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[Expositions 8.2 (2014) 90–112]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

Presidential Statesmanship as Civic Education 
 
JASON JIVIDEN 

Saint Vincent College 

 

 

*Editor’s Note: This is Part Two of a two-part Symposium. Part One, which includes the 
introduction and contributions by Trepanier, DiLuzio, and Caspar, was published in Vol. 8, No. 
1 (2014).  
 

Acting as statesmen, American presidents sometimes offer, in both word and deed, a powerful 

source of civic education for the American public. In this article, I examine the notion that the 

greatest presidential statesmen have periodically sought to educate the American people about 

the most important of political questions. While an exhaustive account of such a topic is certainly 

beyond the scope of this article, we can at least paint in broad strokes and begin to examine the 

issue by discussing alternative civic “lessons” offered by several U.S. presidents. I focus 

primarily upon Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt.  

I choose these presidents in particular because, first, it is generally understood that each of 

them ably used the rhetorical possibilities of the executive as a vehicle for civic education. 

Second, in the circumstances confronting them, each offered a political rhetoric that dealt 

thoughtfully and forthrightly with foundational questions about the nature and scope of popular 

government rightly understood. I argue that each president’s view of civic education, and the 

president’s potential role in fostering that education, is shaped by his understanding of human 

nature, the nature and basis of rights, and the proper ends and means of American democracy. 

Differences in first principles lead to very different civic “lessons.”  

This article is divided into several sections. In the first section, I examine some of the relevant 

literature on the notion that the best presidents are necessarily civic educators. In the second 

section, I very briefly discuss the American Founders’ take on the relationship between the 

executive and public opinion, particularly as it relates to the political science of The Federalist 

Papers. In the remaining sections, relying particularly on their public rhetoric, I explain and 

compare civic “lessons” provided by Presidents Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt.1 By 

comparing the fundamental ideas presented in their respective writings and speeches, we can 

discern an important development in the character and content of presidential civic education. 

We find an education rooted in remembering the natural rights principles of the American 

Founding (best articulated by Lincoln) transformed into an education aimed at the progressive 

overcoming of those same principles (best articulated by Wilson and later modified by FDR). I 

argue that such comparisons are important because they prompt us to consider alternative 



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answers to fundamental questions not only about executive leadership, but about American 

democracy more generally. 

 

“Taking the People to School”: Great Presidents as Civic Educators 

 

We frequently hear that the best American presidents are, among other things, civic educators. 

By virtue of their inherent visibility, and their claim to be the sole national officer elected by the 

great body of the people, presidents are in a position to teach citizens about policy, institutions, 

and ideas through both word and deed. For some, like presidential scholars Marc Landy and 

Sidney Milkis, at least one mark of good statesmanship resides in a president’s willingness and 

ability to offer the American people such an education.2 Identifying the great U.S. presidents as 

Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR, Landy and Milkis suggest that each provided 

answers to the question of what the regime should be; each offered the people a civic teaching on 

the proper ends and means of American democracy.  

Landy and Milkis thus claim that great presidents have historically taken “the people to 

school.”3 This language of the president-as-teacher is, of course, not uncommon. It became a 

staple of studies on presidential behavior after the publication of Richard Neustadt’s seminal 

1960 book, Presidential Power. When Neustadt referred to “presidential teaching,” he referred 

mainly to a rhetorical strategy in which presidents seek to garner support for policy proposals 

while maintaining prestige among Congress, party, and the people.4 Landy and Milkis seem to 

suggest that “taking the people to school” includes at least this much, but they also go farther. 

Great presidents are civic educators, they argue, when they find a way to move the people, 

mobilize party, succeed in their legislative agenda, and when they articulate policies of reform 

(in service of regime maintenance) with reference to the established principles and institutions of 

American republicanism.5  

Elvin Lim also posits that great presidential leadership and presidential teaching go hand in 

hand, and he rightly observes that this idea of a “pedagogical” presidency “pervades scholarly 

conceptions of leadership.” He points us toward Arthur Schlesinger, Erwin Hargrove, William 

Muir, Fred Greenstein, and Mary Stuckey, all of whom have suggested that a large of part of 

presidential leadership resides in the ability to teach or educate.6 Like Landy and Milkis, Lim 

appears to single out FDR as the prime example of the president-as-civic educator here. Lim 

reminds us of Roosevelt’s claim that, by pursuing popular support for his policy agenda, the 

president is “persuading, leading, sacrificing, teaching always, because the greatest duty of a 

statesman is to educate.”7 One need only consider the fireside chats to see the point here. 

Likewise, in her account of twentieth century presidential speechwriting, Carol Gelderman 

argues that FDR understood that “the essence of political leadership in a democracy was 



Presidential Statesmanship as Civic Education  92 
 

teaching.” As the country’s “foremost civic educator,” Roosevelt called the room where he held 

press conferences “his ‘schoolroom,’ the budget, his ‘textbook,’ his speeches, ‘seminars.’”8 

For Lim, Landy and Milkis, Gelderman, and others, FDR may have emerged as a great civic 

educator, as a statesman-rhetorician of the highest order, but he did not do so in a historical 

vacuum. That is to say, Roosevelt built upon a foundation laid by previous presidents. Perhaps 

great presidents, those we can confidently call statesmen, have always engaged in civic 

education through political rhetoric. Perhaps all have “taken the people to school.” But, as Jean 

Yarbrough observes in her review of Landy and Milkis’ book, “it would seem to matter just what 

‘school’ [the people] attend.” While Landy and Milkis suggest that all great presidents offer a 

civic teaching that builds upon or reaffirms our founding principles, Yarbrough asks, “how can 

Roosevelt’s interpretation of the founders’ principles be right and also Jefferson’s and 

Jackson’s?” What about LBJ’s, or Reagan’s?9 Yarbrough’s point is well taken. Insofar as we 

grant that great presidents indeed attempt to be civic educators, what kind of education do they 

offer? Do presidents provide different, perhaps even competing schools of civic education, or are 

the lessons fundamentally the same? It is some of these disagreements on first principles—and 

the consequences of these disagreements for presidential civic education—that we will examine 

below. To understand how, and in what sense, presidents have come to be characterized as civic 

educators, we must begin at the beginning, with the American Founders. 

