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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 .

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 , and this is the 11th episode of 'Presidential.'

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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 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 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 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.

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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 , 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 – 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. He practices jokes and then delivers them and does a good enough job that he manages to convince people that he's really a fine fellow, and that would be a high term of praise in the time period.

So, one way that he rises to power -- and this became really clear to me when I started looking at his early congressional campaigns -- is he just campaigns harder than anybody else. He campaigns for Congress for three or four solid months, riding horseback in order to meet as many people as possible in order to get to Congress.

And when he runs for the governorship, which he does three times starting in 1839, he rides all over the state for four or five months. So, he just works himself to pieces. He's constantly getting sick, he doesn't sleep much, and he just crams more and more events into his schedule until, I think, he really wears down his opponent.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Polk served seven terms as a U.S. congressman, from 1825 to 1839. And he was speaker of the House for the last four of those years -- that's the end of Andrew Jackson's presidency and the beginning of 's.

After he's in Congress, he serves one term as , but then loses the re- election. He runs another time after that for governor again, and loses a second time. So, it came as something of a shock when he ended up the Democratic Party's presidential nominee for the 1844 presidential election. In that election, he ends up eventually beating the Whigs's candidate, , by an extremely narrow margin to take the White House.

Then, in a feat basically never before or after accomplished in presidential history, Polk achieves every single big item that he set out to do as president. I asked Amy how in the world he manages to do this. Is it his work ethic? Is it that he's flexible in using any means necessary to achieve his goals?

AMY GREENBERG: I don't think that Polk has a flexible bone in his body. He's remarkably inflexible. But one thing that definitely helps him achieve his goals is he's not afraid to . And I've been trying to figure out if Polk is the first president who to members of his party -- I'm not sure, but I think he might be.

After he's elected but before he takes office, he meets with members of his party who are on the fence as to whether or not to vote in favor of annexing . There's been an attempt to annex Texas by the outgoing president, , but a lot of senators don't want to vote in favor of the annexation bill. And Polk meets with them, and he promises them that if they vote in favor of the bill, he will send people down to Texas. 'Don't worry we'll work out all of the issues that are keeping you from voting in favor of annexing Texas. I'm going to work all that out after you cast the vote.' But he never has any intention in doing that. And, in fact, he doesn't do it.

So, even before he actually enters office in March of 1845, there are people in his own party -- serious, important politicians -- who write to each other and say, 'The president lied to me.' And this starts a pattern that you can see run through his entire term, which is: Polk being willing to tell people in his party things that he has no intention of doing.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 4 I think he's the first president who does that. He’s obviously not the last, but a politician's reputation was everything in the very early republic. And there was nothing worse in the 1790s, in the first one or even two decades in the 19th century as a politician, than to be called a liar. Yet, Polk lies.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Does that trait come back to bite him?

AMY GREENBERG: I don't really think so. I think it works out pretty well for him.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Let's talk about some of these goals that Polk sets for himself as commander-in-chief. One of them is that he wants to finally pass a that the North and South can both agree on.

AMY GREENBERG: Yeah, the Walker Tariff is a big unsung accomplishment of the Polk administration. Nobody understands or talks about tariffs -- tariffs are basically taxes, and they're pretty boring. But he brought down the tax rates on certain imported items into the in order to basically help the South, which was more interested in importing. And it sort of hurt the North, which could have used protective tariffs in order to build up their industry.

But how did he pass the Walker Tariff? Well, it helped that he had a majority of Democrats in Congress. In one case, John Quitman -- who was a young congressman -- he told Quitman that if Quitman stayed in Congress until the vote on the Walker Tariff took place, he would give Quitman's regiment all these fancy new rifles. So he stayed, voted in favor of the tariff and then was rewarded with these totally awesome, special smooth-bore rifles.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Another thing Polk achieves is gaining California for the United States -- which, at the time he came into office, belonged to Mexico. Can you talk about how he does that?

AMY GREENBERG: OK, so first of all, he never publicly said, ‘I'm going to take California.’ But people kind of knew that was what was coming. And the way that he took California was basically to provoke a war against Mexico.

