Businessmen As President

The NYT goes through the history:

The pursuit of wealth is a real source of identity in America. We are accustomed to seeing ourselves chasing riches, even if we’re not in business the way Mr. Romney was.

Still, Americans haven’t elected many businessmen as presidents. The principal examples come from the Roaring ’20s, a time of huge stock market gains, when faith in business reached all-time highs. Consider our presidents in that decade: Warren G. Harding had been a newspaper publisher in Ohio. Calvin Coolidge, trained as a lawyer, was once a vice president of the Nonotuck Savings Bank in Northampton, Mass., and was known for saying that “the chief business of the American people is business.” And Herbert Hoover was a mining expert who traveled to Australia in its 1890s gold rush and became a mine manager.

But businessman presidents disappeared after the market crash of 1929 and during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when many Americans believed that the business world had failed the nation. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who came from a wealthy family but was never a businessman and never talked like one, handily defeated both Hoover in 1932 and Alf Landon, a banker and independent petroleum producer, in 1936.

Not until the Bush presidencies did businessmen, in the suit-and-tie sense of the word, retake the White House — though it otherwise could be argued that Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer, was a businessman, too. George H. W. Bush was elected during a soaring stock market, and his son George W. Bush won during a real estate boom. Both men were oil venture entrepreneurs.

You might think that the current economic slump would drain support for businessmen, as it did in the Great Depression. But there are differences. Back then, the United States hadn’t yet reached the pinnacle of economic power. Today, many people worry about an apparent crumbling of American economic growth as emerging markets surge around us. There is a widespread fear that the American wealth machine is faltering — and, as a result, many people are aiming to rediscover the nation’s traditional strengths.

I think the attributes of businessmen are overrated, but we will see which way people will vote on Tuesday.