The Mystery of History

Imagined alternate scenarios don't help

If Vice President Thomas Marshall had yielded to pressure from Secretary of State Robert Lansing, his cabinet colleagues and the Congressional leadership to push incapacitated President Woodrow Wilson out of the way – and succeeded – in functioning as President, the history of that period might have turned out quite differently.

It probably wouldn’t have taken the 1920 Democratic convention 44 votes to select a nominee and improved the odds that Democrats could hold the White House. Historian Samuel Eliot Marshall goes further, speculating that Marshall, lacking Wilson’s rigidity, could have won US membership in the League of Nations, thereby averting World War II,

And if he had tried and failed, things might have gone in a very different direction as well.

So what?

This “woulda, coulda, shoulda” bad historical habit resonates today in the futile and distracting discussion of how greater candor about President Biden’s declining health could have put us in a better place than where we are today.

Maybe. Or perhaps not.

If a Marshall effort to replace Wilson – and there was no love lost between the two men and reason to anticipate substantial opposition from the President and his wife and their allies– the outcome could have been worse, a last-minute purge of critics in the cabinet and a poisoned atmosphere that would have made a Republican successor even more inevitable.

There are more than a few parallels with the Biden situation. Had President Biden decided to retire because of declining energy, it would have precipitated partisan and press discussions about the onset of his decline. In short, he would have gone immediately, in political terms, from being a lame duck to a dead duck.

And there’s no particular reason to believe that this serious immediate setback would have led to any long-term benefits accruing to the forces of progress. Some good government types would praise it, but they’d be in a minority in a political environment where no such good deed goes unpunished.

At the moment speculation about the issue serves no positive purpose beyond selling a few books and providing cheap copy to fill the airwaves. It is an interesting bit of history, but history’s lessons are seldom quickly clear and contemporaneous attempts to learn them are useless, if not counterproductive.

I’m personally far too addicted to history to endorse Henry Ford’s view that it is bunk. Too often it is used by partisans to advance their preferred futures. Most Presidents leave us with a record inspiring continuing debate that may tell us more about the present than the past. That’s why William Mckinley and Andrew Jackson have won enhanced reputations since the November elections.

President Biden’s deterioration was sad for him and bad for the country. That says it all without the need for further discussion.