Polk sent half of the regular army -- 4,000 men -- under General down to the Rio Grande. Taylor and a lot of the officers basically know what Polk's doing, which is that Polk is sending U.S. troops into disputed territory that everybody, except Texans, claim is actually Mexican territory, in order to start a war. And basically, this works. It leads to an event called the Thornton Affair, where Mexican troops cross the Rio Grande River and kill some U.S. soldiers, allowing Polk to declare war against Mexico.

The reason that we know that Polk was going to declare war against Mexico, whether or not this event happened, is that: The day before he got news of the Thornton Affair, he sat down with his cabinet and he said, 'I really think we should declare war against Mexico. Mexico refuses to sell us California. They're being very intransigent about the southern border of Texas. They've insulted us by rejecting one of our ministers.’

Everybody in the cabinet except one person says, 'Well sir, you can't actually declare war against a neighboring republic on the grounds of: They've insulted us, and they won't sell us their land. Something has to happen.'

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 The next day they get news that this event happened -- that U.S. soldiers have been killed. And that allows Polk to go to Congress and say, ‘American blood has been shed on American soil. And, despite our best efforts to prevent war, Mexico has started a war.’

So, this is the genesis of how he ends up getting California. Pretty much everyone in Congress knows that Polk is lying, but everybody except 14 people in Congress vote in favor of the war because they don't want to look unpatriotic.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What do you think are some of the most interesting lessons to pull from this?

AMY GREENBERG: One of the big lessons that I learned from researching the U.S.- Mexico War is that a lot of people turned against this war and that their opposition to the war helped bring the war to a close. So, it may not feel like opposing a war is a patriotic thing to do, but it really can be in the best interests of the country if the war that the president's getting us into is not the right war.

Oh, and I have another lesson -- that lying works on some level; that if you're a president, lying can get you what you want in the short term.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, 'Yeah, we're going to Mexico, no question about that. But it's going to be like the man who swallows poison.' The United States fights the 16-month war, and we come out with the entire portion of the country -- so it looks like a huge success, and in many ways it is a huge success.

But it's that territory that leads directly to the Civil War, because nobody can figure out what the status of slavery should be in this tremendous section of land that we just got from Mexico. And the South and the North -- their inability to agree whether or not this land should be open to slavery or whether it should be free territory is what ultimately leads the United States to split apart.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What were some of his wife Sarah's main influences on him while he's in office? What do you find most interesting about her role as an adviser to him while he's president?

AMY GREENBERG: I think she's such a fascinating character. She's this incredibly political creature in a time period when women are not supposed to be involved in politics.

So, 1848: The first feminists meet together at Seneca Falls and issue the Declaration of the Rights of Women. And this is kind of where we think women in politics starts from -- women looking to get the vote. But at the same time that that's going on, you have women -- including Sarah Polk, and maybe most especially Sarah Polk -- who are really, really active in national politics as advisers to their husbands.

So, some of the things I find fascinating about Sarah's role in the White House is that when they first move into the White House, they set up an office where they can work together. And one thing that James puts her in charge of is vetting the news for him. She highlights the stories that she thinks he should read and decides what information gets to him that way. So certainly later in his presidency, when there's a lot of dissent against the war, she is protecting him from that news by not giving him those particular articles. So, that's one thing that she does.

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She institutes three-times-a-week parties in the house, or dinners, but sometimes James is just too busy to come to these dinners, so she just will run them herself. And these are really explicitly political. And politicians know exactly what's going on. In fact, a number of politicians say that they would rather talk about politics with Sarah than with James because James is so secretive and he has no sense of humor, whereas Sarah is open and funny.

Sarah' s also really good at dealing with the media. She convinces everybody that she's this incredibly frugal, down-to-earth person by refusing to spend a lot of money remodeling the White House. She wears very, very simple jewelry, but at the same time, she actually spends, like, a ridiculous amount of money on her clothing.

She's also -- and this is not a put-on, this is very much real -- she's really, really religious. She doesn't allow any dancing in the White House. She doesn't go watch horse races. A lot of people have said that she doesn't allow any alcohol in the White House at all -- but, in fact, she and James spend tremendous amounts of money on wine for these dinners. So, it's like: The public knows that she's political, but they accept her politics because it seems part of her selfless persona in helping her husband in every way possible.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This was a bit of a first, right? There are a number of presidents before Polk who have been widows -- Tyler's first wife dies while he's president – so it seems like it's been a while since there's been any sort of steady female figure in the White House.

