The First Frontiersman President—Andrew Jackson: The Story of America Series [Ep. 22]

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we return to our American Stories. Up next, another installment of our series, “About Us, the Story of America,” with Hillsdale College professor and author of the terrific book, Land of Hope, Professor Bill McLay. In 1828, a political revolution took place. Andrew Jackson, a political outsider from the frontier, had beaten the son of a president—no, the son of a founder—John Quincy Adams, in a hot and often vile election, their second showdown. Let’s get into the story. Here’s Bill McLay.

00:00:54
Speaker 2: He taught the country a lesson.

00:00:56
Speaker 3: He taught Adams a lesson the hard way: that to be high-minded and snobbish was not going to work with this growing, expanding, and diverse electorate—often highly imperfectly educated electorate—in America. That was the reality of the thing. It’s a reality that’s still with us. Mass democracy requires a discourse, a language, a mode of expression that can reach people where they are, instead of telling them, “Well, if you want to know what’s going on, you’ve got to raise yourself to my level. You’ve got to go to college, you’ve got to get a degree. You’ve got to learn how to talk like I do.” No, you’ve got to learn how to talk like they do. One symbolic expression of this change was the inauguration of Jackson in Washington, which was not like the previous affairs that had been decorous and very much high-level, ritual, almost liturgical affairs. In this case, the fans of Jackson—many of them—were rather rough-hewn characters and rowdy in their demeanor. They crowded into the city, Day Line Pennsylvania Avenue. They came to receptions at the White House, and there are all kinds of stories about them muddying the carpets with their muddy boots and this sort of thing that.

00:02:32
Speaker 2: Char as much myth as truth.

00:02:34
Speaker 3: But the point is, this reflected a change—a change in the climate, a change in the climate of American democratic politics. Jackson was a self-made man, if there ever was one. He was a frontiersman. He had a hard life. He was a fighter; he was a dueler. He’d risen the ladder of American society through sheer force of his will, his talents, his determination, but never forgetting where he came from—never forgetting he was one of the common people and letting them know. He remembered his roots, as the saying goes. He didn’t try to rise above his raising.

00:03:19
Speaker 2: He was an empathic.

00:03:22
Speaker 3: Towards ordinary people, towards working-class people, strivers who hadn’t come as far as he had, but whose objectives were not unlike his. They wanted to be landowners; they wanted to be their own boss. Eventually, that was the American way of thinking about equality that had that element of opportunity, of striving. Jackson brings in a different vision of America.

00:03:58
Speaker 2: And it’s different from Jefferson, you know.

00:04:00
Speaker 3: Jefferson was a very democratic, small-‘d’ democratic guy in a lot of ways. And Jefferson was, in his own way, an anti-elitist. He famously said that a moral issue presented to a plowman and a professor might well be decided better by the plowman. He didn’t place stock in air addition.

00:04:24
Speaker 2: For its own sake. And he did write the words:

00:04:27
Speaker 3: “All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

00:04:32
Speaker 2: Those were Jefferson’s words.

00:04:34
Speaker 3: And as the country evolved, those words became more and more of a reality. But Jefferson’s vision of democracy included an emphasis on education. And that’s, by the way, that that’s Wes—never left us. We have a huge faith in the power of education—proper education—to lift people out of the circumstances into which they were born and improve their lot in life. Jefferson’s vision was that the common man needed to be lifted up by a proper education, and thus he would be able to speak the language of and engage in debate with those who are more privileged in their upbringing so they wouldn’t have to defer to the well-born. Jackson, on the other hand, believed the common man was perfectly well equipped as he was.

00:05:29
Speaker 2: He didn’t need to be raised up.

00:05:32
Speaker 3: He was perfectly equipped, as he was, to vote and to govern as they were.

00:05:39
Speaker 2: So, this great respect for the…

00:05:41
Speaker 3: Common man’s abilities, without being tutored in the direction of democracy, is what makes us refer to Jackson as our first populist president. Now, I’m not going to take time to try to find the turn “populism,” which has a lot of different definitions, but this is one way of defining it. That populism is a belief in the power of the people as they are—without vetting, without selectivity, without heredity, without educational credentials—the power of the common person to govern himself in herself in a democratic arena in which there’s a level of playing field. So that’s one way of looking at populism. And populism, it’s this faith in the untutored, good common sense of the ordinary person, and populism almost always carries with it a resentment of elites.

