President William McKinley, the 25th President of the United States, heroically led our Nation to victory in the Spanish-American War. Under his leadership, the United States enjoyed rapid economic growth and prosperity, including an expansion of territorial gains for the Nation. President McKinley championed tariffs to protect U.S. manufacturing, boost domestic production, and drive U.S. industrialization and global reach to new heights. He was tragically assassinated in an attack on our Nation’s values and our success, and he should be honored for his steadfast commitment to American greatness.
In 1917, the country officially honored President McKinley through the naming of North America’s highest peak. Yet after nearly a century, President Obama’s administration, in 2015, stripped the McKinley name from federal nomenclature, an affront to President McKinley’s life, his achievements, and his sacrifice....
Obama changed the name to Denali, and Trump opposed the change at the time — "Great insult to Ohio. I will change back!" With this order, he's done what he said he would do — though now it's about recognizing a man as a hero and not about a particular state that supposedly cares a lot about that man. Note that "Denali" was not a person's name, so Trump isn't elevating one state's hero over another.
"... a self-proclaimed lover of literature. 'I really care about the human condition and emotions and stuff,' she said.
What she has noticed, however, is that many men aren’t into those kinds of books, and a question that may have been intended to screen her often ends up backfiring.
'I can’t stand dudes who just read self-help books or things specifically related to the job that they’re doing and that’s all they read,' Ms. Liu, 27, said on Friday at a book club for singles in Manhattan."
Yesterday's speech was similar to his long, extemporaneous rally speeches — except it didn't have the exuberant energy and humor. I wrote about it in the previous post — reacting to Charlie Sykes's trashing of the event — and at one point I said, "The main objection is that he's in the Rose Garden setting, and he's making the case against his political opponent." After publishing, I had the question I've put in the post title.
A Rose Garden campaign is when an incumbent president takes advantage of the power and prestige of his office to help him run for re-election. The phrase originally referred to a president staying on the grounds of the White House to campaign as opposed to traveling throughout the country....
The term “Rose Garden campaign” was first used by then-candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976. At the time, Carter was challenging the incumbent president Gerald Ford. Carter complained that Ford was using a “Rose Garden strategy” to get himself free publicity, staying in the public eye by signing bills and making pronouncements....
That implies doing presidential work in a way that implicitly makes the case for reelection, not using the Rose Garden as a platform for campaign speeches.
On a metaphorical level, a Rose Garden strategy refers to any time the incumbent president distributes political favors or largesse as part of his re-election strategy. This can mean offering economic packages to certain key states....
Obviously, that's a worse problem than choosing your backyard as the location for overtly political speeches!
In which American presidential election were the major party candidates the least well-educated?
I have an idea of what the answer might be but don't know for sure. Trump famously said "I love the poorly educated"...
... but what does the label mean and who gets it? For the purposes of my question, I would consider the level of education reached, the quality of the educational institutions, and the difficulty and sophistication of the program pursued.
IN THE COMMENTS: Lloyd W. Robertson said:
I think you have to speak of different eras. Before 1900, it would have seemed ridiculous to expect an Ivy League education or something similar; there were lawyers, but as traditionalguy points out, that didn't necessarily involve what we would call formal education. John Quinicy Adams was almost unbelievably well educated in the "classics," with a lot of help from "amateurs" who were themselves well educated (including in law). Polk graduated with Honors from UNC Chapel Hill. Without more checking, I would just say that was very unusual at the time.
In the 20th century you have more "Ivy League" presidents, often with a gentleman's C average. Hoover was a brilliant engineer, an early Stanford grad, and surely one of the four or five highest IQ presidents (despite being remembered for his failure in the Depression). He made a reputation for finding ore where others had failed, working in many countries, making his way through obscure documents in many languages, hiring and organizing work crews, transportation, food distribution, etc. Johnson vs. Goldwater in 1964 may indeed set the standard for "little higher/formal education" for both major party candidates.
Johnson/Goldwater was indeed the idea I had when I wrote the post.
Anyway, to make the question work, let's begin at 1900. That was William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. (1896 was also William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, so we could just as well say let's begin in 1896, but it would make no difference.) WJB graduated from college and law school (Union Law College, known today as Northwestern University School of Law), so 1900 is not the right answer to my question. As for McKinley, he went to Allegheny College for one year and then went back home "after becoming ill and depressed."
I thought of the question this morning because I happened to be reading about Barry Goldwater, and I was surprised to see how little education he had:
After he did poorly as a freshman in high school, Goldwater's parents sent him to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia... He graduated from the academy in 1928 and enrolled the University of Arizona. Goldwater dropped out of college after one year...
As for LBJ, he went to college, but (constrained by poverty) an undistinguished place, Southwest Texas State Teachers College.
That's Twitterese (in case you think his locutions have become even more brusque).
Nice concise politicization, taking offense on behalf of the important swing state.
IN THE COMMENTS: tim maguire said: "Do Ohioans care? This former Ohioan doesn't." That parallels my conversation with Meade, who lived in Ohio for about 30 years. Me: "Does Ohio care about McKinley?" Meade: "Ohio doesn't even care about Taft."
Mr. Obama, freed from the political constraints of an impending election in the latter half of his second term, was also moving to put to rest a yearslong fight over the name of the mountain that has pit Alaska against electorally powerful Ohio, the birthplace of President William McKinley, for whom it was christened in 1896.
The government formally recognized the name in 1917, and efforts to reverse the move began in Alaska in 1975. In an awkward compromise struck in 1980, the national park surrounding it was named Denali National Park and Preserve, but the mountain continued to be called Mount McKinley....
The mountain came to be known as Mount McKinley after a gold prospector who had just emerged from exploring the Alaska Range heard that Mr. McKinley had won the Republican presidential nomination, and declared that the tallest peak should be named in his honor as a show of support....
I'd always assumed the mountain got the name as a consequence of the assassination of President McKinley, they way so many things were named after John F. Kennedy. That wasn't the case, and that makes the renaming more apt.
I questioned whether I'd ever seen the word "mountebank" in the newspaper, so I searched the NYT archive — all the way back to 1852 — and got 782 hits, beginning with "Really, this Louis NAPOLEON is a very provoking fellow" ("the appearance of the mountebank in the character of a king").
Quite a few of the hits were repetitions of H.L. Mencken's 1926 description of William Jennings Bryan: "a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity . . . deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, . . . all beauty, all fine and noble things. . . . Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not."
One often encounters "mountebank" in a string of contradictions about a person, for example, Theodore Roosevelt: "He transformed the 20th century; no, he overextended the 19th. He was a progressive trust buster; no, an imperialist demagogue. He was a defender of liberty; no, a power-hungry mountebank — a pioneer environmentalist, a bloodthirsty hunter; a farseeing visionary, an energetic clerk."
I see that future President Woodrow Wilson — upon hearing of the death of President McKinley in 1901 — said: "What will happen to the country with that mountebank as President?"
That title and illustrations by Barry Blitt were enough to get me to put this book in my Kindle.
ADDED: This book is aimed (according to the publisher) at children in grades 2 to 5. I did a screen shot of a bit about James Madison to give you an idea of the style and attitude. (Click to enlarge.)
I picked Madison not because I'm a conlawprof or because I live in Madison but because — I see here — Madison was the "first president to wear long pants."
AND: In case you think Madison's owning a parrot was special, here's a website called "Presidential Parrots & Birds - A Brief History." Today I learned that Ulysses S. Grant had a parrot, Teddy Roosevelt had a parrot, Andrew Jackson had a parrot that he taught to swear, William McKinley had a parrot named "Washington Post," and George Washington had a parrot that he disliked.
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