The Democratic party has been blessed with a number of leaders who both radically shifted the direction of the country and defined the party around central ideas - strong governmental action on behalf of the common man, and a government that fights for opportunity for all rather than to preserve the privilege of a few. When most people think of the central historical Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt is probably the first to come to mind. The transition from the Republican depression to the New Deal was so dramatic, transformative, and popular that the conservative party had no hope of reversing the major changes that they had opposed along the way.
But Roosevelt was not the beginning of the modern Democratic Party. The beginning of the modern Democratic Party was Andrew Jackson.
Are we outraged when we see the federal government bailing out financial companies and not suffering homeowners? The Jacksonians were the originators of that outrage. Do we believe that the federal government should not be protecting corporations from liability for illegal wiretapping, because the law exists to serve the people and not the corporations? That tradition exists because of the Jacksonians. The politics of the early 19th century have both dramatic differences and eerie similarities to today's politics. In many ways, Jackson's administration helped create today's politics.
I had been wondering why so many states held glamorous Jefferson-Jackson dinners. I decided to investigate why by reading The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlessinger, written in 1945. The main things I remembered from high school history were that Jackson fought against the Bank of the US (a necessary institution for economic growth, my Hamiltonian self told me), he helped exterminate the Cherokees (still inexcusable), and he defied the Supreme Court - clearly a man with contempt for the rule of law. Jackson was no saint, but there are few in politics. Despite the fact that Roosevelt interned the Japanese, Truman bombed Nagasaki and Johnson escalated the Vietnam War, they still in different ways are heroes of the Democratic party. Jackson is as well.
First I want to give some background to the party system. The early US had two main parties - the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans. However, the War of 1812 provoked a level of national unity remembered as The Era of Good Feelings, leading to the nearly unanimous reelection of James Monroe. This collapsed in 1824, when Andrew Jackson won a plurality of the popular and electoral vote but was denied the presidency when Henry Clay through his support in the house of representatives to John Quincy Adams. Jackson then spent the next four years viciously attacking Adams to beat him in a rematch in 1828. Quincy Adams was himself a Democratic Republican, though he had also been a Federalist. The partys were not as well formed at the time, though they certainly were from 1828 until the 1850s.
While party ideologies were not as clear cut, individual ideologies certainly were. The main, ruling ideology, passed from the Federalists to a branch of the Democratic Republicans was fundamentally aristocratic. The theory was this: the role of government is to protect property, therefore only the property owning should have a say in government. Not very democratic, but at least it is coherent as a theory. Interestingly, Jefferson, the original anti-federalist, modified John Locke's dictum that governments exist to protect "Life, Liberty, and Property" to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" in writing the declaration of independence.
The central, corrupt institution of economic power in Jackson's era was Bank of the United States. To understand the Bank, imagine a private, chartered institution that sort of functioned like the Federal Reserve. The Federal Government kept all its public funds there (one fifth of the Bank's total capital) except the Bank didn't pay the government interest. The Bank made loans to other individuals and other Banks.
Further,
-Neither the President nor Congress could fire the chairman
-The accounting books were totally private; the Bank refused to allow Congress to examine them
-The Bank paid direct retainers to individual congressman for their political support
-The Bank could issue paper money which the Federal Government had to accept as legal tender for payment of taxes. This meant that the Bank could fuel massive overspeculation (sound familiar?) with no oversight from the government, and because this money could be used to pay taxes, the Federal Government ultimately carried the risk.
-Nicholas Biddle, the director of the bank, intentionally called in huge amounts of loans, intentionally causing a panic in an attempt to destroy Jackson politically
Schlesinger describes the situation:
Yet men like Biddle and Webster plainly preferred in last analysis a speculative economy, with quick expansion, huge gains and huge risks. During the investigation of the Bank by the Clayton Committee, when Cambreleng asked whether the existing banking system did not encourage speculation, Biddle replied: "Until the nature of man is changed, men will become speculators and bankrupts -- under any system -- and I do not perceive that our own is specially calculated to create them." Cambreleng became more specific. Would not the system be more healthy if note issue were forbidden? Biddle hedged: "I fear I do not comprehend this. . . . That banks do occaisional mischief there can be no doubt; but until some valuable improvement is found which supplies unmixed good, this is no objection to them. And consituted as they now are, the banks of the United States may be considered safe instruments of commerece."
Biddle and men like him were willing to take the chance of depression in exchange for the thrills and opportunities of boom. But others confronted a speculative situation with much less confidence. Men of small and fairly fixed income -- farmers, laborers, mechanics, petty shopkeepers, many of the Southern planters -- felt themselves the victims of baffling and malevolent economic forces which they could not profit by or control. (120)
Sound familiar?
