In 1879 the brilliant young New England conservative Henry Cabot Lodge accepted for publication in the International Review a rousing essay calling for revived presidential leadership. Warning of the marked and alarming decline in statesmanship, the author lamented that "both state and national governments are looked upon with suspicion, and we hail an adjournment of Congress as a temporary immunity from danger." The essay, which appeared at a time when the Washington Post could state as obvious that party bosses such as Thomas Reed of Maine were "no less consequential than the president," expressed a widespread unease among Americans over corruption in Congress and political drift.

More than a century later, Thomas Woodrow Wilson's essay, which he expanded into his best-selling book Congressional Government (1885), offers a reminder of the enduring preoccupation of Americans with leadership as well as the ambivalence with which they regard it. The yearning for decisive leaders and the apprehension that they might upset the balance between power and liberty has made Americans more adept at demanding leadership than at embracing it. Indeed, the US. Senate's defeat of Wilson's efforts to bring America into the League of Nations in 1920- a defeat engineered by the same Lodge who in 1879 had published Wilson's essay blasting congressional aggrandizement-could scarcely provide a more telling illustration of the constraints democratic leaders confront.