The New Age of Jackson

"I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn't have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. There's no reason for this."

Leave it to the Donald to give us a revisionist view of the Civil War. It is relatively safe to say that Jackson would have been against the Civil War given his position on South Carolina's nullification bid, but the two events were thirty years apart. This is what happens when you are spoon-fed little morsels of history from Stephen Bannon.

I was wondering where all this interest in Jackson came from? It probably stems from the decision reached last year to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. Trump questioned this decision during the transition and one of his first acts as President was to prominently hang a portrait of Old Hickory in the Oval Office. This is a very alt-right thing to do. No one in the administration, including Trump himself, has explicitly stated he wants to reverse the Treasury Department decision, but all the signs are there. It wouldn't be until 2020 that we would actually see a Tubman 20.

This isn't the first time someone tried to resurrect Jackson. Arthur Schlesinger saw our first log cabin president as the embodiment of American values both past and present in The Age of Jackson. He linked this populist fervor described by Walt Whitman and others at the time of Jackson's election to Roosevelt in the 1930s. It seems both Art and Walt were willing to forgive Jackson's many transgressions, including the war he waged against American Indians. Jackson has mostly been remembered for the Battle of New Orleans, saving us a second time from British rule. Here's Old Hickory leading the charge on a 1965 commemorative stamp.

It is not surprising Trump identifies with Jackson, given the frontier president's stand against big government in the form of the Second US Bank. The odd part about Jackson is that he was very much a states' right president and supported the extension of slavery into the western territories, he just didn't cotton to secession. He felt the whole country should live under southern laws. In this sense, he embodied the current GOP thinking.

Comments

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

Search This Blog