Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 17: Two political trends leading up to the Civil War

In my third pass this month at Avery Craven's Lost Cause/neo-Confederate essay Coming of the War Between the States: An Interpretation Journal of Southern History 2:3 (Aug 1936).

He describes how the Northern states had developed into non-slave states and their pernicious about freedom and democracy:

The general period in American history from 1825 to 1860 was one of vast material growth and expansion. But it was also one in which the wealth and power of the few grew disproportionately to that of the many. Democracy was not functioning properly. Liberty was putting an end to equality. I£ some were content, others felt deepest resentments and dreamed of a more perfect society as the political and moral right of an American.

Those decadent Yankees started getting all grumpy about economic slumps, and the gap between rich and poor, and the restrictions on opportunities for the common people. He notes in particular, "the Panic of '37 spread wreck and ruin among them; land legislation lagged behind their demands; internal improvements came all too slowly; prices slumped as home markets broke and "overproduction" glutted the few outside markets they had developed."

And the baneful social phenomena multiplied. There was "unrest," and protest, and (gasp!) labor activism:

The rural North, therefore, throughout the era, was a region of potential and actual unrest. The "average farmer," for whose welfare the American system had been established, resented bitterly the growing importance of the city and the mounting wealth of those engaged in what he considered "minor pursuits." Securing the support of the lesser folk of the towns, only recently come from nearby farms, he launched his protests in various forms, but all in the name of a faltering democracy. The labor movements of the period, says Commons, were "not so much the modern alignment of wage-earner against employer" as they were the revolts of "the poor against the rich, the worker against the owner."

Even worse, people started thinking, "The cause of the oppressed was also the cause of 'righteousness'." The Northern public started obsessing about "democracy and morality." Some were even deciding that "Jeffersonian Democracy was God's chosen form of civil government."

He summarizes the unfolding of these threatening democratic movements in various stages:

The Jacksonian war against "the money power" in an earlier period was "from this same cloth." It represented far more the deep resentments of a "grasping" people than it did a belief in abstract ideals. The same holds, in a degree, for the so-called "free-soil" movement. Historians have largely overlooked the fact that the "liberty groups" with a single human rights appeal failed to gain any great following in the Northwest - but that when Salmon P. Chase, the Democrat, broadened the platform to one in which homesteads, internal improvements at Federal expense, and home markets by tariffs, were included, the moral indignation against slavery rose to a burning flame. A local convention in Chicago in 1848 resolved that the [anti-slavery] Wilmot Proviso "is now and ever has been the doctrine of the Whigs of the free States" and added hastily, "the Whig party has ever been the firm, steady, and unchanging friend of harbor and river appropriations." Lincoln himself would keep slavery from the territories because God had intended them "for the homes of free white people." The Wisconsin farmer, whose interest in Negroes was slight, did not further heckle this great Commoner when the assurance was given that the prime purpose behind his program was a 160-acre farm for all interested persons. Thus the halo of democracy and morality, in part borrowed from the abolitionist, was placed upon the brow of all vital Western needs, and its bitterness from unrealized ambitions became a holy sentiment. [my emphasis]

The trajectory of unfavorable democratic developments in Craven's neo-Confederate view ran from Jeffersonian democracy, to Jacksonian reformism, to the Free Soil and Abolitionist movements to land reform to Lincoln and the Republicans. Jefferson and James Madison were "abolitionist slaveowners," Andrew Jackson was a non-abolitionist slaveowner, but the trend toward expansion of democracy, restriction and abolition of slavery, resistance to concentrated economic power and oligarchic government: those did develop along the lines Craven describes, though from a democratic point of view that was a favorable line of develop, while Craven disparages it. Lincoln himself took Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as his main Presidential models.

Especially in these strange times where the Democratic Party declines to claim its own founders and the corrupt, democracy-hating plutocrat Donald Trump adopts Andrew Jackson as a major symbol - a truly twisted and bizarre development - I should add that none of these developments were democratically pure by 2018 standards. The women's movement for the vote and legal equality had begun, but American women were second-class citizens, at best. Even white Abolitionists generally accepted some kind of white supremacist outlook, with even some of the most militant and serious anti-slavery activists embracing the fantasy of of mass colonization of black Americans to Africa. Or, mass deportation, to put it less euphemistically. Even those egalitarian land policies Craven mentions were heavily predicated on current and former Indian lands being distributed to white settlers and the native peoples displaced. And the list goes on.

But the single biggest and most consequential political conflict was over slavery with all its class, racial, and political aspects. And the developments that led eventually to the defeat of the slaveocracy and the abolition of chattel slavery did travel the historical path Craven describes (in a hostile mode). And the road that led to secession goes through the political trend represented by John Calhoun, Jackson's great adversary in Nullification Controversy. Craven clearly sympathizes with the Calhounian tradition:

When James K. Polk was elected president in 1844, certain old leaders such as Martin Van Buren, Francis Preston Blair, and Thomas H. Benton were pushed aside. Each in turn blamed John C. Calhoun and the slave interests; each in a different way added to the impression that the party was no longer a fit place for those who followed the immortal Andrew Jackson.

This is a big problem not only with the pseudohistory that makes Donald Trump the Second Coming of William Jennings Bryan. It's also a problem for what seems to be the currently dominant left/left-liberal view of American history, in which the monarchist Alexander Hamilton that believed democracy could function only through massive corruption is a great hero and Jefferson and Jackson are not only personally dastardly but contemptible in their political and political heritage.

It's just not possible to understand the history leading up to the Civil War without understanding the fundamental difference between the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian trend and the Calhounian trend. One led to an expansion of democracy and the presentation of the United States as a democratic Republic. The other led to a civil war in defense of slavery. That's a big difference.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 8: Jefferson, Jackson, the American democratic tradition and antislavery

I've expressed my reservations about the arguments made by Forrest Gabors in From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017). One of those reservations is that his positive presentation of the Republican Party position on what he describes as "regime change" during Reconstruction is uncomfortably consistent with present-day neoconservative demands for "regime change" in Iran and various other countries.

But his account of the Republican position on the Slave Power and Reconstruction does provide a welcome alternative to the brand of Whig history that the left and center-left in the US have largely adopted at the moment in which the monarchist and advocate of government-by-corruption Alexander Hamilton and the plutocratic John Quincy Adams are the stars with Abraham Lincoln as the superstar Great Emancipator, while leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are considered as something like contemptible hypocrites and villainous evildoers.

Now, there's nothing wrong with writing the history of Whigs. (Lincoln was a Whig before being a Republica, BTW.) Or of warmongers. Or of crackpot rightwing political sects from the Anti-Masonic Party on.

But I've yet to see a way to understand the growth and expansion of democracy without understanding that the process was a historical movement from not-democracy to democracy. And there's no reason to think that process is completed. Or to assume that the process takes place without resistance or setbacks or reversals.

Democracy in practice has its shadow sides. And it's indispensable for honest history that those sides be recognized.

America in 1776 started a national-independence revolution that was widely and rightly understood as the most democratic movement of the time that successfully took on the world's most powerful empire of the day. The Constitution of 1789 and the system it established became the model for the new Latin American nations and was seen by European liberals as the most advanced democratic republic in the world.

The British took pleasure in pointing out that the great American democratic republic was also a slave republic. Even though the slaveholding states that rebelled in 1776 were slaveholding British colonies immediately before that. Despite the cynicism and hypocrisy with which that criticism was often made, it was true. Just because it functioned as British propaganda doesn't mean it was wrong. And, like the Northern US banks and shipping companies, British firms also profited from American slavery in the cotton trade. So much so that it touch-and-go during the first years of the Civil War whether Britain would recognize the Confederacy as an independent country, which would have made the Union cause much more difficult and even opening the possibility of a formal or de facto alliance of Britain with Confederacy.

In other words, the American Revolution was a messy and contradictory enterprise, like every other drastic political change in history. Purity in political movements hard to find. As Hegel famously observed, "history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history." (From his Lectures on World History) Substitute "pure political movements" for "history" and the statement is at least equally true.

But looking in what direction a political movement or process is heading is a different story. Those are results we can see, whether or not we like the picture they present.

In the context of the concerns in the forefront of historians' considerations today, even the post-Civil War Reconstruction regimes would qualify only as deeply flawed and very limited democracies. Although there were scattered periods of women voting prior to the Civil War, When the Territory of Wyoming recognized women's right to vote in 1869, they were unique in doing so in the United States. Women's suffrage in the US was established nationally only in 1920 in the US.

And, of course, Native Americans were the targets of discrimination, relocation, plundering, murder and a long series of what were known as Indian Wars. There's no way to tell that story without several variants of Europeans looking very bad: British, English, Spanish, French, Americans, Canadians, Mexicans. Something that Nabors highlights in his book is that Republicans before and after the Civil War advocated radical versions of democratic land reform. But not only was all that land previously occupied by Indians, although not "owned" in the European sense. And part of those radical land reform proposals had to do with distributing territorial land. Or, in other words, distributing land taken from Indians by force and violence to distribute to white men.

And yet democracy grew and expanded. And eventually the American political community expanded to include the vote and full citizenship for blacks, women, and Native Americans. Nabors recounts how the pro- and anti-slavery disputants each claimed to be the true representatives of the tradition and values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And in doing so, they confronted the contradictions between the ideals of democracy and equality, on the one hand, and the reality of slavery. A big part of his focus is how white citizens - essentially all of whom shared some kind of white supremacist ideas - came to see it as part of their own interest in democratic rights and freedoms for themselves required them to destroy slavery and make the slaves free people and even voting citizens.

