According to Russell Riley, this remark roughly typifies the stance of American presidents from 1831 to 1965. Riley contends that presidents Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson were all slow to act on the nation’s racial problems.

Instead, according to Riley, presidents preferred their role as guardian of the status quo: “The central finding of this study is that the presidency has routinely served as a nation-maintaining institution on the issue of racial inequality. Indeed, the evidence arrayed here strongly suggests that one of the enduring roles each president is required to execute is that of the nation-keeper, a protector of the inherited political and social order and a preserver of domestic tranquility” (10).

Riley argues that in all the great civil rights struggles of American history-abolition, integration of the military, Brown v. Board of Education, Little Rock, the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the president had to be forced into action. Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, was far more concerned with preserving the Union. President Eisenhower, reviewing Justice Department actions on school desegregation, reportedly said, “Jesus, do we really have to file a brief? Aren’t we better off staying out of it?” (179). President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy were initially mystified by the civil rights movement.

Even when presidents did act aggressively on racial inequality, their motives may have been less than pure. In Inside the White House (Pocket Books, 1995), journalist Ronald Kessler reports that President Johnson told two Democratic governors his true reason for supporting civil rights legislation: “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years” (241).

Riley notes that “Americans like to celebrate their presidency as a place of heroic achievement” (3). The theory of “the monumental presidency” has made its way into the scholarly literature. As Riley notes, “In one simple model crafted by Charles O. Jones, the presidency is assigned constitutional supremacy in these phases of the policy process: problem definition, priority setting, and program formulation” (269). Riley’s exhaustive, thoroughly convincing argument is that “there is a strong cultural inclination to attribute to the presidency disproportionate credit for the nation’s successful movement toward racial equality” (238).

Clearly, Riley believes that American presidents should have made civil rights a higher priority than nation-keeping. However, this argument is subject to criticism. Hannah Pitkin, in Representation (Atherton, 1969), notes that elected officials sometimes act as “trustees,” sometimes act as “delegates,” and sometimes act as “politicos” (being trustees when they can and delegates when they must). Similarly, Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro, in The Rational Public (University of Chicago Press, 1992), provide encyclopedic evidence that American public policy is rarely substantially dissonant from American public opinion. Indeed, presidents who get “ahead” of public opinion may lose political influence. For example, President Clinton’s 1993 massive health care proposal—opposed by the public and rejected by Congress—played a role in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994.

In addition, Riley may have unrealistic expectations of public officials. In The United States of Ambition (Times, 1991), Alan Ehrenhalt observes that many individuals run for public office to gratify their own egos. Many want to hold high public office not to “do” something, but to “be” something. Riley seems surprised that American presidents from 1831 to 1965 did not place racial progress over their own desires to acquire and maintain political power and preserve their political jurisdiction.

The Presidency and the Politics of Racial Inequality: Nation-Keeping from 1831 to 1965 successfully challenges the conventional wisdom about the super-human efforts of American presidents to achieve racial progress. And that is a major intellectual contribution.