The Best of Our Knowledge Show 1168, 2013 February 5

This is the best of our knowledge, a presentation of national productions.
Teaching history can be daunting.
I mean, where do you even start?
Now even if you narrow it down to American history, there are still so many stories that
even the best teachers can only scratch the surface.
That's what makes the Don't Know Much About Book Series so much fun.
Author Ken Davis takes a topic like The Presidents of the United States and leaves you with
information you didn't know you didn't know.
Andrew Jackson was Polk's kind of mentor and Polk goes to Jackson one day and says,
I want to have a political career.
What should I do next?
And Andrew Jackson basically tells him, go and marry this woman.
Today on The Best of Our Knowledge, a conversation with Davis about his book about the Potices.
We'll also spend an academic minute with a few negative ants.
I'm Bob Barrett and this is The Best of Our Knowledge.
Did you know the Franklin Pierce was friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne or that Calvin Coolidge's
1923 State of the Union was the first broadcast over radio or that Chester Arthur was the target
of a birther inquiry.
These are just some of the gems found in Ken Davis's new book Don't Know Much About The American
Presidents.
From Washington to Obama, Davis gives an in-depth look at all 43 men who have held the office
of president.
He also gives each president a grade.
The Best of Our Knowledge is Katie Britton spoke with Ken Davis about this latest addition
in The Don't Know Much About Book Series.
Obviously, you have spent a great deal of time on each of the presidents.
How do you decide what the reader should know, what you want to focus in on?
That's a great question because obviously you could write a book and many people have
written a book or many books about any and all of these presidents.
FDR has certainly an example, theater Roosevelt, multi-volume biographies of theater Roosevelt.
And I try and condense that into a few short pages, of course, and a few questions.
I always say that Don't Know Much About Book is not the last word on the subject but the
first word.
What I've tried to do here is present a rounded, accurate and thorough description of each
of these men, a quick view of their lives and what they accomplished during their presidency
including giving them a grade A plus through F with a few incomplete thrown in.
And then I try and point people to more in-depth discussion of them.
Obviously with Teddy Roosevelt, excuse me, theater Roosevelt.
He hated being called Teddy.
He wanted to be called Colonel Roosevelt.
He thought Teddy was vulgar.
But with theater Roosevelt, for instance, this was a lifelong passion of mine.
I mentioned going to Gettysburg and Valley Forge.
I also went to Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt's home on Long Island when I was also a small boy.
And I remember as clearly as yesterday staring up at this great big Kodiak bear that he
had stuffed in his living room.
And so those things have always been in the back of my mind that this is the connection
I have between the person and the historical figure.
It's not just a marble statue or a face on the dollar bill.
So deciding what to include is always a matter of a balancing act, a juggling act.
Obviously, you want to hit the high points of their lives, the high points of their
administrations.
And that's what I do in this book.
But also get it some of the myth and misconceptions about each and all of these men.
Or in some cases reveal them for the first time.
A lot of us don't know much about Millard Fillmore, a New Yorker who became president.
And that's too bad because it's an interesting story.
Not a great president, but still an interesting personal story.
And I try and spin that out in telling the story of Millard Fillmore, who unfortunately
does get one of the F's in my history grades.
Well, that's one of the things as I was reading this book.
And I didn't want to concentrate on the presidents that we hear so much about.
And it was interesting for me reading about, say, Polk.
I feel like he was an extremely underrated and undervalued president.
Very, very much an underrated president or a forgotten president.
I should say for most Americans, I mean, he just falls into that black hole that we call
American history.
But he was an extraordinary character, a very, very interesting wife as well.
Andrew Jackson was Polk's kind of mentor and tutor.
They were both from Tennessee.
And then Polk goes to Jackson one day and says, I want to have a political career.
What should I do next?
And Andrew Jackson basically tells him, go and marry this woman because you know you
should.
And Sarah Polk was really kind of the first truly politically involved wife in the sense
of day to day, really managing things.
Abigail Adams certainly was very involved with her husband's life and career.
Martha Washington was very involved with her husband's life and career.
Not in the sense of really crafting strategy, telling him what to do, telling them him actually,
she wouldn't marry him until he got elected to the legislature, which was, you know, put
up pretty high bar for Mr. Polk to win his wife.
