Post-tropical Storm Sandy on her visit to Chicago. (Photo credit: Me!)

Not only did Sandy merge with an Arctic cold front to create The Perfecter Storm, she merged with an election. Now that her remnants are spinning themselves out, it’s time to get back to the work of prognostication. In this venture, Sandy will be gone, but not forgotten. Until Election Day, and possibly after, analysts will consider Sandy’s impact on the outcome: Was the government’s reaction too fast or too slow? Was it sufficient in scope? Will climate change be a late entrant into this election’s discourse? Will turnout on Election Day be down in the hardest hit areas? Did the candidates say the right things or were they hurt by a perception that they were trying to parlay a disaster into a political points? So much to speculate on!

The weather, you may have noticed, happens everywhere, and so has made its mark on history. Most famously, the Spanish Armada was crippled by a hurricane off the coast of Ireland in August 1588. They would not defeat the British, nor would they ever again enjoy dominance over the seas. (NOTE: It is my personal belief that this was not technically a hurricane, but like Sandy was probably post- or extra-tropical. Talk to me after class if you want me to expound.)

The weather has shaped science too. Thunderstorms were the rage in the 18th century: Benjamin Franklin flew his famous kite, while Italian physician Luigi Galvani unpacked the electrochemical workings of nerves and muscles by observing the twitches of frogs legs rigged up to wires. As luck would have it, the discovery of the Galvanic response is also acknowledged as an influence on a literary classic, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which itself was a by-product of the weather. Shelley hatched the idea for The Modern Prometheus while she and her pals (including Percy Shelley and Lord Byron) were fighting cabin fever during the damp, cold, volcanically-induced weather of The Year Without a Summer.

For all that and volumes more, the intersection of the weather and American politics is a little bit slipperier. The aforementioned Year Without A Summer certainly did a small part shaping American history. It drove western migration from New England to as far west as Ohio and Indiana because of crop failures. Some towns in Vermont and Maine virtually vanished. Among those to move was the family of Joseph Smith, who resettled in western New York where Moroni would appear to him and Mormonism was born. (I think I just tied the weather from 200 years ago to this election. Score!)

The mayor-breaking blizzard of 1979.

Direct impacts of weather on American politics are surprisingly hard to find. One clear example comes from here in Chicago. In 1979, sitting Mayor Michael Bilandic was blamed for mismanaging the city’s response to two blizzards shortly before the mayoral primary. Thirty-five inches of snow fell over about two weeks and Chicago was simply not ready: streets went unplowed, garbage wasn’t picked up, mass transit was crippled, and six weeks later voters made Bilandic a lame duck mayor. The beneficiary of his bunglings, Jane Byrne, has asserted that she would have won without the snow, but historians and local lore alike are not so sure.

Nationally, if there is one leader we can attribute to the weather, it’s Herbert Hoover. Looking at his resume, Hoover seemed much more suited to policy architect/wonk than president. His career was as a mining engineer who rose to Secretary of Commerce under Harding and then Coolidge. Having made a name for himself helping to rebuild Europe after World War I, Hoover tried a brief run at the presidency in 1920, but essentially bowed out after losing the primary in California, his home state. It wasn’t until 1927 that he’d have his chance.

The rains started in the fall of 1926, causing significant flooding, but more importantly saturating the ground, priming it for the real water to come. Those would arrive in the spring of 1927 when the rains came and didn’t stop. They corresponded with and exacerbated the annual spring melt. They led to the breaching of almost 150 levees and inundated an estimated 27,000 square miles. They caused the greatest flood in American history.

Hoover spearheaded the relief effort. There was no FEMA then and he famously leveraged private resources to help with the relief effort noting, “I suppose I could have called in the whole of the army, but what was the use? All I had to do was to call in Main Street itself.” He coordinated ships to bring supplies and built tent cities to house the flood’s refugees. Perhaps most importantly Hoover utilized some new technology, the radio, to take to the airwaves with his pitch for relief efforts. This elevated his profile among the electorate and set the stage for his successful bid for the presidency in 1928.

That would be the only election Hoover would ever win. Those tent cities were eerie predecessors to the notorious Hoovervilles of the Depression. And there massive inequity in the relief effort for African-Americans who were affected. Hoover initially kept those quiet, but by 1932 those failures drove support to Franklin Roosevelt, helping to end African-American allegiance to Republicans that dated back to Lincoln. Mother Nature may have given him his chance at the White House, but she also laid the foundation to take it away.

