Who's to say not expanding would have prevented the Civil War? The slavery debate was already raging over existing territories and states. The tension was baked into the Constitution's compromises from 1787. Polk not acquiring the Southwest doesn't obviously defuse that — it may have just delayed or relocated the conflict. The Missouri Compromise had actually worked for 30 years. From Polk's vantage point in the 1840s, the precedent was that Congress could manage these tensions through deal-making. It wasn't unreasonable to think they'd do it again. ***If 30 years of politicians, compromises, and institutions all failed to resolve slavery, pinning special responsibility on Polk specifically requires explaining why his expansion was the tipping point rather than just one more link in a very long chain. Matthew evades this through a large, and easy, pronunciation. Historians making such largesse claims should do better.
Wait, so when Texas was a nation, its independence was not recognized by Mexico? My dad, the forever Texan in Illinois never told me that. When I lived in NM, he quipped that it used to be Texas, to which I responded, you mean Mexico? I grew up in Pittsburgh and have lived in various regions of the US. It’s so interesting to see how our history is understood regionally and by who teaches us.
There are profoundly important aspects to Polk's presidency that should be added to the story, and I think these things are not only very important historically but actually leads to important practical knowledge value for today given the situation the world is in, there is an additional and super-important structural dimension here. When Polk expanded territory, he also extended the Jacksonian system design into it.
For example, when the essay mentions bringing back of the Independent Treasury System, well that wasnt an isolated policy; it was part of a set that worked to prevent the re-emergence of a nationally centralized credit and powerful special interest groups coordination system (like the Second Bank of the United States) and made sure that capital entering new regions diffused through state and local institutions rather than being directed from a tight and decision-making-exclusionary hierarchical national command structure.
The economic plans of the Democrats’ opponents for California ended up being, even down to details, the development economics that the Congo has received in recent decades. But Polk and the Democratic Party made sure that California had home grown localized institutions whose governance was directed by sophisticated publicly accessible civic structures and that its economy, both in an an external facing sense and also internally, rejected the logics of comparative advantage (that term wasnt be used yet, but the arguments and reasoning proffered for it were the same and the rhetoric used to argue for, well, I could copy n paste and trick you tell it was from a wsj article today), centrally directed infrastructure, educational, fiscal, decision making. And a host of lower case "d" democratic governance structures. And then, after smashing success, when a homegrown oligarchy formed, California was then able to use all that to defeat it, legally, peacefully, defeat it
That’s a lot of information and I’d like to know what it means. If you have the time and inclination, would you please unpack this into kitchen table language? My background is in healthcare, so I know how easy it is to say something that flies right over the heads of others, as if I’m an apple grower and someone asks me about the difference between a red delicious and a honeycrisp. 🙂 As in, “Oh, okay. Basic.” 🙃
From what you said, I glean that there was a governing infrastructure that was put in place to protect, prevent, benefit some entities over others. Jacksonian and the era and Polk being a slaveholder tells me that it was intended to further the infrastructure of the pro-slavery states. But then you refer to civic infrastructure in terms of local communities that to me wouldn’t have included the people who had been living there for generations. That makes me wonder if what you’re describing was actually an infrastructure that would have enslaved the locals. So, somewhere in there, I got lost. I do know that the Treaty of Hidalgo Guadalupe continues to be active today with regards, at least, to water rights for those families who were landowners in the region before the US annexed the territory.
Hi, thanks for the reply, and that’s a fair question! And your confusion makes sense because the original point was framed at a systems level not as a lived one. A simpler way to put it, when Polk expanded the country, the Democratic approach wasnt just to take land, but to make sure new places could mostly run their own local economies, governments, and politics instead of being controlled from a tight center run by a relatively tiny number of socio-professionally networked people.
So policies like the Independent Treasury meant the federal government didn’t funnel money through a single powerful centralized network, which is *just one* element of a diversified structure that made it so that credit and investment could grow through many pluralized local and state institutions instead of being tightly directed by a few elites. Just as important, this sat within a broader federated, bottom-up system of publicly accessible party and civic structures, local party organizations, ward systems, associations, municipalities, and more that helped link things like education, infrastructure decisions, scientific and technical development, and pluralized local capital formation into a more participatory governance process that, while regrettably exclusionary (white males and partially for white females) nonetheless greatly widened and diversified access to decision making.