But he then went on to become a very, very successful president, moved the country for better
or for worse into the Mexican war, expanded the country really from coast to coast, added
more states and more territory than anyone since Thomas Jefferson and Louisiana purchased.
And then left because he had promised he was going to leave after one term.
There were requests that he run again, but he had decided not to coincidentally or not
died a few months later.
Many people believe because he worked so hard, he worked himself to death literally.
So Polk, an interesting character, he has been raised in historians estimates over the
last few years.
I consider him one of the A presidents, not A plus.
And what would be interesting to imagine or speculate and that's impossible to do, what
would have happened if he had taken a second term?
Would he have had the wisdom, the courage, the ability to lead the country in a slightly
different direction in those critical years leading up to the Civil War, which is of course
where three of my true failing presidents all hold office.
I'd like to turn to Chester Arthur and he didn't get a good grade.
And I feel with the immigration issue that he had to deal with the Chinese and also in
the sense of how the new immigrants coming in are looked down upon by the immigrants that
had settled and come earlier to America.
Katie, this is a very, very old story in our history I've written about it before.
And it's one of the reasons that I think that understanding history is so important
because the past is prologue.
We have been through all of these things so many times in our history as Americans, as
a nation that it's astonishing to me and one of the things that really I enjoyed doing
with this book was finding all these issues that keep coming up over and over and over
again.
And they are front and center today.
And certainly one of them taxes is obviously one of them religion, certainly one of them.
The role of the government, the size of the government, we've been arguing over these
issues for more than 200 years and some of the issues like immigration even longer.
But to your point about immigrants coming in and the Chinese exclusion act of that period,
a very, very hateful and disastrous piece of policy, but you're absolutely right.
50 years before that, it had been the Irish who were hated and reviled in this country
in the early 19th century and going back even further.
That was an immigration issue that also had a religious element to it because so many
of the Irish coming into America were Catholics as well.
And there was tremendous suspicion, hatred, mistrust of Catholics and Irish Catholics specifically.
Many people have not heard, for instance, of the Bible riots in Philadelphia.
The city of brotherly love where Protestants and Catholics kill each other in 1844 over
the issues of immigration and religion.
So we keep having the same arguments over and over again.
It's not as if history repeats itself.
That's a very simplistic phrase.
It's more nuanced.
But these issues keep rolling around.
They are in America's political DNA.
And certainly the issue of the question of who's going to have the power and should the
wealthy make all the decisions has been an issue from before the government was created
in the Constitution.
James Madison writes about this in the Federalist papers, his argument for the Constitution.
He talks about class struggle and the differences between parties that would be based on religion.
So all of these issues have been part of the American scene and certainly part of presidential
politics from the very beginning.
And I think that's not only fascinating, but it's important to understand.
The same thing goes for Hoover when the financial crash happened, which doomed him from being
re-elected for a second term.
And he was one of the first presidents to do a railroad in bank bailout.
That's correct.
We've had bailouts for a long time.
There's a long history of government's involvement in building things.
Yes, the government does build things like the Erie Canal and the Transcontinental Railroad
and giving people land under the Homestead Act.
So this country was built with a lot of interaction between the government and the individuals.
So it's instructive to look at the real history of how America grew.
We obviously couldn't have grown without government doing specific things.
That only the government was big enough strong enough and possessed the actual power to do.
So that's an important point.
To Hoover, this is another case of I think people maybe knowing Herbert Hoover and knowing
that he was in charge during the Great Depression and how responsible he was for and what he
did or didn't do to respond to it.
But also another fascinating human story.
And I keep coming back to this because it does have this human element.
He was an orphan at nine.
How many of the American presidents had lost parents?
Either one or both is an extraordinary part of the theme of the presidency in this book.
But Hoover lost his parents.
So the orphaned at nine is sent off to live with relatives, makes his way into college, becomes a successful geologist,
and takes that into the mining field, and becomes a truly a self-made millionaire.
So when he talks about his famous speech was rugged individualism, he was talking about what he had experienced.
He was not born with the silver spoon.
He worked very hard and around the world for what he got.
But one piece of the Hoover story that gets forgotten or overlooked.
During World War I, he was a wealthy man at his own expense, but then eventually with government support.
He forms a food assistance group that feeds millions of people in Europe during World War I.
Probably avert millions of deaths because of his food relief.
