By R. Craig Sautter

A populist desire for “reform” runs deep in the psyche of American voters. Every few decades, a presidential candidate channels this rebellious spirit. Andrew Jackson was such a candidate in 1828. So were William Henry Harrison in 1840, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, William Jennings Bryan in 1896, Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Barack Obama in 2008.
But no candidate for President carried the reform banner for honesty and competence more naturally, or tragically, than Horace Greeley. In 1872, Greeley was the nation’s leading …

By John Copeland Nagle

We are told that this year’s presidential election is unprecedented in many ways. The American voters are faced with the choice between an unlikely candidate who has been repudiated by many within his own party, and a …

By Joel Fox

Today, presidential debates between candidates are considered fixtures of our political scene. Though they generate the occasional dust-up—like Donald Trump complaining that some of this year’s debates conflict with …

By Charles Rappleye

It was not the craziest election of the 20th Century, but it might have been the strangest. One candidate was a natural politician, affable and gregarious, a true man-of-the-people who favored flashy suits and a …

By David Sehat

True or False? Franklin Delano Roosevelt claimed to be a conservative defender of the nation’s founding ideals.

If you answered “both,” you’d be correct. We don’t tend to think of FDR as a conservative today, and at certain points he would have rejected the label, but in 1936 that was how he wanted to be understood. He was three years into his first term and it was far from clear there would be a second. The mandate from his 1932 landslide victory seemed exhausted. Americans were seven years into the catastrophe of the Great Depression, which had destroyed whole industries and spread economic pain across …