Plain English with Derek Thompson

Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk

Play episode

Hosts

Derek Thompson

About the episode

Who is the most successful president in American history? George Washington secured American independence. Abraham Lincoln preserved the union and ended slavery. Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the Depression, remade government, and won World War II. But if we define “success” as the ability to articulate your goals and achieve every single one of them, perhaps only one president in American history was ever perfectly successful.

In 1845, James K. Polk, newly elected by a whisker-thin margin, confided to his friend George Bancroft the four goals of his four years in the White House.

  1. 1. Acquire Oregon from Great Britain.
  2. 2. Acquire California from Mexico.
  3. 3. Reduce the tariff.
  4. 4. Establish an independent treasury.

 

Four years later, he’d done all this and more. As the historian Daniel Patrick Howe wrote, “Judged by these objectives, Polk is probably the most successful president the United States has ever had.” And that’s why Polk is the subject of today’s show. I don’t think another president in American history has so large a gap between his modern reputation and his actual achievement.

There are two great biographies about Polk that I’ve read that have been published in the last 20 years. I’m very pleased that today, we have both authors on the show. Walter Borneman is the author of Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America. And Robert Merry is the author of A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Summary

  • Plain English excerpt with Walter Borneman and Robert Merry 

    Derek Thompson: Before we dive into this material, I just want to first say it’s really thrilling to be able to have two different James Polk biographers here to help me understand this incredibly pivotal time in American history. And before we dive into the material, I’d love to know what drew you to the subject. So, Walt, let’s start with you. There are so many stories to tell about American history. What’s so interesting to you about James Polk?

    Walter Borneman: Well, I actually started thinking I was going to write a book about the election of 1844, because I think it really is a pivotal election in American history. And then you know how things go when you develop a book, one thing leads to another and suddenly I’m writing a full-blown biography of James K. Polk. But certainly he’s front and center in that election and all of the policies of the four years of his presidency.

    Derek Thompson: And Bob, same question to you.

    Robert Merry: Oh, yeah. I have to give full credit to my editor at Simon & Schuster at that time, the late Alice Mayhew, who… I had written a book on American foreign policy, but that was kind of a polemical book, and she knew that my passion was narrative history as was hers. So when that was done, we came up with a few ideas. She didn’t really like them, and she finally said, “So what do you know about the Mexican War?” And I said, “Well, I’m not a military historian. That’s not my meat. But I love politics, and I know that was a yeasty political time, and I know that James Polk is a very fascinating character. So how about if I come up with some ideas of how we would go about doing that?” And she liked them and there we were.

    Derek Thompson: So I want to draw back the curtains here in the election year of 1844. And the U.S. is defined at this time, it seems, along two axes: north, south, east, and west. And in the north, industrialization is surging. In the Agrarian South, slaves make up about a third of the population, cotton is by far America’s biggest export. East of the Appalachian Mountains is home to still 90 percent of the U.S. population. But west of the Mississippi, migration is booming. We are about to enter the heyday of the Oregon Trail.

    The concept of manifest destiny is on the people’s lips, and the year 1844 also happens to be an extraordinary one in telecommunications history. This is the year that Samuel Morse sends the first telegraphic message with four words, “What hath God wrought?” And on top of all this, there’s the seismic presidential election and the looming issue of Texas, newly independent Texas. Bob, why don’t you set the table for us with Texas? What should we know about Texas in the year 1844?

    Robert Merry: Well, Texas had been an independent country, according to its own lights, for 10 years. It got its independence from Mexico in 1835 and Mexico never, however, acknowledged that and always suggested that it was going to get Texas back. And it was a delicate situation for United States because we wanted to recognize the Texas independence, but we also didn’t want to have a terrible war-like situation with Mexico. So even Andrew Jackson, as bellicose as he could be, was wary about it and didn’t recognize Texas until the end of his second term.

    So that was kind of the state of play, and it was essentially a status quo situation. Texas was thriving as an independent nation. Sam Houston was playing a major role in bringing it into fruition. And then, John Tyler, who was kind of in a political no man’s land—he had been a Democrat and he was a Whig, but he wasn’t really a very good Whig based on the Whig sensibility. Certainly Henry Clay didn’t think so. And he was looking for a way to get himself some attention so that he might have a chance to retain the presidency. He had succeeded to the presidency after the death of William Harrison. And so, he entered into negotiations with Texas about annexation, and it exploded upon the political scene in America, because it really did encapsulate that concept of American expansion, of being a country across the midsection of North America from sea to sea. What a concept, what an idea, and that was beguiling American politics.

    Host: Derek Thompson
    Guests: Walter Borneman and Robert Merry
    Producer: Devon Baroldi