Hi, welcome to Hell of Presidents. I'm Chris Wade and I'm Matt Christmas.

And the story we're going to start telling you today is the story of the power invested in the executive branch of the United States government.

Where it comes from, who gets to wield it, and more importantly, how they get to wield it and how they are constrained.

This is Episode 1, Founding Dads.

The characters who dominate our understanding of the presidency of Joe Biden and Trump before him are invested with a great degree of psychic energy.

Just the idea of them, they embody values for the American citizenry during the inauguration in January.

You heard a lot about how Joe Biden embodies values of virtue and how he was a personally a good man.

As in if you could know that about anybody, certainly someone who was a 900 year old political fossil, or that it could ever be true of a person who has been in politics for that long.

But the implication is, even if it was true, that their personal virtue is dispositive in some way to how they will govern.

Or even can be dispositive to the way they govern.

The American presidency has construed in popular imagination as an office of heroes and great men who, through their personal virtue, stand a thwart history saying either stop or go.

Yes, they are the crossing guards of the guist.

But what we are going to attempt to describe in the series is a presidency that is constrained by the factors of history, by the factors of the president's constituencies, by the factors of their parties, by the factors of the very material conditions that brought them to power.

And through these constrictions, what is often observed and remembered as decisiveness or the product of personal energy or virtue, it is often a response to a very limited set of possibilities presented in the circumstances.

And the success or failure of a presidency ends up depending on contingent events and the willingness and ability of a particular president to embody a historical moment, not to shape it themselves.

And often presidents come into office with a set of intentions that are completely invalidated by events.

Before we get started, I just want to outline our roles in this series. Matt will be playing the Mr. P body and I will be his loyal boy Sherman, relating the outlines of history for Matt to riff off of.

And setting up a nice lattice work for Matt to grow a beautiful vine of historical analysis.

And also we're going to try to cover all of American political history in like 12 episodes here. So we're going to move fast and give mostly sketches of some of these people in events because what we're really going after here is an outline of the political economy of presidential history.

So with that said, let's step into our way back machine and travel to a date 234 years ago.

On January 25, 1787, a group of insurgents led in part by ex-continental army captain Daniel Shays marched on the federal armory in Springfield, Massachusetts.

This rebellion grew from a series of long simmering issues in the new American Confederation. The collapse of lines of credit for coastal merchants after the end of the war of independence had been passed on to rural farmers.

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