The New Republic magazine has the latest entry in the slew of articles comparing the modern impeachment inquiry to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. This one is long and well-researched. From the article:
In a bit of fortuitous timing, spring 2019 saw the publication of Brenda Wineapple’s The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, a new history of the barely remembered impeachment of the seventeenth president. Johnson is known mostly as Lincoln’s reelection running mate, a loutish, ticket-balancing Southern Democrat who, after his elevation to the presidency, became a bitter foe of the Radical Republicans’ plan for postwar Reconstruction in the former Confederacy.
Wineapple says she never intended The Impeachers to be as relevant to our own era as it’s turned out to be. She began it back when the prospect of a Trump presidency was a late-night monologue joke, and says her husband, the book’s first reader, was also the first to note how eerily it tracked the current moment. Other journalists and critics, including Mother Jones’s Tim Murphy, have noted how much Johnson resembles Trump, in word and deed. Johnson was erratic, racist, operatically self-pitying, and blamed every failure of his administration on enemies he believed to be trying to destroy him. He held wild, unscripted proto-rallies, in a nationwide tour called the “Swing Around the Circle.” These gatherings were nominally devoted to official presidential business, but instead served transparently political goals: to defeat the Fourteenth Amendment, to force Congress to seat members sent by Southern state governments still dominated by former Confederates, and to help Johnson win the next presidential election. He dragged along two nationally beloved war heroes, Ulysses S. Grant and Admiral David Farragut, to ensure he’d get an enthusiastic crowd at every stop.
During this tour, he let loose with some of the most inflammatory statements a president has ever made, often while those crowds alternated between goading him on and heckling him. Johnson actually got heckled quite a lot. In Cleveland, a crowd kept yelling, “three cheers for Congress!” At another stop, a newspaper reporter claimed, the crowd shouted down Secretary of State William Seward, with one person laying out the heckling strategy thusly: “We don’t want to hear you or Johnson. We shall only cheer for Grant and Farragut. You others are bad men.” Johnson, who would rant about his enemies even when speaking from prepared remarks, was also frequently just plain incoherent at these stops. When someone in the crowd, perhaps anticipating Twitter discourse, shouted at the president, “Don’t get mad!” he responded: “I will tell you who is mad…. ‘Whom the Gods want to destroy they first make mad.’” As Wineapple writes: “It wasn’t quite clear what or whom he meant.”
