Elections Have Consequences: 1844 and 2020

James K. Polk, the 11^th President, was born on November 2, 1795. As mentioned in my Oct. 30 post, Polk’s 125^th birthday anniversary in 1920 was the day when Warren G. Harding celebrated his 55^th birthday—and was also elected the 29^th POTUS.

Polk, elected in November 1844, was a successful President. His four years in office clearly indicates that elections have consequences—as they all do. 

Polk: One of the Best Presidents?

Presidential historian Andrew Bergen ranks Polk as the seventh best President of the first 43 in the history of the U.S. (see here). That is higher than what is found in most rankings, but Polk is regularly ranked in the top one-third. And yet, he is not widely known—although ten states have a county named for James Polk.

(Polk County, Missouri, where June was born and where we were married, was named after James’s grandfather. And now we live in Clay County, Mo., named after Henry Clay, whom Polk defeated in the election of 1844. My 4/20/17 blog post was titled “The Feats of [Henry] Clay,” and mentions his loss to Polk.)

Harry Truman summed up Polk’s legacy in these words: “James K. Polk, a great President. Said what he intended to do and did it.” Accordingly, Bergen states, “Polk followed through on every single campaign pledge that he ran on in 1844,” and that included not running for re-election.  

Election Consequences of 1844

But Polk’s “successful” presidency doesn’t mean that we should broadly praise him. Rather, there is much that should be denounced. Elections have consequences, and those consequences from the 1844 election were not good for many people in the U.S.

Polk is regarded as a protégé of Andrew Jackson, instigator of the deplorable Indian Removal Act of 1830, and that is one reason the consequences of the election of 1844 were not good for many. He was a strong advocate of “manifest destiny” (a term coined in 1845) that resulted in the extermination of many Native Americans.

Further, the annexation of Texas, which he strongly supported, was linked to the strengthening of slavery in the U.S., for annexation gave slavery room to expand. Subsequently, one indirect consequence of Polk’s election was the Civil War, which started just twelve years after his presidency ended.

Election Consequences of 2020?

The guest host on the Nov. 9 Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC kept repeating the words “radical normalcy” with reference to President-elect Joe Biden. That is one of the hoped-for consequences of this month’s election—a reversal of the abnormalities I wrote about in my 10/30 post and that this very lengthy WaPo Magazine article details.

Just as he promised, President-elect Biden has already set up a panel of experts to draw up plans on how best to find ways to control the covid-19 pandemic. And as an indication of the “radical normalcy” in that move, there were no family members or cronies selected for the team.

As a Nov. 9 WaPo article says, Biden’s appointed task force is “a group made up entirely of doctors and health experts, signaling his intent to seek a science-based approach to bring the raging pandemic under control.” This will surely lead to one very positive consequence of the Nov. 3 election.

Further, according to this Nov. 11 WaPo article, another encouraging consequence of the recent election is how “Biden aims to amp up the government’s fight against climate change.”

Of course, some evangelical Christians see negative consequences resulting from the election. For example, on Nov. 10, a conservative Christian Post reporter declared, “Biden planning to reverse Trump’s pro-life policies by executive order.”

It remains to be seen, of course, what all the consequences of the 2020 presidential election will be. I am hoping for, and expect, mostly positive ones that will, indeed, help save the soul of the nation.

Remembering Fanny Crosby, Queen of Gospel Song Writers

All of you old-timers like me who grew up in Baptist, Methodist, or other “evangelical” churches know the name Fanny Crosby, the blind woman who wrote more gospel songs/hymns than anyone else in history. She was born 200 years ago, just about five weeks after Susan B. Anthony whom I wrote about last month.

Fanny’s Blindness

Frances Jane Crosby was born about 75 miles north of New York City on March 24, 1820. Throughout her long life—and she died shortly before her 95^th birthday in 1915—she went by the name Fanny.

When just a few weeks old, Fanny had an eye infection that an incompetent doctor mistreated. Consequently, Fanny became blind for life. A few months later, her father died and her mother, widowed at 21, had to go to work as a maid.

Grandmother Eunice Crosby then took care of Fanny—and she taught the precocious little girl that she could learn and excel in life despite being blind. When Fanny was only eight or nine years old, she wrote the words that appear under her picture on the right.

Just before her 14^th birthday, she enrolled as a student in the New York Institution for the Blind (NYIB, now the New York Institute for Special Education).

Fanny was a student at NYIB for eight years and then taught there for fifteen years, leaving in 1858, the year she married Alexander Van Alstyne, who was also blind—and who had also been a student and then a teacher in the same school.

While a teacher at NYIB, Fanny had the opportunity to recite some of her poems before the U.S. Senate and later before a joint session of Congress—the first woman to do either. She also became a friend of President James Polk, who visited NYIB, and with Fanny, at least twice during his presidency, the last time being in 1848.

In 1849 the cholera epidemic in the U.S. worsened, and Fanny nursed children in the school. After she showed symptoms, she was asked to leave the NYIB until autumn. She survived, but President Polk, whose term ended in March, died of cholera in June of that year at the age of 53.

(Let’s pray that the epidemic of 2020 doesn’t turn out to be as bad as the epidemic of 1848-49.)

Fanny’s Service

Although she had written poetry for thirty years by the time of her marriage, it was only a few years later that she began to write hymns—and write she did! She is said to have written more than 9,000 gospel songs/hymns!

Many of her hymns were regularly used in the highly popular evangelistic campaigns of Dwight L. Moody and Ira Sankey. But hymn-writing was not what Fanny considered her main mission in life.

According to this website, Fanny “wanted most to be remembered as a home missions worker to the poor.” She served in various New York City rescue missions from the early 1860s to the first decade of the 1900s.

Chapter 18 of her book Fanny Crosby's Memories of Eighty Years is titled “Work Among Missions,” and she writes of how her work at the well-known Bowery Mission began in 1881.

(“Serving Kings: The Bowery Mission in Manhattan at 140 Years” is an article in the Winter 2020 Plough Quarterly, and it quotes words that Fanny often said when speaking in the Bowery Mission chapel services.)

Evangelicals, like Fanny, in the nineteenth century often combined loving service to people in physical need with sharing a Gospel message for their spiritual needs.

Fanny’s Hymns

Only a very few of Fanny’s many hymns can be mentioned here. You who know her hymns have your own favorites, I’m sure, but three of her most well-known hymns are also three of my favorites, and I sang them often from when I was a boy until we went to Japan in 1968.

Those three are “Rescue the Perishing” (1869), “Blessed Assurance” (1873), and “I Am Thine, O Lord” (1875). According to Hymnary.org those hymns are currently found in 693, 933, and 616 hymnals, respectively.

In writing this article, I have especially enjoyed reading/hearing—and being challenged by—the first two verses of the third hymn. You can read the lyrics of that gospel song at this link or hear them beautifully sung here.