This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) was one of the prominent figure of American politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. The son of a slaveholding South Carolina family, he served in the federal government in various capacities—as senator from his home state, as secretary of war and secretary of state, and as vice-president in the administrations of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Calhoun was a staunch supporter of the interests of his state and region. His battle from tariff reform, aimed at alleviating the economic problems of the southern states, eventually led him to formulate his famous nullification doctrine, which asserted the right of states to declare federal laws null and void within their own boundaries. In the first full-scale biography of Calhoun in almost half a century, John Niven skillfully presents a new interpretation of this preeminent spokesman of the Old South. Deftly blending Calhoun’s public career with important elements of his private life, Niven shows Calhoun to have been at once a more consistent politician and a far more complex human being than previous historians have thought. Rather than history’s image of an assured, self-confident Calhoun, Niven reveals a figure who was in many ways insecure and defensive. Niven maintains that the War of 1812, which Calhoun helped instigate and which nearly resulted in the nation’s ruin, made a lasting impression on Calhoun’s mind and personality. From that point until the end of his life, he sought security first from the western Indians and the British while he was secretary of war, then from northern exploitation of southern wealth through what he regarded as manipulation of public policy while he was vice-president and a senator. He worked tirelessly to further the South’s slave-plantation system of economic and social values. He sought protection for a region that he freely admitted was low in population and poor in material resources, and he defended a position that he knew was morally inferior. Niven portrays Calhoun as a driven, tragic figure whose ambitions and personal desires to achieve leadership and compensate for a lack of inner assurance were often thwarted. The life he made for himself, the peace he felt on his plantation with his dependent retainers, and the agricultural pursuits that represented to him and his neighbors stability in a rapidly changing environment were beyond price. Calhoun sought to resist any menace to this way of life with all the force of his character and intellect. Yet in the end Calhoun’s headstrong allegiance to his region helped to destroy the very culture he sought to preserve and disrupted the Union he had hoped to keep whole. Niven’s masterful retelling of Calhoun’s eventful life is a model biography.
John C. Calhoun's ghost still haunts America today. First elected to congress in 1810, Calhoun served as secretary of war during the war of 1812, and then as vice-president under two very different presidents, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. It was during his time as Jackson's vice president that he crafted his famous doctrine of "state interposition," which laid the groundwork for the south to secede from the union -- and arguably set the nation on course for civil war. Other accounts of Calhoun have portrayed him as a backward-looking traditionalist -- he was, after all, an outspoken apologist for slavery, which he defended as a "positive good." But he was also an extremely complex thinker, and thoroughly engaged in the modern world. He espoused many ideas that resonate strongly with popular currents today: an impatience for the spectacle and shallowness of politics, a concern about the alliance between wealth and power in government, and a skepticism about the United States' ability to spread its style of democracy throughout the world. Calhoun has catapulted back into the public eye in recent years, as the tensions he navigated and inflamed in his own time have surfaced once again. In 2015, a monument to him in Charleston, South Carolina became a flashpoint after a white supremacist murdered nine African-Americans in a nearby church. And numerous commentators have since argued that Calhoun's retrograde ideas are at the root of the modern GOP's problems with race. Bringing together Calhoun's life, his intellectual contributions -- both good and bad -- and his legacy, Robert Elder's book is a revelatory reconsideration of the antebellum South we thought we knew.
Although John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) remains one of the major figures in American political thought, many of his critics have tried to discredit him as merely a Southern partisan whose ideas were obsolete even during his lifetime. In Calhoun and Popular Rule, H. Lee Cheek, Jr., attempts to correct such misconceptions by presenting Calhoun as an original political thinker who devoted his life to the recovery of a "proper mode of popular rule." As the first combined evaluation of Calhoun's most important treatises, The Disquisition and The Discourse, this work merges Calhoun's theoretical position with his endeavors to restore the need for popular rule. It also compares Calhoun's ideas with those of other great political thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison--while explaining what is truly unique about Calhoun's political thought.
In the first biography of Longfellow in almost fifty years, Charles C. Calhoun seeks to solve a mystery: Why has one of America's most famous writers fallen into oblivion? His answer to this question takes us through a life story that reads like a Victorian family saga and reveals the man who introduced Americans to the literatures of other countries while creating a gallery of American icons - among them Paul Revere, John and Priscilla Alden, Miles Standish, the Village Blacksmith, Hiawatha, and Evangeline.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Award The Nation's "Most Valuable Book" “[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic “This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.”—NPR An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution. Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.