 

The Founders: Civic Education, Institutions, and Leadership 

 

In their letters, speeches, and writings, the American Founders often spoke to the need for civic 

and moral education to help preserve and transmit the American regime to future generations. A 

general diffusion of knowledge, particularly in the rights and duties of citizenship and the proper 

ends of government, combined with an understanding of virtues such as moderation, self-

restraint, humility, liberality, and courage, would help to form good republican citizens and 

foster attachment to decent republican institutions. Yet, as is often noted, the cultivation and 

administration of such things were left largely to the prudential authority of state and local 

governments, private families and institutions.10 We might ask, from the Founders’ point of 

view, what role presidents might have in educating citizens through statesmanship and political 

rhetoric.  

The Founders did see a role for the president in civic education of a fundamental sort, and we 

know that presidents of the early republic performed such a function. This is seen most clearly in 

the use of presidential proclamations, declarations, open letters, and inaugural addresses. Landy 

and Milkis remind us that long before Teddy Roosevelt coined the term, Washington took 

advantage of the “bully pulpit” to teach the nation about the requisites for healthy republican 

government in his Farewell Address, the “most overtly didactic of all presidential utterances.”11 



93  Jividen 
 

 
 

President Jefferson, despite his ambiguity on executive authority, would help to continue the 

same course, particularly in his explanations of the “Revolution of 1800,” in his First Inaugural 

Address, and through the Louisiana Purchase. When Washington and Jefferson did speak to the 

people, they largely articulated and reflected upon the principles and structures of republican 

government and American constitutionalism.12 

Yet, when one turns to the Federalist Papers dealing with the executive, there is little said 

about presidential education of the public, at least not explicitly. The separation of powers, the 

president’s mode of election, his enumerated powers, his tenure of office, and absence of votes 

of no confidence against the president all combine to help provide what Hamilton refers to as 

“personal firmness” in the executive. In situations where short-term, hasty, and perhaps overly 

passionate public opinion might call for policies harmful to the common good, presidential 

independence and firmness allow the cool and deliberate sense of the community to reassert 

itself.  

Hamilton thus focuses on the executive’s independence from public opinion in light of the 

danger of demagoguery and faction.13 This is not the common twentieth-century depiction of 

“visionary” presidents educating, or leading the people toward expanded ideas of liberty, 

equality, and justice. Rather, The Federalist characterizes the president as a kind of conservator 

or agent of moderation. And, here at least, that function seems to rely mainly upon the 

constitutional structure of the presidency and its place within the separation of powers. 

The Founders’ views here are predicated on fundamental assumptions about human nature, 

rights, and the legitimate purpose of government. Their political science rested on the notion 

that, by nature, human beings are equally endowed with inalienable rights, and that the purpose 

of government is to secure those rights. Given that we possess these rights equally as a 

fundamental fact of human nature, no man has a claim to rule over another man without his 

consent. Governments thus derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. These 

ideas, held to be true everywhere and always according to the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God, 

are most succinctly expressed in the Declaration of Independence, but they are found throughout 

the state constitutions, public documents, and sermons of the day.  

Moreover, as Madison noted in Federalist Paper 51, since human nature is everywhere and 

always complicated and imperfect, we are in perpetual need of government. For the same reason, 

it is simply too risky to trust any one man or group of men in that government with absolute, 

arbitrary power over our lives, liberties, and possessions. Good governments are thus 

constitutionally balanced, limited, and structured.14 This view of a timeless, imperfect human 

nature informed the Founders’ design of various institutions and structures to help secure our 

natural and inalienable rights. The biggest threat to our safety and happiness, the Founders 

reasoned, is the problem of faction. The Founders’ view on the persistence of faction is best 

expressed in Federalist 10. The seeds of faction, Madison argued, are sown in the nature of man. 



Presidential Statesmanship as Civic Education  94 
 

To remove the causes of faction would thus require the impossible: that we change human nature 

by finding a way to extinguish our self-love, our diverse and unequal talents, abilities, and 

interests.15 Human nature offered permanent political problems that could not be eliminated by 

institutions, education, or progress; the best we can hope for is control the effects of faction in 

the best manner possible.  

The Founders’ understanding of executive leadership and civic education ought thus to be 

understood in light of their broader understanding of human nature and the ends and means of 

healthy republican government. For the Founders, however useful excellent individuals might be, 

as Madison famously suggested, enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.16 And 

worse than the absence of greatness is the presence of demagogues, the flatterers who exacerbate 

and feed upon the problem of faction in popular government. Leadership, for the Founders, was 

intimately related to the problem of demagoguery and faction. We know from reason and 

experience that, just as human beings are endowed with reason and capable of virtue, we are also 

prone to recklessness and vice. Our shared and imperfect human nature suggests that, just as 

leaders are prone to flatter, the people are prone to flattery.17  

One thus gets the sense that, for the Founders, if presidents are to provide civic lessons to the 

people, among those lessons might be the following: presidential leadership might sometimes be 

useful, desirable, or necessary; it might even be crucial in helping to educate citizens in 

republican virtue and first principles. But prudence dictates that that we not rely too heavily upon 

such leadership. A healthy republican government would do well to rely primarily upon 

institutions, and the character of its citizens, rather than upon the character and rhetorical 

leadership of presidents as the chief means of securing our natural and inalienable rights.  

