Dud Presidents
Reading notes from America's least turbocharged newsletter
Dear Readers:
I picked up my copy of Martin Chuzzlewit the other day and learned from P.N. Furbank’s introduction that Dickens had gone fourteen months without publishing when, in November of 1842, he set out to write a new novel. “It had been a deliberate plan on the part of himself and his publisher that he should give his public a rest.”
Well, thought I, that’s how I will explain the recent lag in production of the Dots & Arrows newsletter: the author has been giving his public a rest.
Such a strategy is no way to succeed as a writer. I get a lot of promotional hype from the people who run the Substack newsletter platform, and they often say that the tried-and-true way to gain more subscribers is to write these missives constantly. Keep peppering those inboxes with your latest thoughts! I guess it does work for some writers. But I can’t imagine that people want to hear from me via email every few days, or even every few weeks. The newsletters I subscribe to come so often I can’t keep up. They cause that little red number on the “Mail” icon on my phone to go up to a level that makes me feel bad about my inbox housekeeping.
Still, one’s reading public may wander off! Furbank tells us that when Dickens started serializing Martin Chuzzlewit the sales weren’t nearly as high as they were for The Old Curiosity Shop. One theory was that “he had lost ground with the public by his deliberate abstention from novel-writing.” He hadn’t been idle, exactly. He took his famous trip to the United States. Though he was greeted with enthusiasm here, he decided that “the vaunted radical republic was a sordid swindle,” and some (not all) of that harsh judgment was reflected later in his American Notes.
Anyway, sometimes all it takes is a stray comment to get us to pick up a book. A while ago I noticed that Phillip Lopate told an interviewer he had just recently read Martin Chuzzlewit for the first time. His capsule review: “Not his best, but the prose is magnificent as always, and it has some wonderful depictions of skulduggery.” Since I sometimes write about American politics, skulduggery is always of interest—so that is recommendation enough for me. Will report back.
Presidents’ Day Sale: I am writing this on the American holiday that perhaps has no rival when it comes to lack of meaning and celebration. In fact, as I noted here, there is no national holiday called “President’s Day.” Some states don’t observe it. And though Washington’s birthday has been a federal holiday since the 1880s, and states such as Indiana and Illinois celebrate Lincoln’s birthday, Congress was never able to create a national holiday honoring Lincoln—the Southern states would not stand for it.
Presidential historian Alexis Coe discussed some of the reasons this is “a dud of a holiday” in a New York Times op-ed today claiming that “George Washington would hate Presidents’ Day.” What Washington worried about was the growth of political parties that could be potent engines “by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
We went for a long stretch when presidential historians came up with grand theories about presidential greatness, and about the magisterial power of the institution—they seemed to have forgotten about the presidential usurpers. A year after Trump was inaugurated, I looked back at some of the classic works in the field and wondered how the election of this particular unprincipled man would change our ideas about the threat to democracy that is embedded in the presidency. I put forth a theory:
It’s safe to say that nowhere in this vast body of studies—there are seven essential reference works and 214 “Important Works” listed in the bibliography of Cronin and Genovese’s The Paradoxes of the American Presidency—will you find extended consideration of “the deranged presidency.” None of this work, which so consistently falls into the Great Man school of history, has a chapter in it labeled “When the President is an Unqualified Twit.”
OK folks, I know you did not spend any time on Presidents’ Day thinking about this. You owe it to the nation to read about the strange and mixed-up ways we regard our national magistrate.
A couple of readers have mentioned to me Lawrence Wright’s long piece in the recent New Yorker about how Austin, Texas, is “transforming into a turbocharged tech capital.” Wright tries hard not to straight-out say the city that he’s lived in for much of his life is being ruined by tech billionaires, but, geez, I kind of got the impression from his reporting that the city is being ruined by tech billionaires.
He mentioned the days when people would gather at a restaurant called the Raw Deal. (A notice on the wall: “Remember: you came looking for the Raw Deal—the Raw Deal didn’t come looking for you.”) It made me recall a fundraising event for The Texas Observer we held there once. Our publisher, Ronnie Dugger, used his influence to get Walter Cronkite1 to be the guest speaker. (Cronkite had grown up in Houston and attended the University of Texas.) Ronnie was so alarmed about Ronald Reagan in these years that I remember him pressing Cronkite on whether he would ever consider running for president. He didn’t say no, but he didn’t say yes.
Wright’s story brought back a lot of memories of what Austin was like before it became “turbocharged”—and what Texas was like when Democrats could, every once in a while, get elected statewide. Now look here: There are a lot of people on this mailing list who live in Texas, or who used to live in Austin, or who still live in Austin. I want you all to report in with your opinions about this Lawrence Wright dispatch, along with news about how it has been received in Austin, what people are saying about it, whether it’s legitimate to hate this kind of “progress,” things of that nature.
A friend writes. . . This occasional newsletter has inspired a writer I know to, as she told me the other day, “write a kind of shipping news letter to myself daily based upon wind speeds and the tides here, which I’ve never done before —- I’ve called it Knots and Narrows.” I believe the French call that a subtle homage!
Which, in turn, reminds me of the recent passing of the great editor Victor Navasky, who led The Nation magazine in that era. Navasky reminded the Brooklyn Rail in 2002 that Cronkite used to end his nightly newscasts by saying, “That’s the way it is.” “Well, I wanted to put out a magazine which would say: ‘That’s not the way it is at all. Let’s take another look.’”
Best wishes to Knots and Narrows — that is indeed high praise.