00:06:33
Speaker 3: There’s an edge of bitterness often in populism towards those who are well-born, and this certainly showed itself with Jackson. A lot of what he did as president was to stop things from happening. He was a sort of a, like a hockey goalie—”No, you’re not going to work with me”—except he was more aggressive than the hockey goalie.

00:07:13
Speaker 2: He’d go up the ice.

00:07:15
Speaker 3: He used his veto pen often, more than all the other prior presidents combined. He was the president veto, and above all else, the great passion of his presidential career was the National Bank. He opposed the National Bank, and he was unwaveringly opposed to its being rechartered. The charter of the bank ran out and would have to be—would have to be—rechartered, was it was not established in perpetuity. So that became the great—that we called it—the Bank War. His war against the bank. All the political cartoonists had so much fun with this, depicting Jackson and the Bank War.

00:08:02
Speaker 2: And he was not…

00:08:02
Speaker 3: Afraid to openly challenge the Supreme Court and John Marshall. Remember that burr in the saddle imposed on Jefferson by Adams and still serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a Federalist remnant in this sea of Democrats.

00:08:28
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Professor Bill McLay share with us the story of Andrew Jackson: his rise to power and ultimately to the White House, and the first real populist president. Understanding that there’s a way to reach this mass democracy and the masses, and it’s not through, well, high-falutin’ language. It’s the language the people use. Jackson, as Professor McLay noted, stopped things. He used his power to block, block legislation time and again, more times than any president before him. When we return, more of the story of the rise of populism in America—the story of Andrew Jackson’s presidency—continues here on our American Stories. And we return to our American Stories and our series “About Us, the Story of America” with Professor Bill McLay, author of the terrific book, Land of Hope. When we last left off, Professor McLay was describing Andrew Jackson’s politics. He was an anti-elitist. He hadn’t forgotten his roots, after all, and he’d opposed what we’d call big government today, preferring turnover in our nation’s halls of power. Let’s return to the story. Here again is Professor Bill McLay.

00:10:17
Speaker 3: Now, like Jefferson, Jackson was a strict constructionist.

00:10:21
Speaker 2: He did not believe in the…

00:10:24
Speaker 3: Necessary and Proper Clause of the Constitution as a gateway to all kinds of other goodies. He wanted to keep government limited. You remember Jefferson’s saying, “That government governs best that governs least,” and that really reflected the sentiments of Jackson. He was also a great opponent of the what he saw as the alliance of government and business—what we today would call crony capitalism. He would have opposed the growth of what we call…

00:10:59
Speaker 2: Today, the admitted straight of state.

00:11:01
Speaker 3: These agencies, not accountable to the voters, not held accountable to rotation in office, which was…

00:11:10
Speaker 2: A figure that Jackson often used.

00:11:13
Speaker 3: It was an approach to service for the public that he favored.

00:11:19
Speaker 2: That is, that nobody should…

00:11:22
Speaker 3: Serve in office for very long. What’s important is to move him along so that after three years—people, or whatever period of time you want to rotate into—After that period of time, people start develop roots; they start develop contexts; they send out tentacles.

00:11:42
Speaker 2: It’s only human nature.

00:11:44
Speaker 3: So, move them along before that happens, before they develop a self-interest in the fortunes of their office, and thereby they’ll serve the public interest. That was more important to him than being experts. He had a really strong aversion to self-proclaimed expertise and expert knowledge. So there are good aspects of that, and there are…

00:12:07
Speaker 2: Bad aspects of that. From our present standpoint, but…

00:12:10
Speaker 3: We want a common person with no knowledge of nuclear physics to run nuclear regulatory agencies? Probably not. But there are many other things where the installation of experts leads to an evisceration of democracy itself. Really a fascinating character, and one whose fortunes have gone up and down…

00:12:38
Speaker 2: Provided him by historians.