He then does the same thing after the war in the Soviet Union.
So we think about the man who talked about his hatred of Bolshevism and the importance of rugged individualism.
And he was really a hero to the Soviet people because he brought food to them.
He may have saved millions of lives.
And that's why I always try and find the Balancing Act.
We can talk about the very, very great presidents like Washington and Lincoln or Woodrow Wilson or FDR,
who also made mistakes.
We can also talk about the failed presidents or some of the minor presidents who also did some extraordinary things.
And it's always striking that balance and getting away from the very simplistic view of these men.
Still to come, Katie Britons' conversation with Ken Davis, author of Don't Know Much About The American Presidents,
continues.
That's next on the Best of Our Knowledge.
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Be sure to ask for the Best of Our Knowledge, number 1168.
This is the Best of Our Knowledge.
I'm Bob Barrett.
Our guest today is Ken Davis, author of Don't Know Much About The American Presidents.
He continues his conversation with the Best of Our Knowledge's Katie Britain,
with a look at what some presidents did for a living before they became president.
You mentioned that Hoover had managed gold lining.
That's how he was a self-made man.
And that to me was so interesting looking at each of the presidents and what they did before they became presidents.
And the first few presidents, I mean, they were land surveyors and that sort of thing,
you're thinking, wow, how in the world did you become president?
That's a really good question in a lot of these cases and education.
We talk about it so much.
Some of the greatest presidents, certainly Lincoln, were not well-educated men in the traditional
sense of education.
Lincoln valued education.
He valued reading.
He probably was one of the best red presidents up until that point, but mostly self-taught.
He knew the Bible.
He knew Shakespeare.
He knew American history extremely well.
He knew the law extremely well.
He knew the Constitution extremely well.
So education is an interesting one.
Washington, of course, had a very minimal, typical education, a little bit of grammar school.
By the time he was 16, he had become a surveyor, which when you have millions and millions of
acres opening up and a lot of arguments over who owns that land, being a surveyor was
a very important job.
So interesting backgrounds.
And I know this comes up a lot these days because being a businessman, if you look at history,
is not necessarily the path to a great presidency.
Hoover was a businessman, a failed president.
Warn G. Harding was a businessman.
He was a newspaper publisher before he went into politics, not a very successful president,
a W. Bush, a businessman essentially before became governor of Texas.
So that track hasn't always proven to be the way to produce a great president.
So backgrounds and personal history are always important, but they're not the single
determining factor.
Now there have been four presidents to win the presidency with electoral votes, but not
the popular.
First of all, the electoral college.
Those words are not in the Constitution, which mentions electors.
The words electoral college came along much later.
They finally come into federal law in around 1845.
So let's go back to 1787 and the Constitutional Convention.
These 55 men give or take a few here.
They are because they went in and out sitting and in secret in a hot room with closed windows
and locked doors, inventing the Constitution, inventing the government and with it the presidency.
And it was probably the most hotly contested single question that they were facing.
What would the presidency be?
What would the executive department, as they first called it be?
Would it be one man or a council of three?
That was a recommendation.
How long would he serve?
What would his specific powers be?
How would we get rid of him if he was a crook or incompetent?
Benjamin Franklin said that if we didn't have a good answer to that question, assassination
would be the only recourse.
And finally, how to choose him or who should choose him.
They did not want direct election.
There were some who did.
James Wilson of Pennsylvania, a very interesting founding father or a frame or the Constitution
most of us have never heard of, was in favor and put forth a proposal for direct election.
Men like Roger Sherman said, we can't have the people doing it.
They are too easily misled.
They're liable to be misled by other people.
On the other hand, there were those who wanted the legislature to make the decision.
There was tremendous resistance to that because if the legislature chose the president, the
president would be too beholding to the legislature.
So where to find the balance, the compromise between direct election by people and let's
be fair, this is the late 18th century.
How does someone in Massachusetts know a candidate in Georgia or South Carolina or Virginia for
that matter?
So there were legitimate reasons to be concerned about people really being able to make informed
choices.
But that was less of a concern than the feeling that democracy as a pure democracy was just
one short step from mob rule as far as most of these framers of the Constitution were concerned.
So into this comes another compromise and the Constitution of course was a series of compromises.
Electors were people who the framers of the Constitution thought would be people who had
the wisdom and the time and the ability to study the candidates to make considered choices.
