While George Kremer is depicted in today’s artwork as a sophisticated “man of the people”, it’s thought that the artwork was meant to be sarcastic, since Kremer’s colleagues didn’t respect him very much, thinking he was a kind of bumpkin back-bencher.

And indeed, George Kremer’s political legacy, at both the state and Congressional level, is fairly thin, with the exception of the allegations he made against Henry Clay. At that time, if there was no clear majority winner of the presidential election, the House of Representatives chose the winner. Clay backed John Quincy Adams, who came in second to Andrew Jackson in the vote count. When Adams won and Clay became Secretary of State, that got a few people suspicious.

It’s actually not unlike what was thought to have happened in the 1970s when Richard Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford became President and then pardoned Nixon. When Ford became Vice President, the Watergate scandal was already brewing, so it was thought that perhaps Ford cut a deal with Nixon: “appoint me VP, and if you resign I’ll pardon you.” This probably didn’t happen, however, since Congressional leaders gave Nixon almost no choice in the matter.

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