Execute the Office: Essays with Presidents - Softcover

Rafferty, Colin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 193609732X ISBN 13: 9781936097326

Publisher: Baobab Press, 2021

Synopsis

Colin Rafferty's Execute the Office uses lyric prose and formal invention to explore the humanity, or lack thereof, that thrived in each of the forty-five American presidents. Whether these powerful individuals were celebrated for infamous deeds and heroism, or forgotten as placeholders in the annals of American history, too often presidents are commemorated by the sterility of simple fact. Execute the Office builds upon factual accuracy with essays that are equally invested in lyricism and experimental forms. To balance these factions, Execute the Office uses constraint, metaphor, allusion, and epiphany to explore not just the facts and artifacts of history, but describe the connections between those facts and human nature. These essays discuss the modes in which we remember through death songs, footnotes, infinite rooms, evacuation routes, and nomenclatures, to name a few examples, engaging with history from fresh perspectives. Execute the Office contains histories in and of unusual objects. While unfamiliar at first, they soon become distinct, unforgettable, profound, human.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Colin Rafferty grew up on the Kansas side (which makes a difference). In third grade, he unhesitatingly told an autograph dealer that the label on a Lincoln autograph was wrong―he was the sixteenth president, not the seventeenth. Later, Rafferty attended land grant universities (Kansas State, Iowa State) and eventually got an MFA from the University of Alabama. He writes about monuments and memorials (Hallow This Ground, Break Away Books, published in 2016), presidents (Execute the Office), and more generally public and private histories. In doing research for Execute the Office, he visited the graves of 28 presidents, toured the homes of another 16, and, for reasons still unbeknownst to him, was allowed to handle a four-page letter written by George Washington. Rafferty has taught nonfiction writing at the University of Mary Washington since 2008, developing classes on nonfiction of place, the lyric essay, and writing for multimedia. Since 2012, he has lived in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife, Elizabeth, and their dog in the same neighborhood where Patrick Henry gave the “give me liberty or give me death” speech in the presence of two future presidents. He is surrounded by history.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

500 Black Ships
Millard Fillmore
Thirteenth President of the United States
1850-1853
63 years since the Constitution
10 years until the Emancipation
121 years until the resignation

You don’t know him, or know him only as a shell, a funny name, a repeated pair of consonants. You know he was president, but just sometime, you’re not sure when. You don’t know anything he did.

I’ll explain.

He’s the first president born in the nineteenth century, the first born after George Washington dies; there’s a significance to this, a continuity, the idea that the country is more than its founders. He’s the second vice president to become the president after a death. He’s the last Whig president. He signs the Compromise of 1850, which adds California to the Union as a free state and organizes the land taken in the Mexican-American War into the Utah and New Mexico territories, delegating to them the decision on slavery (“The Union Is Saved!” cry the people upon the news, eleven years before the war begins). It’s his name on the letter from the United States that Commodore Perry carries when the black ships sail into Tokyo Bay on the last day of March 1854. Perry turns away all the emissaries the Emperor sends to the ship; he’ll meet only with the Emperor himself, occupant of the Chrysanthemum Throne, the man descended from Emperor Jimmu, the first Emperor of Japan, descended himself from the sun goddess and the storm god.

This is what I hope you will remember: wealthy men and their corporations sought to open Japan to the West, and as the president was a means to those ends, these men considered Millard Fillmore the equal to a living god.

His signature’s lovely, calligraphic elegance, the swash added to the top arm of the F swirling out over the M, doubling back to meet the dot of the I. The first name, waves cresting, black ink a ship’s path on the paper. He had the biggest library of any president up to that point. He signed his name in each book, marked its shelf number in each one. Methodical. Complete.

In the same year that Perry opens Japan with Fillmore’s signature, the painter Kano Kazunobu begins a series of scrolls, one hundred total, of the five hundred disciples of the Buddha, commissioned by a temple in Edo. The disciples―arhats or rakan―are capable of amazing feats. A dry river flows again. The lotus flower grows from a begging bowl. Stones rain from the sky to end conflict. The rakan fly on foxes.

They travel between the six realms: gods and demigods, humans and animals, hell and the realm of the hungry ghosts, consuming, consuming. When an earthquake kills seven thousand people in Edo in 1855, the rakan use tiny dragons to blow out the fires, while people escape from their collapsed worlds.

The hungry ghosts are the reincarnations of those who have died having done evil deeds of a certain kind―not those bad enough to warrant rebirth in hell or as an animal, but bad enough to keep them from a peaceful state. Desire, greed, ignorance―these are the sins of the hungry ghosts.

Kazunobu works on these paintings until his death nine years later. He almost finishes the series; after his death, his wife and his own disciple work from his sketches for the last ten. Methodical. Complete.

