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His Elective Majesty – Part I. The Patriots

It’s now 2018. For the first post of the year, I thought about doing a major issue (specifically “The Rome Accords of 2017: First Step to Peace in the Mediterranean or the Devil’s Masturbation Fodder?” [title pending review]), something about New Year traditions, or just something completely random (doesn’t feline psychology sound interesting?). But all of those would be too much work. Instead, let’s note that it’s an election year in the United States. The country is set to pick its forty-sixth president in an unbroken chain going back to 1789.

Sorry-not-sorry. I had to liveblog Europa LIED 2017, now it’s your turn to suffer under my blind nationalism.

Additionally, people often get confused by the country’s name, so it might require a note: it’s officially the United States of America. We typically shorten it to either the "United States" or "America" and call ourselves "Americans." This gets awkward when America is also the name of two continents that make up the near-entirety of the Western hemisphere. You’d think that sometime during the Constitutional Conventions of 1787 or 1915 we could’ve fixed this, but we’re still stuck in this situation. People have suggested several alternate names, some good, some bad – Franklin, Columbia, and Liberia have been the most popular at different points in time – but, instead of taking the easy path by doing that, over the last century and a half we’ve been slowly tricking the rest of the Americas into calling themselves Hesperia while we steal the original name for ourselves. It’s now 2018 and I think we’ve gotten away with it. Joke may be on us, though, since Hesperia is a pretty cool name with mythological origins, while America comes from a random Italian explorer who never set foot in what is now the United States.

We Americans are a bit obsessed with our presidents, but not many people really know that much about them. Most of us are familiar with the first few and the most recent ones, but the middle is a bit of a blur. If you’re from the United States, you hopefully know the major ones like Gray, McLaren, Creighton, and Lawson, and you might know that Preserved Fish had a funny name, Frederick Stenger had a killer mustache, and J. Albert Sprague looked like a cartoon character, but not much else. Hell, I’m a history buff and I can barely remember that Henry Stainbrook was a real person who existed. If you’re not American, your knowledge probably goes as far as that of a Californian friend of mine: “Lasser is a prick, Kirkland is a war criminal, Husik is a socialist, and Ball is an idiot, but Rees is fun.”

This is a bit unfortunate. First, there’s the boring stuff about how it’s important to know your history if you’re an American and, if you're not, we're probably the most powerful country in the world at this point so it's about time that you learn. But also because there’s lots of fun stuff in presidential history – like Benjamin Franklin’s saucy sex life, Irving Graham’s various misadventures, Howard Price’s "book collection," and everything about Hannibal Wharton – that more people need to know about.

While researching, I found that one of the first debates handled by Congress was over what to call the president. There were few precedents for how to formally address a republican leader at the time, so the Senate’s suggestions ranged from “His Most Serene Highness” to "His Mightiness" to my personal favorite and the name for this series, “His Elective Majesty," simultaneously emulating republican values and admitting how the president satisfies our need for a king to obsess over. Eventually Franklin settled on “His Excellency,” which we used until Creighton decided that even that was too elaborate and just wanted people to call him “President Creighton.” This is more in line with republican principles and whatever, but it's also a lot more boring.

I hope to get around to every president, but for now I’ll just cover the first eight, the generation that fought for independence and shaped the republic in its first decades – the Patriots. They lived in a perilous time, when America easily could've fallen apart due to internal struggles or been recolonized by Britain, Spain, or another European power.

First, some things I found surprising/interesting/noteworthy about this era:
  • The United States was not a democratic society by any modern definition of the word. First off, women were regarded as property and Negro slavery was legal in most states – you probably know that two presidents owned slaves while in office (I’ll cover both of them today), but the most surprisingly thing about that is that it was only two, given how widespread the practice was. The only people with voting rights were landowning men, and the only federal officials that they could even vote for were members of the House of Representatives. In contrast to the egalitarian paradise that we often get romanticized as, the early United States was a land of indirect democracy controlled by the elite (to be fair, this was better than most of Europe at the time).
  • The modern political spectrum didn’t really apply to the situation of the time. Often, Liberals stress their ties to the Republicans of yore and the Humanists (especially the progressive faction of the party) liken themselves to the early Nationals, but these comparisons are flawed. Our traditional definitions of arbitism vs. firmism, liberalism vs. traditionalism, and reformism vs. penalism just wouldn’t make sense to the people of the time. Up until the latter half of the 1800s, I think the politics of the United States is best described as a conflict between urban businessmen and rural farmers. The former wanted government funds to help them modernize the country, while the former were generally poorer but paranoid of dictatorship and just wanted the state to keep out of their business.
  • People were serious about separation of power back then. Today, we generally like to leave things to state and local governments, but when it comes down to it, the federal government is king and can implement whatever taxes and regulations it wants. This was not the case in the 1700s, when people weren’t even sure if the national government should even be allowed to build roads, much less ban discrimination or provide poverty relief. The main reason it took so long for us to deal with problems like slavery and disenfranchisement is that they were implemented on a state rather than national level.
Without further ado, let’s start. To set the scene: The United States declared independence in 1776 and made peace with Britain in 1783, but the old constitution – the Articles of Confederation – didn’t give the central government enough power to settle the major issues of the day or prepare for a possible invasion or rebellion. Thus, the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 drafted a new one, creating a stronger government with the president as its chief executive. Each state then had to ratify the document, with internal battles between the Federalists who supported it and the Anti-Federalists who opposed it. Now it’s 1789. The Federalists have mostly won out and they’re ready to elect the first president.
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