 

Lincoln: Civic Education as Remembering First Principles 

 

Aside from FDR, when academics, journalists, and politicians characterize the president as the 

nation’s civic educator-in-chief, they will perhaps most often point to Abraham Lincoln. This is a 

consequence not only of the profound crisis Lincoln faced in leading the nation through the Civil 

War and emancipation. It is also a consequence of the political rhetoric he left behind. It’s been 

said that the actions of statesmanship consist largely in “saying something,” and Lincoln, 

perhaps more than any other American president, had a gift for saying things that stick with us.18 

Clearly an adequate account of Lincoln’s, or of any great president’s, efforts at civic education 

would require much more space than we can indulge in here. We are again forced to settle down 

on what we take to be the most illuminating and representative examples and themes.  

Lincoln’s sweeping response to secession and his eventual pursuit of emancipation illustrate 

the profound sources of presidential authority embedded within the Founders’ energetic 

executive. Presenting his case to Congress in his Message to Congress in Special Session, and to 



95  Jividen 
 

 
 

the people in his First Inaugural, Lincoln defended his actions primarily, though not exclusively, 

through an appeal to the provisions of the U.S. Constitution and the principles of the American 

Founding, particularly as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.  

More importantly for our purposes here, the war itself might call into question the adequacy 

of the Founders’ solution to the problem of faction as expressed in the Federalist. If that solution 

resides primarily in mechanical, institutional arrangements (particularly the extended territory 

and multiplicity of interests) and not in leadership, those mechanisms only served to stave off the 

war. And once the war came, some might argue, it was primarily the leadership of a great 

presidential statesman that guided us through the crisis. Yet, if Lincoln held to such a view, he 

certainly never said so explicitly.19 Rather, even in his tenure as president, Lincoln never 

appeared to abandon the civic teaching on leadership he offered as a young man in his 1838 

Lyceum Address.  

At the Lyceum, Lincoln argued that history suggests popular governments are always prey to 

demagogues and that, insofar as leadership is necessary, America had always been fortunate that 

chance circumstances offered the most gifted and ambitious of political men opportunities to put 

their talents to good use. And the people themselves once had an outlet for the worst of their 

passions in a common foe during and after the Revolution. But new circumstances re-expose 

timeless dangers. The people themselves, without an outlet to siphon off the most destructive of 

passions, turn those passions on one another. The ostensible topic of Lincoln’s speech was the 

growing problem of mob violence and disregard for the rule of law in 1830’s America. But the 

fundamental problem, Lincoln argued, was not destruction of life and property, but the 

detachment from the principles of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the laws that mob 

violence engenders. A people detached from the Founding principles and institutions are ripe for 

demagoguery. Without such a grand project, to borrow the language of the Federalist, the most 

ambitious of men might commence demagogues and end tyrants, seeking to tear down the 

regime the Founders built. Only through a political religion of law-abidingness and a 

rededication to the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration could a free people resist 

the temptations of demagogues and defend itself from the most dangerous of leaders.20 

Lincoln’s views on leadership here are not unlike those of the Founders. His account of the 

dangers of demagoguery, and its contribution to the problem of faction, is premised on the notion 

that leaders and the people alike share an enduring and imperfect human nature. Lincoln once 

suggested that “Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with 

the men of this [the Civil War], we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad 

and good.”21 A sober acknowledgment of our own nature suggests that we guard against 

demagoguery by guarding against our own destructive passions. Lincoln’s solution resides in a 

thorough-going civic education in the principles and institutions of the American Founding. 

According to Lincoln, reverence for the laws must be taught in the schools and seminaries, 



Presidential Statesmanship as Civic Education  96 
 

preached from the pulpit, passed on from parents to children, proclaimed in legislative halls and 

enforced in the courts of justice.22 Of course, we might add that presidents may be called upon to 

help foster this civic education. In great national crises, such statesmanship might be especially 

necessary. But for Lincoln, like the Founders, the ultimate object of our civic veneration is not 

the leadership of a president, but the principles of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the rule 

of law. 

We see something of Lincoln’s own efforts at civic education prior to assuming the 

presidency, particularly in his speeches on the slavery crisis of the 1850’s. With the spread of 

slavery into the western territories, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas’ Popular Sovereignty 

doctrine, and the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln became increasingly concerned that a new and 

dangerous idea was creeping into our political discourse. Coming out of political retirement, 

Lincoln would argue that a new and invigorated slave interest had abandoned the intention of the 

Founders by seeking not to keep slavery on the path of ultimate extinction, but rather by 

declaring moral indifference to the institution (Douglas) or by even declaring slavery a positive 

good for both slave and master (Calhoun). This attempt to change public attitudes toward slavery 

could only be accomplished, Lincoln claimed, by rejecting the first principles of American 

democracy.  

In his 1856 Speech at a Republican Banquet, Lincoln suggested: 

 

Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can 

change the government, practically just so much. Public opinion, on any subject, 

always has a “central idea,” from which all its minor thoughts radiate. That 

“central idea” in our political public opinion, at the beginning was, and until 

recently has continued to be, the equality of men.23  

 

In response to the slave interest, proper statesmanship would require a war of ideas. Above all, it 

would require an attempt at civic education in first principles, particularly in the idea of natural 

equality. 

Lincoln repeatedly reminded his audiences that government by consent of the governed 

presupposes that all men, everywhere and always, are equally endowed by nature with the same 

inalienable rights; that no one is, by nature, wise or virtuous enough to rule over another without 

that other’s consent. The principle of natural equality, Lincoln argued, is the very sheet anchor of 

American republicanism.24 This the slave interest emphatically denied. But, for Lincoln, 

rejecting the principle of natural equality had profound consequences for American public 

philosophy, for it ripped the theoretical grounding from any principled, objective defense of 

limited government by consent of the governed.  