AMY GREENBERG: Oh, that's absolutely, absolutely the case. I also think this is one of the reasons why her activism in the White House has been overlooked -- she falls into this kind of dead space between Dolley Madison and Mary Todd Lincoln, who has a negative reputation in many ways, but she's seen as a real person.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: If we return to Bob Woodward's statement -- that one way to evaluate a presidency is to look at what the leader wanted to achieve at the outset and then ask, 'Did he actually manage to do it?' By that calculation, James Polk might truly be our most effective president ever.

AMY GREENBERG: Yeah, in terms of Polk, sure, he's incredibly effective. But his positions, I think, are wrong. Most of the positions are wrong.

So, I don't think that just because he achieves the things he sets out to do that we would say he's a great president. When you're evaluating whether or not the president is great, you really have to think about how well that president's goals or beliefs align with the goals and beliefs that you have, doing the evaluating.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: James Polk leaves office in 1849, and he writes in his diary that he's exceedingly relieved.

AMY GREENBERG: By the time the war comes to an end, Polk has been widely demonized by people as a terrible person, as a killer of innocent Mexicans, as a supporter of slavery. His actions have greatly increased sectional animosity. He's definitely not a beloved figure when he leaves office.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 The thing that's so sad about this is that Polk really worked himself pretty much to death. He's so weak from not sleeping and from working nonstop that he only lives a couple of months after he leaves office. He catches probably and he's so weakened, he dies. It's kind of a sad end.

It's also sad for Polk because he leaves office and the next president is a Whig. It's General Zachary Taylor. Polk, when he took a pledge to only served one term, his reasoning was that he could get the whole party behind him, they would support his goals and he could do things without having to worry about being reelected.

But what he finds instead is that his unwillingness to serve a second term leads to a lot of infighting among Democrats. It splits the party, and then he has to see this awful realization -- which is that him serving only one term leads to a war hero from the very war that he started getting elected, and then that hero is, in fact, a member of the opposition party.

So, I guess that's another way you could evaluate the success of a president -- how good they are at leaving the country in a position where his policies are continued after he leaves. And this is definitely not what happens to Polk.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What do you think about Polk's legacy today? I mean, I would venture to say that most people don't really know anything about Polk. He's one of the presidents probably lower on the list in terms of our collective contemporary memory.

AMY GREENBERG: Despite all of the land that the United States gained from the U.S.-Mexico War, it's not a war that anyone in the United States was very interested in remembering, even immediately after it was over.

The U.S.-Mexico war was the first war that we fought against a neighboring republic that was just based on greed. It was really the U.S.'s first major war that wasn't grounded in principle. It's just one of those bad wars that people don't want to remember or talk about.

In Mexico, everybody knows about the U.S.-Mexico War. I wouldn't be surprised if people in Mexico know more about James K. Polk than people in the United States do.

Is it fitting that nobody really remembers him? Yeah, I think it is. Sarah lives 50 years after Polk dies and she spends the last 30 years of her life trying to raise awareness of how great James K. Polk was. And it's just a total failure. It's a total failure.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: For years and years and years, there's hardly anything that seems to budge his legacy -- until the band They Might be Giants comes along, and musician John Linnell composes the song, 'James K. Polk.'

Judging by all the requests from our podcast audience, this song has probably done more than Polk's wife Sarah could ever do to boost his name recognition.

JOHN LINNELL: We thought it would be fun to make up a song that was as impersonal as possible - - that was just filled with facts that people generally kind of weren't interested in, but that would be sort of force-fed.

MUSIC FROM THE SONG ‘JAMES K. POLK’

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JOHN LINNELL: I think some people assumed that They Might be Giants was kind of advocating for Polk, you know. And so, I mean, unfortunately, it's created this situation where I kind of feel like when we're performing it, I have to say something about how I don't actually really like this guy, you know.

MUSIC FROM THE SONG ‘JAMES K. POLK’

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you personally have an interest in presidential history?

JOHN LINNELL: Well, I will tell you that I now own the complete set of presidential Pez dispensers.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you think there's any chance that you will do another presidential song in the future?

JOHN LINNELL: Why not? We're pretty free this year, so I suppose, you know, it's possible we could make another presidential theme for you.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Alright, people. Let's try to make this happen.

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