00:12:46
Speaker 3: One of the things that made his reputation go down and stay down was his Indian policy. What to do with the Native American population in this ever-expanding American losses, bent on occupying the entire continent as an expression of its Manifest Destiny? He was a man of the people; he was a man of the common man, but he didn’t fully extend this empathy to Native Americans, whom he feared and also, in some ways, looked down on. He also rejected their claim that American land was their homeland. To be fair to Jackson, there were a lot of other points of view that were much less humane than the path that he settled on. But there were also points of view that were much more humane in recognizing that Indians might have some right to their ancestral lands, and that moving them to territory that was of no current use to the Western European—white European—population was not necessarily the most humane approach. His answer was to resettle the tribes in the eastern part of the country to land west of the Mississippi River. The Indian Removal Act was signed into law in 1835, and it relocated close to 50,000 Indians, 15,000 more of whom would be relocated after Jackson’s presidency. When the Army forced the Cherokees in Georgia to depart for the Oklahoma Territory along a brutal 800-mile path that would become known as the Trail of Tears, along which nearly 4,000 Indians would lose their lives. One French visitor to America wrote eloquently about the policy of Indian removal. He witnessed it firsthand in 1831 when he stumbled on, by mere chance, a group of Choctaw Indians crossing the Mississippi River near Memphis. And here is what that Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in his epic work called Democracy in America: “It is impossible to conceive the extent of the sufferance which attended these force emigrations.”

00:15:33
Speaker 2: They are undertaken by…

00:15:34
Speaker 3: A people already exhausted and reduced, and the countries to which the newcomers betake themselves are inhabited by other tribes which received them with jealous hostility. Hunger is in the rear, war awaits them, and misery besets them on all sides. In the hope of escaping from such a host of enemies, they separate, and each individual will endeavors to procure the means of supporting his existence in solitude and secrecy, living in the immensity of the desert, like an outcast in civilized society.

00:16:16
Speaker 2: The social tie…

00:16:17
Speaker 3: Which distress had long since weakened, is then dissolved. They’ve lost their country, and their people soon desert them. Their families are obliterated, the names they bore in common are forgotten, their language perishes, and all the traces of their origin disappear. Their nation has ceased to exist, except in the recollection of the antiquaries of America and a few of the learned of Europe. I should be sorry to have my reader supposed that I’m coloring the picture too highly. I saw with my own eyes several of the cases of misery which I’ve been describing, the witness of sufferings which I have not the power to portray. Tocqueville ended this passage on the subject, and it ended the first volume of his amazing book Democracy in America with these words: “These are great evils, and it must be added that they appear to me to be irremediable.” I believe that the Indian nations of North America are doomed to perish, and that whenever the Europeans shall be established on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, that race of men will be no more. The Indians had only the two alternatives of war or civilization. In other words, they must either have destroyed the Europeans or become their equals. That book of Tocqueville’s, the two-volume set called Democracy in America, may be the greatest study of American life…

00:18:14
Speaker 2: And culture ever written.

00:18:18
Speaker 3: It captured very good things and great things about the nation, but it also captured the nation’s flaws. I often tell my students if they were to pick one work on America to take to a desert island, and only that one work, I would still say Democracy in America, published in the 1830s and 1840s in two volumes, would be the choice. Because Tocqueville captures many things about America that are permanent part…

00:18:54
Speaker 2: Of our national character. Our makeup has not changed.

00:18:58
Speaker 3: And one of those elements is the elements of tragedy that have attended every stage of our development, every stage of our expansion. Tocqueville was not an American booster and not an American cheerleader, but he was an astute, an objective observer from the foreign land of France.

00:19:22
Speaker 2: In fact, he often…

00:19:23
Speaker 3: Entered into his explorations with explicitly the thought: “How can we in Europe learn from the American experience?” Because America, as he saw it, was…

00:19:36
Speaker 2: The vanguard of the future.

00:19:39
Speaker 3: All nations of the world were going to become democratic. America was leading the way. So, let us look closely at America. He had advised and learned from its successes, from its failures, from its tragedies, and from its tribe.

00:20:01
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery—himself a Hillsdale College graduate—and a special thanks to Professor Bill McLay, for the story of Andrew Jackson, the Jacksonian Era. Here on our American Stories.