But those ideas didn't drop down from Heaven on the day in 1860 when South Carolina declared its secession from the Union. They were deeply rooted in the ideas of of the Revolution and the Constitution and the ways in those ideas were incorporated of their understanding of their individual and group interests. Abraham Lincoln gave particular emphasis to the Declaration itself. He made this well-known observation in a letter to Joshua Speed (08/24/1854):

I am not a Know-Nothing [i.e., not an adherent of the anti-immigrant American Party]. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].

As President, Lincoln, who was an abolitionist and dead set on stopping the expansion of slavery, claimed Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as the Presidents to whom he looked as models for his own Presidency. The two Presidents who founded the Democratic Party that now can't even be bothered to invoke the democratic traditions of which they were a part. Even allowing an anti-democratic malicious clown like Donald Trump to pose as a Jacksonian.

Nabors gives this example of how the Jacksonian reformers in the Democratic Party later found their way into the Republican Party when the Democratic Party converted itself into the party of John Calhoun. How people today can fail to distinguish the radical difference between the Jacksonian tradition and that of John Calhoun still bewilders me:

James Blaine dated Van Buren’s defeat in 1844 as the beginning of Calhoun’s total influence over the Democratic Party, but it “moved so rapidly and so far, that men in the North, who wished to remain in the ranks of the Democracy, were compelled to trample on the principles, and surrender the prejudices, of a lifetime.” In particular, Reconstruction Republicans who were former Democrats deplored the transformation of their party. John Hale had left the Democratic Party and successively joined the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican Parties. He remembered Van Buren’s surprising demise at the 1844 convention, with the words, “I repeat but history when I say that the breath of slavery has made and unmade the public men of this country.” The old Democratic Party led by Andrew Jackson, said George Williams, had opposed “monopolies, class legislation, and the unjust and artificial distinctions of society.” But “Calhounism however found its way into the party and worked like poison. Contrary to the teachings of the Fathers that Slavery was a political, social and moral evil, it came to teach the ethics of Calhoun that Slavery was a political, social and moral blessing.” [my emphasis]

Nabors also describes an early version of what we now call "voter suppression" directed by the planters and their flunkies against ordinary white workers and farmers in the South, in which votes had to be cast by voice, about as far removed from a secret ballot as it could be.

This method of voting exposed the elector to the candidate’s control by means of bribery, pressure, or intimidation. In addition, it could reverse the effect of the central reform of the Jacksonian democracy movement — the elimination of property qualifications for voting. If the elector was landless or a tenant but had to express his choice by voice vote at the polls, the individual’s fear of the landlord or employer could more easily induce him to vote as the landlord wished, increasing the landlord’s control of election outcomes. Madison expressed this concern in the Federal Convention of 1787, when he predicted that if the propertyless obtained suffrage, they would become the “tools of opulence and ambition.” His intention was not to limit the republican liberty of the people; rather, he intended the opposite. In the same context, he said, “The right of suffrage is certainly one of the fundamental articles of republican government” and that a “gradual abridgment of this right has been the mode in which aristocracies have been built on the ruins of popular forms.” The apparently democratic reform of giving suffrage to the propertyless would actually augment the ruling power of oligarchy, not restrict it, and Madison wished to check that result. Viva voce voting assisted the oligarchy, under democratic guise. [my emphasis]

The 19th century USA had slave revolts and women's suffrage campaigns, utopian movements and religious revivals, public dissent and passive resistance, democratic societies and labor unions, all of which provided some ways for which those excluded from full citizenship ways to exert pressure for democratic change: women, slaves, free blacks, immigrants, non-Protestant religious groups, even Native Americans.

But they also appealed to democratic principles put into effect by war and revolution and political struggle among the dominant white male political community. That was real history. American democracy wan't born by Immaculate Conception.

Trump goes after Andrew Jackson's tree

As someone who insists on recognizing the progressive, democratic nature of much of what we know as the Jacksonian era and Jacksonian movement, it drives me up the wall that the Democrats have surrendered the positive elements that Andrew Jackson symbolized to, not just the Republicans, but white supremacists.

One small, symbolic piece of vindication that shows how phony it is for plutocrat and democracy-hater Donald Trump to claim Andrew Jackson as some kind of soulmate came this week. He's taking down the magnolia tree that Jackson planted in memory of his wife Rachel, who had passed away just before Jackson became President.

Rachel Jackson

Kate Bennett and Jeremy Moorhead report for CNN (Exclusive: Iconic White House tree to be cut down 12/27/2017):

After a brutal presidential campaign in 1828, Andrew Jackson's wife, Rachel, died just days after his election; according to historians, Jackson believed the particularly divisive campaign contributed to his wife's untimely demise. When he took up residence in the White House as a widower following his inauguration, it is believed Jackson insisted on planting a sprout from Rachel's favorite magnolia tree from the couple's farm, Hermitage, in Tennessee.

That tree eventually grew into the sprawling magnolia the American public has come to know and recognize to this day. (A companion magnolia was planted on the opposite side of the South Portico years later for symmetry.) The official Jackson Magnolia has been in the background for numerous historic events, from state arrival ceremonies and Easter Egg Rolls, to thousands of photo ops, social and athletic activities, and countless Marine One departures and arrivals. Ironically, the tree stands directly behind where the press is currently penned during these occasions, now perilously close to the weakened giant.

And if Jackson symbolizes popular democracy - even popular democracy with grim faults - the fate of his and Rachel's tree may represent some grim symbolism of in itself:

In person, while the tree and its trunks appear quite normal from the front side, from the back, the massive hulk of the tree is virtually hollow, with wood chipping away, in places crumbling to the touch.

The Arboretum experts agree the rigging in place is now itself greatly compromised. According to their report, "further cabling and support of the east leader is not an option due to the fragile, almost non-existent lower trunk. There is no longer a sound foundation, and the upper portion lacks sound wood for cabling. This half of the tree is considered a hazard. The west leader, on the other hand, could possibly be saved for a time, but will eventually succumb to the same fate. In addition, the high winds resulting from frequent helicopter landings complicates the future of the limb. It may fail in an unpredictable way."

See also: Historic White House Jackson Magnolia Tree to be Cut Down US News & World Report 12/26/2017

Hans Küng on the construction of historical narratives

Swiss theologian Hans Küng got Faulknerian in his book Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1991), writing, "It is impossible to cope with the past in the sense of bidding it farewell or neutralizing it. Whether one likes it or not, the past always remains part of the present."

This comes in his discussion of the Holocaust, which he prefaces with some theoretical declarations about his approach to history, also noting, "A repressed past easily becomes a curse."

He offers these three bullet-points:

• Neither a national history nor a church history may be sweepingly 'instrumentalized' in the interest of a particular party, state or church policy as a means of creating identity. As Habermas has remmarked, history is not a 'substitute religion', capable of offering compensatory meaning to those deprived o f their roots in the process of modernization, and creating a consensus in state and church.
• Rather, both national and church history need to be examined critically and appropriated self-critically: with a view not only to the historical dialectic of continuity and interruption, but also to the ethical difference between humanity and inhumanity, good and evil.
• So those who because of negative historical experiences have a critical relationship to their own history and thus have a heightened moral awareness and greater human sensitivity can help to avoid the repetition of earlier mistakes. They can find a new, freer identification with their state or their religion, which excludes the former uncritical total identification with all its totalitarian consequences.

Küng isn't making only methodological points for academic research there. In the second bullet point, he emphasizes a focus on "the ethical difference between humanity and inhumanity, good and evil."

I could undoubtedly fine ways to quibble with or qualify some of what he says in the bullet-points. But I'm not really inclined to try. Because it largely reflects my own approach to history. And the kind of emphasis I've given here to the events that developed democracy and human freedom.

That's also how I've used the historical figure of Andrew Jackson, for which this blog was named for most of its existence ("Old Hickory's Weblog"). The fact that a white supremacist view of Andrew Jackson via Steve Bannon and Donald Trump has become for the moment the "hegemonic narrative" in popular usage in the US is an obscenity. One I hope will be short-lived. Because that also reflects a serious deficiency in how the left in the US tends to both understanding and use early American and antebellum history.

History, the study and evaluation of the past, has an indispensable empirical basis. But it also involves quality in the construction of narratives and both technical and normative judgments about the significance of events. Those different aspects can be distinguished. But never entirely separated.

Trump and Andrew Jackson again, aka, the right is still better at historical symbolism than the left

Andrew Jackson got dragged into Trump's obnoxious "Pocahontas" outburst yesterday.

At a ceremony honoring very elderly survivors of the legendary Navaho Code Talkers of the Second World War, Trump worked a gratuitous slur at Sen. Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas": Lauren Gambino, Trump makes 'Pocahontas' joke at ceremony honoring Navajo veterans Guardian 11/28/2017.

The Young Turks' had this report, Cenk Uygur and John Iadarola Trump Uses Racial Slur 11/27/2017:

As Cenk and John's report notes, the ceremony took place in front of the large portrait of Andrew Jackson that hangs by Trump's Presidential desk.

