In 1833, President Andrew Jackson was a steamboat passenger when a lieutenant he had once fired asked him if he was, in fact, President Jackson. Jackson allowed as how he was, and was greeted with a punch in the nose.
Early presidents travelled unprotected, and young America liked it that way. The country's love was their protection, we said.
Willamette University Professor Richard Ellis' "Presidential Travel," well-laced with lively anecdotes, is a highly readable look at how presidents wanted to be seen and how Americans wanted to see them, and how travel defined it.
Ellis laments that the topic has been little-explored "because presidential travel provides an important window into the changing relationship between the president and the people." And that relationship may have come full circle - or more.
The Federalist Washington visited each of the 13 colonies in an elegant coach with liveried attendants. Thomas Jefferson rode his own horse with one servant. The popular James Monroe travelled as a private citizen at his own expense.
Americans wanted neither a presidential peacock or a mere stump-speaker, and nothing mildly redolent of Wicked King George, recently trounced and still reviled.
Attitudes changed with the nation.
No. 12, Zachary Taylor, a dusted-off general who shunned offers of private rail cars, was called "Old Zach" by the people who shook his hand through the passenger car window.
Try that today.
For years, some presidents used free passes and palatial coaches provided by happily unregulated railroads.
In the early 1900s, when Theodore Roosevelt travelled across New York City under heavy security, a letter to The New York Times asked if we were "nearing the conditions of monarchy where its crowned head is held in hate by its subjects." And this was after three presidential assassinations in 36 years. It took that much to get mandated federal protection for our head of state.
In 1906, the president finally got his own travel budget, $25,000 a year after eye-gouging partisan squabbling.
Why should he have one? It could be a partial tool. Other Americans didn't have travel budgets. Weren't we all equal?
Well, almost. Congress had had one for decades.
The president needs to travel. But who pays for it?
In 1998, Bill Clinton travelled to six African countries in 12 days for more than $43 million. About 80 per cent was covered by military budgets, the State Department picked up some as did other agencies, with a tiny fraction covered by the executive office.
One study estimates that the government recovered about two per cent of the costs for 46 campaign-related trips taken by George W. Bush in 2002 because they were mingled with less-partisan functions.
This, Ellis writes, was not breaking the law, it was taking advantage of it.
In 1992, Ellis writes, hearings found that in 1990 President Bush had spent $29,000 of his $100,000 allowance for 108 days of travel one year. Ellis says such costs now are "concealed in a baffling array of department and agency budgets." Who pays? Who knows?
Franklin Roosevelt was the first president to fly, often to critical Second World War conferences. But the train took the president to the people.
Between Labour Day and Election Day in 1948 Truman delivered about 250 speeches from the back of a train. Oddly, at its height, the "whistle-stop" campaign gave way to TV and air travel.
By the 1970s, suggestions arose that the "regal presidency" was returning as presidents flew over the United States instead of travelling through it.
New York Times columnist William Safire suggested a "deroyalization" of the presidency. The citizen president, he said, was surrounded "with royal trappings against all propriety and American tradition." Air Force One was a mansion in the sky, with its 85 telephones, seven bathrooms and a luxury suite while millions lacked health insurance.
The president today rolls into select large cities in a motorcade with tinted windows, leaving onlookers unsure of which car he even is in; he often speaks to a screened audience and departs.
Precautions following numerous assassinations and attempts have made the presidency vulnerable to charges that it has lost touch with the people. But the travel is safer and more predictable.
Ellis sees no solution.
"No amount of traveling can break down the barrier now erected between the president and the people," he concludes. "All that is left is spectacle."
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"Presidential Travel. The Journey From George Washington to George W. Bush"
By Richard Ellis (University Press of Kansas)
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