Andrew Jackson: a new PBS special and Web site

Photograph of Old Hickory late in life

Our Blue Voice partner FDTate called my attention, via this article Jackson's 1st presidential year revealed by Fred Brown Knoxville News Sentinel 12/17/07, to the fact that PBS is presenting a program on Andrew Jackson tonight, called Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency (9:00 PM Eastern). A good way to start the year. I mean, if it's a decent program, that is. The "first year" in the Knoxville News Sentinel is not referring to the PBS program, which apparently deals with his whole Presidency. That article provides a link to a video by Dan Feller, editor of the great man's papers. The main Web site for the program is up already (linked above) and as of Wednesday morning the video is apparently already available for viewing there, although I've only watched the Introduction so far.

The PBS preview Web site blurb says:

"Is he a president we should celebrate or a president we should apologize for? It's a question that could certainly spark a fierce debate about our current chief executive," notes Carl Byker, the film's producer, writer and co-director. "But of all the presidents whom Americans have had conflicting feelings about, the one who's been simultaneously adored and reviled with the most intensity is Andrew Jackson."

Dang! I ripped my shirt. Seeing George Bush and Andrew Jackson mentioned in the same breath always puts me in a clothes-rending mode.

Feller in his video refers to the three major political events of Jackson's Presidency: the Indian Removal Act, the confrontation with South Carolina secessionists and his fight with the Bank of the US. He also mentions that "Jackson, while he was personally very religious, resisted - very much - efforts by organized religious groups to influence government's agenda."

I assume the PBS special will talk about those three events. I don't know to what the good-and-evil theme in the program's title refers. The Indian Removal Act, while arguably not evil in intent on Jackson's part, certainly had evil consequences. It was a bad policy. And that's not projecting today's values anachronistically back onto that time. The opponents of the plan in Congress made moral arguments against it based on the standards of that time.

My admiration for Jackson and for what he represents in the history of American democracy is not based on some false assumption that he was a plaster saint. He was a slaveholder, and there is no evidence of which I'm aware that he was particularly "enlightened" in that role. Certainly, he did not publicly oppose slavery like Thomas Jefferson did, and he did not manumit (free) his slaves during his lifetime like George Washington did or upon his death as Jefferson did.

What makes Jackson a great President is that in the confrontation over secession with South Carolina and the battle with the Bank of the United States and its supporters, Jackson did the right thing for the country and for the broad majority of working people, in both cases defying his own class and narrow personal interests as a wealthy slaveowner to do so.

American democracy was a democracy of white men when Jackson became President in 1829 and remained so when he left office in 1837. But in 1837, it was a much expanded democracy. Jackson and his movement pressed to knock down property qualifications that prevented significant numbers of white men from voting. Jackson and his movement also recognized that the owners of concentrated wealth would use the power of the state to preserve and expand their own power at the expense of democracy and of ordinary people. Jackson and the Jacksonians understood that farmers and workers needed a party that would fight for their interests.

Even Jackson's famous use of the "spoils system", in that time when the actual number of government positions was very restricted and not specialized to anything like the degree they were even 50 years later, represented a significant expansion of democracy in that it opened opportunities for new groups and individuals and also removed many conservative-leaning types for whom government office had been more of an elite privilege.

Theodore Roosevelt was speaking very much in the Jacksonian mode in 1912 when he said:

There is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with the money touch, but with ideals which in their essences are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers.

It's not coincidental that TR made that statement when he was bolting from the Republican Party.

No political movement escapes the contradictions of its time. The Jacksonians were no exception. But what Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal represent to us today gives an idea of what Jackson's movement represented in the 1820s and 1830s.

One last thing. I saw some Paulian not long ago alluding to Jackson's battle with the Bank of the United States as a justification for the Bircher obsession with the Federal Reserve Bank today. That is nonsense. The Bank of the United States of Jackson's time was the central institution by which the most wealthy and socially dominant segment of society exercised a very restrictive financial control over the country. At the time of Jackson's Presidency, for example, something like one third of the Congress were receiving monetary stipends from the Bank! It compares only superficially in its actual function with the Federal Reserve.

Okay, PBS: don't screw this one up!

Tags: andrew jackson, old hickory