Andrew Jackson: Father of Our Country
Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 09:48:12 AM PDT
This entry is follow up to Welshman's entry of 2/4/05 which he summed up as
"Our posts here should address not the deficiencies of Bush but the deficiencies of the nation. The question is not what sort of President should you have but what sort of country should you have". (Sorry, I can't do the yellow thing).
(Or, in deathless headline of the Daily Mirror:
"How Could 59,054,087 Americans be so dumb?")
Only a few comments that followed dealt with the historical roots of the American Character, or at least the currently dominant American Character, embodied in the rise of Andrew Jackson (President of the United States, 1829-37).
It is supremely ironic that Jackson (aka "Old Hickory, "King Andrew I") used to be credited with being the co-founder (with Jefferson)of the Democratic Party. This may be true, but it is also true that he should equally be called the founder, from the grave, of the modern (post-1964) Republican Party. Jackson's biography, values, and behaviors seemed to have served as a model for those who have come to dominate it. Most especially our current President. And the majority (?) of voting Americans likewise apparently so strongly admire these characteristics that they have chosen our neo- (and partly faux-) Jackson to lead us again, in spite of W's record of spectaculatular international and domestic failure.
Why?
Jackson was a self-made, self-(and poorly) educated son of the frontier, slave trader, entrepeneur, plantation owner, lawyer, judge, amatuer( but brillianly successful) soldier, national hero, U.S. Senator, and finally president.
Bush was none of these except President, but he played most of them on TV and on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
Jackson was violent, unschooled, ruthless, efficient, and consistant with his values. Americans loved him, and he easily won election and then reelection against J.Q. Adams and Henry Clay, each of whom was problably three times the man Jackson was, except in the ass-kicking, Indian -killing sense that Americans hold so dear.
Jackson destroyed Henry Clay's program of internal improvements (roads, canals, a national college), the Bank of the United States (which provided economic stability to the country), and engineered the infamous Indian removal and Trail of Tears. When challenged by South Carolina over Tariffs, he threatend to hang it's leaders, prepared to invade it, and came close to starting an earlier Civil War. He would tolerate no resistance to his policies, even from a slave state.
His policies, likes Reagan's, were cheered during his term and brought about a recession (1837)that destroyed the term of his successor and set back U.S. economic development.
Above all, Jackson was emblematic of the kind of American who rises to wealth and power by bold, and, if necessary, ruthless acts. These fortunes were made off the sweat of enslaved Africans in cotton fields that produced 60% of our national exports as well as in the textile mills of the north that jump-started the American Industrial revolution .
Jackson also encouraged the migration of thousands of Americans to the potentially great cotton-producing lands of what would soon become separated from the nation of Mexico to become the State of Texas.
Jackson's life said any white man can become should have the opportunity to become a millionaire, and even President. It said that any
white American man (and his wife) should have a shot at the wealth and glory for sprawling lands,great manner houses, fine horses, and, best of all, Negro slaves to work in their fields clean their stables, cook their food, wash their dirty clothes, and serve in other such ways as desired. This is a powerful dream, and is why even poor Southern whites fought so hard to preserve this system in the Civil War, and so hard (successfully) to restore it between 1865 and 1900.
But the Jacksonian American Ideal survived slavery. It idealizes the the kind of American who is, like Jackson, bold, fierce, pragmatic, not fond of deep thinking or analysis, no great respector of laws or conventions (I could, without resorting to sources, easily write a post equally long about his Jackson's violations of everything from Tennessee marriage statutes to the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court), ignorant or oblivious of the opinons of foreigners, amiable with his colleagues but absolutely ruthless against his enemies.
Sound familiar?
Bush and the Neo-Jacksonions have succeeded by departing from original Jacksonians in the following ways:
1. They have abjurred racism. to their credit.
2. They have made alliances with fundamentalist Christianists, who used to sit out elections.
Jackson & Jacksonians were not a Bible-thumpers.
3. They have made alliances with Big Money (duh). Jackson believed himself, correctly, to be for the common (white) man of his time and fought battles against the capital and planter elites of his time.
I submit that, regardless of his obvious faults, George W. Bush resonates strongly with the large number of Americans who admire and follow the Jacksonian model.
Perhaps you are like me, and only ruefully adimire these kind of people. Perhaps you would prefer a leader who is works successfully for the betterment of all Americans, who respects learning and science, who prefers concilliation to warfare, whose is creative and inventive, and loves civic improvement rather than conquest. America has produced many people like Benjamin Franklin, though perhaps none his equal. More to the point, his kind is out of favor with most of our fellow Americans. Too bad, because we really could use one now.
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