97  Jividen 
 

 
 

This was the essence of Lincoln’s oft-repeated argument that the institutions of the U.S. 

Constitution could not be disentangled from the principles of the Declaration of Independence. 

The Constitution, Lincoln argued, was framed to secure the principles set forth in the 

Declaration. Indeed, these principles justified the American people’s very right to form and 

maintain a government the first place. Lincoln’s speeches of the 1850s, especially the Peoria 

Address, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and his response to the Dred Scott decision, are filled 

with statements to this effect. Lincoln argued that, at bottom, the slave interest was attempting to 

reeducate the American public to forget that the central defining idea of American republicanism 

is that all human beings are, by nature, created equal. And when the war came, as president, 

Lincoln would often remind the American people (in speeches like his First and Second 

Inaugurals and the Gettysburg Address) about the founding principle of natural equality, that the 

war really was about the moral status of slavery, and that the war had a ultimately had a 

philosophical cause.25  

For Lincoln, combating the slave interest required that the American people be reminded of 

the centrality of the principle of natural equality to the very notion of government by consent of 

the governed. Like the Founders, Lincoln saw civic education as consisting primarily in 

remembering the first principles of America republicanism. And like some of the Founders, 

while Lincoln did not explicitly or directly comment on the president’s role as civic educator, he 

repeatedly performed that function through his political rhetoric. Yet if Lincoln and the Founders 

saw presidential civic education as promoting this remembering of first principles, later 

presidents would offer an alternative view. Beginning in the progressive era of the late 

nineteenth and early twentieth century, we witness the beginning of a very different take on the 

president-as-civic educator, one that focuses not so much upon civic education as remembering 

first principles, but rather upon redefining and transcending those principles. 

 

Wilson: Leadership, Progress, and Civic Education 

 

In discussing the idea of a “pedagogical” presidency, Lim argues that the notion of president-as-

civic-educator was present at the Founding, but that the case for the pedagogical president is best 

made by considering the “theories and practices of the founding rhetorical presidents,” TR, 

Wilson, and FDR. The rise of the modern, rhetorical presidency marks a change in the way 

presidents speak to the American people, a change in how often they speak, and a change in what 

they speak about. By the early twentieth century, in support of their policy agendas, presidents 

would increasingly appeal directly to the people (as opposed to Congress or party) through 

speech making. By going around Congress and directly to their constituents, presidents can 

pressure legislators to acquiesce in the presidential agenda, often by discussing not only the 

principles of republican government, but the finer points of policy and presidential leadership 



Presidential Statesmanship as Civic Education  98 
 

itself. If the Founders’ fear of presidential demagoguery is not dismissed, it is at the very least 

muted.26   

Yet, when it comes to presidents and civic education, the rise of the rhetorical presidency 

coincides with, and is intimately related to, something still more fundamental than the frequency 

of presidential speechmaking, going public, the bully pulpit, etc. The founding of the twentieth 

century rhetorical presidency was inextricably bound up with a reevaluation of the principles and 

institutions of the American Founding. To the extent that the Founders and Lincoln saw the 

presidency as a resource for civic education, that education was meant to be provided in service 

of transmitting the principles and institutions of the Founding to future generations. This need for 

civic education, indeed much of the content of that education, was understood in light of certain 

first principles: a timeless and imperfect human nature, that all men are equally endowed by 

nature with inalienable rights, that the purpose of government is to secure those rights, that 

faction is the greatest danger to securing those rights, that good government is necessarily 

limited and balanced government, etc. The rhetorical presidency as we understand it today is a 

product of American progressivism, the first intellectual and political movement in the United 

States to feature as its central characteristic a critique of the Founding principles mentioned 

above. We can thus expect that it is not merely the method by which a president educates that 

changes with the progressives (i.e., increased public addresses, press conferences, going public 

etc.). The content and character of that education also changes.  

Although many look to TR’s use of the bully pulpit as a prime example of the rhetorical 

presidency, the broader and more fundamental relationship between the progressive critique of 

the Founding, statesmanship, and civic education is perhaps best expressed in the speeches and 

writings of Woodrow Wilson. Inspired by Hegel’s philosophy of history, Wilson believed the 

idea that there might be trans-historical truths that apply to all men at all times was mistaken. 

Such ideas were merely expressions of the American mind in a particular historical epoch. 

Wilson sought to help bring forth the modern, rational, bureaucratic state in America, and to 

keep abreast of Progress with a capital “P,” proper statesmanship would require a direct 

engagement with the principles and limited government institutions of the American Founding.27  

Key to Wilson’s analysis of the Founders’ Constitution was a critique of separation of powers, 

what he referred to as the spirit of “checks and balances.” According to Wilson, while such a 

view might have been appropriate for the eighteenth century, this understanding of the 

Constitution had become dangerously behind the times. A constitution read in the spirit of 

checks and balances unnecessarily inhibits and restricts energetic, active government. Old 

political formulas, such as the spirit of checks and balances, “do not fit the present problems; 

they read now like documents out of a forgotten age.”28 New economic problems exist in 

twentieth- century industrial America and we must overcome the spirit of checks and balances if 

we are to keep pace with the times. According to Wilson, the old theory of checks and balances 



99  Jividen 
 

 
 

does not work because it mistakenly conceived of government as a machine. The problem, 

Wilson argued, is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls under “the theory 

of organic life.” Wilson urged that government “is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is 

modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer 

pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and 

live.”29  

Above all, Wilson claimed, our understanding of the Constitution tended to inhibit the 

emergence of competent and energetic political leadership to solve social and economic 

problems. Wilson thus sought a means by which to craft a new notion of statesmanship for the 

twentieth century, a vision of leadership for a new age. According to Wilson: 

 

A great nation is not led by a man who simply repeats the talk of the street-

corners or the opinions of the newspapers. A nation is led by a man who hears 

more than those things; or who, rather, hearing those things, understands them 

better, unites them, puts them into a common meaning; speaks, not the rumors of 

the street, but a new principle for a new age; a man in whose ears the voices of the 

nation do not sound like the accidental and discordant notes that come from the 

voice of a mob, but concurrent and concordant like the united voices of a chorus, 

whose many meanings, spoken by melodious tongues, unite in his understanding 

in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak what no 

man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice.30 

 

According to Wilson, such leaders have a kind of oracle into history, for they see the direction in 

which the progress of history is moving and they can understand the common opinion more 

completely and more accurately than the people themselves.  

