Letters: Vilify a true insurrectionist president; Fairness for students, former students

Vilify a true insurrectionist president

As America grapples with the scourge of contemporary insurrectionism, those eager to vilify a complicit chief executive need not look farther than the history books. Though few are aware, one former president unequivocally took up arms against the nation he once led — and remains inexplicably celebrated today.

John Tyler became the first vice president elevated to the presidency when William Henry Harrison died just weeks after his 1841 inauguration. Though Tyler served longer than any non-elected chief executive in our history, his four years in the White House were remarkably uneventful.

Tyler’s actions after leaving office were much more contentious. In 1861, the elderly statesman was called from retirement to preside over Virginia’s Secession Convention. Tyler voted with the majority for secession, and was promptly named to the Provisional Confederate Congress. He died the following year, shortly after being elected to the Confederate House of Representatives, and lay in state in Richmond, his coffin draped in a Confederate flag. By that time, Tyler’s reputation had reached such a nadir in the North that his death was neither acknowledged nor mourned, making him the only U.S. president not accorded a state funeral.

In spite of this inauspicious president’s nefarious end, a bevy of namesakes endure in Tyler’s honor, including Capitol Hill’s John Tyler Elementary and the city of Tyler, Texas. As America endeavors to reconcile the conflicted legacies of our former leaders with today’s norms, this author suggests John Tyler should top the list of those examined.

Fairness for students, former students

Continuing to demonstrate their odd definition of unity, the Biden administration is pushing to have student debt retired by taxpayers rather than by students, their parents or the colleges and universities they attended, seemingly without regard to those families who paid the way via frugal living and/or working extra jobs, as well as those who chose not to attend college. If this happens, it would seem only fair that the action also provide for retroactive spring and holiday breaks for me and my peers who got our higher education in the 1950s and early ‘60s, and who always worked full time during those breaks in order to pay college bills.

It’s true that the cost of higher education has skyrocketed, making it almost impossible to work one’s way through most colleges today. Dominant among the reasons for this was the passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965 during the Johnson Administration, providing for federal guarantee of student loans. Not surprisingly, this act and follow on legislation resulted in the doomsday cycle of loans being too easily available, the abandonment of prudent spending practices by most colleges, sharply rising tuitions, and an accompanying demand for even more student loan dollars. Another example of a well-meaning Democrat policy with unintended consequences, now to be remedied by “generous” Democrats who want someone else to clean up the mess.

A link for Penn State presidents

Whatever he may claim for his academic achievement as Penn State’s former president, Graham Spanier bears forever a two-word indictment: Jerry Sandusky.

Whatever he may claim for his academic success as Penn State’s current president, Eric Barron’s name links with another two-word stigma: Jameis Winston.

If you fail to make the latter link, you can join those Penn State trustees who hired Eric Barron. But history suggests that applicants for Penn State’s presidency must first and foremost promise to promote and protect at any cost a lucrative football program, as Spanier first did at Nebraska and later Barron did at Florida State.

If you accept my invitation to conduct further research into this principal presidential prerequisite, you can start with Pulitzer Prize winner Mike McIntire’s 2017 book, “Champions Way.”