Pop Quiz—Who Rioted at the White House?

What may be the earliest photograph of the White House--an 1846 daguerreotype taken five years after the riot on the grounds of the mansion. 

The White House a/k/a The President’s Palace and Executive Mansion has seen its share of turmoil.

There was the time the British arrived uninvited and Dolly Madison had to abandon dinner and make a getaway with Washington’s Portrait rolled up in a rug.  The Redcoats burned the place requiring a fresh coat of white wash and earning the place a new name.

The Red Coats burning the Executive Mansion was a no-good-terrible-very-bad-day but it wasn't a riot.

It got pretty boisterous when Andrew Jackson was inaugurated and he invited the “plain people” over to the house.  Things got out of hand when thousands showed up, apparently very hungry.  They climbed through windows and broke furniture to get to the Enormous Cheese sent down from Vermont for the occasion.  But despite shocking the sensibilities of respectable folks, it was a friendly, if inebriated, crowd.

Then there was the day when Abraham Lincoln looked out the window and saw his Army running in a panic for their lives after being whipped at the First Battle of Bull Run.

Harry Truman was living across the street at Blair House while the old place was getting fixed up when Puerto Rican Nationalists tried to break in and shoot him.  They failed, but a White House Police Officer was killed.

This blog has covered all of those exciting events.

But today is the anniversary of the first, and as far as I can tell, only full scale riot on the White House grounds.  Can you guess who rioted and why?  Betcha can’t.

First let’s eliminate some possible candidates.

• Coxey’s Army—The first great “march on Washington” by the unemployed in 1894 during one of the nation’s recurring financial Panics.  It dispersed peacefully at the Capital and never targeted the White House.

• Suffrage Protests—Picketing of Woodrow Wilson’s White House during World War I was a first for public demonstrations there, but was entirely orderly.  Irked, Wilson ordered the arrest of the women, many of whom were sent to jail where they went on a hunger strike and were force fed by hoses shoved down their throats.  But no riot.

• The Bonus March—World War I Veterans demanding early payment of a promised bonus in 1932 marching up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capital was dispersed by General Douglas MacArthur’s tanks and cavalry and chased across the river where he burned their shanty town.  Herbert Hoover, however, and the White House were never in any danger.

Since these events there have been many huge demonstrations in Washington for civil rights, for and against abortion rights, against several wars, and for numerous other causes.  The current Resident has drawn regular protests large, small, and creative.  But no riots at the White House.

Picketing now occurs almost daily for one cause or another and symbolic but peaceful civil disobedience there is so routine that it hardly merits any press attention.  The occasional loon tries to scale the fence or somehow gets on the grounds, but is always nabbed.

Give up?

On August 16, 1841 a mob of Whig Party members, likely fueled by generous supplies of alcohol by their backers, rioted on the grounds of the White House, pelting the building with stones and bricks breaking windows, fired guns into the air, and burned the President in effigy.  They never breached the doors, but John Tyler undoubtedly had some very anxious moments.

What were they so mad about?  Tyler had just, for the second time , vetoed a bill re-chartering the Second Bank of the United States.  This was a riot by business interests who had solidly backed the Whig’s against the firm Anti-bank policy of both Thomas Jefferson’s old Democratic Republicans and Andrew Jackson’s rebuilt Democratic Party.

Tyler was sitting in the White House, albeit accidently, as a Whig, so his opposition to the Bank was even more infuriating.

Tyler was a Virginia aristocrat and self-described “Old Republican”—a conservative opposed to creeping nationalism and an advocate of strict construction of the Constitution.  After a successful political career as a U.S. Representative, Governor, and Senator, like many southern politicians of his class, he broke with Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party when Jackson backed a controversial Tariff and threatened to send Federal troops to South Carolina when it threatened to nullify the law.

Henry Clay of Kentucky--perhaps the most powerful of the Whig's three great national leaders including old Federalist Daniel Webster and pro-slavery firebrand John C. Calhoun.  Each represented faction of the party at war with each other from the beginning.

He was left with little other option than to join with other Jackson haters in the Whig Party.  The Whigs were a new party made up of the fragmentary remnants of the old Federalists in New England led by Daniel Webster and the western Nationalists and advocates of internal improvements led by Henry Clay.  Disgruntled southern aristocrats like Tyler added to the mix and were generally led by firebrand former Vice President John C. Calhoun. 

The Whigs were an inherently unstable alliance with the first two groups backing Northern business interests, strong central government, and Federal spending on infrastructure.  The old Federalists were generally opposed to slavery, or at least its expansion, while the Westerners were eager to add new states, slave or free.  The agrarian Southerners fought New England business interests tooth and nail, opposed spending on infrastructure as unconstitutional and likely to lead to Federal taxation, and were passionate advocates of slavery and its expansion.

An 1840 Whig ticket poster.