This brought the following tweet from the Navaho Law Center:

The President calls a white woman "Pocahontas"—who was a Native American victim of child rape—at an event "honoring" Diné WWII code talkers, all in front a portrait depicting the original architect of Indian removal, Andrew Jackson. https://t.co/Du9DDg2cC3

— Lakota Law Project (@lakotalaw) November 27, 2017

To which I replied:

Trump was a jerk today as usual. But Andrew Jackson was not the inventor of Indian removal. History didn’t begin in 1830. https://t.co/0UcLgdvAoY

— Bruce Miller (@brucemillerca) November 28, 2017

From the Encyclopedia Britannica Online article on Northeast Indian People (2008) by Elizabeth Prine Pauls and Elisabeth Tooker, about the native people of what's now the Northeast United States (internal hot links omitted):

Of the three language families represented in the Northeast, Algonquian groups were the most widely distributed. Their territories comprised the entire region except the areas immediately surrounding Lakes Erie and Ontario, some parts of the present-day states of Wisconsin and Minnesota, and a portion of the interior of present-day Virginia and North Carolina. The major speakers of Algonquian languages include the Passamaquoddy, Malecite, Mi’kmaq (Micmac) Abenaki, Penobscot, Pennacook, Massachuset, Nauset, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Niantic, Pequot, Mohegan, Nipmuc, Pocomtuc, Mohican (Mahican), Wappinger, Montauk, Delaware, Powhatan, Ojibwa, Menominee, Sauk, Kickapoo, Miami, Shawnee, and Illinois.

The territory around Lakes Ontario and Erie was controlled by peoples speaking Iroquoian languages, including the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Huron, Tionontati, Neutral, Wenrohronon, Erie, Susquehannock, and Laurentian Iroquois. The Tuscarora, who also spoke an Iroquoian language, lived in the coastal hills of present-day North Carolina and Virginia.

Although many Siouan-speaking tribes once lived in the Northeast culture area, only the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) people continue to reside there in large numbers. Most tribes within the Sioux nation moved west in the 16th and 17th centuries, as the effects of colonialism rippled across the continent. Although the Santee Sioux bands had the highest level of conflict with their Ojibwa neighbours, the Teton and Yankton Sioux bands moved the farthest west from their original territory. These bands, as well as most other Siouan-speaking groups, are usually considered to be part of the Plains Indian culture area despite their extended period of residence in the forests. [my emphasis]

That's quite the euphemism, "as the effects of colonialism rippled across the continent." But they go on to explains that what that meant was the effects of Europeans' diseases, violence, depletion of resources and Christian missionary activity. For instance (internal hot links omitted):

Europeans who traveled to the Americas brought with them diseases to which indigenous peoples had no immunity. These new diseases proved much more deadly to Amerindians than they had been to Europeans and ultimately precipitated a pancontinental demographic collapse. The introduced diseases proved especially virulent in the concentrated settlements of the Iroquoians, who began to suffer heavier population losses than their neighbours. In attempting to replace those who had died during epidemics, the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy seem to have taken kidnapping to unprecedented levels.

Economic disruptions related to the commercialization of animal resources also instigated intertribal conflict. By the early 17th century, trapping had severely depleted the beaver population around the Great Lakes. At that time beaver pelts were the most important commodity in the fur trade economy and could easily be bartered for guns, ammunition, and other goods necessary to ensure a tribe’s safety, or even preeminence, in a region. The Iroquois Confederacy occupied some of the more depleted beaver habitat and began a military campaign intended to effect expansion into territory that had not been overhunted. ...

When Europeans arrived on the North American continent, they brought manufactured goods that the Indians welcomed and new diseases that they did not. Certain of these diseases proved particularly devastating to Native Americans because they did not have the immunity that the colonial populations had developed through centuries of exposure. For example, the first epidemic recorded in New England took place in 1616–17; while the very early date of this pestilence makes it difficult to determine exactly what disease was involved, most historical epidemiologists and demographers believe it was probably smallpox. As no census figures for Native Americans are available for this period, the number of individuals who perished is similarly difficult to discern. Historically, however, the mortality rates for populations experiencing smallpox for the first time have ranged from 20 to 90 percent. The mortality rates appear to have been quite high in this case, as the Puritans who landed at Plymouth in 1620 remarked upon the large number of abandoned villages near their settlement. They interpreted this obvious and recent depopulation of the region as a sign of divine favour—believing that God had used the epidemic to rid the area of indigenous nonbelievers who would have hindered Puritan expansion. ...

The initial European settlement clung to the Atlantic coast—the sea provided the lifeline to the European homeland that the colonists needed—and thus coastal groups were first affected by the newcomers’ desire for land. They were ill equipped to counter the invasion. Not only were their numbers relatively small (and made even smaller by the epidemics), but their political organization was not of the kind that easily led to unified action of numbers of men. Friction with the colonists did occasionally erupt, however, as in the Pequot War (1637) and King Philip’s War (1675–76). Such resistance could not be maintained for long, however, and indigenous peoples began to adopt European ways as a means of survival. This often involved the acceptance and practice of Christianity; some missionaries were especially influential. John Eliot, for example, accomplished the monumental task of translating the Bible into Algonquian, publishing the translation in two volumes that appeared in 1661 and 1663. [my emphasis]

The occupation of the North American continent - including Canada, Mexico and Central America - and South America, as well, was accomplished largely by the physical expulsion of the native populations. I don't say this as any kind of moral or political justification of the actions. But it's what happened. It started happening way before the Jacksonian Indian Removal Act of 1930, and continued long after. Even today, Indian tribes have to actively resist attempted incursions by mining companies and others, though fortunately more effective legal means to do so are available to them today.

The history of mass deaths is always grim business. The chief instrument of the European conquest of natives and their land were microscopic. And, as Pauls and Tooker say above, those germs and viruses "ultimately precipitated a pancontinental demographic collapse." That was also true all across what is now Latin America, beginning with Columbus' landing in what is now Haiti in 1492.

Andrew Jackson did not invent Indian relocation. But at this moment in American history, Jackson is now largely viewed in the media and the public discussion as an almost uniquely culpable figure in the long history of Europeans and their descendants in North America. In earlier posts, I've discussed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and its brutal consequences. It deserves to be seen as a bad, terrible thing in US history.

But the Republicans have now successfully (for the moment) made Jackson a symbol of their version of white supremacy. In the outlook of the Steve Bannons and Richard Spencers of our world, Jackson's treatment of the Indians must look like an admirable thing. As well as the actions of viruses, germs, warriors, plunderers and thieves who preceded and succeeded Jackson.

So, the President who led and lent his name to some of the most important domestic reforms and expansions of democracy, and who led the successful fighters against the plutocratic Bank of the United States (which was a major factor in the early corruption of politics by money) and against John Calhoun and the leaders of South Carolina in the pre-secessionist Nullification Crisis. The Jacksonian reformers were the first large political movement in the US to actively support organized labor. Jackson himself assisted the early feminist activist Frances "Fanny" Wright in setting up the explicitly Abolitionist utopian colony, the Nashoba Commune, in his native Tennessee in 1825. She also actively campaigned for Jackson's Democratic Party and in support of his fight against the Bank.

Republicans are just better at using (misusing) symbols and traditions of the American past than Democrats are.

And reducing history to any one factor is ahistorical. Even those factors like class and gender are fundamental influences, they are not the only ones. It's important to remember that the original political community of the US recognized essentially only white men as full citizens, and even universal male suffrage didn't emerge with the Constitution in 1789. (The Jacksonians pushed for eliminating property requirements for voting.) But there were important developments that benefited some as disadvantaged others within that community. Ever our basic law was established with our 18th-century Constitution. So it doesn't really make much sense to dismiss the entirety of earlier American history to an unbroken horror show. Even though it had no shortage of horror shows, and not only for Indians.

The North American Indian Wars are considered to have definitely ended in the late 1870s, although some might prefer to use the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 to mark the ending point. If we date it to Wounded Knee, every US President and Congress from George Washington to Benjamin Harrison presided over a reprehensible Indian policy, even one that liberals and the left are quick to call genocide. But was there nothing in American politics worth admiring, praising, using as some kind of model in all that time?

I think it would be sophomoric to look at history that way. Plus, I still think Andrew Jackson is a great historical symbol that can be used against neo-Confederacy. The title of this blog for most of its existence since 2003 until this year was "Old Hickory's Weblog" for just that reason.

But the left in the US seems largely ready to cede most all of American history prior to 1861 to Republicans, conservatives and white supremacists. And I wonder how long it will be until purist-minded earnest folks on the left discover that Lincoln served in militias in Illinois that fought Indians. Or that both and the Confederate and the Union armies fought Indian tribes. Once people decide that Lincoln is therefore not the Great Liberator but the Great Genocider, then the left can happily join hands with neo-Confederates who also see Lincoln as a bloody, genocidal tyrant (against good Christian white people).

And be careful about telling a group of Democrats that some Indians were also slave-owners. Their heads might just explode.

On a little more serious note, "Whig history" has a depressingly strong influence on the left and center-left in the US today. In that narrative, the monarchist Alexander Hamilton and the plutocrat John Quincy Adams are the great heroes. Maybe we could add in the reactionary Chief Supreme Court John Marshall to make it a trinity. That narrative incorporates them into a trend that culminates with Lincoln the Great Liberator.

In the real world, hardcore Jacksonians saw Lincoln as standing in their own tradition. And the Great Liberators himself cited the slaveowners Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as his main Presidential models. Go figure. History is kind of complicated, I guess.

But Republicans are happy to provide their own simplifications, which by coincidence wind up providing ideological support for their current policies.

This video on the Trump/Pocahontas flap features Navajo Nation's President Russell Begaye, who takes a more cautious approach to criticizing Jackson, in that he doesn't make him the central symbol of bad policy toward Indians, Navajo President: Donald Trump's 'Pocahontas' Comment Was 'Inappropriate' Velshi & Ruhle/MSNBC 11/28/2017

"Charlottesville" as a reminder that the left and center-left need to contest historical interpretations

The transcript of Trump's instantly-infamous press conference on Tuesday is available from several sources, including Read the complete transcript of President Trump's remarks at Trump Tower on Charlottesville Los Angeles Times 08/15/2017. The press conference was physically located in Trump Tower in New York City.

