Supreme Warlord of the Earth

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There is no single explanation for the presidency’s growth. New communication technologies such as radio and television played a role, as did growing material progress, which made Americans less willing to suffer inconveniences and more receptive to the belief that all public problems could be solved with collective action. Yet in each key period of the presidency’s growth, we see a familiar pattern: expansionist ideology meeting practical opportunity in the form of successive national crises.

Much of what’s wrong with American government today can be traced to the Progressive Era, that period of reformist backlash against the industrial revolution that dominated the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century. As the Progressives saw it, if the Constitution stood in the way of necessary reforms, then too bad for the Constitution. “We are the first Americans,” a young scholar named Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1885, “to hear our own countrymen ask whether the Constitution is still adapted to serve the purposes for which it was intended; the first to entertain any serious doubts about the superiority of our own institutions as compared with the systems of Europe.”

The Progressives had no use for the restrained oratorical traditions of the 19th century; it was the president’s job to move the masses, unifying them behind calls for bold executive action.

Their model and embodiment was Teddy Roosevelt, whom the Progressive journalist Herbert Croly described as a “sledgehammer in the cause of national righteousness.” When Roosevelt took the stage at the 1912 Progressive Party convention, he foreshadowed Obama’s quasi-religious fervor and McCain’s bellicosity, barking, “To you who strive in a spirit of brotherhood for the betterment of our Nation, to you who gird yourselves for this great new fight in the never-ending warfare for the good of humankind, I say in closing . . . We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!”

The most astute among the Progressives recognized that, given the American public’s congenital resistance to centralized rule, a sustained atmosphere of crisis would be necessary to sell the expansion of White House power. Two world wars and the Great Depression did the trick nicely. Roosevelt’s activist, celebrity presidency heralded the coming of a new sort of chief executive, one who would evermore be the center of national attention, the motive force behind American government. With his expanded power, Roosevelt busted trusts, carried a big stick throughout the Americas with a newly imperial U.S. Navy, and issued nearly as many executive orders as all of his predecessors combined.

Woodrow Wilson then proved what Progressives had long hypothesized: that soaring rhetoric combined with the panicked atmosphere of war could concentrate massive social power in the hands of one person. Over the course of his presidency he helped create the Federal Reserve System, nationalized railroads, and used the Espionage and Sedition Acts (along with more than 150,000 vigilantes) to carry out the most brutal campaign against dissents in U.S. history.

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