Everything happens slowly, with the deliberation of Kazonobu making his hundred paintings. Fillmore’s an accident, president only because of a hot July 4 and some cherries and some milk. By the time the black ships reach Edo and Perry demands that Fillmore’s signature be presented only to the Lotus Flower Throne (although the Shogunate, and not the emperor, is the true leader of Japan at this time), he is no one again, retired to the city by the crashing water, the city of the Falls. Franklin Pierce, a drunkard consumed with sorrow, takes his place. The nation Fillmore once led slides toward war, world collapsing, and he is headed toward obscurity and embarrassment. In his final notable act, he runs for the high office again on a campaign against the foreign, calling himself a Know-Nothing, presenting himself as against the foreigners, the invaders, who arrive not in five hundred black ships but in the ports of the East Coast. At his career’s end, Fillmore is driven, like the hungry ghosts, by something that prevents him from a peaceful rest. Maybe power. Maybe greed. Maybe the knowledge of his former godliness.

And Kazunobu’s paintings too. They are installed in the temple, survive the firebombing of Tokyo in the second World War, although the temple is badly damaged. In 2011, the public sees the hundred scrolls for the first time, and in 2012 they travel, in a reversal of Perry’s ships, back to Washington. The Smithsonian Institution sells out of the exhibition catalogue.

Once, Fillmore was a god’s equal; then, nothing. What sorrow that must be. Every man who is president is president, whether by election or by accident. Nothing can remove them from the paintings, the forty-five disciples of the Constitution. They perform the amazing, but only briefly, and then they are men again.

When Perry arrives, Japan is unknown, the mysterious East. And now we know more of Japan than we do of Millard Fillmore, the hungry ghost, once capable of magic, now capable of nothing. Write your name in the book. File him away on his shelf. Use your method. His story’s complete. A tiny dragon will blow out the flame.

Warp and Weft
Andrew Johnson
Seventeenth President of the United States
1865-1869
78 years since the Constitution
2 years since Emancipation
105 years until the resignation

At a point―some night, most likely the day’s cutting and sewing and stitching done, tomorrow’s work ahead of him―the idea becomes clear, snaps into focus in front of the young tailor’s eyes. A moment, when in the light of a candle, his wife over his shoulder guiding him, he looks at the scratchings in front of him, lines like jagged stitches:

XXXXX XXXX XX XXXX XXXXXXXX

He is a tailor, he is good at putting things together, and he recognizes―he reads―a word in all of that mess. Perhaps a simple word like the, he, or she, or perhaps his name. Perhaps he points to the word, sounds out its phonemes, looks up to his wife, who smiles at him, saying yes, Andy, that is your name, Andy.

In that moment, Andrew Johnson, illiterate tailor of rural Tennessee, looks at the page beneath him, and confirms that yes, he is emerging from the page:

XXXXX XXXX XX ANDY XXXXXXXX

He is a tailor, a good one. Years from now, when others could do it for him, he mends his own clothing. He looks at a bolt of cloth and sees it unfurl into shirts, dresses, a coat here and a pair of pants there. He sees patterns, where to cut or to stitch, where to bind, or where to rip a seam apart. He sees how to use as much of the cloth as possible, how to reattach a sleeve so the stitches do not show. He has not needed to read for this, but when his wife teaches him, he understands both that the marks on the paper mean something, and that whatever they mean, they mean a station beyond a tailor’s.

He reads. The world opens to him. What had been XXXXX, he now recognizes Eliza, his wife, his teacher. He had known his state’s name, but now he sees written Tennessee, the pattern of repeated letters, the way a pen moves when writing it. He reads everything, books, newspapers, the Constitution, whose XX XXX XXXXXX becomes WO LKU RUQRIU and finally resolves into We the People, and where he encounters another word, potentially for the first time, emerging from the shadows: impeachment.

Because of the customers who come into his shop, he has learned to speak well, and he begins his ascent―alderman, mayor, the state house and senate, United States Congress. He buys a slave, his Constitutional right. He believes in the Constitution, believes in how these words, when read, form a more perfect union, the threads that stitch together the pieces of the union.

When it unravels, he holds fast the whole cloth. He can look at the jumble and make sense of it. Before the war, he had been governor; his successor cut the threads binding it to the Union, to Andy’s beloved Constitution. When Grant and Pope and Buell tear much of Tennessee bloodily from the rebels, Lincoln names him military governor of his state, and then names him vice president for the ’64 election, thinking already about Reconstruction.

But if we pull this ascending thread of his career, it takes all the stitches with it. He is likely drunk when he takes the oath as vice president, and a month later he becomes president when his own assassin loses his nerve while Booth leaps from the box. The task of binding up a nation’s wounds falls to him, a tailor.