But "Charlottesville" is now the name for an event. Like "Jackson State" or "Kent State" became symbols in 1970s as well as physical locations.

I've been trying this year to incorporate "synecdoche" and "metonymy." I think using "Charlottesville" to review to the confluence of events from the torch demonstration Friday night to (at least) Trump's both-sides press conference yesterday counts as a synecdoche, in which one element of something is used to represent the whole. (People more literate in linguistics than I am are welcome to correct me.) I would also say that "Charlottesville" qualifies as a "vacant signifier" in the sense in which Ernesto Laclau uses it in his political theory, a place name in this case, that had no particular national or international political significance has suddenly become a word signifying white supremacist terrorism and the defense of it and of white supremacists, the KKK and Nazis by the President of the United States.

Here is a Wednesday take from the Morning Joe crew, Joe: None Of Us Have Seen Anything Like Yesterday MSNCBC 08/16/2017:

There are a few groaners in that one, such as Jon Meachem wondering in good Pod Pundit fashion how the Republican Party got this way. A few hints Jon: Barry Goldwater, the Southern Strategy, "Build That Wall."

The head of the Our Revolution organization that emerged from Bernie Sanders' campaign discusses "Charlottesville" in this segment, Nina Turner Denounces the Enablers of Nazis The Real News 08/15/2017:

I'll mention a few good takes on the situation prior to Tuesday:

• Will Bunch, Trump's shameful moral void on Charlottesville leaves America without a leader Philadelphia Inquirer 08/13/2017
• Charlie Pierce, This Is the Bleakest Moment for America in my Lifetime Esquire Politics Blog 08/13/2017
• David Neiwert and The Investigative Fund, Home is where the hate is Reveal 06/21/2017 (Obviously, in June, "Charlottetsville" hadn't taken on the meaning it just did over this weekend.)

Charlie Pierce calls attention to an important feature of Trump's Tuesday press conference in Maybe Next Time Stick to the Notes Esquire Politics Blog 08/15/2017, focusing on this aspect of Trump's rant, from the LA Times transcript:

Those people -- all of those people -- excuse me. I've condemned neo-Nazis. I've condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue, Robert E. Lee. So -- excuse me. And you take a look at some of the groups and you see -- and you'd know it if you were honest reporters, which in many cases you're not, but many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. So this week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson's coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you all -- you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop? But they were there to protest -- excuse me. You take a look, the night before, they were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. ...

QUESTION: George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same (inaudible)…

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So, will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down -- excuse me -- are we going to take down -- are we going to take down statues to George Washington?

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him?

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: OK. Good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue? So you know what? It's fine. You're changing history. You're changing culture. And you had people, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. OK? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You've got -- you had a lot of bad -- you had a lot of bad people in the other group. [my emphasis]

Pierce writes:

There's actually an interesting question buried in all that malarkey as to where to place the slaveholding of Washington, Jefferson and many of the rest of the Founders in our historical memory now that we're correcting the memory of the Civil War, monument by monument. (At Montpelier, the home of James Madison, the people in charge have been working hard for several years to honor the stories of the slaves that lived and worked there.) But that's not what the president* was getting at. He was bigot-signaling to his vaunted base that he would have been out there with a tiki torch himself. That's why we got all that talk about the very fine Nazis who were patrolling the park on Saturday night along with the Citronella SS, and who were treated so unfairly by the fake news media when they decided to go for throats.

And that's what takes Tuesday's explosion beyond the realm of simple mockery. There's an audience out there for every lunatic assertion the president* made. We saw it in full flower last Saturday. And he knows it's there, too. He knows that it's the one segment of the American population still guaranteed to give his fragile-if-monumental ego the constant boost that it needs. So he needed to salve all the fee-fees he wounded the other day when somebody dragged him out so he could say right out loud that being a Nazi is a bad thing. This was an angry, heartfelt appeal to his white nationalist base to stick with him, probably because that base is all he has left.

One of my longtime concerns is that the left and center-left do not contest American history thoroughly enough, given the ways in which the rightwingers invoke figures like Washington and Jefferson that have a mythical status for most Americans as Founders and pioneers of democracy.

I've expressed here more than once my frustration at the inability of the left and center-left to contest the democratic and, yes, revolutionary heritage of early and antebellum American history. I hope the left generally gets better at it.

Here is a recent post of mind on the Andrew Jackson part of that heritage, Trump puts Andrew Jackson back in the news 05/03/2017. Jackson, BTW, legitimately counts as a Founder; he fought in the Revolutionary War.

(Anti-) Pseudohistory Sunday

The continuing move to take down monuments honoring the Confederacy has brought with it an encouraging spate of articles discussing the real history of the Confederacy and of the white supremacist, post-Civil War agenda behind neo-Confederate ideology, including Adam Serwer's The Myth of the Kindly General Lee Atlantic Online 06/04/2017.

One of my Facebook friends posted this piece on Andrew Jackson that is vague enough to be sparse on particular claims but nevertheless has a definite pseudohistory edge to it: Adrienne Keene, How I Feel As a Native Woman When Trump Idolizes Andrew Jackson Teen Vogue 04/19/2017. She happily accepts the idea of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump that Jackson is a fitting image for the current Trump Family Business Administration:

Trump embraced the comparison to Jackson, and once in the Oval Office, he chose a portrait of Jackson to hang in a place of honor. More recently, ... Trump spent the night at Jackson’s Tennessee plantation, the Hermitage, and laid a wreath on his tomb. He gave a speech at the site, stating that America will “build on [his] legacy.” He called Jackson a “military hero and genius and a beloved president,” but noted he was “also a flawed and imperfect man, a product of his time.” He ended his speech, “Andrew Jackson, we thank you for your service. We honor you for your memory. We build on your legacy, and we thank God for the United States of America.”

These statements and comparisons terrify me. Jackson’s legacy is nothing short of Native genocide. History has strangely been kind to him, painting him as a populist president, a “common man,” a political outsider who came to shake up the establishment and break the rules to serve the people. But the reality was far from it.

Jackson came to power campaigning against "the Money Power," concentrated wealth that corrupted democracy. American political leaders used terms like "Wall Street" and "the trusts" and the "malefactors of great wealth" and "economic royalists" to describe later incarnations of the same problem. And DONALD TRUMP wants us to think of him as a present-day Andrew Jackson? Ur-Confederate John C. Calhoun is laughing maniacally in whatever corner of the underworld he currently hangs out. Tom Paine is weeping.

Historians still provide some incredibly nuanced and insightful views of the pre-Civil War US history. But on seemingly the entire left of center, popular accounts reject nearly everything that would have been considered "left" at the time. Republicans and conservatives are much better at evoking historical imagery than the Democrats. But among other things, it leads to sloppy history.

It also leads the Democrats to miss the opportunity to challenge the far right's alt-history of the United States. Like the idea of Donald Trump being a new Andrew Jackson. The Democrats don't even bother to contest that bit of pseudohistory, although Keene doesn't present herself as speaking as a Democrat in that piece.

And even well-informed articles I've seen the last few weeks debunking neo-Confederate pseudohistory haven't yet seem to have focused on the fact that Jackson in the Nullification Controversy came down hard on the side of the Union and against threats of secession on behalf of slavery. Popular left and left-of-center history right now tends to reject Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson (the two major founders of the Democratic Party!) out of hand because they were slaveowners. But Lincoln is still allowed to be the Great Emancipator. But how to explain that he saw Jefferson and Jackson as major role models, and understood his own political project as carrying on their work of democratic emancipation?

For that matter, Lincoln took part in state militia action against Indians in his younger years. And Indian tribes were among those Lincoln sent the Union Army to fight in the Civil War. Some groups of Indians supported the Confederacy, including in Oklahoma where the Creeks, Choctaws and Cherokees were relocated under Jackson Indian Removal Act.

I'll say again what I've said various times in other posts. Jackson's Indian policy was bad. The opponents of Jackson's Indian Removal Act did object to it in real time. But their arguments were things like, having Indian slaveowners in the South helped defend the institution of slavery. Keene at least alludes to that. And that it would be easier to Christianize the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees if they stayed in the southeast, i.e., easier to destroy their cultures completely.

Though Jackson rightly gets blamed for the Indian Removal Act, the removal of the Cherokees (what the term Trail of Tears originally referred to) under that law took place under Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren, which most popular accounts don't even mention. Keene's article also omits that fact. That's not an excuse for Jackson's Administration. Other relocations took place under Jackson's Presidency, and they also caused a great deal of death and suffering.

Herman Melville was one of the few whites in America at that time who held something like a 21st-century view of equality for Native Americans. Francis Parkman came close, but Melville thought Parkman was a bit backward on the subject. And even the Great Emancipator was a white supremacist in today's sense, along with virtually every other white person in the US, including most of the soldiers of the Union Army that destroyed the Slave Power in the Civil War. The only famous white person prior to the Civil War that comes to mind who held views on racial and gender equality like those of American liberals in 2017 is John Brown. And how many white Americans today are willing to identify with the "terrorist" guerrilla fighter and convicted traitor John Brown?

History is complicated, Especially the part that human being make.