Perhaps the greatest virtue of Wilson’s leader of men is his unique ability not only to read and 

interpret public opinion but to articulate that opinion back to the people in a readily 

understandable and palatable form. The leader of men must prepare democratic citizens for the 

next stage of national progress. Although the leader can see over the next horizon, the people 

cannot. Thus, the leader must not get too far out in front of the people in his policy proposals or 

his arguments and justifications for them. The leader of men is thus, above all a political 

rhetorician, of the first order. He must “read the common thought: he must test and calculate very 

circumspectly the preparation of the nation for the next move in the progress of politics.”31 

Wilson eventually turned to the presidency as the most fertile ground for this visionary 

progressive leadership. He came to argue that the American president is not only a party leader 

and chief executive officer under the Constitution, but is also the only national office elected by 

the entire nation, and thus, the only office capable of legitimately claiming a national mandate. 



Presidential Statesmanship as Civic Education  100 
 

Compared to Congress, the president enjoyed a greater visibility and a closer relationship with 

the entire American people, better able to lead public opinion through political rhetoric.32 

Wilson’s president is the chief legislator for the nation, tightly connected with Congress, 

energetically pursuing a national policy agenda. Yet Wilson’s presidency moves beyond the 

energetic executive envisioned by Hamilton and the American Founders.33  

The constitutional presidency of the American Founders was designed in accordance with the 

notion that while executive authority was ultimately and fundamentally derived from the 

sovereignty of the people, in civil society that authority is defined, structured, and limited by the 

people’s Constitution as fundamental law. As mentioned above, to help guard against the 

dangers of faction and demagoguery, the Founders created an energetic executive independent 

from Congress and temporary whims of short-term public opinion. These dangers could not be 

transcended or overcome by historical progress because they were the consequence of an 

imperfect and unchanging human nature; they were enduring political problems. And the 

Founders constructed their political institutions—including the presidency—accordingly.34  

But, with Wilson, the energy and independence of the American executive is seen in a 

different light. For Wilson, institutional limitations on government were on the wrong side of 

history. Insofar as human nature can evolve and develop over time—as Wilson’s progressive 

historicism posits—institutions designed in light of the notion of a necessarily imperfect and 

unchanging human nature are obsolete and counterproductive. Wilson posited that the seeds of 

faction are not forever sown in the nature of man. Contrary to the political theory of the 

Federalist, the very causes of faction could be overcome by history. As history progresses and 

human nature improves, the most controversial of political questions will have been agreed upon 

and the emphasis in government turns from politics to administration.35  

Clearly, Wilson’s vision of the president as a leader of men speaks explicitly to the idea of the 

president-as-civic educator. With the details of governing handed over to a federal bureaucracy 

of administrative experts, one of the key responsibilities of Wilson’s president is to articulate and 

defend far-reaching, transformative policy to the people. In short, Wilson’s president would 

serve as a civic educator of progress. Wilson was explicit in suggesting that such leadership 

would require a confrontation not only with the Founders’ Constitution, but also with the 

principles of the Declaration of Independence.  

Wilson understood that the notion of natural and inalienable rights serves as the foundation of 

limited government. And, for Wilson, part of what the best presidents must undertake is to 

reeducate the people about the nature and basis of liberty, to offer a new civic education that 

redefines our fundamental political principles in light of a progressive notion of history. Wilson 

asserted that, although we tend to think of the Declaration of Independence as a highly 

theoretical document, “except for its assertion that all men are equal, it is not.” Although the 

document “names as among the ‘inalienable rights’ of man the right to life, liberty and the 



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pursuit of happiness,” Wilson claimed, “it expressly leaves to each generation of men the 

determination of what they will do with their lives, what they will prefer as the form and object 

to their liberty, in what they will seek their happiness.” In brief, Wilson argued, “political liberty 

is the right of those who are governed to adjust government to their own needs and interests.”36  

On Wilson’s reading, liberty is thus no longer understood with any reference to pre-political, 

natural and inalienable rights, but is rather the continually changing, conventional result of a deal 

between the government and the governed.37 As the result of conventional agreement, and 

devoid of any basis in nature, the meaning of liberty is not subject to any limitations or 

guidelines save the will of the parties at the time of that agreement.38 Whereas Lincoln had once 

declared “All honor to Jefferson, to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for 

national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce 

into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” 

Wilson reads the idea of timeless natural and inalienable rights out of the American political 

tradition.39 For Wilson, this effort was to be guided by American presidents, as the chief moral-

political educators of the people, leading the nation toward the next stage in the development of 

American democracy. To meet this challenge, as leaders of men, the best presidents must help to 

reeducate the American people about the proper ends and means of American democracy. 

Presidential civic education, on this view, resides not so much in helping the people to remember 

or the maintain the principles of the Founding, as it does in prompting the people to reevaluate, 

or perhaps even reject, those principles in the name of historical progress. 

