For Fear of an Elective King

Historians have long understood that the “title controversy” in the early Republic—the debate over what to call the president in the new government established by the U.S. Constitution—was not as frivolous as it sounds to us now, but Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon, in For Fear of an Elective King: George Washington and the Presidential Title Controversy of 1789, offers such an impressive analysis of high politics and political theory and sets up so effectively the social and cultural landscape within which the conversation unfolded that everyone interested in the early Republic, broadly defined, should read it. The Constitution declares that “no Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States” and offers no suggestions for what to call the powerful new chief executive it created. Americans—especially those identified with opposition to the Constitution—worried a great deal about the fate of liberty under a president who possessed what “Cato” described as the “powers of a monarch” and who would live in a kind of “court” whose “language and manners” would “distinguish” it “from the rest of the community.” But, as Bartoloni-Tuazon is at pains to note in her fascinating prehistory of the controversy, Americans were already quite used to status differentiations because titles distinguishing military rank, occupational status, and political office had long been “entrenched in the American experience” (p. 13). Even during the Revolution, Americans embraced the use of titles such as “Excellency” for governors of the new states because they did not want their governors to be any “less honored in a republican state than in a royal colony” (p. 18)

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