Jackson's Indian policy sucked. So did that of virtually every other white person in the US from before the American Revolution until, well, arguably even now. And while there were undoubtedly many settlers who wanted to just kill every Indian in sight, Jackson was not one of them. If "genocide" means anything like the official UN definition of it today - which involves a deliberate intent as well as concrete action aimed at exterminating an entire group of people - neither Jackson's Indian Removal Act nor the removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma count as genocide. The Cherokee removal on which Keene focused was mainly implemented by Jackson's successor Martin Van Buren. Obviously, "not genocide" does not mean "acceptable."

Republicans are not only better at evoking historical symbolism than the Democrats. And more willing to make up their own pseudohistory, which I guess we call alt-history right now. While Democrats aren't willing to defend the genuine democratic progress made prior to the Civil War even by their own party founders. This is one reason that saying adapted from Robert Frost remains current, "A liberal is someone who is so open-minded he won’t take his own side in a fight."

Adrienne Keene who authored the Teen Vogue article is presumably the same one who is an American Studies Professor at Brown University. She has a blog called Native Appropriations focusing on issues of "cultural appropriation," which seems to be a major focus of her scholarly work, as well.

Trump puts Andrew Jackson back in the news

Well, I called this blog "Old Hickory's Weblog" for most of its existence 'til now. So I'm happy to see this refreshingly historically literate commentary on Andrew Jackson and the Nullification Crisis in response to our President's bizarre Civil War revisionsm from this past weekend ("People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War?"). Because Josh Marshall in this piece knocks it out of the park in Trump Knows Jack about Andrew Jackson. SAD! TPM 05/01/2017:

The final months of Jackson’s first term as president saw what historians refer to as the Nullification Crisis. In critical ways, it was a dry run for the Civil War. The notional trigger of the crisis was a tariff law which was generally opposed in the Southern states. But the real issue was the authority of the national government, whether states or groups of states could block federal laws or even secede from the union, and ultimately the security of slavery.

The originator of these doctrines and driver of the crisis was one of the great political stars of the early 19th century, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

Who, we might add, is the real political ancestor of Trump and Steve Bannon. As Josh also concludes at the end of the piece.

... the Nullification Crisis cut to the core of one of his central beliefs: the inviolability of the federal union. Today we hear ‘nationalism’ used as a byword for xenophobia, racism and militarism. Jackson had his mix of each. But Jackson thought the crisis, what Calhoun was doing could not have been more important. He actually wanted to march an army down to South Carolina and hang Calhoun. To the extent Jackson knew about the Civil War and was 'really angry' about it, he was really angry at the Southern planter aristocrats who would later start the Civil War. He was ready to go to war in 1832-33 to vindicate the union and popular democracy – two concepts that to him were basically inseparable.

Josh slips up a bit when he says that Jackson "also become known for his militarism." Say what? There was wasn't even a standing army to speak of when Jackson was President. Remember all those big wars during the Jackson Administration of 1829-1837? Me neither. I believe the sum total of them amounts to: the Second Seminole War of 1835-42. I think Ken Burns did a 12-part documentary series on that one. (Or, NOT!) Unless we include that it was during Jackson's Presidency that the US snatched the Malvinas/Falkland Islands from Argentina and gave it to the British, leaving a still-unresolved problem. But Josh redeems himself on that one:

Most of the public image of Jackson today, at least in the public arena is driven by the writing of Walter Russell Meade, whose grasp of the man and the period is, I would argue, rather thin and presentist. It’s this Jackson – militarist, unilateralist, authoritarian and nationalist that Bannon is in love with and through Bannon has become Trump’s favorite President.

Andrew Jackson has become the Schroedinger's Cat of contemporary American politics. Republicans don't believe in science, so rather than looking for quantam complexity, they just make stuff up to fit their preferred narrative. Democrats worry that if they challenge the Trump/Bannon/white-supremacist image of Jackson, it might upset some hardcore Republican somewhere who would never consider voting for a Democrat ever. So they cede the image of Jackson - Revolutionary War veteran, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, a Founder of the country and of the Democratic Party - to Republican hackery.

The reason that the Steve Bannons of the world would go to the trouble of fabricating a bogus historical version of Jackson: because Jackson has an enduring reputation as a pioneering political reformer. They make use of his image. The Democrats don't bother to contest it.

I visited the Reagan Library and Museum in southern California two weekends ago for the first time. They have a replica of the Oval Office as it was during St. Reagan's Presidency. I learned from the guide's spiel that St. Reagan was 6'1" tall. And LBJ was 6'5". I also noticed that he had a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the office, although not positioned in so prominent a way as Trump has it. St. Reagan surely realized that the well-known image of Jackson the Democrat had a firmly-established reputation as a reformer. And using it fit well with his pitch to the so-called Reagan Democrats that "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me."

And the Democrats can't use their own well-established party symbol! It reminds me of the famous quote, a attributed to poet Robert Frost, that a liberal is someone "too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."

One fascinating thing in learning about Argentine history is that contesting 19th century history is still a thriving practice. Left-nationalists and kirchneristas, not just historians but politicians and polemicists - proudly identify themselves with the images of Mariano Moreno (1778-181) and Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877). While conservatives look to Bernardino Rivadavia (1780-1845), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) and especially Bartholomé Mitre (1821-1906) as the secular saints of their political tradition. But here in the US, only the Republican Party draws on that symbolism of the early days of the US, which still resonates strongly for many American voters. Zach Schonfeld notes in Understanding Donald Trump's Weird Obsession With Andrew Jackson Newsweek 05/01/2017, "Despite the more despicable aspects of his legacy, he remains reasonably popular among historians. (Though his popularity is sliding, and some are blaming Trump for that.)"

Sean Wilentz' Andrew Jackson (2007), his contribution to the American Presidents Series, is a fairly recent but pre-Trump account by a liberal historian that stresses elements of Jackson's democratic achievements and legacy without ignoring the less democratic aspects of his character and career.

But I said at the time that Trump visiting Jackson's grave and ludicrously trying to identify himself with Old Hickory was an instant dose of major bad karma. He's lucky that Jackson didn't claw his way out of his grave right there and bitch-slap him. He wouldn't have challenged Trump to a duel, though, because you only did that with somebody who was considered to have some personal honor.

Trump's vague remark that Jackson could have worked out something to avoid the Civil War attracted a lot of attention.

Jackson's supporters who were still around after the 1860 election were heard to wish they could have Jackson back in the White House for that moment. (Although, apparently unlike Trump, they were aware that Jackson was dead since years before.) But they were addressing a particular, immediate problem. Lincoln's famous decision-making style was to weigh decisions carefully and analytically, but then when he made the decision he followed it through in a determined way. And they were frustrated at Lincoln's seemingly restrained posture after he took office, in what they saw as a contrast to Jackson's handling of the Nullification Crisis. Lincoln himself later expressed regret that he hadn't responded more actively, like arresting Union military officers who resigned to go South to lead an armed rebellion against the US government. Trump may have heard some version of that, but what came out of his mouth in that interview was hopelessly garbled.

Tim Morris gives Trump way too much credit in understanding that situation, of which Morris himself gives a decent account, in Donald Trump is right about Andrew Jackson New Orleans Times-Picayune 05/02/2017.

Here are a few other notable reactions:

• Digby Parton expresses her gobsmacked response to Trump goofy Civil War remarks in Your Sixth Grader In Chief Hullabaloo 05/01/2017.
• Aaron Blake, Trump’s totally bizarre claim about avoiding the Civil War Washington Post 05/01/2017
• David Graham, Trump's Peculiar Understanding of the Civil War Atlantic Online 05/01/2017 Not so good.
• Tim Murphy, Historian on Donald Trump's Civil War Comments: "God Help Us" Mother Jones 05/01/2017
• Yoni Appelbaum, Why There Was a Civil War Atlantic Online 05/01/2017
• Chris Cillizza interviews Jon Meacham, What would Andrew Jackson think of Donald Trump? CNN 05/02/2017
• Jessica Estepa, Note to President Trump: Andrew Jackson wasn't alive for the Civil War Tennessean/USA Today 05/01/2017

Christopher Wilson in Historians react to Trump’s Civil War comments: ‘That’s entirely wrong in every respect’ Yahoo News! 05/01/2017 quotes historian Eric Rauchway putting Trump's comment about Jackson's "big heart" in some necessary context:

There was also pushback against Trump’s musings that Jackson could have prevented the Civil War and his suggestion that the seventh president — whose Indian Removal Act essentially legalized genocide — had a “big heart.”

“Andrew Jackson himself was a slaveholder and the Jacksonians were slaveholders and they despised the abolitionists,” said Rauchway, “so it’s hard for me to believe that they would have been able to prevent the Civil War. And actually it was Jacksonian policies – particularly those of James K. Polk, who styled himself as Young Hickory, as a direct heir to Andrew Jackson – which precipitated the Civil War. That’s entirely wrong in every respect.”

“Jackson had a big heart for white farmers,” said Hemmer, “Less so for the American Indians he slaughtered and the African-Americans he enslaved. Given Trump’s own focus on white Americans over non-white Americans, it’s not surprising that he would fail to see the limits of Jackson’s big-heartedness.”

James Loewen responds to Trump's now-infamous question in ‘Why was there the Civil War?’ Here’s your answer. Washington Post 05/02/2017:

Trump’s conclusion about Jackson places him in a camp of 1930s historians who called it a “needless war,” in the words of James G. Randall, brought about by a “blundering generation.” That view is a product of its time, and that time is now known as the Nadir of Race Relations. The Nadir began at the end of 1890 and began to ease around 1940. It was marked by lynchings, the eugenics movement and the spread of sundown towns across the North. Neo-Confederates put up triumphant Confederate monuments from Helena, Mont., to Key West, Fla., obfuscating why the Southern states seceded. They claimed it was about tariffs or states’ rights — anything but slavery.