 

FDR: Civic Education and Statesmanship as the Redefinition of Rights  

 

Woodrow Wilson was the chief intellectual architect of the modern rhetorical presidency, and his 

vision for executive leadership—indeed his vision for American democracy—rested 

fundamentally upon the president’s role as a civic educator. Yet, as we have seen above, when 

scholarly commentators discuss presidents as civic educators, Franklin Roosevelt often emerges 

as the example par excellence. In facing the profound challenges of the Great Depression and 

World War II, it would fall to FDR to institutionalize Wilson’s model of presidential leadership, 

the administrative state, and civic education. Through his political rhetoric, Roosevelt found a 

way to make sense of the challenges facing the American people in a palatable and reassuring 

form. With regard to the Great Depression, perhaps the most significant and far-reaching aspect 

of FDR’s political rhetoric was his characterization of statesmanship as the perpetual redefinition 

of rights in light of changing political and economic circumstances. We will focus on this aspect 

of FDR’s statesmanship here, for it speaks directly to the notion that the best presidents are first 

and foremost civic educators charged with teaching the people about the legitimate ends and 

means of American democracy. 



Presidential Statesmanship as Civic Education  102 
 

In response to the Great Depression, FDR routinely argued that the federal government and its 

president are duty-bound to regulate increased segments of the national economy, to intervene 

into the relationship between capital and labor, and to establish economic safety nets for the 

young, the sick, and the elderly. In his public speeches and writings, FDR routinely explained his 

New Deal policies as solutions to a potentially regime-threatening economic crisis. But beneath 

the New Deal, indeed fundamental to it, was a civic teaching about the purposes of American 

democracy and the nature of statesmanship itself.  

Campaigning for the presidency in 1932, Roosevelt delivered an address to San Francisco’s 

Commonwealth Club that laid out the political theory of the New Deal. Here Roosevelt would 

claim that the profound economic crises of the Great Depression required that the national 

government must take on a more active, more “positive” role in securing the social and economic 

well-being of the people.40 Roosevelt framed his proposals in light of a progressive economic 

history, and his chief concern here was the regulation of banking and business, along with 

increased social welfare policy. We had once given free rein to “financial titans” to help build up 

the American economy, but current economic conditions call for a “reappraisal of values.” 

Roosevelt claimed that today’s task is not seeking out new resources and producing new goods. 

Our industrial plant is built, he urged. Today’s task is rather “administering resources,” dealing 

with the problem of under-consumption, “adjusting wealth and products more equitably,” and 

“adapting existing organizations to the service of the people.” Roosevelt summed up the matter 

by famously declaring, the “day of enlightened administration has come.”41  

Roosevelt sought to work with business to help create an “economic declaration of rights, an 

economic constitutional order.”42 The declaration of such rights, Roosevelt argued, was nothing 

more than a redefinition of the terms of the Declaration of Independence, a rewriting of 

America’s social contract. He explained: 

 

The Declaration of Independence discusses the problem of Government in terms 

of a contract. Government is a relation of give and take, a contract, perforce, if we 

would follow the thinking out of which it grew. Under such a contract rulers were 

accorded power, and the people consented to that power on consideration that 

they be accorded certain rights. The task of statesmanship has always been the re-

definition of these rights in terms of a growing and changing social order.43 

 

Roosevelt here followed Woodrow Wilson’s reading of the Declaration, with the terms of the 

social contract (which would seem to include not only the means but, importantly, the ends of 

government) capable of being continually renegotiated. Our most fundamental rights, rights once 

claimed to be natural and inalienable, become rights “accorded” to us as the result of a deal 

struck between the people and their rulers.44 The formulation of the social contract as we find it 



103  Jividen 
 

 
 

in the Declaration suggests that governments are instituted among men to secure their natural 

(i.e., pre-existing, pre-political) and inalienable (i.e., non-negotiable) rights. Roosevelt’s reading 

of the Declaration obscured this fundamental premise, and thus departed significantly from the 

Founders’ and Lincoln’s understanding of the first principles of American government. As such, 

the ends of government are open to perpetual redefinition and any principled limits to the means 

we might consent to in pursuit of those ends no longer have any objective basis. The means of 

government would be increasingly fashioned by administrative agencies, while politics would 

turn increasingly toward civic education and opinion leadership by the executive. Insofar as our 

most fundamental rights must be perpetually re-defined, it helps if we have a proper leader, 

Wilson’s rhetorically gifted “man of the people,” to see into the future, discern the movement of 

history, and point us in the direction we must tend.  

Although Roosevelt began to sketch out his economic declaration of rights in the 

Commonwealth Club Address, these rights are enumerated in more detail in his famed 1944 

State of the Union Address. Here Roosevelt argued that our republic began “under the protection 

of certain inalienable political rights,” but as our “our industrial economy expanded—these 

political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” Today “true 

individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous 

men,’” Roosevelt claimed, “‘are not free men.’”45 Over time, certain “economic truths have 

become accepted as self-evident.” He called for a “second,” or economic Bill of Rights. Among 

these new rights are:  

 

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or 

mines of the Nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and 

clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at 

a return which will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every 

businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair 

competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every 

family to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good 

health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, 

sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education.46 

 

“All of these rights,” Roosevelt suggested, “spell security. And after this war is won we must be 

prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human 

happiness and well-being.”47  

In principle, Roosevelt’s view of statesmanship consisted in redefining the right to pursue 

happiness into a right to happiness itself, at least happiness understood as material well-being or 

security.48 Roosevelt’s economic bill of rights clearly does not demand an equality of results in 



Presidential Statesmanship as Civic Education  104 
 

any unqualified sense. What it does do, however, is call for equality in particular or specific 

results in that pursuit (gainful employment, decent wages, etc.), elevating them to the status of 

“rights,” or more accurately stated, entitlements.49 As Landy and Milkis suggest, these rights 

were best understood as “programmatic rights,” secured through the pragmatic administration of 

the economy and a government freed from the “demands of formal constitutionalism.”50 

Roosevelt’s elevation of these rights certainly resonated with the American people. Landy and 

Milkis rightly suggest that, after the Roosevelt era, nearly every major public policy is 

characterized as a “right,” asserted to automatically confer constitutional status to programs like 

Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps. According to Landy and Milkis, the attempt to 

secure these rights required a “relentless government identification of problems and the search 

for methods by which these problems might be solved.”51 This never-ending seeking after 

problems to solve in the name of securing perpetually redefined rights is the very essence of the 

New Deal’s pragmatic liberalism. 