 Desperate to win the Presidency for the first time after failing to dislodge them under Martin Van Buren in 1836, the Whigs passed over their big three  leaders to run a military hero and “Man of the People” in the mold of Jackson in 1840.  They tapped William Henry Harrison, the vanquisher of Tecumseh and his federation of the tribes, hero of  the War of 1812 and former Governor of Indiana Territory.  The old general, although born a Virginia aristocrat, was portrayed as a simple frontiersman content to sit on his log cabin front porch with a jug of cider.  He was expected to be compliant to the wishes of Party leaders, especially Henry Clay.  Tyler was added to the ticket for balance and to attract votes in the South, where Democrats were the strongest.  The ticket prevailed under the banner of Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!

Tyler was expected to sink into honorable obscurity as Vice President.  But the old Indian fighter came down with pneumonia after giving the longest inaugural address in history in freezing rain and died just a few weeks later.  Tyler became the first accidental president.  He beat back attempts to characterize him as “The Vice President acting in lieu of the President” or as “Acting President” and insisted on assuming the full powers and title of the office.  He moved into the Executive Mansion and inherited Harrison’s Whig Cabinet.

The romance between the new president and his party was short lived.  Tyler remained ever an Old Republican at heart.  When Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, as leader of Congressional Whigs, tried to move key elements of the party platform, he found himself stymied again and again by Tyler, who vetoed cherished internal improvement projects.  But the number one objective of the Party was re-chartering the Second National Bank of the United States which Jackson had killed in his first term with the strong support at that time from Senator Tyler of Virginia.

The bank was seen by commercial and industrial interests as key to stabilizing the chaotic currency system, becoming a repository for Federal funds, and having enough capital to invest in both infrastructure and private industry.  Tyler, in the tradition of Jefferson and Jackson, hated banks as usurers and deeply distrusted the power of a central bank to subvert republican virtues.  He vetoed the first attempt at a re-charter and sent Congress a list of his objections.

Clay re-crafted the charter incorporating many of Tyler’s objections and expected that he would sign it.  Tyler vetoed it for a second time.

John Tyler--a much un-loved President without a party.

 It was that veto that set off the riot on the White House lawn.  It was not the only outlet for Whig rage.  On September 11, Tyler’s entire Cabinet with the exception of Secretary of State Daniel Webster resigned in mass at the urging of Clay.  Webster refused to resign citing on-going treaty negotiations with Britain over establishing an agreed upon northern boundary and probably to tweak his party rival Clay.  The resignations were expected to force Tyler himself to resign.  He did not.  Days later he was officially expelled from the Whigs by the Congressional caucuses.

Tyler was now despised equally by most Whigs and Democrats who viewed him as a turn coat.  He managed to survive an attempted impeachment promoted in the House of Representatives by John Quincy Adams.  But government was essentially in stalemate.  Congress rejected 11 of his appointments to the Cabinet until he was able to attract Southern Democrats to back his choice of Calhoun for Secretary of State.

Tyler lost two members of the Cabinet he did manage to put together—and nearly his own life—when a cannon exploded on the deck of the U.S. Princeton in February 1844.  Many regretted that the President was not among the dead.

Tyler’s major accomplishment was the Treaty of Annexation of Texas.  Tyler, who was usually lukewarm to western expansion, was eager to add a slave state.  Northern Whigs were adamantly opposed and even the usually pro-expansion Clay was worried about upsetting the delicate balance of power between slave and non-slave states.  The Senate at first rejected the treaty.

Meanwhile, Tyler, a man without a party, attempted to create one around himself for a run for the Presidency on his own.  He patched together a party of sorts from the few loyalists he had in Congress, conservative southern Whigs, and officeholders who he had appointed.  They even held a convention and nominated Tyler.

The Whigs put up Clay, who was opposed to the treaty, but the Democrats abandoned early favorite Van Buren, also a treaty opponent, for Speaker of the House James Knox Polk of Tennessee, an ardent expansionist and supporter of Texas.  Tyler withdrew from the race and threw his support to Polk.  Polk won the election and pro-Texas Democrats picked up seats in Congress.

Although his treaty could not get through the Senate, the new Congress, with the support of the President, voted to accept Texas into the union by resolution.  Tyler signed the act three days before leaving office.

Rejected and unloved by anyone but his brand new bride, Julia Gardiner, the daughter of a New York Congressman also killed on the Princeton, Tyler returned to his Virginia plantation expecting to live out his days in obscurity.  He surely would have succeeded in this aim had he not sided with the Confederacy and been elected to the Rebel Congress from Virginia.  He died shortly after taking office in January of 1861.

Considered a traitor to the country he once led, he was the only former president not to be memorialized in Washington upon his death.

A frequent denizen of worst president lists, John Tyler, top row center, and all of the rest have new competition.

 Most historians place Tyler close to the top of any list of worst presidents.  He is certainly among the most obscure.  History relegates him to a virtual footnote.

