A Revolution For The Common Man: The Story of America Series [Ep.21]

And we return to our American Stories. Up next, another installment of our series, “About Us,” the “Story of America” series, with Hillsdale College Professor and author of the terrific book Land of Hope. We’re talking about Professor Bill McLay. Much like today, after America’s founding, and much to the chagrin of people like George Washington, two political parties waged war against one another: the Democrat-Republican Party and the Federalist Party. After the War of 1812, though, one of those parties would pass into oblivion, and that would set up another political revolution. Let’s get into the story. Take it away, Bill.

It seems hard to imagine this today, but after only five presidential elections, one of the two major parties simply vamited. It was the Federalist Party. The Federalist Party was gone, and the Republican Party was ascended. With President James Monroe running essentially unopposed in his second term in 1820. Can you imagine anything like that today? And this made for relatively peaceful times, and when you have, when you’re running unopposed, that’s a reason to call it the Era of Good Feelings, which is a phrase that probably didn’t apply to many old Federalists. They weren’t feeling too good. So there’s a kind of settledness, a kind of predictability, stability when it came to presidential elections. The election of 1800 had been all full of tension and a sense that the world might be coming to an end, or at least the constitutional republic might be coming to an end. But those days were far behind, and actually, when you look back at it, except for John Adams, who was of course a New England or and a Federalist, there’d been a Virginian—not just a Jeffersonian, but a Virginian—occupying the White House. George Washington for two terms, Thomas Jefferson for two terms, James Madison for two terms, and James Monroe for two terms. Adams, by the way, only served one term. But the country was changing and the country was growing, and the Virginia Dynasty, which overtook the New England Dynasty, the Adams family, would itself come to an end. In what can be charitably called a chaotic election, there were four Republican candidates: John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, Henry Clay, and one political outsider, Andrew Jackson. One of these candidates that William Crawford withdrew from contention due to problems with his health, and in the event—in the election—Henry Clay, a very influential figure in the Congress. Henry Clay had the lowest vote total both in the popular and electoral vote, but he was able to use this influence to push John Quincy Adams into the presidency, much to be preferred to the “wild Man,” an unknown joker card, Andrew Jackson. This was infuriating to Jackson and his supporters. They accused—and not without reason—the followers of Clay and Adams, of a “corrupt bargain,” essentially a stolen election. Now, Adams was superbly equipped for the job. He not only was “to the manner born” as the son of a president who had served overseas as a secretary to him, who knew many of the players in world politics of the day, had been Secretary of State under Monroe; he had been an important figure in the formulation of American foreign policy, including the Monroe Doctrine associated with Monroe’s names, but really a product of the mind of John Quincy Adams. So he was, in a sense. In terms of looking at his résumé, you’d say, “Wow, this is the guy!” But there were real problems within his party, and Adams was unable to pivot or adjust to the circumstances at hand. Some thing’s never changed. Don’t think that our politics today is uniquely dirty. It’s really actually rather clean. Compared to the election of 1828, the election of 1800, other elections to come, this campaign of 1828 was brutal. Both sides caricature of the other side in crude ways, in ways that wanted a sort of character assassination. Adams’s supporters portrayed Jackson as a crude, ignorant, “wild man” from the frontier. Adams himself used the term “barbarian” to describe Jackson. What Jackson’s supporters portrayed Adams as an elitist, out-of-touch, corrupted by his patrician, even aristocratic origins. Jackson was a man of the frontier. Part of his appeal was the fact was, he had raised himself up from very hard-scrabble beginnings in North Carolina to become the greatest American military hero of his time. His success in the War of 1812 stayed with him. So he was a patriotic favorite, appealing to the Americans who were shop owners, farmers, and mechanics. He was the term it was he was at the time, the workers, working-class people, and artisans. They were the people who turned out in force and enthusiastically to carry Jackson over the top. And so Andrew Jackson would win in 1828, and by the sheer force of his personality, he created a new political party, the Democrat-Republican Party. And of course, this would eventually become shortened to the Democratic Party, and it was, it was the beginning of today’s Democratic Party, which has existed continuously since Jackson’s time. It’s had periods—low periods, very low periods—especially after the Civil War, but it’s existed since Jackson’s time. So Jackson’s election was a bit of a revolution, although it was a revolution that picked up on and brought together elements that were already in place: the talents and energies of an expanding nation; the greater and greater expansion of the franchise; the sense of a growing sense of America as a nation dedicated to equality (only in certain limited ways, from our perspective, but relative to the rest of the world, relative to the previous American history); and a definite expansion of the scope of the average, ordinary man.

It was the Age of…
the Common Man. So politicians needed to learn how to connect with the average man. You didn’t do it by writing learned treatises. You needed to do it by appealing to popular taste, popular sensibility. Racists began to look as much like entertainment and carnival barking unless the high-minded discourse about issues and policies alone that you might have found the Federalists engaged in, and even found at the time of the ratification of the Constitution—the debates over the ratification of the Constitution—a very high-level discourse then, but not so much in the political campaigning after Jackson’s election. He taught the country a lesson. 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.”

And there’s always a terrific job on the storytelling by Professor Bill McLay. He teaches at Hillsdale College. “The Story of Us” on “Our American Stories.”