zachary-taylor-killed-whigs-political-party

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zachary-taylor-killed-whigs-political-party

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2Muscogulus
Redigerat: jun 5, 2016, 12:03 am

No, can't say it does. Zachary Taylor has little in common with Donald Trump. Sure, both men are characterized by wealth, celebrity, and egotism. But that takes in a huge proportion of the men who have run for president of the USA.

Taylor did not cause the death of the Whig Party, as this author wants us to believe. He was not even the first war hero the Whigs successfully ran for president; (William Henry "Tippecanoe" Harrison, the vanquisher of Tecumseh, was the first, but he had the ill grace to die only weeks after taking office.)

What killed the Whig Party was the sectional split over slavery, which worsened with each election cycle (from about 1818 to 1860). Had they not had Taylor in 1848, it's hard to see whom the northern and southern Whigs would have united behind. Henry Clay, possibly the most talented US politician never to win the presidency, was too much of a slaveholder for the northerners and too much of a compromiser for the southerners. Both the Whig and Democratic candidates in 1848 were studiously evasive about slavery. It was what they felt they had to do to win.

The Mexican-American War, which boosted Taylor's celebrity (though he was already famous for killing Indians), was also the catalyst that forced the final crisis over slavery. By adding so much Mexican territory, the US had to face the question of whether the states that emerged from those territories would be slave states or not. And the South wasn't settling any more for the line drawn across the continent in 1820, when Missouri was admitted to the Union.

So why did this writer make such an effort to persuade us that picking Taylor had spelled the death of the Whig Party? When I got to the end and saw the writer's name — Gil Troy — it all fell into place.

Gil Troy, though he works at a Canadian university, uses his historical writing as an outlet for Republican Party propaganda. (I read his biography of Ronald Reagan, which makes a great show of even-handedness to try to mask what is really an apotheosis.) In his monographs as well as his frequent opinion pieces, his first query seems to be, What can I say to promote the interest of the Republican Party?

So in this instance he has clearly aligned himself with the Dump Trump movement. His job, then, was to search for a historical precedent that could be made to appear as a warning against letting Trump win. He found one. But he had to fudge the details to make it work.