The invented Jackson

What Hath God Wrought:  The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
by Daniel Walker Howe
(Oxford University Press, 2007, 928 pages)

Probably the only thing most Australians know about the seventh United States President Andrew Jackson comes from The West Wing.  In an episode in the TV show's first series, the Chief of Staff Leo McGarry instructs the Presidential staff to meet with members of the public who wouldn't ordinarily be granted a meeting at the White House.  According to McGarry, as a President, Jackson put a two tonne block of cheese in the White House foyer and encouraged visitors to come and eat it and talk with him.  (By all accounts the tale is true).  The staff find themselves in meetings with a whole series of weird and wonderful people, as they get lobbied on the need for wolf crossings on highways and harassed by UFO-watchers.

The moral of the story in The West Wing is a simple one.  Jackson was a good President because he was willing to meet with "normal" people.  In this regard The West Wing scriptwriters are merely following the standard Democratic Party orthodoxy.  Andrew Jackson, who was President between 1829 and 1837, is often portrayed as the first real "democrat" in the White House, as he fought against the commercial interests of the East Coast banks and financiers and stood up for the interests of farmers and the dispossessed urban masses.

Indeed, the historiography of the left in the United States depicts an almost seamless transition from Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt.  It is no coincidence that the greatest spruiker of the New Deal, historian Arthur Schlesinger, also wrote The Age of Jackson in the 1940s.  More recently Sean Wilentz, a professor at Princeton in his 2005 book The Rise of American Democracy:  Jefferson to Lincoln talks of Jackson's democratic tendencies, which he contrasts to the aristocratic airs of those such as Jackson's predecessor John Quincy Adams.  Wilentz is well-known in the United States as a strong supporter of the Clintons and the Democratic Party.  In 2006 he wrote an article "The worst President in History?" about (guess who) George W Bush.

The hero worship of Jackson and the invention of "Jacksonian Democracy" by the left in America is quite deliberate.  It is part of the American version of the history wars.  The big problem for the liberal left in the United States has been that it was a Republican, Abraham Lincoln, that abolished slavery.

What Hath God Wrought:  The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 redresses the balance of American pre-Civil War history.  As Howe points out the idealisation of Jackson is, at the very least, highly problematic.  The reality is that there was no such thing as democracy in the age of Jackson (or at least nothing that we'd today recognise as democracy).  As Howe says we would find "the limitations on the democracy of that period glaring:  the enslavement of African Americans, the abuse of Native Americans, the exclusion of women and most non-white from the suffrage and equality before the law."  Further, Jackson was a divisive figure who pursued a winner-take-all strategy in everything he did.  The phenomenon whereby a new President sacks the officials appointed by the previous administration was not introduced by Jackson but he perfected it to a fine art.

It's too much to call Howe a "conservative" but unusually among historians he's willing to recognise the benefits of organic, rather than revolutionary change, and he appreciates the importance of the rule of law.  To a large extent Howe regards the middle decades of the nineteenth-century in the United States as the time during which the growing economic and financial markets of the country brought with them the political and social changes that allowed the notions of individualism and liberty to be embedded in the American psyche.

However, the growth of the market did not come without pain.  Although we now regard the United States as the ideological epicentre of "small government", it hasn't always been so.  Up until the 1830s American state governments were as actively engaged in "nation building" as is the Australian Government in 2008.  It was the depression of 1837 that sent many state government-owned corporations bankrupt and which opened the way for a greater role for free enterprise.

When it was published in the United States What Hath God Wrought was hailed as one of the decade's outstanding books of history.  It brilliantly combines the economic, political, and social history of pre-Civil War America into a story that is at least as interesting as any of the best episodes of The West Wing.