And yet the Constitution’s friend would leave this to the states. The North sees him giving away the victory; the South sees him as hands-off, and they cut the patterns of Jim Crow from the cloth he gives them. He inherits almost an entire presidential term, and in his four years he clashes with the Radical Republicans in Congress, who see him as too gentle with the former rebels, who pass legislation over his vetoes.

Perhaps he is. Perhaps he knows that to pull too hard on a piece of fabric risks tearing it beyond repair. In the first two years of his presidency, the South, despite the abolition of slavery, begins to return to its prewar state, with former leaders and former laws and the new black codes designed to hold the freedmen back―slavery in a new change of clothes.

When the Radical Republicans solidify control of Congress at the midterms, they look to break the South. They place the states of the former Confederacy under military rule and pass rules to tie Johnson’s hands together as president to prevent him from firing Cabinet officials who do not agree with him. When he fires Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, the Congress impeaches him―the first time this provision of the Constitution ever comes into play―and he is acquitted in the Senate by a single vote. The rest of his presidency is unremarkable, scrap cloth on the pile.

What if a different self-taught southerner was president for Reconstruction? What if, instead of Johnson’s would-be assassin losing his nerve, Booth decides not to go to Ford’s Theater that April night, and Lincoln―kind, merciful Father Abraham―is the one to bring the country back together?

The answer is impossible to know, and all speculations are hazy guesses, like trying to look through muslin to see a picture clearly. It would have been different. It would not have been what Andrew Johnson did.

Andrew Johnson is buried in his Tennessee―stitched into an American flag, his head resting on a copy of the Constitution, his legacy a reminder that this country’s lie―anyone can be president―means that the wrong person can become president, and that these ideas―all men are created equal, by the people, of the people, for the people, and that they shall not have died in vain―do vanish from the earth, and we forget how to read them. They fade from ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL to ALM MON ATE CLEVTEV EMUAL to TLR VXA ATR MNEBCZ JLPQT and finally to simple lines at which we stare, uncomprehending.

What They Said About Him
Barack Obama
Forty-fourth President of the United States
2009-2017
222 years since the Constitution
146 years since Emancipation
35 years since the resignation

Have we had a president like him before? The easy grace, the timeless cool, the effortlessness of the three-point shot dropping in the basket. First, the young candidate for Senate on the convention stage charming the faithful, then four years later the stadium full as he accepts the nomination, and in five months he stands in the bright cold and takes the oath―when in our lives had we seen that? The differences were obvious, the differences went beyond the surface―we’d never had a president like him before.

We’d never had a president like him before, the focal point of a white-hot rage flooding every channel, tea kettles of minds continuously at the boil, the outrage never stopping, the coded language we didn’t need an enigma to understand: Thug. Monkey. The ways they used his middle name as an insult, Barack Hussein Obama, the way they turned the answers into more questions for their fires, the way they found their echo chambers in cable networks and 140 characters, how the resonances grew to stadium-level noises. We’d had characters before him―the Fool, the Philanderer, the Wimp―but we had not seen this before.

Had we seen a president like this before? Over the hills of Afghanistan, a predator flies nonstop, scanning the landscape. Eight years prior, we had bumper stickers that replaced Endless War with End this War, and what did we get for our efforts? We supported our troops by replacing them with machines. Remember that April night when the networks said that the president would make a statement? Remember watching the static live shot of the podium, the red carpet of the long hallway? Remember him finally appearing, the walk to the podium? All our answers just seem to raise more questions. All our solutions just seem to create more problems, both the same and different from before.

Had we seen a president like him before? Every Democrat since Truman tried and failed to reform health care. In a year, he turned a nightmare recession into continued job growth. He worked on pay inequality, signed arms treaties, improved school lunches. When, in his second inaugural, he mentioned “Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall,” didn’t your throat catch? When he paused while speaking in Charleston, then sang “Amazing Grace,” the crowd cheering and joining, had you ever heard that before?

Did anyone ever see the president we thought we elected? What happened to the reformer? What happened to the crusader? The rich got richer, the banks got stronger, the dollars seemed to flow in one direction, only up. All those fears from the right―He’ll redistribute wealth, he’ll take our guns―never came to fruition. Were we better off than we were eight years ago? All those opportunities lost, all those chances wasted. Did we progress with a progressive in office, or did it seem like we just ran hard enough to stay in the same place?