The Plays for Presidents team recently held one of our regular meetings in the lush confines of our Google+ Hangout. As we are in the homestretch of the 2012 festival, much of the talk was about dotting I’s and crossing T’s: promoting all the openings, continuing to communicate with participants across the country, etc. But then we asked the question that arises in every production: what do we do next? Once all the houselights are up, sets are struck, and, most importantly, the votes counted, what are we going to do with ourselves? Educational outreach and a bigger, better 2016 festival are fine ideas, but I am here to throw down the gauntlet. I want Plays for Presidents to come clean on a horrifying oversight: the 16 missing American presidencies.

Students of American history – and really anyone who can distinguish between different four-digit numbers – may have noticed something fishy about our country’s past: we declared independence in 1776, but our “first” president doesn’t get sworn in until 1789. I know that we are falling behind in math and science, but did we really think that no one would notice? Something is clearly up.

What’s up is that George Washington was elected president under a governmental structure that didn’t take shape until the Constitution was written and ratified. Prior to that the “President” was actually the President of the Continental Congress; and, in fact, we had our first one of those guys 2 years before the Declaration was even signed. (Incidentally, John Hancock’s legendary, space-hogging signature might be somewhat forgiven since he held the title of President and the time. It wasn’t just an ego thing.)

I know full well that the roles and responsibilities of the 16 apocryphal presidents were not commensurate with George Washington et. al. The President of the Continental Congress was closer to emcee than Commander-In-Chief. He presided over the Congress’s proceedings, signed documents, kept meetings moving along, and probably delivered innocuous, corny jibes at delegates to keep things light. Ceremonial as these presidents were, they represented one of the critical anxieties that helped shape the future architecture of this country. The Founding Fathers had a seeming paradox on their hands: the newborn democracy would need strong leadership to survive, but democracy by definition needed to keep overly strong leadership in check.

We know, of course, how this all was resolved: representative democracy, federalism, and a separation of powers. Within this, the idea and place of the President of the United States was (re-)invented and the pre-Constitutional emcees largely forgotten. It is for them that I make my plea for the 2016 staging of 60 (or 61) Plays for 60 (or 61) Presidents. Here are a few starter tidbits, my lovely and talented playwright-y colleagues:

• You think that Cleveland invented the whole “elected to non-consecutive terms” thing? Nay, says Virginian Peyton Randolph, Grover the Poseur ain’t got nothing. Randolph was the first and third presidents. Plus, Thomas Jefferson called him “a most excellent man,” though “somewhat cold and coy towards strangers. (Incidentally, Hancock was the 4th and 13th. Talk about non-consecutive! Whoa boy!)
• While several Presidents owned slaves, Henry Laurens (President 5) trafficked in them. He was one of South Carolina’s wealthiest men and thousands of slaves came through his Charleston auction house, many shipped from the Bunce Island slave castle in Sierra Leone. Fate was not overly kind to him. He was a prisoner of war, doing more than a year in the Tower of London, after which he was never quite hale and hearty.
• What about Nathaniel Gorham? The Massachusetts native was a master debater, advocating fiercely for a strong Congress and for his state’s ratification of the Constitution. Still he admitted that, because of its size, the United States would surely eventually fracture into several independent countries. Oh, and he has a street named after him in Madison, WI, just a block or so from the Forward Theater’s production. While you cruise his strip, we’ll get cracking on the missing plays.

Tomorrow it begins. If the conventions are the real Opening Day for election season, then we should find ourselves quickly in the pennant race with the debates. To hear the candidates tell it, however, this is nothing of the sort. The pre-spin on both sides is all about how winning isn’t that important, or even relevant. It’s almost as if there is nothing to actually win and that the Debate in Denver is just an exhibition game with no conceivable impact on the outcome of the Championship to be held on Election Day.

This seems to be in stark contrast with what much of the electorate imagines can happen in a debate. I, for one, think every debate can be Lincoln and Douglas: intellectual titans delivering oratory, vision, and zingers in equal measure. They should be a forum for ideas and reason and the spirited flexing of rhetorical muscles. The trouble is that I am totally wrong. After all (a) the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates weren’t even for a presidential election (they were for the 1858 Senate race in Illinois) and (b) history shows that fatal blows are rarely attempted, let alone landed, in a modern American presidential debate.

(more…)