Coolidge, The Man Who Says "No"
P.W. Wilson previewed the upcoming presidential election for a June 1924 New York Times Magazine article, with some strong similarities to 2024's election... but also some huge differences.
First, the similarities:
[The] President of the Republic will play a leading part in the drama that is Europe still groping toward the ways of peace. The next five years will be years of rapid decision in international affairs, with chances of war always in the balance and Western civilization, including the United States, face to face with an awakened Asia.
At the time, the European war issue was post-World War I uncertainty. Today, it's Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
And at the time, the rising Asian nation was presumably Japan, which the Encyclopedia Britannica says "had become the strongest imperialist power in East Asia" by 1912. Today, it's China.
But there were also some massive differences. Namely, the 1924 article argued that which man won the presidency would be less important than Congress — a statement it's impossible to imagine anybody making in 2024.
To foreign countries, therefore, in their necessary dealings with the United States, the question of interest today is not so much whether next November there is to be elected a Republican or a Democratic president, but whether the president so elected will be allowed by Congress a reasonable initiative in foreign affairs.
The article also claimed the real issue regarding Congress was its level of leniency towards the executive branch, more so than the body's partisan control:
One of the difficulties of the situation is that the two parties in Congress do not vote as parties. A Democrat may vote with a Republican group, and vice versa. The fate of any particular proposal is thus uncertain up to the last moment.
Those were the days.
"The imperial presidency" era arguably started not too long after this 1924 article, with FDR in the 1930s-40s, expanding even further under LBJ in the 1960s, and truly escalating with the post-9/11 presidencies of George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden.
By the 2020s, Washington Post opinion columnist George Will could write of the imperial presidency: "On Jan. 3, the 117th Congress will convene. It is not clear why."
Coolidge, The Man Who Says "No"
Published: Sunday, June 8, 1924