Next to ancestral Americanism, a country upbringing, a widowed mother, and dependent younger brothers and sisters, nothing is so desirable as birth in a log cabin. Indeed, such a birthplace subsumes the first two qualifications for the presidency. For a long time after the campaign of 1840, when old Tippecanoe Harrison was swept into office as the simple “log-cabin candidate,” a man could hardly hope for the White House unless he had first been close to a log cabin.

Buchanan, Lincoln, and Garfield were among the boys actually reared in log cabins, but a lot of other candidates did what they could to identify themselves with such dwellings. Daniel Webster, hankering after the presidency and not even winning a nomination, admitted ruefully: “It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin, but my elder brothers and sisters were born in a log cabin and raised amid the snowdrifts of New Hampshire.” Despite the New England snows he summoned up as a compensation, Webster, a politician with older siblings, a mother who was not widowed, and a birthplace not built of logs, obviously sensed that his career could not extend beyond the Senate.

Horace Greeley’s biographer was smarter. Admitting that his candidate also had the misfortune not to be born in a log cabin, the writer at least made it clear that Greeley’s birthplace was “small and unpainted.” Moreover, he implied that Greeley’s schoolhouse was built of logs. Hayes had even better luck. Though his first home was built of brick, his parents had the foresight to add a log extension to their substantial house.

Even so late as 1924 a log cabin was a valuable asset, as Coolidge’s biographer indicated by stating “this is another story of the Log Cabin to the White House.” Then, in an outburst of specious honesty, he admitted of his hero, “while he may not have been born in a log cabin it must not be forgotten that the civilization of his day had advanced. Relatively the termini have been as far apart.”

Once family, birthplace, and childhood are out of the way, the biographer is ready to concentrate upon his subject’s education. If there is too much of it and at institutions too elegant to be thought democratic, the whole matter may be glossed over. This is the technique of Horatio Seymour’s biographer, who brings his hero to the age of 31 in two pages of a 292-page life. But when faced by a candidate like Garfield, once a college president,

On the other hand, Al Smith is praised for having gone to the “University of Hard Knocks” and for possessing a “clear mind unencumbered by mere vocabulary and mere excess baggage.” As in all other aspects of a candidate’s life, the treatment is based squarely on the principle that whatever is, is right.

The course of the candidate’s adult life is followed in the same fashion. The occupation he chooses is presented as the best one to prepare him for the presidency; what he does in that occupation is shown to be just the right thing to do, for that time and for all time. Military careers often give the biographers a little trouble because of the belief that Americans fear the man on horseback. Yet, of the 33 men who have reached the White House, ten have been generals, and five others have held lesser military rank. Nevertheless, every time a general runs for office his biographer finds a need to indicate, as Harrison’s did, that he is basically a man of peace, “a brave soldier, without being a violent man.”

And then there is always the shade of our first President to be called forth. Paradoxically, just after a war, when the impulse toward the army hero is strong, writers even make civilians look like generals, as did the biographer who so ingeniously argued: “Had Mr. Clay entered the military profession, upon the breaking out of hostilities between this country and Great Britain, in 1812, he would have been one of the most distinguished generals and warriors of the age.” And, as of Clay, it is always pointed out that if a candidate has not seen service during the war, it is only because, contrary to his desires, his talents were more needed elsewhere.

The majority of presidential aspirants, of course, have political careers before they try for the highest office. The statesmanship of such men is stressed in biographies that soon turn into simplified and biased political histories of America during the preceding twenty years or so. In such accounts party connections are strongly emphasized. Sometimes, indeed, they are treated as reverently as a church affiliation, so that we know Little Matt is a man of good beliefs because “Mr. Van Buren the elder lived a Democrat and died in the same faith.”

But since the political history of America is pockmarked by scandals, compromises, and unpopular stands, the biographer often employs remarkable ellipses and equivocations to avoid committing his man on public issues. So it is that Pierce’s stand on the issues of the Compromise of 1850 is described as “distinct and bold,” as anyone should know, for “his views on these measures were expressed in a private letter to a distinguished Senator under date of

When the issues are not too disputatious, the writer is able to save himself a lot of work by fleshing out his book with lengthy quotations lifted from the Congressional Record or its predecessor, the Globe . And, of course, the authors frequently resort to such padding as a tabulation of convention votes or, if his candidate is an army man, to lengthy reprints of military dispatches, as well as to brief sketches of vice-presidential candidates, and a compilation of miscellaneous material called a “citizen’s handbook.”