Earlier, everyone knew better. In 1858, William Seward, a Republican senator from New York, gave a famous speech titled “The Irrepressible Conflict,” referring to the struggle between “slave labor” and “voluntary labor.” When Mississippi seceded, it emphasized the same point: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”

Simply to recognize this material interest renders improbable the “needless war” notion. Mississippi was right: Slavery was the greatest material interest in the United States, if not the world. Slaves made up an investment greater than all manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation. Never has an elite given up such a stake voluntarily. The North went to war to hold the nation together, not to emancipate anyone. But the Civil War did end slavery. When might that have happened otherwise?

And I see that the next generation of the Clinton Dynasty has a safely simplistic answer that would not disturb any donor to the Clinton Foundation:

1 word answer: Slavery. Longer: When Andrew Jackson died in 1845 (16 yrs before the Civil War began), he owned 150 men, women and children. https://t.co/Icg6puG2JZ

— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) May 1, 2017

Postmodernism never really took hold with me, I admit. But "Slavery. Longer." seems like a 2-word answer to me. I'm just sayin'.

I wonder how Chelsea would explain Jackson's position in the Nullification Controversy. She went to Stanford, so I'm guessing she had one or two decent American history classes. But if you take the real history seriously, slavery and antislavery were devilishly complicated. Last month, I wrote a bit here about Hinton Rowan Helper, who was one of the most famous and effective antislavery advocates. He was also a white supremacist with racist ideas against blacks so noxious I can barely read them. And that combination of attitudes was not at all unusual among antebellum white opponents of slavery.

The one famous white American prior to the Civil War I know of who had ideas on the equality of blacks and whites, and men and women that would sound respectable in 2018 was John Brown. But how many Americans today would regard the "terrorist" (and hardcore Calvinist) John Brown as someone with whom they could identify? I think most Democratic politicians today, of either the corporate or progressive variety, would do backflips to avoid identifying the guerrilla fighter and convicted traitor John Brown as some kind of hero. Even though the Union Army that put an end to slavery - and was mainly composed of white men who thought themselves to be part of a superior race - used "John Brown's Body" as a marching song. Like Josh Marshall says in his excellent post on Trump and Jackson, history is complicated.

Also, there's this from Hillary hardliner Simon Maloy:

not every day you see a GOP president shit on Lincoln in favor of a genocidal, racist, Democratic war criminal https://t.co/momFwItuOd

— Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) May 2, 2017

Seriously, dude?

Jamelle Bouie's heart and head seem to be in the right place in this piece from March, Donald Trump Sees Himself in Andrew Jackson Slate 03/15/2017:

This is the most familiar vision of Jackson, heavily indebted to the mythmaking of the Democratic Party, which claims him as its founder next to Thomas Jefferson. In this popular narrative of the party, Jefferson embodied equality, autonomy, and economic opportunity, whereas Jackson stood for democracy and its expansion. Under his presidency, the United States renounced its property requirements for voting, opening the franchise to all white men. Defenders of Jackson acknowledge his racial exclusivity but see it as separate from a broader embrace of the principle of democratic participation.

That’s one view of Jackson. There is another. That perspective sees Jackson in a different tradition. Not of democracy, but of white supremacy. This Jackson was a planter who built his wealth and influence with the stolen labor of more than 200 enslaved Africans. He forced Native Americans off their land in a campaign of removal that claimed thousands of lives in service of white expansion and white hegemony.

Jacksonian democracy, in other words, was a racial democracy built on a foundation of ethnic cleansing, committed to race hierarchy and enslavement. And while Jackson rejected the nullification theories of his vice president, John C. Calhoun, he all but embraced the South Carolinian’s view that slavery — and racial caste more broadly — was “the best guarantee to equality among the whites.” Along with that racial ideology, he brought ceaseless condemnation of elite corruption and a profoundly anti-government philosophy that contributed to the panic of 1837, a crushing depression that lasted more than a half-decade.

Unfortunately, it's also a little-bit-of-this-little-bit-of-that approach to history. Jackson's two most significant democratic achievements as President were his successful fight against the Money Power embodied and symbolized by the Bank of the United States headed by Nicholas Biddle and his suppression of Calhoun's nullification scheme. Bouie ignores the first and trivializes the second.

But he does manage to say that Jackson's "populism ... is too exclusive." The present tense there is a tell. This is very much a presentist view of the Age of Jackson. And while I would call the Jacksonian movement proto-populist and let William Jennings Bryan's Populist Party be the first populists, I suspect that for corporate/Hillary Democrats, what bothers them about Jackson's "populism" is not that it was too exclusive, but rather than it made the Money Power a symbol of the wealthy ruling elite and successfully opposed it.

If the Hillary hardliners could scold Bernie Sanders for supporting a mayoral candidate in Omaha that had an anti-abortion record in his past, even though he had the most pro-choice position of any of the candidates in that race, I can picture them accusing Bernie or Elizabeth Warren of being "Jacksonians" and try to make that mean "Trumpists."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 9: Andrew Jackson and the Missouri Compromise

I'm out of step with current popular impressions of early US history in that I insist on validating the advancements in democracy and equality while recognizing that retrogression and restrictions on freedom were also taking place at the same time. American democracy in 2017 is vastly more inclusive than that of American democracy in 1820. We also just elected a xenophobic hyper-nationalist loon as President and made his party by far the dominant one at the national and state levels. It's hard to conceive a narrative of continual progress toward greater democracy, freedom and equality that doesn't also recognize that some things get better and some things get worse, and it's a very good thing if there is more of the former than the latter.

The initial Spanish colonists to the New World brought with them a missionary zeal that was simultaneously being expressed in the home country in the expulsion of Jews and the Reconquista of Grenada, along with the massive persecution of Muslims and Jewish converts to Christianity. The first century of Spanish colonization brought the Spanish Inquisition and the zeal of the Counter-Reformation to the Americas. This resulted in a view of the native inhabitants as uncivilized heathens who needed to be converted or exterminated. The germs and viruses that the Europeans brought with them to the New World did more to achieve the latter than military force or religious inquisition. Portuguese, English and French colonists brought similar attitudes (and diseases) to their settlements in the New World. Russia was last to the colonizing game in North America, discovering Alaska and the Aleutians in 1741 and brought their own version of Christian civilization to the native peoples there, with broadly similar results.

The American democracy that emerged from the Revolution was a democracy founded on revolutionary principles that were understandably inspiring to many reformers and advocates of popular government and freedom in other parts of the world. The democratic republic of the United States was also a slaveowning republic and an expansionist nation. The expansion included the expansion of democracy and the expansion of slavery. And it was the expansion of a democracy largely restricted to white men.

With time, the real contradictions among democracy, westward expansion and slavery became increasingly obvious, resulting eventually in the Civil War. The Missouri crisis was a very obvious case in which westward expansion and slavery - more specifically, the struggle over the numerical balance in the Senate between slave and free states - were obviously in conflict. As Robert Remini in Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767-1821 (1977), "Andrew Jackson determined the course of American expansion. He was, in fact, the greatest expansionist of them all."

At the time of the Missouri crisis, Jackson was a general during the John Quincy Adams Monroe Administration. He had successfully seized Florida from Spanish control. In the Adams-onís Treaty of 1819, aka the Transcontinental Treaty, Spain agreed to sell Florida to the United States. Remini says Jackson's reacted to the Missouri Compromise "as southerner and slaveowner," concerned about its implications for the Union and for the Peculiar Institution (slavery). He quotes Jackson's undated reaction from that time:

The Misouri [sic] question so called, has agitated the public mind, and that I sincerely regret and never expected, but that now I see, will be the entering wedge to seperate the union. lt is even more wicked, it will excite those who is the subject of discussion to insurrection and masacre [sic]. lt is a question of political ascendency, and power, and the Eastern interests are determined to succeed regardless ofthe consequences, the constitution or our national happiness. They will find the southern and western states equally resolved to support their constitutional rights. I hope I may not live to see the evills [sic] that must grow out of this wicked design of demagogues, who talk about humanity, but whose sole object is self agrandisement regardless of the happiness of the nation.

We see reflected in that statement by Jackson the Republican views to which Jefferson also adhered. There is the fear of slave revolt or post-emancipation black revolution. There is the fear of destabilizing the Union, which Jackson seems to suspect is a continuation of the Federalist secessionist plotting around the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812. And he also views the antislavery agitation as a cynical political move by Federalists and Northern Democrats following in their wake. Remini comments, "As far as Jackson was concerned, 'national happiness' included slavery fdor the south and the west, whether the north liked it or not."

In the Nullification Controversy of 1832 when Jackson was President, he was forced to choose between the interest of democracy and Union, on the one hand, and aggressive defense of slavery, on the other. Jackson chose the country in that dispute.

Historical illiteracy, or, the new Dark Age (America 1776-1859)

More evidence that historical illiteracy about the early decades of the United States is rampant: "This nation survived Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon. It survived slavery. It survived devastating wars. Most likely, it will survive again."

That's from the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times. In an otherwise very good opinon piece, Our Dishonest President 04/02/2017.

Andrew Jackson=Richard Nixon=devastating wars?

The shades of Nicholas Biddle and John Calhoun are laughing maniacally in the underworld.

There seems to be a real disconnect between actual historians of the US, on the one hand, and American pundits, journalists and politicians on the left/center-left over early American history.

