Page 50 - American Conservative September/October 2015

Arts&Letters
Tucker’s is an adequate if not in- spired overview of Southern states- man and political theorist John C. Calhoun—I’m partial to the brief bi- ography of Calhoun I find in Forgotten Conservatives in American History, a similar volume released several years ago by Clyde Wilson and Brion Mc- Clanahan—but I am impressed all the same to see Calhoun in a mainstream conservative book like Tucker’s in the first place. Modern conservatism with its nationalist idiom cannot under- stand Calhoun, much less respect the gravity of the problems he identified. And Tucker’s discussion of the South Carolina Exposition and Protest— which, if I may gently correct the au- thor, was two documents, not one—of 1832 gets to the heart of Calhoun’s concerns.
Any society will have its compet- ing and incompatible interests. In the
the task that consumed Calhoun, and it was at the heart of his idea of the “con- current majority” and his version of state nullification. Wrote Calhoun: “It requires the greatest wisdom and mod- eration to extend over any country a system of equal laws; and it is this very diversity of interests, which is found in all associations of men for a common purpose, be they private or public, that constitutes the main difficulty in form- ing and administering free and just governments.” No delusional happy talk about “democracy” here.
Also making an appearance here is Grover Cleveland, who along with Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan is one of three U.S. presidents to feature in Tucker’s book. Cleveland’s virtues are familiar to students of American history, though few of us ever heard them presented as virtues. Cleveland was anti-inflationist, generally lais-
chapter is certainly filled with illustra- tive examples of Cleveland’s govern- ing style and policy positions.
For instance, when in 1887 several counties in Texas had suffered a ter- rible drought and Congress proposed a $10,000 grant for seed grain, Cleve- land vetoed the bill. His reasoning was instructive. Cleveland said he could not “indulge a benevolent and chari- table sentiment through the appro- priation of public funds.” (As it turned out, $150,000 in voluntary charitable donations was raised for the purpose.) Cleveland simply could find “no war- rant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.”
Most Americans will not have heard of the majority of the people Tucker discusses in Conservative Heroes, and those figures whose names are famil- iar are generally known to the public only in caricature. Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president, is a prime example. Every schoolboy has heard Coolidge’s remark that the chief business of the American people is business. He has probably not heard, from the very same 1925 speech:
It is only those who do not un- derstand our people, who believe our national life is entirely ab- sorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civi- lization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism.
Coolidge may be a familiar enough name, but I rather suspect that even most conservatives and libertarians, especially young ones, will be unfa- miliar with Josiah W. Bailey or the “Conservative Manifesto” of 1937 he played such a key role in drafting. Bailey belonged to the dwindling but pugnacious Jeffersonian wing of the Democratic Party and sought to foster
Modern conservatism with its nationalist idiom cannot understand Calhoun, much less respect the gravity of the problems he identified.
sez-faire, a con- stitutionalist, and while not a strict nonintervention- ist, certainly an opponent of the drive toward im- perialism that was gathering steam
United States, Calhoun found, those competing interests were by and large geographically defined: the North and the South, generally speaking, had op- posing views on many of the key is- sues important to both regions.
“The interest of the two great sec- tions is opposed,” Calhoun wrote. “We want free trade—they restrictions; we want moderate taxes, frugality in Government, economy, account- ability, and a rigid application of the public money to the payment of debt, and to the objects authorized by the Constitution. In all these particulars, if we may judge by experience, their views of their interest are precisely the opposite.”
How to prevent the various interests in society from using their electoral strength to oppress one another was
in the late 19th century.
This latter quality is absent from
Tucker’s story of Cleveland, but it, too, was evidence of the president’s conservative temperament. He had no sympathy for the interventionist agitators who wanted a war over Cuba and even said he would refuse to call up the army if Congress should de- clare such a war. He made no moves to annex Hawaii, frustrating imperi- alist ambitions yet again, this time on the grounds that annexation was be- ing pursued by parties who had had a hand in foisting an unrepresentative regime on the Hawaiian people.
What we do read about in Tucker’s tale is Cleveland’s approach to domes- tic affairs, although the president’s handling of labor union violence is likewise curiously absent. But the
50 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015