Supreme Warlord of the Earth

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Instead of stoking public demands for action, the chief magistrate was expected to resist “the transient impulses” of the people and use the veto to keep Congress within its constitutional bounds. That role didn’t require much speechifying. Early presidents rarely spoke directly to the public; from George Washington through Andrew Jackson, they averaged little more than three speeches a year, mostly ceremonial addresses. In his first year in office, by comparison, President Clinton delivered 600.

In the early State of the Union addresses to Congress, presidents knew better than to adopt an imperious tone. After his third State of the Union address, Washington wrote that “motives of delicacy” had deterred him from “introducing any topic which relates to legislative matters, lest it should be suspected that [I] wished to influence the question” before Congress. Yet the deference shown by Washington and his successor, John Adams, didn’t go quite far enough for our third president, Thomas Jefferson, who thought their practice of speaking before the legislature in person smacked of the British king’s “Speech from the Throne.” Jefferson began a new tradition of delivering the annual message in writing, and this held sway for 112 years, until the power-hungry Woodrow Wilson delivered his first State of the Union address in person.

The 19th century did see presidents occasionally taking independent action of enormous consequences: Jefferson purchased Louisiana without congressional approval, Madison seized West Florida in 1810, and Abraham Lincoln expanded presidential power dramatically throughout the course of the cataclysmic Civil War. Yet taken as a whole, the 19th-century presidency was a pale shadow of the office we know today.

In a 2002 study tracking two centuries of State of the Union and inaugural addresses, political scientist Elvin T. Lim noted that in the nation’s first decades presidents rarely mentioned poverty, and the word help did not appear until 1859. Nor did early presidents subscribe to the modern notion that it’s all “about the children”; they rarely even mentioned the little buggers. But Lim found that “Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton made 260 of the 508 references to children in the entire speech database, invoking the government’s responsibility to and concern for children in practically every public policy area.”

George Washington did mention kids in his seventh annual message, lamenting “the frequent destruction of innocent women and children” by Indian raiders. But that was a far cry from Bill Clinton in 1997, who declared in the State of the Union address that “we must also protect our children by standing firm in our determination to ban the advertising and marketing of cigarettes that endanger their lives.”

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