They had never seen a president like him before, and now the absolute terror of what will follow in his wake―the door thrown open wide to white nationalists. Their song of sealing the borders―that will echo for quite some time. They heard someone say Black lives matter, and they responded with No, all lives matter, and it’s possible to draw a line from that to some of them chanting Jews will not replace us in Charlottesville. When they said I just want my country back, they meant from him but also from them and from you. Part of his legacy is that the party of Lincoln threw itself into the hands of the paranoid and furious. The party that freed the slaves became the party that remembered the slave uprisings, and now their fears guide them into unfamiliar territories, lands with strange costumes, strange buildings, a leader they’ve never seen before because their leaders have always looked like them.

Have I ever seen a president like him before? I’ve never seen a president at all, but him I heard in a small town in Virginia during the first campaign. Tens of thousands of people crowding the campus circle, waiting through the rain―the biggest thing to happen in that town since the Civil War, since Lincoln visited―and we couldn’t get close enough to see the stage. In the press of our fellow citizens, we heard the cheers go up as the candidate stepped on stage. How did he look? I’ve seen photos―no jacket, white sleeves rolled up. A light rain falling. But I didn’t see him at that time. The first debate had been the night before. I remember he said, “You know, John McCain had a lot to say about me last night, but he didn’t have a lot to say about you.” We cheered. We’d never heard a candidate like him before.

Nomenclature
Donald Trump
Forty-fifth President of the United States
2017-TBD
230 years since the Constitution
154 years since Emancipation
43 years since the resignation

Adam gave all the animals different names, but Trump gives everything the same name―his. A tower in midtown Manhattan, another on Wall Street, another in Chicago. Hotels around the world, including one in the old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, just blocks from the White House. He has, in the past, put his name on a university, a steaks-by-mail company, a casino in New Jersey. He has put his name on three wives, five children, an administration, an era.

Usually, the presidency makes a name. Certainly, we have elected famous men with name recognition before―Eisenhower, Reagan―just as we have elected wealthy men before. But their names were affixed to buildings and street signs after their time in office, not before. Trump is not that way. He existed as personality before we understood him as president. He is brand, he is corporate and incorporated. He is without boundaries in an office designed to be checked by two other branches, iconoclastic in a house full of icons. He is not out of many, one; he is out of one, more of that one. He is a copy machine, a cloning device, a rubber stamp dedicated to the same thing over and over and over: Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump.

The presidency has been bigger than the person occupying the office, until Trump. We used to speak of the office and the holder of the office as separate things, talked about how we expected certain behaviors and pronouncements from the officeholder, because they were the president, and that’s what a president did.

Trump is Trump, who is also president. Before his inauguration, some wondered if he might be changed by the gravitas of the office, the way that others had been.

Now it seems that the accurate thing to say is that while Trump has not been changed by the presidency, the presidency has most assuredly been changed by Trump.

Let us engage in a failure of the imagination: the idea that he might have been created by the office he swore to execute. That Donald J. Trump, Manhattan real estate mogul and television personality, sits in the chair behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office on his first day in office and recognizes the gravity of the situation, the forces at work. “I alone can fix it,” he said on the convention stage, but imagine that he now realizes that his name is not enough to do this work, that he needs others, not just family and a few trusted advisors, but a large team of staff and government workers. Imagine that he looks out upon the swamp he railed against in the campaign and realizes that it teems with life, a vast ecosystem. Imagine that he uses his Twitter account and its millions of followers as a way to communicate effectively to the American people, something beyond the instant gratification of his base.

The presidency, and with it America, is based on an idea of continuity. Power passes from term and term and party to party without violence or revolution. Trump has disrupted that in the way that businessmen often laud. He has given the presidency his name, rather than taken on its title.

Vineyards, hotels, golf courses: he gives his name to things, but I was wrong to say that only gives his name. He gives lots of names: Lyin’ Hillary, Sleepy Joe, Crazy Nancy, Low Energy Jeb, Slimeball James Comey, Dumb as a Rock AOC, Little Marco, Shifty Schiff, Pocahontas, Low-IQ Maxine Waters, the China Virus. Those he likes still get his name: the president of Mexico becomes “Juan Trump,” the prime minister of Great Britain “Britain Trump.” He makes his creations into his image. Names are power. What’s in a name?

He is impeached, and he is acquitted. One senator stated that “the question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did.” In other words, what name will you put to this? High crimes? Distraction? Treason? Harassment? Witch hunt? What’s in a name? Everything. Everything.

A New York State Park on land he gave. A settlement in the Golan Heights named in recognition of his support of Israel’s claim. He gives his name, an act of charity, an act of connection. The father of all mankind, the benevolent bestowal, a legacy passed on and on and on, echoing through the years. Look on his works. Nothing else remains.

The number of baby boys named Donald has decreased steadily since 2015.

Edition details

• Publisher: Baobab Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 193609732X
• ISBN 13: 9781936097326
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 125