Of course this is all very idealistic and theoretical.
And then they said, well, who's going to choose these electors and the question was punted
over to the states?
The states could decide that.
They do that because they thought the states should have that right or they just didn't
want to make the decision themselves.
We don't really know the answer to that.
But in the end, in the 1789 election of course everyone knew who the winner was going to be
well before there was no campaign in a sense.
There was no party, no conventions, no debates.
Washington's name was going to be put forward.
Electors at that time on the original plan wrote down two names.
The first place finisher, the one with the most named most became the president and the
second place finisher became vice president seemed like a pretty good plan.
Washington and John Adams were the first president and vice president.
But what they didn't see was the coming of political parties.
And in 1796 the first contested election, John Adams becomes president.
Thomas Jefferson, his opponent so to speak, even though they were old friends from 20 years
before, becomes the vice president.
And so immediately it was clear that this system would have to be fixed somewhat and they
started to fix it.
But one thing about this whole system of electors that we have to be clear on is the importance.
And I write about this a great deal because I think it's been overlooked in our history.
The importance of the other compromise that was made 225 years ago, allowing slaves to
be counted for the purpose of the seats in Congress as three fifths of a person.
What does that have to do with presidential elections?
Well obviously the number of seats you have in Congress also determines how many electors
you have as a state.
And we know that you win states to win the election, not just votes.
So this presented an extraordinary advantage to the slave holding states for much of America's
early history, particularly in terms of presidential history for the first five presidents
of slave holders from slave holding states, five of the first seven.
And in fact the majority of presidents before Abraham Lincoln are slave holders, most
of whom brought their slaves to the White House.
That's a story we often don't tell our kids and our school children.
And then we never learn it ourselves.
So the import and the impact of slavery on the electoral college is an important one that
was certainly part of the so-called slave power.
And I write about that a great deal because I think there's still tremendous myth
and misconception about slavery's role in American history before the Civil War.
Again the name of Ken Davis's new book is Don't Know Much About The American Presidents.
He spoke with the best of our knowledge is Katie Pratt.
One thing that's become universal for everyone who runs for president is negative advertising.
That's the topic of today's academic minute.
Welcome to the academic minute.
I'm Lynn Pascarolla, president of Mad Holyoke College.
Although the 2012 political campaigns are now in the books, your head may still be spinning
from the dizzying effect of all of those negative ads.
And while the consensus is that they work, Julianna Fernandez, assistant professor of communication
at the University of Miami, reveals how they can be overdone to the point of diminishing
returns.
We have all had our share of negative political ads.
The 2012 presidential elections surpassed the total number of ads earned during the 2008
campaign.
Clearly candidates believe the negative political advertising is an effective tool to communicate
with voters.
According to the latest report, 61% of all Obama ads spending was negative compared with 71%
of Rommies.
The dude is negative ads affect the way people evaluate the candidates.
My latest study investigated the effects of repetition of negative political advertising
on candidate assessment.
Participants in this study were exposed to one, three or five repetitions of a negative
political ad within a TV show.
Defining show that Wendy ad was presented a maximum of three times during the show.
And when the interval between ad repetitions was small, opinion of the candidate's
sponsoring the ad improved.
Yet, when the ad was presented five times and frequently, a backlash effect was observed
so that opinion of the sponsoring candidate actually declined and opinion of the attack
candidate increased.
Interestingly, increasing the interval between ad repetitions within television programming
improved opinion of the candidate sponsoring the ad, even if it was repeated many times.
His results suggest that negative ads are sometimes effective, but they become ineffective
if repeated too many times.
The results also show that the ads can be more effective when candidates adopt a strategy
of spacing out their ads on television.
That was Juliana Fernandez of the University of Miami.
You can find this, other segments, and more information about the professors on our website
academicminute.org.
And support for the academic minute comes from Newman's own foundation in partnership
with Mount Holyoke College.
That's all the time we have for this week's program.
If you'd like to listen again, join us online at our flagship stations website.
Go to www.wrg.org and click on the program's link.
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Our email address is knowledge at www.wrg.
I'm Bob Barrett.
Be sure to join us next time for another edition of The Best of Our Knowledge.
Bob Barrett is producer of The Best of Our Knowledge.
Dr. Alan Shartock is executive producer.
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