The former try to understand it as history. With greater or lesser degrees of success, of course.

The latter now seem to generally view American history prior to 1860 as a Dark Age redeemed only by the occasional Abolitionist or maybe women's-rights advocates. Seneca Falls did happen, you know. And thanks to the popular musical, the monarchist Alexander Hamilton, who believed that democratic government could work only via massive corruption, is considered a bit of a bright spot. Maybe an Indian warrior chief here and there, although the details of Native American history are less familiar to most people than basic US national government history.

To call the prevailing popular view one-dimensional would give it too much credit. Obscurantist is a better description.

"Andrew Jackson" and foreign policy

Seeing Donald Trump's name in the same headline with Andrew Jackson's makes me feel ill and cranky. Which is why I've been posting about it the last few days.

Jarrett Stepman in Trump Should Model His Foreign Policy After Andrew Jackson The National Interest 03/13/2017 talks about how Jackson's one-time historical image has changed in more recent years:

When the Treasury Department announced in 2015 that it was stripping Andrew Jackson’s visage from the front of the $20 bill, almost nobody cared to defend the seventh president.

Jackson was a legendary figure of the nineteenth century, the symbol of an age whose political legacy was often embraced by Americans across the political spectrum. It seemed he was doomed to be forgotten and abandoned.

I'm not impressed by the arguments I've seen from Walter Russell Mead, who Stepman cites, in his characterizations of Jackson's foreign policy.

Mead seems to have created a widespread impression that Jackson's foreign policy was notably hawkish. Quick: name all the wars the US had between 1829-1837, when Jackson was President. Yeah, hard to come up with on a moment's notice. Britannica Online's entry on the Seminole Wars tells us this (internal links omitted):

The Second Seminole War (1835–42) followed the refusal of most Seminoles to abandon the reservation that had been specifically established for them north of Lake Okeechobee and to relocate west of the Mississippi River. Whites coveted this land and sought to oust the Seminoles under the Indian Removal Act. Led by their dynamic chief Osceola, the Seminole warriors hid their families in the Everglades and fought vigorously to defend their homeland, using guerrilla tactics. As many as 2,000 U.S. soldiers were killed in this prolonged fighting, which cost the government between $40,000,000 and $60,000,000. Only after Osceola’s capture while parleying under a flag of truce did Indian resistance decline. With peace, most Seminoles agreed to emigrate.

So that operation spilled over from the Jackson Administration to those of Martin Van Buren (1839-1841), William Henry Harrison (1841) and John Tyler (1841–45).

There was a military incident during the Jackson Administration that seemed insignificant at the time but created a long-lasting issue and became the central issue in a 20th-century war. Felix Weil described it in Argentine Riddle (1944):

The Falkland islands, Las Malvinas, near the southern tip of Argentina, belonged to Spain and became Argentine territory when Argentina broke away from Spain in 1810. Whalers and traders used the islands as a base. In 1831, the governor of the islands seized the ships of some Americans, who called that an act of piracy. In retaliation, Captain Silas Duncan of the United States Navy sloop Lexington landed troops there on December 28, 1831, arrested the authorities and blew up the powder depot. His action was clearly unlawful, as was later established by a Federal court of Massachusetts. The French-Argentine jurist Paul Groussac, from whose documented study of the episode I am relating, states that it has not been proven that the American aggression was directly connected with the British occupation which followed. He means that he did not find documentary evidence, but the Argentines are convinced that, in spite of the Monroe Doctrine, an understanding must have been reached in the matter between the United States and England, since subsequent to the incident the United States government informed the Buenos Aires authorities that it recognized British sovereignty over the islands and on January 1, 1833, H.M.S. Clio took possession of them. Since then, the British have held them. The United States has ever since consistently refused to lend ear to Argentina's plea for indemnification or to let her present her titles to sovereignty · over the islands. Argentina never relinquished her claim. It is emphasized by her current one-peso postage stamp showing the islands as part of Argentina. The deep-rooted feeling about the islands' seizure is evidenced also by the fact that the quite active "Committee for the Reclamation of the Malvinas" whose posters on the subject cover many walls, is composed not only of extreme nationalists, as might be expected, but also of outspoken progressives, such as the Socialist ex-Senator Palacios. The islands themselves are of a doubtful economic value to Argentina, but of a very important strategic value as a navy base to Britain. As usual in questions of that kind, this is an argument which will not silence nationalistic claims. [my emphasis in bold]

Since the discovery in the 1990s of big oil reserves in the territorial water of the Malvinas, the economic value of the islands for Argentina (and Britain) has risen considerably.

(Fun fact: Felix Weil was the prime financial supporter in the 1920s and 1930s of the Institute for Social Research, better known as the Frankfurt School.)

Stepman describes this more constructive accomplishment of Jackson's foreign policy, though it seems to suggest the success of intelligent diplomacy more than any military blustering:

Americans stuck by Jackson through thick and thin because they believed he would always stand up for them. Old Hickory was “one of us,” and never failed to defend the nation he unquestionably knew was the greatest in the world.

One of Jackson’s biggest tests as commander in chief came over American “spoliation” claims against France that dated back to a previous conflict between the two nations. Jackson was able to secure a treaty with France to pay for property damage that had been incurred during the war. This treaty had eluded American presidents for thirty years, and it was a sign of growing respect for American strength and leadership that Jackson had secured it.

However, when France waffled on the deal and threatened to delay payment, Jackson sprang into action and demanded they follow the terms of the treaty. Taken aback by the response of an American president seemingly willing to go to war over a seemingly trivial matter, the French demanded an apology from Jackson.

Old Hickory wouldn’t back down, and delivered a message to Congress calling for immediate military preparation. Though he said he meant no offense to France they would get “no apology.”

It should go without saying, but taking such a stand against France in the 1830s when the United States was far from being a world power is quite a different thing from the world's mightiest nuclear superpower posturing this way in 2017. In Jackson's day, Stepman notes, "Through his actions, Jackson was able to secure more respect from foreign nations which had often treated the new country with contempt."

But Stepman's pitch in his column suggests that there is some kind of easy comparison with Jacksonian foreign policy and what is required for the United States today. In effect, Stepman is making a more clean-shaven pitch for "Andrew Jackson" as a political symbol than that of Steve Bannon. But it's much the same concept.

More on the Bannon-Trump cartoon version of Andrew Jackson

Adele Stan gives us a glimpse of Trump’s Race-Baiting Bromance with Andrew Jackson The American Prospect 03/15/2017.

It's good description of how the white supremacist right uses the image of Andrew Jackson.

Sadly, it's lacking in evidence of anything more than a superficial understanding of the actual political history of the Jacksonian Era.

Which is an indication of why the right and far-right in the US dos a better job than the left or the center-left in drawing on American historical iconography of American history and using it to define true "Americanism."

But Digby Parton is right in the conclusion she draws from Adele Stan's description of Trump demogogic pseudo-Jacksonianism (It's never just the economic populism is it? Hullabaloo 03/17/2017):

This is right wing populism. And it's very potent because it pits middle and lower class whites against people they already look down upon. Left wing populism is a heavier lift because white people in America see themselves as members of the same tribe as rich white people. Their resentment and fear of the wealthy doesn't run nearly as deep. They want to identify with them --- foreigners and people of color not so much. The class identification gets subsumed by the nationalist/racial identification.

she also links to this piece by Asawin Suebsaeng on Bannon-Trump version of "Andrew Jackson," Steve Bannon Pushed Trump to Go Full Andrew Jackson Daily Beast 03/16/2017.

And he rightly says, "The parallels between Trump and Jackson are, in many ways, deeply flawed. Jackson brawled with the established elite of the era, whereas Trump has, despite his rhetoric, emboldened them. Jackson came from poverty and was known as a war hero, while Trump was born into wealth and dodged the draft. Trump is a deeply divisive and outwardly bigoted figure.

But then he goes on to say that Jackson was worse than Trump has been so far: "Jackson, however, committed mass murder and ethnic cleansing."

The best I could say about that judgment is that it's just not meaningful as a description of Jackson's Indian policy, as bad as it was.

At some point, we need to ask people who make this kind of argument at what point, if any, that American history is pure enough for liberals and the left to take any lessons at all from it.

Since we still have a Constitution that was ratified in 1789 that incorporated political and legal traditions from centuries before that, there's reason not to ignore it all. I'm just saying.

There's also reason not to careful concede the interpretation of American history to the Steve Bannon's of the world.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Jackson, that habit has become widespread on the left and center-left. Here are three examples from January:

• Trump’s disturbing resemblance to the dangerously abrasive and disgustingly racist Andrew Jackson Raw Story/History News Network 01/27/2017
• Steven Rosenfeld, Slave driver and ethnic cleanser, but populist? Most vicious president in U.S. history is Trump’s new role model Salon/Alternet 01/28/2017
• Sidney Plotkin, Donald Trump, Andrew Jackson and American “greatness”: There are valid parallels — but not in a good way Salon 01/30/2017

Donald Trump as Andrew Jackson? Not even in an alternative universe!

Okay, this makes me ill. Trump hails 'very great' Andrew Jackson in political pilgrimage AFP/Yahoo! News 03/15/2017:

The Hermitage (United States) (AFP) - Donald Trump hailed America's first populist president Wednesday, laying a wreath at the tomb of Andrew Jackson and waxing lyrical about the similarities between himself and the seventh US president.

On the 250th anniversary of Jackson's birth, Trump visited "Old Hickory's" Tennessee home, dubbed The Hermitage.

