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James K. Polk Getting It Done EPISODE TRANSCRIPT James K. Polk Getting it done EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: At the very beginning of this ‘Presidential’ podcast, I started by asking Bob Woodward, the legendary Washington Post reporter, how it is that I should go about assessing each American president. And one thing he said was: BOB WOODWARD: It is a matter of ascertaining what the will of the president is. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That is -- figuring out what exactly it is he hopes and promises the American public that he'll accomplish during his time in the White House. BOB WOODWARD: To what extent do they succeed or fail at working their will. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, if we're looking at what these leaders said they wanted to do and then comparing that against whether they actually did it -- by this assessment, we're about to learn that James K. Polk may be the most successful president we have ever had. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I'm Lillian Cunningham with The Washington Post, and this is the 11th episode of 'Presidential.' PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: For this episode, we're going to take a deep dive into the story of James K. Polk with Amy Greenberg, an expert on Polk and a professor at Penn State University. Polk was president for one term, from 1845 to 1849. He was born in North Carolina 50 years before that, in 1795. So, I asked Amy to start here, at the beginning of his life. AMY GREENBERG: His family moved from North Carolina to Tennessee when he was fairly young, and they were part of a big migration of slaveowners from North Carolina to Tennessee, who were basically moving onto land that Indians had been kicked out of. And they were bringing slaves onto Indian land in order to grow crops. Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 And Polk -- I think the defining feature of his childhood was that he was really sickly. He could not compete with other kids his age in the kind of backwoods physical contests that were really important at that time. He couldn't run fast. He wasn't strong. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What kinds of illnesses are these? AMY GREENBERG: He developed bladder stones, which caused excruciating pain. So, his father actually took him when he was a teenager, I think 15, to North Carolina to have experimental surgery to remove these bladder stones. And the surgery was a success -- in that, as soon as he healed up, he was a completely new person. He was able to go to school. He had all this energy that he had never had before. And it was really sort of the start of his life. But the sad thing about the surgery is that it left him unable to father a child. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So I'm curious in what way you think that being sick as a child shaped who he was -- the type of interests he had or ambitions or character he developed. AMY GREENBERG: I think it made him an unusually serious young man. And it also caused him to become very, very intense and to sort of develop a strength of will that I don't think a lot of other people had at the time. He realized in a very profound way what his limitations were and just determined to succeed despite these limitations. So, I think that you can see this kind of settling or intensity of will, as a result of the illnesses, playing out later in life when he faced problems or difficulties. He just would power through them, just through pure force of will. He was also an incredibly hard worker, and I have to think that that emerged out of this sort of painful childhood. And the last thing that I would say about this: I feel pretty confident that his inability to compete as a child physically left him with a complex where he wanted to prove to everybody that he was just as much of a man as anybody else was. And I think it caused him to become maybe unnaturally focused on war and martial expressions of manhood. You can see, even though he's never really served in the military -- even before he's president, he's such a gung-ho expansionist and so intent on proving to other countries that America really is in the right. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Alright, time for my classic question. Let's say I'm about to go out on a date with James K. Polk and I know nothing about him, know nothing of his personality. What am I in for? AMY GREENBERG: OK, first of all I would recommend that you not go on this date -- because I don't think it's going to be any fun. First of all: James -- he doesn't drink. I don't know if you drink or not. He's not going to drink. He has no sense of humor. So, you cannot expect any kind of fun, uplifting conversation to detract from the fact that you can't drink anything on your date. I don't imagine that the two of you are going to do anything that he would consider frivolous, so don't expect to go to the theater. Don't imagine that the two of you are going to go listen to music. These are not really his kind of things. It is possible, if you enjoy riding, that that you and he might go out on a ride. You're definitely not, you know, you're not going to go hiking or berry picking. I hope you like politics because that's what he's going to talk about all night. Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Where did that interest in politics come from? AMY GREENBERG: You know, his father was not particularly political. So, basically after he had his surgery, he went to what we would call sort of a private boarding-school high school. And he immediately proved himself to be an excellent debater – and really, actually, a crack student all around. He was definitely the best student in his class. And then he went from that boarding school to the University of North Carolina, where again, he was just an outstanding student and a great debater. Then he became a lawyer and, you know, I think a lot of lawyers in his sort of position got involved in politics. And while he was acting as clerk for the Tennessee House of Representatives, he met a young woman named Sarah Childress and rumor has it that she's the one who encouraged him to run for the legislature in Tennessee. And he did, and he won. And then she's the one who pushed him to become a congressman -- and he ran for Congress and he won. So, it's not totally obvious to me that his real interest in politics was firmly in place before he met the woman who became his wife. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I had read that she said she wouldn't marry him unless he won a seat in the Tennessee state legislature. AMY GREENBERG: You know, knowing her as well as I feel like I do, I think she probably did make it clear that she did not see her future as being married to just some local lawyer -- that she had a higher idea of what they were destined for. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Could you talk a little bit about his relationship with Andrew Jackson --how he comes to know Jackson and then the role that Jackson plays in also helping his political rise? AMY GREENBERG: So, Andrew Jackson is not just an important military figure of this time period, and he's not just the father of the antebellum Democratic Party. He's this incredibly important mentor and formative mentor for a whole generation of politicians who are coming of age in what was then the southwest. And Polk was lucky enough to get to know him at an early point. And rumor has it -- it was Jackson who encouraged Polk to court and marry Sarah Childress. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What skills or leadership traits of Polk's get him to the presidency? AMY GREENBERG: One thing that I'm really impressed by is his ability to overcome his personal limitations. In the 1820s, if you wanted to get elected as a Democrat, you had to be a man of the people. You had to convince voters that you were one of them. And usually the way that you did that was sort of like Davy Crockett – by being really funny. Being fun and funny. Achieving military prominence. But, above all else, just kind of being somebody that people like. People are voting for men who they feel like share their values and who are like them. They're not necessarily voting for someone who they think is better than them -- who will do a good job in office because they're smarter than the electorate -- but somebody who really seems like they they feel their pain or they understand where they're coming from. And Polk is really just not like that. He's not fun. He's not funny. But he manages to convince people that he is, and he makes this Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 concerted effort to learn to speak in a folksy manner and interact with the public -- to shake hands for hours with people, even though he's not what you would call a 'people person.' He doesn't necessarily like people.
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