In effect, through such highly visible rhetorical pieces like the Commonwealth Club Address 

and the 1944 State of the Union, Roosevelt attempted to educate the people toward a new 

understanding of equality, in which the national government can no longer rest content to merely 

secure the conditions whereby individuals might pursue happiness. Rather, government must 

actively seek to secure at least a minimal or baseline equality of condition. And the engine of this 

change resided in a growing administrative bureaucracy and an increasingly powerful rhetorical 

presidency, in which the executive would redefine our most fundamental rights, and perpetually 

reeducate the American people, in light of changing historical and economic conditions.   

Roosevelt’s view of the presidential statesman as civic educator thus owes more to Wilson’s 

political theory than to that of Lincoln or the American Founders. It is often noted that part of 

Roosevelt’s and his speechwriters’ (particularly Adolf Berle’s) rhetorical prowess was the ability 

to offer a radically new teaching about rights, and the very nature and scope of government, that 

looked like the old liberalism that the New Deal sought to supplant.52 Roosevelt’s rhetoric works 

more comfortably with the language of rights than that of his progressive predecessors. But the 

focus on the redefinition of founding ideas, and the primary emphasis on the administrative state 

and executive leadership of public opinion, reveal just how indebted to Wilson FDR’s depiction 

of statesmanship and civic education really is.  

FDR once suggested that Lincoln transfused the concepts of the Framers with new meaning. 

Landy and Milkis rightly suggest that, in doing so, FDR offers insight into his own 

understanding of statesmanship.53 That FDR saw statesmanship in these terms, that he saw 

statesmanship as residing fundamentally in giving new meaning to old ideas seems correct. 

However, whether Lincoln, or for that matter the Founders, saw statesmanship in that light is 

another question, a question that, in my opinion, Landy and Milkis do not adequately consider. 

Presumably, FDR meant by this statement that, by applying the idea of natural equality to blacks, 



105  Jividen 
 

 
 

Lincoln gave new meaning to the Founders’ principles. Indeed, Landy and Milkis suggest as 

much.54 However, Lincoln repeatedly suggested that his duty was not to give new meaning to old 

ideas, but to resist the slave interest’s attempt to transfuse the principles of the Founding with 

new meaning. And like the Founders, Lincoln did not claim that the statesman’s duty is to 

educate and guide the people toward the redefinition or overcoming of first principles, but to 

assist the people in the maintenance of those principles.55 The argument that FDR was forced to 

reinterpret the American constitutional in order to save it is indeed a powerful one, but, arguably, 

it does not attach enough weight to the fact that Roosevelt’s recasting of the Declaration 

denatures the rights professed therein and robs the Declaration and Constitution of any 

theoretical, objective defense of limited government. Insofar as this teaching is a key part of 

FDR’s civic teaching, that teaching is more fundamentally indebted to Wilson and the 

progressives than to the Founders or to Lincoln. 

 

Conclusion 

 

The foregoing discussion briefly examines some of the civic teachings offered by just three U.S. 

presidents. Again, any exhaustive account of such matters would require far more than one can 

offer here. Nor do I wish to imply that the Founders’, Lincoln’s, Wilson’s, or FDR’s political 

thought can be merely reduced to the ideas presented above. But I do think these ideas are 

nevertheless fundamental to their views on statesmanship and civic education and I do think we 

can draw some useful conclusions. Insofar as presidents are civic educators, it does matter what 

lessons they offer. Examining the civic lessons of Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR are instructive 

because each offers arguments that force us to consider the nature and basis of rights, the 

limitations of human nature, the proper ends, and the necessary means of American democracy.  

One would be hard pressed to deny FDR’s lasting influence on our expectations of 

presidential speechmaking, and on our expectations about the kind of civic education presidents 

should offer to the American people. His rhetoric of leadership and economic rights should 

certainly resonate with us today. Yet, whatever one might think of FDR’s institutionalization of 

the progressive rhetorical presidency, or his economic bill of rights, these things rest 

fundamentally upon a far-reaching critique of the political theory informing Lincoln and the 

Founders’ understanding of popular government, and the president’s educative role in it. By 

rejecting the natural rights and limited government constitutionalism of Lincoln and the 

Founding, this transformation came at a great cost. If we understand our most essential rights as 

no more than the result of a tentative bargain with the national government, and there are no 

trans-historical limitations placed up the objects of our consent, then we’ve arguably sacrificed 

any objective, principled defense of limited government by consent of the governed. The 



Presidential Statesmanship as Civic Education  106 
 

necessity of this moral-theoretical foundation for American democracy is what Lincoln saw so 

clearly in his dispute with the slave interest. 

Thus, it should be clear by now that when we refer to presidential statesmen as civic 

educators, we mean by civic education something broader and substantially more significant than 

a particular president’s attempts to persuade citizens of his policy agenda. While such things are 

surely important, in its most serious sense, civic education is a part of liberal education, that is, 

an education worthy of a free human being. As such, civic education points us toward the 

question of how we ought to live together. Through our careful reflection upon them, presidential 

speeches and actions can serve as enduring sources of civic education well beyond a president’s 

tenure in office. The civic lessons offered by the Founders, a Lincoln, a Wilson, or an FDR, for 

example, are just as available to citizens today as they were during the slavery crisis, the 

progressive era, or the Great Depression. Their arguments are guided by first principles, and 

through their rhetoric those principles are articulated to us. By weighing and comparing their 

arguments, we contribute to our own civic education today. Indeed, today, when it seems we 

expect as a matter of course that presidents will offer the nation moral and civic guidance on 

even the smallest of concerns, we are better able to evaluate and judge that guidance if we have 

considered well the civic lessons of the great American statesmen of the past. 