 

But once upon a time he stirred enough passions to earn the only riot ever at the White House.  That ought to count for something.

 

And, by the way, the riot had one other lasting effect. It led Congress to form the Auxiliary Guard, the predecessor to today’s Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia.  Prior to that the only law enforcement in Washington was the single U.S. Marshall for the District.

War Time Internment—We Are Embarrassed by This Kind of Crap but It Could Happen Again

 

On February 19, 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which gave local military commanders the authority to declare military areas where exclusion zones could be established from which any or all persons could be removed.  Although the order did not specifically identify Japanese aliens and citizens, they were overwhelmingly the greatest number of people involved. 

A few thousand people of, German and Italian origin or lineage, mostly those actively identified with pro-Nazi German American Bund or various Fascist organizations, were affected.  But around 120,000 Japanese of all status were rounded up and placed in War Relocation Camps—virtual concentration camps—far from their homes. 

Of these the vast majority were from the West Coast, which was in the midst of a virtual panic about a possible Japanese invasion stoked with newspaper fantasies that local Japanese would form a fifth column and sabotage defense efforts.  The war fed anti-Asian bigotry that had long been a staple of West Coast social and political life.  Yet in Hawaii, which had actually come under attack and where Japanese were nearly a third of the total population, only 1,800 were interred. 

Families were typically given 48 hours to a maximum of two weeks to prepare for relocation and allowed to bring only what they could personally carry.  Many had to simply abandon homes, businesses, farms, and automobiles or were forced to sell them far below value. 

Camps were scattered inland over most of the states west of the Mississippi, many in inhospitable and remote areas.  Families were allowed to remain together and were generally held in barracks like buildings hastily erected with little or no insulation.  Although rations were adequate, schools were allowed to operate, and some degree of self-government allowed within the camps, conditions were generally harsh and many military guards hostile. 

As time went on individuals who could find work and sponsors away from the coast were allowed to leave the camps.  Many were sponsored by religious organizations and found work in hospitals, on farms, and even in war production plants. 

Despite these conditions, many young men, particularly the American born Nisei generation, voluntarily enlisted in the Armed Forces.  Others were drafted.  Many served in the most highly decorated unit of the U.S. Army, 442 Regimental Combat Team while their families remained behind barbed wire. 

In December of 1944 the Supreme Court declared the detention of loyal citizens unconstitutional, but did not overturn the whole relocation program. 

On January 2, 1945 the program was officially ended.  Internees were given $25 and tickets to homes most of them no longer had.  Some camps had to remain open to accommodate those who had no where to go. 

In 1988, after years of petitions for redress, Congress finally passed an act apologizing for the Internment and acknowledging that it was the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”  The act included reparations for survivors. It was signed by President Ronald Regan, who many believe did so only because it was a slap to the memory of F.D.R. 

Despite the fact that Supreme Court decisions on the most famous test cases during the war were overturned in the 1980’s because the War Department was found to have lied about or hidden facts in the cases, the underlying law allowing “emergency” internment has never been overturned. 

In 1950 the McCarran Internal Security Act was passed over the veto of President Harry Truman which allowed the internment of “each person as to whom there is a reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage,” by which was meant members of the Communist Party or their agents, dupes, and tools.  The Army was directed to designate holding camps and actually began construction of some.  Some were former Japanese internment camps or Prisoner of War camps.

Although the camps were never used, their existence was a continued threat.  After it was learned that the Nixon Administration had considered invoking the Act and interning anti-war protestors and Black Militants like the Black Panthers, congress revoked most of the internment provisions of the McCarran Act in 1971 substituting criminal trial and prison sentences for certain overt acts.

In 1993 the Supreme Court overturned many of the remaining sections of the law as an unconstitutional abridgement of free speech.

But vestiges of the act remain in force and have been cited in such recent prosecutions as the Pentagon Papers case in1972, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) involving the collection of intelligence by pro-Israeli lobbyists in 2005, and the current Bradley Manning case.

In the days following the 9/11 attacks there were public calls for the rounding up and detention of Arab and other practicing Muslim aliens of both illegal and legal status.  Broad new powers, some barely understood by the public, were granted to the government under the so-called Patriot Act which again could lead to possible wide spread detention in “the interest of national security.”

One thing that unites the radical right and the American left is a conviction that the McCarran Act camps are being readied for use against them.  An elaborate scenario involving UN Black Helicopters, a New World Order, and jackbooted Federal thugs kicking down doors to seize guns is a staple paranoia of the right which has taken on new urgency with them since the election of Barak Obama, the Muslim/Communist/Fascist/American-Hater.

The enhanced use of domestic surveillance and the coordination by Federal authorities in attacks on Occupy Movement encampments and demonstrators across the country fueled similar fears on the left.

While both paranoid scenarios seem farfetched, the nagging truth is that they don’t seem entirely impossible.  After all, it happened before.

It could happen again.