Soon after winning the presidency in 1845, according to the
oft-repeated anecdote, James K. Polk slapped his thigh and
predicted what would be the ""four great measures"" of his
administration: the acquisition of some or all of the Oregon
Country, the acquisition of California, a reduction in tariffs, and
the establishment of a permanent independent treasury. Over the
next four years, the Tennessee Democrat achieved all four goals.
And those milestones--along with his purported enunciation of
them--have come to define his presidency. Indeed, repeated ad
infinitum in U.S. history textbooks, Polk's bold listing of goals
has become U.S. political history's equivalent of Babe Ruth's
called home run of the 1932 World Series, in which the slugger
allegedly gestured toward the outfield and, on the next pitch,
slammed a home run. But then again, as Tom Chaffin reveals in this
lively tour de force of historiographic sleuthing, like Ruth's
alleged ""called shot"" of 1932, the ""four measures"" anecdote
hangs by the thinnest of evidentiary threads. Indeed, not until the
late 1880s, four decades after Polk's presidency, did the story
first appear in print. In this eye-opening study, Tom Chaffin,
author, historian, and, since 2008, editor of the multi-volume
series Correspondence of James K. Polk, dispatches the thigh-slap
anecdote and other misconceptions associated with Polk. In the
process, Chaffin demonstrates how the ""four measures"" story has
skewed our understanding of the eleventh U.S. president. As
president, Polk enlarged his nation's area by a third--thus
rendering it truly a coast-to-coast continental nation-state.
Indeed, the anecdote does not record, and effectively obscures
complex events, including notable failures--such as Polk's botched
effort to purchase Cuba, as well as his inability to shape the
terms of California's and the New Mexico territory's admission into
the Union. Cuba would never enter the federal Union; and those
other tasks would be left for successor presidents. Indeed, debates
over the future of slavery in the United States--debates
accelerated by Polk's territorial gains--eventually produced
perhaps the central irony of his legacy: A president devoted to
national unity further sectionalized the nation's politics,
widening geopolitical fractures among the states that soon led to
civil war. Engagingly written and lavishly illustrated, Met His
Every Goal?--intended for general readers, students, and
specialists--offers a primer on Polk and a revisionist view of much
of the scholarship concerning him and his era. Drawing on published
scholarship as well as contemporary documents--including heretofore
unpublished materials--it presents a fresh portrait of an enigmatic
autocrat. And in Chaffin's examination of an oft-repeated anecdote
long accepted as fact, readers witness a case study in how
historians use primary sources to explore--and in some cases,
explode--received conceptions of the past.
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