Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive.

Newman, Paul Douglas

Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive. By Ray Raphael. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. 324 pp.

In Mr. President, a traditional and engaging political history, Ray Raphael seeks to answer How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive by using "narrative as an analytical tool." Raphael focuses squarely on the single issue of the presidency, carving the debate and parliamentarianism chronologically at Philadelphia, to excise "the day-by-day and even minute-by-minute dynamics of the dialogue" (p. 281). This technique is not new, historians have often culled single issues from the debates for narrative and analysis, but Raphael is the first to do so for the presidency. Raphael's how and why are not limited to the convention, as he divides his investigation into three parts: "Precedents," "Conjuring the Office," and "Field Tests." Throughout, Raphael stresses the unlikelihood of a powerful American executive and reveals that political maneuvering by key players led to its creation. Further, Raphael argues that while most founders wished the presidency to be a unifying factor in American politics both inside and out, the office and its first three inhabitants deepened and hardened existing divides into entrenched partisanship and political warfare.

In "Precedents," Raphael travels the familiar road from American monarchism at 1750, through its opposition to programs by Parliament and placemen, to the rejection of the king in the Declaration of Independence, followed by the creation of strong state governments with varying forms of executives, bound together loosely by a weak confederation with no executive (and no governing power, for that matter). He is at his best in "Conjuring the Office," where his use of narrative as an analytical tool reveals the central role of Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris at the Constitutional Convention. In debate, Morris's advocacy for a single, powerful executive and for the method of selection evolved over the summer, and he used the committee structure of the convention to his advantage when he perceived vulnerability for his plans in general session. Raphael's focus on Morris explains in stunning clarity the sensibility of a system that most today deem arcane and undemocratic: the Electoral College. As the presidency emerged and grew in power, the mode of selection became more contentious, pitting many interests against one another: state governments versus the national, large states versus small, democratic selection versus elite control.

Unfortunately, Raphael abandons his use of narrative as an analytical tool in "Field Tests," as he turns to telling narrative stories in a topical, case study manner that ignores the chronological "day-to-day" approach that worked so well in his coverage of the Convention. As a result, Raphael devotes his chapter "The Launch" to President Washington's management of the office during the first congressional session, as he and the legislature "created" the government. In doing so, Raphael fails to follow his excellent discourse on the Electoral College to show its inaugural operation. How did the states apportion their delegates and why; were there instructions; what was the reason and effect of the unanimity for Washington? Subsequent chapters become less narrative, and as a result, connections are lost that might otherwise further illuminate Raphael's thesis. Raphael separates the stories of Hamilton's funding scheme, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Democratic Societies (Genet is totally absent), the Proclamation of Neutrality, the Jay Treaty, and the Farewell Address. He moves forward, then backward, then forward again in time, rarely connecting the events, and never analyzing the power of those connections in forging the presidency. For example, when in 1794 and 1797, Washington denounced the "self-created" Democratic Societies that extolled the democracy of the French and American Revolutions, he was asserting the power of the president and the national government to punish western Pennsylvanians' Democratic Societies for their political opposition to Hamilton's funding scheme, support for a French offensive against the Spanish control of the Mississippi, and opposition to closer relations to the British who still refused to abandon western posts and who still armed Indians to attack frontier settlers. Westerners connected these stories in their political narrative; so did Washington and Hamilton privately. That is why the president politically separated them and branded the Societies as "self-created" and their opposition as "Rebellion," as George Washington led the largest army in the field he ever commanded to do battle with his political opposition in western Pennsylvania and beyond. And was this Gouverneur Morris's intention?

Raphael's use of narrative as a political tool in the 1790s could undo the Federalists' political construction of the decade's history, as he deconstructed the Philadelphia convention. Regardless, his treatment of the convention is enlightening, his narrative is lively and engaging, and the book should be equally appealing to the scholar as well as the general reader.

--Paul Douglas Newman

University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown