined for the good of the country.

A sampling:

• “We don't have a lot of closers in politics, and I understand why: It's a very rough system. It's an archaic system.”
• “You look at the rules of the Senate, even the rules of the House — but the rules of the Senate and some of the things you have to go through — it's really a bad thing for the country, in my opinion. They're archaic rules. And maybe at some point we're going to have to take those rules on, because, for the good of the nation, things are going to have to be different.”
• “You can't go through a process like this. It's not fair. It forces you to make bad decisions. I mean, you're really forced into doing things that you would normally not do except for these archaic rules.”

William Kristol sums it up:

Donald Trump, Wilsonian progressive. https://t.co/DoSEnikIgo

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 29, 2017

In the concluding essay of Is Congress Broken? The Virtues and Defects of Partisanship and Gridlock, William Connelly and I offer an alternative view:

Today’s critics of Congress argue it moves too slowly and passes too few bills. But from a Madisonian perspective, the real question is not speed or quantity of legislation but the quality of deliberation. Similarly, the issue of representation is not whether Congress reflects the polls but whether it heeds deliberative opinion. And oversight is not just about preventing tyranny but keeping the executive within its proper bounds so that it can do what it does best.

To think constitutionally is to keep these ideas in mind no matter which party controls which branch. In 1990, Representative Mickey Edwards (R-Okla.) offered some far-sighted advice. Although his party had held the White House for nearly a decade and had not controlled the House since 1954, he defended congressional prerogatives. “I am frustrated by continued liberal domination of the Congress. . . . …. But there was a reason why wits of earlier ages cautioned us not to toss out the babies when we dump the bath water. Let us reform the Congress, but let us hold it dear as the guardian of our liberties against the centralization of power.”

Woodrow Wilson, Bad President

At The Federalist, David Harsanyi writes of Princeton protests against Woodrow Wilson:

Like most progressives of his era, Wilson wasn’t merely a common racist, he embraced the pseudo-scientific eugenics that would haunt millions. After his election, he didn’t only say terrible things—”There are no government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro’s place in the corn field”—he institutionalized racism in the federal government, segregating the civil service in 1913. He personally fired 15 out of 17 black supervisors appointed to federal jobs, while his postmaster general and Treasury secretary segregated their departments. He’s the only president that I know of who’s ever celebrated the Ku Klux Klan in the White House.

While governor of New Jersey, Wilson signed a bill making sterilization of criminals and the mentally ill compulsory. Is that the legacy Princeton was talking?

A well-regarded scholar, Wilson, who argued that Americans needed to get “beyond the Declaration of Independence” and valued “progress” over freedom, is typically given a pass because he was the first president to lead a massive expansion of the federal government, activating the state in the “service of humanity.”

That’s just the start. Although I suspect there will be pushback to this contention: Wilson also oversaw one of the greatest foreign-policy disasters in American history, World War I. The untenable outcome was bad enough, but the massive social engineering project Wilson helped spearhead is still being paid for. Simultaneously, Wilson sent American citizens to jail for expressing opinions that cast the government or the war effort in poor light.

There are many insane things happening on college campuses these days, but calling out Woodrow Wilson is not one of them.

"Unstinted Power" and Federal Spending

A report from the Joint Economic Committee:

A progressive philosophical shift in federal spending began under President Woodrow Wilson. The First World War masked the fiscal effect of Wilson’s policies, but a clear change had occurred between pre- and post-war federal spending. Whether viewed as total spending or isolated to non-interest spending, federal spending as a percentage of the economy had notably increased. For the 10 years prior to Wilson (1902 – 1912), non-interest federal spending averaged 1.95 percent of the economy; for the 10 years after Wilson (1921 – 1931), it averaged 2.77 percent.* Yet due to the Great War’s effect on spending, it is better to study the effects of the philosophical shift with the enactment of the 1921 Budget Act, rather than with the inauguration of Wilson.

From the nation’s founding through 1920, total federal spending as a percentage of the economy (including the Civil War) averaged 2.80 percent; but since then (1921 – 2014), total federal spending has risen to an average of 17.27 percent. George Will—writing on Wilson’s underlying philosophy—succinctly contrasted Wilson with James Madison by noting, “Wilsonian government, meaning (in Wilson’s words) government with‘unstinted power,’ is hostile to Madison’s Constitution, which, Madison said, obliges government ‘to control itself.’”24 

The combination of philosophical change, along with the new budget process—which gave the President a more prominent role in directing federal spending, as well as expanding “the President’s control over budgetary information by establishing the Bureau of the Budget,”25—were two of the notable forces at work as federal spending began to deviate from the historical average rate. 

 * From 1844 through 1976, U.S. government fiscal years ran from July through June, so the 1941 fiscal year ended nearly six months prior to the U.S. entering World War II.

24 George Will, “The Danger of a Government with Unlimited Power,” The Washington Post, June 3, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/02/AR2010060203278.html. 25 “Our Founding,” Congressional Budget Office, accessed July 20, 2015, http://www.cbo.gov/about/our-founding.

 

Madison, Wilson, Obama

President Obama's popular vote margin in 2012 is similar to that of another reelected president, Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

In 1908, Woodrow Wilson wrote:

The government of the United States was constructed upon the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe. In our own day, whenever we discuss the structure or development of anything, whether in nature or in society, we consciously or unconsciously follow Mr. Darwin; but before Mr. Darwin, they followed Newton.

George Will writes:

America’s Newtonian Constitution might again function according to Madisonian expectations if a provoked Congress regains its spine and self-respect, thereby returning our constitutional architecture to equipoise. But this is more to be hoped for than expected. Even without this, however, the institutional vandalism of Barack Obama’s executive unilateralism still might be a net national benefit. It will be if the Republicans’ 2016 presidential nominee responds to Obama’s serial provocations by promising a return to democratic etiquette grounded in presidential self-restraint.

