In Presidential Leadership in Feeble Times, Mark Zachary Taylor challenges two major pieces of conventional wisdom. The book’s main theoretical argument is that presidential policy and political decisions do matter for short-term economic outcomes, sometimes accounting for why similar economic circumstances yield different results. By using the cases of late nineteenth-century presidents—Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and William McKinley—Taylor also addresses the myth that presidents in this era were uniformly passive and detached from policymaking. The book skillfully merges these two complex arguments, each a heavy intellectual lift.
These presidencies are treated as difficult test cases for the theory that presidential leadership matters, given the limitations of the era on presidential power. These presidents were constrained by a lack of resources and institutional norms, and they held office at a time when Congress dominated national politics. This is a clever way to approach the theoretical question at hand, and it is matched by a social scientific rigor that poses hypotheses and then investigates them by asking, in essence, “if this explanation were true, what else would have to be true?”
Alongside this analysis, the book also paints a detailed picture of the circumstances, background, and views of each president. A major contribution of this book is the detail it provides about the interconnected crises and developments of the era with an eye to how they shaped presidential decision making. The rich context allows for a nuanced account of how each president both inherited circumstances and made decisions. While acknowledging that each president faced different circumstances, Presidential Leadership in Feeble Times ultimately (and cautiously) concludes that presidential “vision” is important in guiding economic policy and the federal government’s crisis response, an insight consistent with Elizabeth Nathan Saunders’ conclusion in Leaders at War (Cornell, 2011) about the influence of leaders’ causal beliefs on their foreign policy decisions. Both works find that how presidents see the world matters. Taylor’s analysis concludes that Grant’s rigidity about economic policy contributed to the economic woes of his second term, while Hayes’ flexibility proved to be a strength and fostered better results. Importantly, the book’s conclusion also provides a nuanced discussion of the fine distinctions between showing presidential flexibility and lacking values and vision as well as between having a strong vision and displaying ideological inflexibility. The book does not resolve these issues, but it draws on the examples discussed in the text to offer avenues for further investigation in future scholarship. It also chips away at the usual assumptions about how presidential experience and biography matter, finding little connection between presidents’ personal histories and their later decisions and performance.
Two other factors stand out in the analysis: the president’s ability to foster trust in political and economic institutions; and their aptitude and will to forge political coalitions. Failure in these areas, along with passivity and lack of vision, rendered Chester Arthur ineffective. A neglect of coalition-building and other forms of political outreach damaged Grant’s prospects for political-economic effectiveness. Similar neglect, combined with a less active vision for the government and the presidency, undermined Cleveland’s economic leadership, especially in his first term. McKinley’s presidency stands out for its bolstering of institutional trust “around his vision of nationalist protectionism, industrialization, and active government” (p. 353).
Identifying these political factors—vision, coalition-building, and trust—helps to answer the central question of how presidents, even under highly constrained circumstances, influence the economy. Of particular interest to scholars of the president–party relationship are the accounts of how parties and partisanship operated for different presidents in this era. Throughout the book, we learn about tensions over civil service reform and patronage, internal party strife, and the different ways presidents positioned themselves relative to their parties. Grant’s policies were portrayed as helping his supporters rather than as sound decisions for the nation’s economy (p. 94). Benjamin Harrison’s presidency was limited by his commitment to party loyalty over coherent governing philosophies, and in the example of Grover Cleveland—the sole Democrat in the bunch—we see the operation of a distinct set of views about the role of government, which were decidedly more limited than the Whig-influenced Republicans and their support for public infrastructure and greater government involvement.
Taylor’s account begins with the Civil War and Reconstruction, explaining the way these events created economic pressures that in turn shaped the political environment for years to come. The book provides a great deal of detail about debt and currency and their implications for tariffs and taxation, two issues that would continue to define politics throughout the rest of the century. Presidential Leadership likewise explains how Reconstruction influenced and was influenced by economic fluctuations, and how it drove Grant’s priorities. Connecting these two eras—the Civil War/Reconstruction and the Gilded Age—helps illuminate how long-term structural factors create the circumstances that later presidents were forced to navigate. The analysis of the Grant and Hayes presidencies illustrates the long impact of the Civil War and the efforts to rebuild the nation. More broadly, the author takes care to explain the changing political, social, and economic context of each decade covered. The blurry boundaries between different eras are both a strength and weakness of the book. The story about political economy is enhanced by showing the continuities across administrations and the lasting impact of major events. However, to the extent that the argument rests on the idea that Gilded Age presidents were a distinct breed—selected under certain party mechanisms and constrained by the system—it might have made sense to have specific criteria for what conditions make a “Gilded Age” president.
Each of these accounts tells us about how individual presidents operated and paints a picture of the recurring issues in Congressional, electoral, and party politics that defined the era. But the politics sometimes gets lost in all of the complexity and detail offered. The book is a corrective to the Congress-centric view of nineteenth-century national politics, but the argument about presidential coalition-building might have been strengthened with more attention to the specific ways in which presidents engaged with Congress—as well as with the public. The case study of Hayes suggests that a friendly Congress is not necessary for successful economic management—but I would have liked more analysis how this holds under other conditions. In turn, there is only minimal engagement with some of the major scholarly debates about presidential rhetoric and public engagement in this era. Such engagement would have strengthened the overall argument about how presidents mattered for shaping economic policy and outcomes. The conclusion specifically suggests that the book is not about presidential power. Serious analysis of what tools were available to presidents in this era as they built coalitions and public trust, and persuaded others of their economic vision, will be an important topic for future scholarship.
This book brings a systematic lens to a complex and underexamined subject. Its rich historical detail and careful argumentation make it a useful resource for teaching and a valuable scholarly contribution.
