Regardless of party or ideology, presidents have long claimed to be the representative of the whole nation and tribune of the public welfare. We are familiar with the classic articulations of this idea from Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson in the early nineteenth century, and from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the early twentieth century. The research of B. Dan Wood (The Myth of Presidential Representation, 2009), Douglas Kriner and Andrew Reeves (The Particularistic President: Executive Branch Politics and Political Inequality, 2015), and John Hudak (Presidential Pork: White House Influence over the Distribution of Federal Grants, 2014) has empirically poked holes in the presidential claim of representation, and in an era of hyper-partisanship the idea itself seems implausible. Nonetheless, the conceptual shift from presidents as constitutional officers to presidents as leaders of the people has considerable staying power.

Until now, we have lacked a thoroughgoing investigation of how presidents have come to claim the role of national representative. Moreover, we have lacked a critical history that questions whether the idea of the president as people’s champion has truly supplanted the original idea of a constitutional executive. In The Idea of Presidential Representation, Jeremy D. Bailey has accomplished both of these tasks in impressive fashion.

Bailey’s history begins before the American Revolution and concludes with the contemporary party system. Chapters cover the founding era, the reconstructive presidencies of the nineteenth century, the Progressive era, the early Cold War period, and the divergent executive conceptions of Democrats and Republicans today. Each chapter is framed around the debate between law and opinion. What is most original and striking in each chapter is the voice of the critics who resist the claim of popular representation and uphold a legal perspective on presidential authority.

The book’s focus on the defenders of law over opinion is illustrated in the title of the second chapter: “Jefferson’s Federalists, Jackson’s Whigs, and Lincoln’s Democrats” (p. 42). Driven into minority status by the popular leadership of Jefferson and Madison, the Federalists who were gathered at the Hartford Convention of 1814–15 proposed several constitutional amendments to prevent a plebiscitary presidency in the future. Reversing the position of the Federalists’ founder Alexander Hamilton—that the opportunity for reelection was essential to the strength of the executive—Hartford Federalists called for a single-term limit for the office. In the face of Andrew Jackson’s claim that the president, and not Congress, is the direct representative of the American people, Whig leaders denounced Jackson’s position as constitutional heresy. As Bailey observes, Henry Clay pronounced himself “surprised and alarmed at the new source of executive power,” and Daniel Webster insisted that “there can be no substantial responsibility” of the executive “but to the law” (p. 70, emphasis in original). When a former Whig, Abraham Lincoln, asserted extraordinary powers during the Civil War, he remained faithful to the stance of Clay and Webster, justifying his actions through the Constitution and not a popular mandate. Lincoln’s most vitriolic Copperhead critic, Clement Vallandigham, was also steeped in the traditional arguments of his political faith “and did not know how to reconcile his belief in the Jacksonian theory of representation with the use of executive power by Lincoln” (p. 77).

In examining the debate between opinion and law in the Progressive era and the early Cold War period, Bailey notes that the conventional “story of American political thought and development does not match up to the facts” (p. 9). Scholars paid so much attention to the famous claims of presidential representation by Herbert Croly, Theodore Roosevelt (TR), and Woodrow Wilson that they failed to notice how unconvincing their position was to many prominent political figures, at least in the Republican Party. William Howard Taft’s well-known rebuke of TR’s stewardship conception of the presidency receives extensive discussion here, but Taft was hardly alone: Bailey also delves into similar critiques of TR by Nicholas Murray Butler, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Charles Nagel, and two of TR’s close friends: Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root.

A chapter on “The National Security Constitution and Presidential Representation at Midcentury” (p. 126) also complicates the familiar story in which a bipartisan national security state, with expanded powers for the presidency, emerged in the years immediately following World War II. Although conservative Republican Robert Taft famously bucked the internationalist trend, Bailey is more interested in a band of Republican moderates, headed by Michigan senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, who joined with President Truman in support of the Truman Doctrine, the National Security Act, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. These Republican moderates distinguished their support for a national security state from their attitude toward executive power, voting for the Twenty-Second Amendment and defending the constitutional prerogatives of Congress. In Vandenberg’s case, Bailey writes, the senator “did not argue that the new facts of the Cold War required a new understanding of the presidency in the constitutional order. Nor did he embrace presidential claims to represent the people” (p. 148).

Bailey is on more familiar ground in discussing the plebiscitary McGovern-Fraser reforms on the Democratic side and the unitary executive theory on the Republican side. His treatment of how the unitary executive theory developed is subtle and perceptive. He links that theory to the long-standing Federalist-Whig-Republican orthodoxy on the Constitution versus public opinion. Particularly in the presidency of George W. Bush, “the party of Lincoln and Taft did not come to embrace the methods of the party of Jefferson and Jackson after all” (p. 189).

Despite his book’s subtitle, Bailey’s work is primarily about the intellectual rather than the political history of presidential representation. Additional insights into the idea at the heart of the book might be gained by looking at the fate of presidents who actually set out to be representatives of the whole people. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson each began their administrations with a bid to encompass as many and diverse interests as possible. FDR sought a concert of interests in the face of the Great Depression, most notably in the National Industrial Recovery Act. By the second year of his presidency, that concert was shattered by backlash from the Right and challenge from the Left, with Roosevelt shifting in response to the militant populism of 1935–36. Johnson sought a consensus of all major forces in an era of prosperity. He carried off this consensus stance with productive results during his first two years in office, only to see it wrecked by racial conflict and the Vietnam War. Historical cases such as these suggest that the idea of the president as champion of the public will is unsustainable in practice.

In the book’s final paragraph, Bailey sums up his central thesis:

With extensive analyses of both well-known and obscure texts, Bailey has made a strong case for the importance of this “enduring debate.” His account is likely to become one of the core texts on the history of the presidency.