Really Cool Stuff About Martin Van Buren
1. He was the first president to write his own memoirs. “Yes, his autobiography is arguably the first presidential memoir, and for that reason alone it holds real interest” (p. 4). (There aren’t many other reasons though.)
2. He is most likely the president with the most nicknames. “The Red Fox of Kinderhook. The Little Magician. The Enchanter. The Careful Dutchman. The Great Manager. The Master Spirit. The American Talleyrand. King Martin. Matty Van. This surfeit of sobriquets suggest both a familiarity with Van Buren and an ultimate failure to catch him. The names cancel each other out, they disagree with each other, and they suggest an inscrutability still hangs like Spanish moss around him” (p. 4)
3. He was good friends with the contemporary author, Washington Irving, dating from his brief sojourn in London as Ambassador.
4. He invented the word “noncommittal” (p. 5).
5. He was the first president born to the post-Revolutionary period and fully American. “There was something to the claim—Van Buren was the first president who was technically American, and not the bastard offspring of the British Empire” (p.125).
6. He was the first president not distinctly Anglo-Saxon. “Van Buren was also our first president (and our last, save Kennedy) without a trace of Anglo-Saxon bloodlines. In our putative nation of nations, every other president has come from an English-speaking household, and rather high English at that. Van Buren grew up speaking Dutch, a relic of the time before the Revolution when the inland waterways of North America were a polyglot blend of non-Anglophile communities” (p. 6-7).
7. He was the first president from the state of New York.
8. He was the first presidential candidate to run on a third party ticket. “Still, he had made history one more time. The Free Soil campaign was America’s first great third-party effort” (p. 155).
9. During his presidency, Van Buren would commission the United States Exploring Expedition in the summer of 1838. “The United States Exploring Expedition, or the US Ex Ex, was the largest effort that had ever been mounted by the American government to advance human knowledge, and a worthy ancestor to the NASA missions of the 1960s. its mission, no less daunting at the time, was the exploration of the little-known Southern Hemisphere and the remote reaches of the Pacific Ocean…Despite considerable adversity, the US Ex Ex would make history in a number of ways: the first oceangoing voyage of discovery by the US government, the last all-sail naval squadron to circumnaviagate the world, and a crucial extension of American force into Pacific regions that might as well have been extraterrestrial for their distance from the Yankee republic. All in all, before returning in 1842, the expedition logged 87,000 miles, mapped 800 miles of Oregon territory, and explored 1,500 miles of Antarctic coastline. Its Pacific charts were still being used a century later, in World War II” (p. 129-30).
10. He is credited for creating the 10-hour workday to aid those hit hardest by the Panic.
11. His presidential campaign for the 1840 election created the popular term “Ok” as “shorthand for ‘oll correct,” a slangy way of saying ‘all right.’ Early in 1840, Van Buren’s supporters began to use the trendy expression as a way to identify their candidate, whom they labored to present as ‘Old Kinderhook,’ perhaps in imitation of Jackson’s Old Hickory. Van Buren even wrote ‘OK’ next to his signature. It spread like wildfire, and to this day it is a universal symbol of something elemental in the American character—informality, optimism, efficiency, call it what you will. It is spoken seven times a day by the average citizen, two billion utterances overall. And, of course, it goes well beyond our borders; if there is a single sound America has contributed to the Esperanto of global communication, this is it. It is audible everywhere—in a taxicab in Paris, in a café in Istanbul, in the languid early seconds of the Beatles’ ‘Revolution,’ when John Lennon steps up to the microphone and arrestingly calls the meeting to order. There are worse legacies that a defeated presidential candidate could claim” (p. 140.)
12. He met and hung out with Abraham Lincoln on one memorable night. During Van Buren’s tour of the US in preparation for the 1844 election, he was accidentally stranded in Rochester, IL. In order to impress their surprise visiting dignitary, the local officials brought along a young man by the name of Abraham Lincoln. “All evening the young Abraham Lincoln and Martin Van Buren delighted each other with their stories. Van Buren took the crowd back to his earliest days in New York politics, when Hamilton and Burr circled each other. According to a lucky witness, Lincoln responded with an endless supply of stories, ‘one following another in rapid succession, each more irresistible than its predecessor. The fun continued until after midnight, and until the distinguished traveler insisted that his sides were sore from laughing.’ Van Buren later claimed that he had never ‘spent so agreeable a night in my life.’ That is no small claim from someone who had been listening to and telling the tallest tales in American politics for more than three decades…Their evening together, two ships passing in the prairie night, offers one of the more intriguing chance meetings in American history” (p. 146-47).
I am not sure whether it’s due to the fact that Martin Van Buren is a relative nobody in the American presidential pantheon of today or if it’s because Seinfeld worked him into the series but I really enjoyed reading about him! I can almost picture him—a small man, dandified and bewhiskered—becoming the intellectual architect behind the entire political party organizational movement. And, in a way, this is the American Dream at its most charming. That a Dutch-speaking, physically unattractive dude should become the president of our great nation—well that speaks volumes. He seemed to be an amusing, socially adept man, nancing his way through the rough-and-tumble of politics in a more rustic Washington setting. “A widower, blond and charming, in control of thirty-six electoral votes, he was bound to be popular in the Washington scene. The Democratic Party may have begun, in fact, as a party—or at least an extension of the idea that like-minded people enjoy being together” (p. 58). Van Buren seems like he stepped right out of fiction.
Ted Widmer does a great job of painting the picture of this very odd little mastermind. He combines an irresistible pairing of old concepts with newer ideas, an anachronistic view of the turbulent 1830s. For instance, I like how he juxtaposes characters from The Scarlet Letter with real people of that time and uses modern day wording to explain phenomenon from the past. Speaking about a book written in 1842 detailing New York politics, Widmer writes “Aaron Spelling could hardly ask for more: colossal egos in conflict, visionary acts of statecraft, and the petty acts of villainy that no less truly define our politics” (p. 39). Widmer makes that time period live for us in his very potent descriptions and I would recommend this book as a good read into the political side of our nation’s history.
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