In my constant quest to learn more about American history, I’m reading a new biography of John Calhoun. Written by Robert Elder, a professor at Baylor, it is a great book — not only as a source of information on the fascinating Calhoun, but for capsule portraits of his contemporaries and general description of the America in which he lived. Strongly recommend that you check it out.
One thing that’s struck me about Calhoun is his similarity to another poly sci major who won a national election: Woodrow Wilson. I wasn’t expecting this at all, and am still not convinced that I’m right in making this comparison. Here’s my reasoning.
Southern charm and northern efficiency
Both men were southerners (Calhoun from South Carolina; Wilson from Virginia) educated in the North (Calhoun at Yale; Wilson at Princeton). In addition to studying politics, both wrote on it extensively, and became practitioners of the subject. With the exception of the Founding generation, and possibly Theodore Roosevelt, no American president or vice president has written political theory on such a sophisticated level. Calhoun’s writings on the “concurrent majority” are still read by American graduate students, as is Wilson’s book Congressional Government.
Prophets with honor
Both Calhoun and Wilson were prophetic: they understood that the American constitutional settlement, as existing in their respective eras, was unsustainable.
Calhoun argued that the growing population of, and concentration of capital in, the northern states had unsettled the political balance achieved by the Founding generation. He also saw that slavery — which he labeled a “positive good” — had become an easy to understand, catchall rubric to which any political difference between North and South (tariffs, the scope of the franchise, foreign policy) could be ascribed. To push back against the growing power of the North and its increasing antipathy toward slavery, Calhoun advocated for southern sectionalism. He encouraged his fellow southerners to vote in federal elections as a conscious bloc. He also attempted to minimize the ability of the federal government to intrude upon the authority and power of the individual states.
Wilson believed that the American governmental system could not function in a modern, industrialized economy. The business entities present in such an economy — scaled to a level unimaginable to the Founders — would CORRUPT the people’s representatives. Corporations, trusts, and monopolistic interests influenced Congressmen through lobbying. Where this failed, they would use money to influence voters directly through misleading and propagandistic campaigns. While Wilson wanted to abandon our constitutional framework and replace it with a parliamentary system, he recognized that doing so would be impossible. Instead, he sought to check electoral — and thus corporate— power through active anti-trust enforcement and the creation of independent regulatory agencies. Staffed by supposedly “neutral” and technocratic “experts,” these agencies would do what Congress could not, and rein in the excess of American business.
Lack of problem solving ability
Both Calhoun and Wilson’s proposed solutions didn’t work out.
Calhoun’s efforts to promote southern sectionalism had a mirror image in the later efforts of some of his northern colleagues, who sought to promote a northern sectionalism.1 And after Calhoun’s death, his ideological heirs ceased to be southern sectionalists, and instead became southern nationalists. This movement (in both North and South) had disastrous consequences, by contributing to the secession of the southern states and the Civil War.
For his part, while some of Wilson’s anti-trust efforts succeeded2, his administrative state has a lot of issues. As Wilson himself was aware, but chose to ignore, the bureaucrats who staff administrative agencies are just as subject to outside influence as the representatives who make up a legislature. This concept — regulatory capture — continues to plague the United States today. Note that a captured regulatory agency is in some ways worse than a corrupt legislature. Elected representatives are easily identifiable, and can be thrown out by the voters if they are corrupt. By contrast, bureaucrats are largely unknown to the voting public. And, due to the independent nature of their agencies and civil service protections, they cannot be easily removed from their positions.
That’s all I’ve got for this quick and potentially wrongheaded post. If you liked these observations, please feel free to “like” and share them. And if you disagree, let me know in the comments (politely of course).
I need to be careful here and make clear that Calhoun’s advocacy of southern sectionalism didn’t singlehandedly create its northern counterpart. Nothern sectionalism existed in a from the 1810s. And its existence led Calhoun to (accurately) identify the all-purpose use of slavery as a wedge issue between North and South — even when the nature of the disagreement would ostensibly not divide people along sectional lines. For instance, if the United States instituted protective tariffs to assist domestic manufacturing, it would make it more likely that other nations would respond in kind. Farmers of export crops would accordingly be unlikely to support such protective tariffs, as it could harm their ability to sell their produce overseas. This view would ostensibly be (and occasionally was) shared by both wheat farmers in Pennsylvania and cotton farmers in Alabama. In other words, one would expect that the disagreement would be between farmers (in all sections) and manufacturers (in all sections). The existence of slavery, however, sectionalized the issue. Because the southern states were largely agrarian, and the north increasingly industrial — and because the southern states permitted slavery, and the northern ones did not — to be “anti tariff” was to be southern; to be “pro tariff,” northern.
Contra his right-wing haters, for whom he is the origin of all our present troubles, Wilson did not believe in a centralized economy. In fact, he had a Jeffersonian view of the American economy, updated for the industrial age. His thinking went like this: anti-trust actions would break up giant business conglomerates. In so doing, they would be replaced by regional, smaller-scale firms. The economy, in other words, would be decentralized. This would SPREAD capital — and thus political power — over a diffuse geographic area. This would reduce the corruption of Congress by aligning the interests of the donor class (which were now regional in nature) with those of the voters (which were, by definition, regional and local). The board structure of the Federal Reserve System, with regional elections and stakeholders thereto, drew from the same intellectual well. That idea quickly went south, however, and is beyond the scope of this post.