For Fear of an Elective King: George Washington and the Presidential Title Controversy of 1789 by Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon (review)

This is the first book-length study of a controversy to which historians, as Bartoloni-Tuazon notes at the outset, have rarely paid detailed attention. The book achieves two important things. Firstly, it demonstrates that the debate over titles went considerably beyond the Senate chamber where it has traditionally been located. Secondly, it convincingly (and often entertainingly) shows the extent to which the titles controversy was a lightning rod for deeper American concerns in the early republic.

Previous accounts of the controversy have usually focused on the debate in the Senate and between Senate and House over proposals for quasi-monarchical titles for the new president. Bartoloni-Tuazon however begins with three chapters exploring the context of those congressional arguments. The first covers the complicated use of titles in revolutionary America, the second the persistence of monarchical sympathies in the same period (seen particularly in attitudes to and depictions of Washington), and the third the sharp contemporary disagreements over the role of the presidency. The account of the debates that follows, while beginning with Congress, also explores the subsequent life of the issue in newspapers, private correspondence, and satirical poems and plays.

The titles dispute is thus shown to function on a number of levels. At its simplest it was a continuation of long-standing debates over where power should be located in the new nation, and who might wield it. But it also exposed that neither titles nor monarchical sympathies vanished with British rule. And there is a sense at times that Washington stands apart as a quasi-monarchical figure, potentially even for those who deplored the idea of elaborate titles. Bartoloni-Tuazon ultimately argues that the rejection of titles was also a rejection of “the monarchy they symbolised” (158). The book makes clear that that rejection was slower in the country than in Congress, but it was perhaps not as complete as the author concludes, and indeed there is some contradiction here with her subsequent suggestion that after Washington left office “there would be only uncertainty” about the presidency (160).

The book is based on deep and effective use of archival material (particularly the valuable volumes of the Documentary History of the First Federal Congress). Many readers will be familiar with the John Adams–William Maclay clash, far fewer with such sources as St. George Tucker’s satirical dramatization of it in Up and Ride; or, The Borough of Brooklyn. Our understanding of the first is much enriched by the addition of the second. Throughout, Bartoloni-Tuazon’s deployment of well-chosen quotations renders the dispute, in all its iterations, freshly vivid.

Some aspects of the interpretation are open to further debate, such as the rejection of monarchy already mentioned, or the argument that the taint of monarchism was crucial to subsequent Federalist collapse. I was also surprised that a study in which John Adams is so central does not engage with C. Bradley Thompson’s John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty. However, these are small points. Bartoloni-Tuazon absolutely demonstrates the importance of the titles controversy to the early development of the US presidency and to our understanding of contemporary American political sensibilities. She also, not always the case with deeply researched work, tells a thoroughly good story.