The Jacksonians were concerned with more than just the economic destructiveness of the Bank. They inaugurated the political argument against concentrated wealth and political power that so may of us carry on. To quote Schlesinger,
Andrew Jackson ably summed up its broad aims. "The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer," he wrote, "all know that their success depends upon their own industry and economy, and that they must not expect to become suddenly rich by the fruits of their toil." These classes "form the great body of the people of the United States; they are the bone and sinew of this country." Yet "they are in constant danger of losing their fair influence in the Government." Why? "The mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency, which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges which they have succeeded in obtaining in the different states." His warning to his people was solemn. "Unless you become more watchful . . . you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or barteered away, and the control over your dearest interests has passed into the hands of these corporations." (126)
Now how would that happen?
Jackson refused to recharter the Bank, and later withdrew the federal funds from it. The second Bank of the United States went bankrupt several years later. In deploying his immense force of personality and popular appeal against the forces of economic conservatism, Jackson permanently altered the political landscape. Schlesinger describes it this way:
The same year the aged conservative publicist Noah Webster set forth a plan to halt the disintegration and reconstruct society according to Federalist principles. While the American people, he said, were not divided into orders, like the nobility and commoners of Britain, "the distinction of rich and poor does exist, and must always exist, no human power or device can prevent it." Would it not be sensible, then, to recognize this distinction in the structure of government? After all, "the man who has half a million of dollars in property . . . has a much higher interest in government, than the man who has little or no property." Let us therfore end the popular election of Presidents, for the "great mass of people are and always must be very incompetent judges." Let us destroy the theory that the rich exploit the poor, and the corporations are "aristocratic in their tendency"; these are among the "most pernicious doctrines that ever cursed a nation." Let us divide the electorate into two classes, "the qualifications of one of which shall be superior age, and the possession of a certain amount of property," and let each class choose one house of congress. Thus the supremacy of property may be assured, and America yet saved from democracy.
This proposal was the last gasp of Federalism. The mere act of stating such a program, after eight years of General Jackson, showed how unreal Federalism had become. No politician could espouse such ideas. No populace would submit to them. Not only were they dead, but the corpses were fatal to the touch. (268)
It is here that we see how Jackson created today's politics. The insight of the post-Jackson conservatives was that in order to succeed in their aristocratic program, they needed to adopt the language of the Democrats. The Whigs initiated George W Bush style politics, in which a tax cut for the rich is promoted as a measure for the middle class, or a minimum wage is opposed because it would cause unemployment (the politics of taxes specifically were different at the time, however). William Henry Harrison, the first Whig President, was, in fact, the original George W Bush - a candidate promoted for the sake of being manipulated by his handlers and lying about his program. Schlesinger again:
The metamorphosis of conservatism revived it politically but ruined it intellectually. The Federalists had thought about society in an intelligent and hard-boiled way. Their ideas had considerable relevance to the conflicts and tensions of the life around them. But the Whigs, in scuttling Federalism, replaced it by a social philosophy founded, not on ideas, but on subterfuges and sentimentalities. As Henry Adams observed, "Of all the parties that have existed in the United States, the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas."
Federalism and Whiggery represented the same interests in society, the same aspirations for power, the same essential economic policies; but Federalism spoke of these interests, aspirations and policies in a tone of candor, Whiggery, of evasion. The vocabulary of Federalism had something to do with actualities; it was useful as a scheme of analysis; it aided one's understanding of society. The vocabulary of Whiggery had nothing to do with actualities; it was useful mainly as a disguise; its object was to promote confusion rather than comprehension. Both intended to serve the business classes, but the revolution in political values forced the Whigs to talk as if they intended primarily to serve the common man. (279)
Do we recognize what he is talking about in today's Tom DeLay politics? I want to continue quoting Schlesinger because I think this is so astute (and he was writing in 1945!):
The widening chasm between private belief and public profession took all seriousness out of Whiggery as a social philosophy, turning it into a miscellaneous collection of stock politicaly appeals, consistent only in a steady but muted enmity to change. it may be argued, of course, that the intellectual collapse of conservatism was unimportant, since the first criterion of a political creed is its success and not its profundity. Yet it may be speculated whether the repeated failure of conservatism in this country to govern effectively may not be related to the increasing flabbiness of conservative thought. Individuals might continue thinking in Federalist terms, reserving the Whig phrases for public consumption; but such a thoroughly Machiavellian position is difficult to sustain. When a party starts out by deceiving the people, it is likely to finish by deceiving itself. (282)
But the parallels between Jackson's era and today don't end with economics. Economic conservatives of the time deployed religion as a phony issue in the same way they do today, and Jackson refused to capitulate.