That doesn’t mean the system was just or inclusive, far from it; slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and early generations of these structures often had explicit racial exclusion, but it does mean the structure of governance and economics was far more locally distributed, publicly accessible, and accountable/contestable. My point isn’t that this solved moral issues (it didn’t), but that it shaped whether places like California developed as controlled extractive regions with fairly tightly homogenized economies who were structured to be a certain way by a mass scale geographic economic central planning system or as more locally driven societies with real internal capacity and diversified and heterogenous economies, academes, science, etc, etc
Ah, hence your reference to the Congo. I follow Krugman, so I know a little bit about “resource economy” based on extraction of resources, where the infrastructure and power dynamic is limited to a few. And Heather Cox Richardson had an interview with Vanessa Williamson about taxation, where they discussed the importance of taxation in a democracy. If the government is funded by extraction of resources (oil, minerals) or by means other than its people (the uber wealthy, corporations, tariffs, foreign entities) the people (other than the few billionaires) lack the power to control the government.
It seems I may have mis-communicated a bit. RE your reply: 1) the structure of taxation is very important and it varies so it must be gotten right, so at what level is it taxed, Polk and the vast federated organization that he was a member of, made sure that (in the NE, Mid West, and West; the South ran a very different system) most all government revenue intake and spending occurred at the local level of government while the regional level (the states) were the second highest and the national level was the smallest. 2) government here is an abstraction, governments and their analytical, deliberative, and decision making structures vary by alot, they made sure the government had many access nodes for the direct manipulation of it and it was deeply integrated with publicly accessible and internally contestable *real* civic society. Krugman advocates for deeply centralized, standardized, and decision-making-exclusionary systems
Always fascinating to have more specific history lessons, and to see the (alarming) parallels with current events.
There is so much truth to this.
A very enlightening essay. I appreciate how the information expands understanding of a President that is often quietly not discussed.
Who's to say not expanding would have prevented the Civil War? The slavery debate was already raging over existing territories and states. The tension was baked into the Constitution's compromises from 1787. Polk not acquiring the Southwest doesn't obviously defuse that — it may have just delayed or relocated the conflict. The Missouri Compromise had actually worked for 30 years. From Polk's vantage point in the 1840s, the precedent was that Congress could manage these tensions through deal-making. It wasn't unreasonable to think they'd do it again. ***If 30 years of politicians, compromises, and institutions all failed to resolve slavery, pinning special responsibility on Polk specifically requires explaining why his expansion was the tipping point rather than just one more link in a very long chain. Matthew evades this through a large, and easy, pronunciation. Historians making such largesse claims should do better.
Wait, so when Texas was a nation, its independence was not recognized by Mexico? My dad, the forever Texan in Illinois never told me that. When I lived in NM, he quipped that it used to be Texas, to which I responded, you mean Mexico? I grew up in Pittsburgh and have lived in various regions of the US. It’s so interesting to see how our history is understood regionally and by who teaches us.
There are profoundly important aspects to Polk's presidency that should be added to the story, and I think these things are not only very important historically but actually leads to important practical knowledge value for today given the situation the world is in, there is an additional and super-important structural dimension here. When Polk expanded territory, he also extended the Jacksonian system design into it.
For example, when the essay mentions bringing back of the Independent Treasury System, well that wasnt an isolated policy; it was part of a set that worked to prevent the re-emergence of a nationally centralized credit and powerful special interest groups coordination system (like the Second Bank of the United States) and made sure that capital entering new regions diffused through state and local institutions rather than being directed from a tight and decision-making-exclusionary hierarchical national command structure.
