• Robert W. Merry, A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009, 594 pages.
When President Obama told an interviewer he’d rather be a great one-term president than a mediocre two-termer, he probably wasn’t thinking of James K. Polk. Of the 11 chief executives who served only four years, Polk stands out as the one who announced his intentions ahead of time. Robert Merry’s A Country of Vast Designs shows Polk’s administration was remarkable for two other reasons — Polk’s successful achievement of a simple but audacious agenda, and the powerful and strange personalities he confronted, recruited, or circumvented to accomplish it. Though Merry doesn’t put it this way, Polk engaged many of the same fundamental questions Obama faces, making this story from the late 1840s especially relevant today.
Polk was a disciple of Andrew Jackson, both Carolinians who made their political fortunes in Tennessee. Like Jackson, he stood for a strong union but limited government, and when elected to Congress he embraced Old Hickory’s animosity toward Henry Clay’s philosophy of benevolent and expansive federal spending and authority. With Jackson’s careful tutelage, Polk quickly rose to become speaker of the House, and in a surprise convention move, gained the Democrats’ presidential nomination in 1844.
Unlike Jackson, Polk was unable to inspire either devotion or fear. Instead, he relied on a keen political insight, nerves of steel, and a deep, almost egotistical self-confidence. “He was in many ways a smaller-than-life figure, but he harbored larger-than-life ambitions,” Merry observes. He saw his election as a repudiation of the Clay-led Whigs and their program and launched his presidency with a sense of personal destiny.
“There still would be tensions over the definition of America in economic terms: whether the country should be guided by those who sought to generate progress through governmental projects and good works, through protective tariffs and the concentration of economic power in a federal bank; or whether the country should avoid concentrations of power, either economic or political, and distribute it as widely through the polity as possible,” Merry writes. “But these frictions … had been superseded by a new political development — the explosive emergence of the expansionist impulse. … [Polk] embraced this new outlook without thought of nuance or ramification … and that is what would propel him through four years of national leadership.”
Polk formulated a four-point agenda: remove the Whigs’ protective tariff and reduce it to a revenue-raiser only; continue Jackson’s efforts to decentralize banking, pressing for hard currency; wrest the Oregon territory away from remaining British claims; and purchase New Mexico and California from the tottering kleptocracy of Mexico.
Each of these set off strident alarms from both Whigs and some Democrats. Polk proved adept at brinksmanship both in Congress and diplomatic circles, and usually won in the end. Even Providence smiled on his boldness. While opponents decried Manifest Destiny as creating an ungovernable sprawl of territory, the invention of Morse’s telegraph and the rapid expansion of railroads compressed time and space. When economists warned Polk’s hard money reforms would plunge the nation into depression, vast reserves of gold turned up in the newly American California mountains.
Polk’s self-reliance created problems as well as opportunities, though. A micromanager by design, when his Cabinet went home for congressional recess, Polk smugly told his diary he felt perfectly capable of governing without them.
He was unable to govern James Buchanan, though. While Polk sought carefully to exclude ambitious men from his Cabinet, somehow he overlooked Buchanan when he chose him for secretary of State. Buchanan proved erratic, temperamental, and intentionally disruptive. Frequently Polk was forced to overrule or bypass Buchanan, and while Polk wrote in his diary that he had sternly rebuked Buchanan on several occasions, he never brought himself to cashier the man.
Polk suffered further from the inflated egos of senior officials. In the midst of the Mexican War, Gen. Winfield Scott, the Army’s commander in chief, brooded over Polk’s attempts to appoint additional generals to balance Scott’s ego-driven leadership.
Scott, in turn, suffered from charismatic but insubordinate generals under him; John Kearny and John C. Fremont conquered New Mexico and California almost without bloodshed, but their political scheming led Scott to court-martial Fremont. The telegraph notwithstanding, commanders west of the Mississippi operated with nearly the autonomy of sea captains, and often months elapsed between military actions and Washington’s response.
Polk’s greatest lapse was his inability to grasp the emergence of slavery as the next defining issue.
“Like most Democrats throughout the Jacksonian ascendancy, he considered slavery a side issue, something that just got in the way of the important political objectives — such as preventing concentrations of power in government and commerce, keeping tariff rates just high enough to sustain a prudent national government, [and] finding some means of maintaining currency stability without resorting to a nefarious national bank,” Merry says.
The Missouri Compromise was supposed to settle the question forever, Polk thought, and both the rise of abolitionism as a political force and the deepening regional divisions within his own party eluded him. Merry writes, “There is no evidence Polk took serious note of these developments.”
Like the current administration, Polk had to answer questions over whether we would have an activist government or a minimalist one, whether America would look forward or inward, and whether we would lead or be led in international affairs. Polk found solutions; the jury is still out on Obama.