Two issues in Jackson's first term confirmed the clerical groups in a hostility already stirred up by their predominantly conservative reaction to his economic measures. The first was the case of the Georgia missionaries. Eleven missionaries to the Cherokee Indians were arrested for violating a Georgia law forbidding whites to dwell among the Indians without state licesnses. Two of the groups fought the case through to the Supreme Court, which decided in their favor; but the state defied the Court, Jackson refused to intercede, and the missionaries remained in prison for over a year. Henry Clay raised the second question, a few months before the election of 1832, by offering a resolution requesting the President to reconsider his refusal to declare a national day of fasting and prayer in order to avert the cholera epidemic. The two incidents provided the conservative party, already impressed with the urgency of mobilizing all their resources, the means of making a powerful appeal to the church vote. (351)
I want to finish with one more story regarding how Jackson altered the relationship between corporations and the state. This centers around the famous Supreme Court case Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge. Massachusetts had charted a toll bridge across the Charles River since 1785, but then authorized a second nearby bridge. The first bridge company sued arguing that this would depress their profits, and their charter entitled them to exclusive rights across the bridge in perpetuity. Roger Taney charted the court in a dramatically different direction from the conservative John Marshall. Though Marshall is rightly recognized as a key leader in establishing the court as a power center in American government, his court was for a long time the last conservative, Federalist bastion in America. As Scheslinger describes the case,
The crucial case in the retreat from Federalism was the fight, so long a staple of Massachusetts politics, between the Charles River Bridge and the Warren Bridge. The question was whether the legislature of Massachusetts, by authorizing the construction of a free bridge over the Charles River at a point where it would interfere with the profits of a privately owned toll bridge, had impaired the contract of the toll-bridge corporation. The case had been argued before the Supreme Court in 1831, but no decision was handed down. It was reargued in 1837, with Daniel Webster as one of the counsels for the bridge company. The fact that Harvard College, as well as many leading citizens of Boston, held stock in the Charles River Bridge increased the general tension.
...
Taney, on the other hand, had made clear as Attorney General that in his mind an act of incorporation -- particularly in the case of corporations which perform essential public services, such as constructing roads and bridges -- could "never be considered as having been granted for the exclusive benefit of the corporators. Certain privileges are given to them, in order to obtain a public convenience; and the interest of the public must, I presume, always be regarded as the main object of every charter for a toll-bridge or a turnpike road."
"The object and end of all government," Taney declared in words central to an understanding of Jacksonian democracy, "is to promote the happiness and prosperity of the community by which it is established; and it can never be assumed, that the government intended to diminish its power of accomplishing the end of which it was created. (324-5)
Thus the Jacksonians opposed monopoly for the public good. By fighting against monopolies whether they were a chartered bridge or a chartered bank, the Jacksonians paved the way for true economic competition. Did the business community appreciate them for it?
Yet the fact that the Jacksonian program was eventually beneficial to economic enterprise does not mean that the business world was astute enough to recognize this advance. In fact, businessmen fought the Jacksonian program bitterly, step by step, and indulged in interminable wails of calamity and disaster. Taney's opinion in the Charles River Bridge case, for example, was clearly more responsive to the necessities of capitalistic expansion than Story's, which would have held back the development of transportation for years. Yet businessmen of the day agreed with Story and denounced Taney as a radical. (338)
Today we're debating Municipal WiFi rather than bridges, but our principles are still the same. I want to leave everyone with one more quote:
Frederick Robinson, the old Massachusetts radical, showed in another way how the antislavery crusade had absorbed the old Jacksonian fight. He still clung in 1862 to the basic Jacksonian convictions. "The world has always been separated into two classes. . . . and the people are divided into two parties, the aristocrats and the democrats, the conservatives and progressives." He recalled a remark he had made in the thirties -- that so long as conservativism continued to denounce the Democratic party, calling it "radical, loco foco, leveller, agrarian, property dividers, setters of the poor against the rich," so long the Democratic party "would be the true rallying place of the people. But when all those vile epithets shall cease, and conservatism begins to heap its virulency upon some other name, it will be a sign that they have scented corruption in the democratic party, and have gone over into its ranks." Corruption had triumphed, and he traced its growth, apologizing for his own support of Cass in 1848, and declaring that after the Kansas-Nebraska Act "all democracy left the democratic party, and every true democrat that was too intelligent to be cheated by a name, deserted its ranks." (495-6)