The economic plans of the Democrats’ opponents for California ended up being, even down to details, the development economics that the Congo has received in recent decades. But Polk and the Democratic Party made sure that California had home grown localized institutions whose governance was directed by sophisticated publicly accessible civic structures and that its economy, both in an an external facing sense and also internally, rejected the logics of comparative advantage (that term wasnt be used yet, but the arguments and reasoning proffered for it were the same and the rhetoric used to argue for, well, I could copy n paste and trick you tell it was from a wsj article today), centrally directed infrastructure, educational, fiscal, decision making. And a host of lower case "d" democratic governance structures. And then, after smashing success, when a homegrown oligarchy formed, California was then able to use all that to defeat it, legally, peacefully, defeat it
That’s a lot of information and I’d like to know what it means. If you have the time and inclination, would you please unpack this into kitchen table language? My background is in healthcare, so I know how easy it is to say something that flies right over the heads of others, as if I’m an apple grower and someone asks me about the difference between a red delicious and a honeycrisp. 🙂 As in, “Oh, okay. Basic.” 🙃
From what you said, I glean that there was a governing infrastructure that was put in place to protect, prevent, benefit some entities over others. Jacksonian and the era and Polk being a slaveholder tells me that it was intended to further the infrastructure of the pro-slavery states. But then you refer to civic infrastructure in terms of local communities that to me wouldn’t have included the people who had been living there for generations. That makes me wonder if what you’re describing was actually an infrastructure that would have enslaved the locals. So, somewhere in there, I got lost. I do know that the Treaty of Hidalgo Guadalupe continues to be active today with regards, at least, to water rights for those families who were landowners in the region before the US annexed the territory.
Hi, thanks for the reply, and that’s a fair question! And your confusion makes sense because the original point was framed at a systems level not as a lived one. A simpler way to put it, when Polk expanded the country, the Democratic approach wasnt just to take land, but to make sure new places could mostly run their own local economies, governments, and politics instead of being controlled from a tight center run by a relatively tiny number of socio-professionally networked people.
So policies like the Independent Treasury meant the federal government didn’t funnel money through a single powerful centralized network, which is *just one* element of a diversified structure that made it so that credit and investment could grow through many pluralized local and state institutions instead of being tightly directed by a few elites. Just as important, this sat within a broader federated, bottom-up system of publicly accessible party and civic structures, local party organizations, ward systems, associations, municipalities, and more that helped link things like education, infrastructure decisions, scientific and technical development, and pluralized local capital formation into a more participatory governance process that, while regrettably exclusionary (white males and partially for white females) nonetheless greatly widened and diversified access to decision making.
That doesn’t mean the system was just or inclusive, far from it; slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and early generations of these structures often had explicit racial exclusion, but it does mean the structure of governance and economics was far more locally distributed, publicly accessible, and accountable/contestable. My point isn’t that this solved moral issues (it didn’t), but that it shaped whether places like California developed as controlled extractive regions with fairly tightly homogenized economies who were structured to be a certain way by a mass scale geographic economic central planning system or as more locally driven societies with real internal capacity and diversified and heterogenous economies, academes, science, etc, etc
Also, thanks for unpacking that.
Ah, hence your reference to the Congo. I follow Krugman, so I know a little bit about “resource economy” based on extraction of resources, where the infrastructure and power dynamic is limited to a few. And Heather Cox Richardson had an interview with Vanessa Williamson about taxation, where they discussed the importance of taxation in a democracy. If the government is funded by extraction of resources (oil, minerals) or by means other than its people (the uber wealthy, corporations, tariffs, foreign entities) the people (other than the few billionaires) lack the power to control the government.
It seems I may have mis-communicated a bit. RE your reply: 1) the structure of taxation is very important and it varies so it must be gotten right, so at what level is it taxed, Polk and the vast federated organization that he was a member of, made sure that (in the NE, Mid West, and West; the South ran a very different system) most all government revenue intake and spending occurred at the local level of government while the regional level (the states) were the second highest and the national level was the smallest. 2) government here is an abstraction, governments and their analytical, deliberative, and decision making structures vary by alot, they made sure the government had many access nodes for the direct manipulation of it and it was deeply integrated with publicly accessible and internally contestable *real* civic society. Krugman advocates for deeply centralized, standardized, and decision-making-exclusionary systems