Not since the off-year elections of 1938, when voters rebuked Franklin Roosevelt for his attempt to pack the Supreme Court by enlarging it, has the electorate made constitutional equilibrium a central concern. James Madison, however, hoped institutional balance could be self-maintaining: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”

...
America’s two vainest presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Obama, have been the most dismissive of the federal government’s Madisonian architecture. Wilson, the first president to criticize America’s Founding, was especially impatient with the separation of powers, which he considered, as Obama does, an affront to his dual grandeur: The president is a plebiscitary tribune of the entire people, monopolizing true democratic dignity that is denied to mere legislators. And progressive presidents have unexcelled insight into history’s progressive trajectory, and hence should have untrammeled freedom to act.

...
Obama, who aspired to a place in the presidential pantheon, will leave office with a status more like Chester Arthur’s than Franklin Roosevelt’s, but without an achievement as large and popular as Arthur’s civil service reform. Obama will, however, merit the nation’s backhanded gratitude if the 2016 Republican presidential nominee makes central to a successful campaign a promise to retreat voluntarily from his predecessor’s Caesarism.

A Critical View of State of the Union Speeches

George Will deplores the practice of delivering the State of the Union as a speech instead of a written message:

When the Founding generation was developing customs and manners appropriate to a republic, George Washington and John Adams made the mistake of going to Congress to do their constitutional duty of informing and recommending. Jefferson, however, disliked the sound of his voice — such an aversion is a vanishingly rare presidential virtue — and considered it monarchical for the executive to lecture the legislature, the lofty instructing underlings. So he sent written thoughts to Capitol Hill, a practice good enough for subsequent presidents until Wilson in 1913 delivered his message orally, pursuant to the progressives’ belief in inspirational and tutelary presidents.

It is beyond unseemly, it is anti-constitutional for senior military officers and, even worse, Supreme Court justices to attend these political rallies where, with metronomic regularity, legislators of the president’s party leap to their feet to whinny approval of every bromide and vow. Members of the other party remain theatrically stolid, thereby provoking brow-furrowing punditry about why John Boehner did not rise (to genuflect? salute? swoon?) when Barack Obama mentioned this or that. Tuesday night, the justices, generals and admirals, looking as awkward as wallflowers at a prom, at least stayed seated.

In any case, the speech is no longer meeting the Wilsonian goal of swaying public opinion, because the public is not watching.  Constitution Daily reports:

The final TV viewership numbers are in for President Obama’s State of the Union speech, and the broadcast hit a historic low in one of two key ratings categories.

Nielsen says the State of the Union was seen by 33.5 million people, which is the lowest number since 2000 and the second-lowest total since 1993, when the agency first started combined measuring for the event.

The combined rating for the 2013 speech was 21.5, which is the lowest in history. President Bill Clinton’s speech in 2000 had a rating of 22.4. The rating number represents the percentage of possible households that have TV sets and could watch the speech.

In other words, nearly 80 percent of American households skipped watching the State of the Union live or on a tape-delayed basis on TV.

State of the Union: Historical Perspective

Tonight, the president delivers the annual State of the Union address. At The American Presidency Project Gerhard Peters writes:

A seemingly well-established misconception found even in some academic literature, is that the State of the Union is an orally delivered message presented to a joint session of Congress. With only a few exceptions, this has been true in the modern era (ca. 1933-present, see Neustadt or Greenstein), but beginning with Jefferson's 1st State of the Union (1801) and lasting until Taft's final message (1912), the State of the Union was a written (and often lengthy) report sent to Congress. Although Federalists Washington and Adams had personally addressed the Congress, Jefferson was concerned that the practice of appearing before the representatives of the people was too similar to the British monarch's ritual of addressing the opening of each new Parliament with a list of policy mandates, rather than "recommendations." This changed in 1913. Wilson believed the presidency was more than a impersonal institution; that instead the presidency is dynamic, alive, and personal (see Tulis). In articulating this philosophy, Wilson delivered an oral message to Congress. Health reasons prevented Wilson from addressing Congress in 1919 and 1920, but Harding's two messages (1921 and 1922) and Coolidge's first (1923) were also oral messages. In the strict constructionist style of 19th Century presidents, Coolidge's remaining State of the Unions (1924-28) and all four of Hoover's (1929-32) were written. Franklin D. Roosevelt established the modern tradition of delivering an oral State of the Union beginning with his first in 1934. Exceptions include Truman's 1st (1946) and last (1953), Eisenhower's last (1961), Carter's last (1981), and Nixon's 4th (1973). In addition, Roosevelt's last (1945) and Eisenhower's 4th (1956) were technically written messages although they addressed the American people via radio summarizing their reports. Any research design should recognize these facts.

PBS compares the state of the union in 1913 -- the year in which Wilson revived the oral version -- and 2013:

The State of the Union: 1913 vs. 2013 infographic by amccartney.

Wilson on Political Parties

As noted earlier, there is a good deal of commentary that the GOP is "leaderless." In 1885, a scholar named Woodrow Wilson said the same thing about parties of his day:

It is probably also this lack of leadership which gives to our national parties their curious, conglomerate character. It would seem to be scarcely an exaggeration to say that they are homogeneous only in name. Neither of the two principal parties is of one mind with itself. Each tolerates all sorts of difference of creed and variety of aim within its own ranks. Each pretends to the same purposes and permits among its partisans the same contradictions to those purposes. They are grouped around no legislative leaders whose capacity has been tested and to whose opinions they loyally adhere. They are like armies without officers, engaged upon a campaign which has no great cause at its back. Their names and traditions, not their hopes and policy, keep them together.