Praising "the very great" Jackson's willingness to take on "an arrogant elite," Trump broke away from prepared remarks to exclaim, "Does that sound familiar to you?"

"I wonder why they keep talking about Trump and Jackson, Jackson and Trump. Ooh, I know the feeling Andrew."

Since coming to office in January, Trump aides have sought to draw comparisons between the bareknuckle Democratic president and Trump.

Jackson is obviously trying to identify with the image of Andrew Jackson as the champion of the common man. And Trump probably means man, too, even though women can vote now. More specifically, white man. It's also a safe bet that Trump himself has never read a history book or substantive history article about Andrew Jackson.

I would call Jackson a proto-populist instead of "America's first populist president," as this article does. I'll let the Populist Party be the first populists. Even though William Jennings Bryant didn't make it to the Presidency. He did serve as Secretary of State, though.

Trump's ceremonial wreath-laying at Jackson's grave brings up one of my chronic laments about present-day left and center-left politics in the US. Conservatives may have some inherent advantage in evoking iconic historical figures, although I'm not willing to concede that it has to be that way. But Andrew Jackson actually was one of the founders of the Democratic Party. And Donald bleeping Trump has stolen the Jackson symbolism for himself and the Republicans.

Nicole Hemmer gives us a look at Steve Bannon's white nationalist narrative of Andrew Jackson in Jacksonian Republicans US News and World Report 03/14/217:

Jackson is an odd touchstone for Trump. He is, after all, one of the founders of the Democratic Party. But Jackson's belief that democracy and race were inextricably bound together, that whiteness was a prerequisite for self-governance, fits neatly with Trump's own worldview – a worldview that is coming to define not just Trump's administration, but also the Republican Party.

The rise of the Jacksonian Republicans is remarkable. For well over a century after leaving office in 1837, Jackson was seen by white Democrats not only as the father of the party but the man who breathed life into the country's democratic promise. Historians wrote paeans to the age of Jacksonian democracy, when ordinary white people tore power from the hands of white elites, when universal white manhood suffrage replaced property requirements to vote.

Unfortunately, Hemmer seems to accept too much of the underlying assumption of the white nationalist propaganda outlook when she writes, "Jackson's belief that democracy and race were inextricably bound together, that whiteness was a prerequisite for self-governance, fits neatly with Trump's own worldview – a worldview that is coming to define not just Trump's administration, but also the Republican Party."

Using historical imagery in politics is never going to be exactly the same as trying to understand history in a serious way. The two don't have to be disconnected. It's just two different approaches.

But that means we need to be careful with how one kind of view feeds the other. The view of history as a upward process of progress is very much an Enlightenment outlook. So is race as a way of claiming essential qualities of civilization for Europeans, including those in the New World that are assumed to be lacking in the "inferior, primitive" peoples. Even if we don't hold a view of inherent progress in history, if we also assume that democracy is a good thing, a desirable thing, then that viewpoint will in some way privilege the events, movements, processes and leaders that contributed to the development and advancement of democracy. And democracy - political, social and economic - is not a product of Immaculate Conception. It's product of a messy, complicated history made by human beings. The latter of whom are known for being fallible and inconsistent even in their best moments.

Historians use "anachronism" to refer not just to the colloquial meaning of old-fashioned. But also to describe projecting normative assumptions of the present onto the past. I can't entirely escape the suspicion that this gives conservatives an advantage over the left and center-left when it comes to appropriating iconic images of the past for present-day usage. Political conservatives in their most constructive mode want to "make haste slowly." Reactionaries want to restore a past era of glory, even when the image of that past era invariably turns out to be a very present-day adaptation of selective imaginings of the golden past. While the classic image of liberals (in the American sense), progressives, the left is more that of people who embrace change, who want to find innovative solutions to social problems and to create constructive adaptations to new problems. In that broad view, conservatives may just be more comfortable identifying with the past.

Yet if the famous statement from George Orwell's 1984 is true, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past," then the converse is also partially true: that narratives of the past shape the present and future.

So I would prefer to see the left and center-left take a more nuanced view of the democratic traditions in the American past.

Jackson and his legacy became part of a public policy discussion with the idea of putting a black woman on the $20 bill. I certainly have no issue with putting Sojourner Truth on the $20 bill.

But there are still meaningful connections from 19th century political movements in America to the present day. The direct political ancestor of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon was John Calhoun, patron saint of white supremacy. Jackson became Calhoun's arch-enemy over the Nullification Controversy, one of the major milestones on the road to Southern secession. One side in that controversy defended the traditions of democracy, the Constitution and the Union (all still developing in 2017); the other side defended treason in support of the institution of slavery and white supremacy. When he was literally on his deathbed there just inside the house from where Trump laid a wreath at his grave, Jackson said the only regret of his life was that he hadn't hanged John Calhoun for treason over his nullification stunt.

Since I've been especially bugged by neo-Confederate nonsense since the 1990s, I've grown very fond of the image of the slaveowner Jackson taking the right side against Calhoun when events forced him to choose between Constitutional democracy, on the one hand, and the democracy-hating "Slave Power," on the other.

Yes, Jackson's Indian policy was bad. So has every other President's been from Washington to Trump. And, no, that's not an excuse for Jackson or any of the rest of them. But Democrats and progressives today don't have much trouble still seeing the New Deal and FDR's pro-union policies as important democratic moments in American history. While at the same time criticizing his questionable compromises with segregation and flat-out condemning his order to intern Japanese-Americans. The same two-steps-forward-one-step-back process was at work in the Age of Jackson, too.

There's more of a "usable past" in that era than most Dems and progressives today seem to realize. It's of some interest to me that Jackson helped the pioneering American feminist Frances "Fanny" Wright set up a Utopian community called Nashoba in Tennesse in 1825. Among other things, the project was a biracial community with an abolitionist bent. He may have assisted her more because she was a friend of General Lafayette. But he did it. But we won't hear Donald Trump or Steve Bannon praising Andrew Jackson for assisting Fanny Wright to set up an abolitionist Utopian community.

Donald Trump trying to identify himself with the image of Andrew Jackson reminds me of the pictures from the infamous German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden featuring a giant image of George Washington. Rare Historical Photos provides this image from that rally (American Nazi organization rally at Madison Square Garden, 1939 02/19/2014):

The article makes this observation on why the we-love-Hitler crowd might pick George Washington as a mascot (emphasis in original):

There is a reason George Washington is up there and not Thomas Jefferson or James Madison Jr. Fascism was an ideology that emphasized action and heroism over intellectualism and philosophy. This is why Hitler’s ideal Aryan concept was a strong, handsome, and physically fit person rather than someone with a mind for civics. Men of action were the ideal example figures. The other part of fascism was extreme patriotism, which is why each nation/group had its own fascist symbolism and mythology. It wasn’t like communism where concepts were supposed to transcend ethnic boundaries, but an ideology where each nation had its own flavor. Washington, as a military leader, patriotic father, and someone whom a legend of heroism and virtue has grown up around, was the ideal figure for fascist groups looking to pull a symbol out of American history.

But anti-New Deal conservatives at that time did re-imagine Thomas Jefferson as a prophet of "free enterprise" Herbert Hoover economics. But liberals and leftists in those days were at least willing to contest the historical symbolism. Today, not so much.

I don't recall ever finding a reference to Andrew Jackson as a hero of the Radical Right in the 1930s, although there may well have been.

This is a big topic. But I'll make these observations about why I think the left and left-center have trouble with defending major democratic figures in the United States prior to the Civil War.

Anachronism: I think some of it is just that people on the left are likely to make moral and political judgments about history based on cherished standards of today. And to judge them harshly because the progress of those standards was much less developed than they are now. It's not only a lazy and unrealistic way to look at history. It's also a small step from saying that we don't like any political figure before 1860 because they didn't have the prevalent 21st standards on race and women's rights to saying they discriminated against blacks and Indians and women and there's no point in criticizing it. And much more realistic approach is to look at the actual debates over issues and the positions people actually took in those debates. Northern states in 1860 were free (non-slave) states because they had abolished slavery in their states. So opposition to slavery was very much a contemporary value in 1820, or in 1776, for that matter. And there is a lot to be learned from why people - and of course we're talking here mostly about white people, and in particular white men who could vote - lined up on different sides of that issue. It wasn't only white people, though. One of the arguments against Jackson's infamous Indian Removal Act was that some Indians in the Southeastern regions affected were slaveowners, and having examples of Indian slaveowners strengthened in institution of slavery. Real history is complicated.

Superficial understanding of social change: When Nicole Hemmer writes, "Jackson's belief that democracy and race were inextricably bound together, that whiteness was a prerequisite for self-governance," a lot of readers will assume that this is a common assumption on the left. And not without reason. But the same Enlightenment worldview that promoted chauvinistic notions of European civilization and white racial superiority also promoted ideas of democracy and equality and civil liberties that wound up presenting major challenges to the restriction of the vote to white property-owning men and to white supremacy in its various forms. And with widespread segregationist voter-suppression schemes in effect and Trump Muslim ban - to take only two examples - those conflicting notions are still in contention in the United States in 2017. The varying positions people take today on such issues matters, and it mattered in the past, too. The fact that most voters in the 1832 elections were white men who assumed "that whiteness was a prerequisite for self-governance" doesn't mean that there were no meaningful differences in the positions that took on, say, the vote in the Virginia legislature in 1831-32 over abolishing slavery in that state.

Insufficient historical literacy: The fact that Donald Trump can even try to pass himself off as the Andrew Jackson of the 21st century is prima facie evidence of this problem.