 

 

Endnotes  
 

1. Portions of this article, especially the sections on Wilson and FDR, are adapted from 

arguments made in my book, Jividen 2011. 

2. Landy and Milkis 2000, 6. Also see Landy and Milkis 2009. 

3. They borrow this phrase from Felix Frankfurter’s characterization of FDR. See Felix 

Frankfurter to Franklin Roosevelt, August 9, 1937, Corcoran Papers, Box 210, Library of 

Congress. Cited in Landy and Milkis 2000, 6. 

4. See Neustadt 1990, 84, 87–90, 108, 188–91. 

5. Landy and Milkis 2000, 233. 

6. Lim 2008, 117–120. See Hargrove 2000 195; Muir 1995, 13–17; Greenstein 2000, 195; 

Stuckey 1990, 97. 

7. Rosenman 1938–1950, 1:756. Cited in Lim 2008, 119; Landy and Milkis 2000, 158, 234–

35. 



107  Jividen 
 

 
 

8. Gelderman 1997, 11. Lim points us toward similar statements in Schlesinger 1957, 539; 

Leuchtenburg 1995, 15. Also see Leuchtenburg 1963, 330. Here Leuchtenburg suggests 

that FDR’s many press conferences “served […] as a classroom to instruct the country in 

the new economics and the new politics.” 

9. Yarbrough 2001, 143–44. 

10. See, for example, Peek 1954, 83–92; Peterson 1975, 332–46; Allen 1988, 469, 521–22; 

Padover 1953, 313–14. 

11. Landy and Milkis 2000, 33. 

12. See Ibid., 40–79. See esp. 41, 71, 78–79 on Jefferson as civic educator; also see Bailey 

2007. 

13. Cooke 1982, 482. 

14. Ibid., 349. 

15. Ibid., 58–59. 

16. Ibid., 60. 

17. The term “leadership” is mentioned twelve times in The Federalist. Of those, eleven 

times the term is used disparagingly. Only once is the term used favorably and it is in 

reference to the leaders of the American Revolution. See Ceaser 1979, 192–97. 

18. See Frisch and Stevens 1983, 4. 

19. Compare with the (in)famous and admittedly esoteric reading of the Lyceum and 

Temperance Addresses in Jaffa 1959. 

20. See Basler 1953, 1:108–15. 

21. Ibid., 8:101. 

22. Ibid., 1:112. Lincoln’s words here are especially reminiscent of John Adams’ advice to 

the colonies in response to the Stamp Act in his “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal 

Law.” See Padover 1954, 3–21. 

23. Ibid., 2:385. 

24. Ibid., 2:266. 



Presidential Statesmanship as Civic Education  108 
 

25. See, for example, Ibid., 4:168–69, 258, 438; 7:23; 8:333. 

26. See Lim 2008, 6–12; Ceaser, Thurow, Tulis, Bessette 1981; Tulis 2009; Tulis 1987. On 

the argument that elements of the rhetorical presidency have always been part of the 

American political tradition, see Nichols 1994, Medhurst 2008. 

27. On Wilson’s historicism and the principles of the American Founding, see Pestritto 2005, 

esp. chapters 1–2; Kesler 1984; Kesler, 1989. 

28. Wilson 1908/1961, 57; Wilson 1913/1961, 19–20, 41. 

29. Wilson 1913/1961, 42; cf. Wilson, 1908/1961, 56- 57. 

30. Link 1966–1993, 19:41–42. 

31. Ibid., 6:659. 

32. Wilson 1908/1961, 68. Milkis and Nelson 2003, 231–35; Ceaser 1979, 170–212. 

33. Ibid., 57 (54–81 more generally). See Ceaser 1979, esp. 192–97; Tulis 1984, 117–44. 

34. For example, see Federalist Papers 10, 51, 63, and 71 in Cooke 1982. 

35. See Wilson 1908/1961, 54–81; Link 1966–1993, 5:357–58. Wilson 1889, 631; Pestritto 

2005, 209–210, 221–52. 

36. Ibid., 4; cf. Wilson 1913/1961, 42–43. 

37. Ibid., 5. 

38. Kesler 1984, 115–16; Kesler 1989, 157–58. 

39. Basler 1953, 3:376. 

40. Rosenman 1938–1950, 1:742–56. 

41. Ibid., 1:752. 

42. Ibid., 1:752. 

43. Ibid., 1:753. 

44. Ibid., 1:754. Here I closely follow Kesler 1989, 161–63. See Wilson 1908/1961, 4; 

Wilson 1913/1961, 42–43. 

45. Ibid., 13:40–41. 



109  Jividen 
 

 
 

46. Ibid., 13:41. 

47. Ibid., 13:41. 

48. See Frisch and Stevens 1983, esp. 330–334; Landy and Milkis 2000, 158, 193–95. 

49. See Eden 1993, 137n204; Mansfield 1991, 56–59, cf. 31–34, 93–95, 185–86, 196–200; 

Mansfield 1993, 96–111. 

50. Landy and Milkis 2000, 194. 

51. Ibid., 194. 

52. See, for example, Eden 1993. 

53. Rosenman 1938–1950, 5:68. See Landy and Milkis 2000, 157–158. 

54. Landy and Milkis 2000, 114–15, 157–158, 242–243. 

55. See, for example, Basler 1953, 2:398–410, 3:220. 

 

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