April 3, 2024 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, in our 22nd episode of our Story of America Series, Bill McClay, author of Land of Hope, tells the story of the first President to appeal to the popular sensibilities of Americans in The West.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next another
installment of our series about Us, the Story of America series,
with Hillsdale College professor and author of the terrific book
Land of Hope, Professor Bill McLay. In eighteen twenty eight,
a political revolution took place. Andrew Jackson, a political outsider
(00:31):
from the frontier, had beaten the son of a president, No,
the son of a founder, John Quincy Adams, in a
hot and often vile election, their second showdown. Let's get
into the story. Here's Bill McLay.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
He taught the country a lesson. He taught Adams a
lesson the hard way, that to be high minded and
snobbish was not going to work with this growing, expanding
and diverse electorate, often highly imperfectly educated electorate in America.
(01:15):
That was the reality of the thing. It's a reality
that's still with us. Mass democracy requires a discourse, a language,
a mode of expression that can reach people where they
are instead of telling them, well, if you want to
know what's going on, you've got to raise yourself to
my level. You got to go to college, you got
(01:35):
to get a degree. You got to learn how to
talk like I do. No, you got to learn how
to talk like they do. One symbolic expression of this
change was the inauguration of Jackson in Washington, which was
not like the previous affairs that had been decorous and
(01:58):
very much high level ritual, almost liturgical affairs. In this case,
the fans of Jackson, many of them, were rather rough
hewn characters and rowdy in their demeanor. They crowded into
(02:19):
the city today line Pennsylvania Avenue, They came to receptions
at the White House, and there are all kinds of
stories about them muddying the carpets with their muddy boots
and this sort of thing that char as much myth
as truth. But the point is this reflected a change,
a change in the climate, a change in the climate
(02:41):
of American democratic politics. Jackson was a self made man
if there ever was one. He was a frontiersman. He
had a hard life. He was a fighter, he was
a dueler. He'd risen the ladder of American society through
sheer force of his will, his talents, his determination, but
(03:05):
never forgetting where he came from, never forgetting he was
one of the common people and letting them know. He
remembered his roots as the saying goes. He didn't try
to rise above his raising. He was an empathic towards
ordinary people, towards working class people, strivers who hadn't come
(03:27):
as far as he had, but whose objectives were not
unlike his. They wanted to be landowners, they wanted to
be their own boss eventually, and that was the American
way of thinking about equality that had that element of
opportunity of striving. Jackson brings in a different vision of America,
(03:58):
and it's different from Jefferson. And you know, Jefferson was
a very democratic, small d democratic guy in a lot
of ways. And Jefferson was in his own way an
anti elitist. He famously said that a moral issue presented
to a plowman and a professor might well be decided
(04:19):
better by the plowman. He didn't place stock in air
addition for its own sake. And he did write the
words all men are created equal and endowed by their
creator with certain unalienable rights. Those were Jefferson's words, and
as the country evolved, those words become more and more
of a reality. But Jefferson's vision of democracy included an
(04:45):
emphasis on education. And that's by the way that that's
Wes never left us. We have a huge faith in
the power of education, proper education to lift people out
of the circumstances into which they were born and improve
their lot in life. Jefferson's vision was that the common
man needed to be lifted up by a proper education,
(05:07):
and thus he would be able to speak the language
of and engage in debate with those who are more
privileged in their upbring so they wouldn't have to defer
to the well born. Jackson, on the other hand, believed
the common man was perfectly well equipped as he was.
(05:29):
He didn't need to be raised up. He was perfectly
equipped as he was to vote and to govern as
they were. So this great respect for the common man's
abilities without being tutored in the direction of democracy is
what makes us refer to Jackson as our first populist president. Now,
(05:54):
I'm not going to take time to try to find
the turn populism, which has a lot of different definitions,
but this is one way of defining it. That populism
as a belief in the power of the people as
they are, without vetting, without selectivity, without heredity, without educational credentials,
(06:16):
the power of the common person to govern himself in
herself in a democratic arena in which there's a level
of playing field. So that's one way of looking at
populism and populism. It's this faith in the untutored, good
common sense of the ordinary person, and populism almost always
(06:47):
carries with it a resentment of elite. There's an edge
of bitterness often in populism towards those who are well born,
and this certainly showed itself with Jack. A lot of
what he did is president was to stop things from happening.
He was a sort of a like a hockey goalie, No,
(07:10):
you're not going to work with me, except he was
more aggressive than the hockey goalie. He'd go up the ice.
He used his veto pen often more than all the
other prior presidents combined. He was the president veto and
above all else. The great passion of his presidential career
(07:31):
was the National Bank. He opposed the National Bank, and
he was unwaveringly opposed to its being rechartered. The charter
of the bank ran out and would have to be
would have to be rechartered was it was not established
in perpetuity. So that became the great that we called it.
(07:51):
The bank war, his war against the bank. All the
political cartoonists had so much fun with this depicting Jackson
and the Bank war. And he was not afraid to
openly challenge the Supreme Court and John Marshall remember that
burr in the saddle imposed on Jefferson by Adams and
(08:15):
still serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. A
federalist remnant in this sea of democrats.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And you've been listening to Professor Bill McLay share with
us the story of Andrew Jackson, his rise to power
and ultimately to the White House and the first real
populist president. Understanding that there's a way to reach this
mass democracy and the masses, and it's not through well
high falutin language. It's the language the people use. Jackson,
(08:49):
as Professor McLay noted, stop things. He used his power
to block block legislation time and again, more times than
any president before him. When we return more of the
story of the rise of populism in America, the story
of Andrew Jackson's presidency continues here on our American Stories,
(09:39):
and we returned to our American Stories and our series
about Us, the Story of America series with Professor Bill McClay,
author of the terrific book Land of Hope. When we
last left off, Professor McClay was describing Andrew Jackson's politics.
He was an anti elitist. He hadn't forgotten his roots.
After all, he'd opposed what we'd call big government today,
(10:03):
preferring turnover in our nation's halls of power. Let's return
to the story. Here again is Professor Bill McLay.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Now, like Jefferson, Jackson was a strict constructionist. He did
not believe in the Necessary and Proper Clause of the
Constitution as a gateway to all kinds of other goodies.
He wanted to keep government limited. You remember Jefferson's saying
that government governs best, that governs least, and that really
(10:40):
reflected the sentiments of Jackson. He was also a great
opponent of the what he saw as the alliance of
government and business, what we today would call crony capitalism.
He would have opposed the growth of what we call
today the strative state. These agencies not accountable to the voters,
(11:05):
not held accountable to rotation in office, which was a
figure that Jackson often used. It was an approach to
service for the public that he favored. That is that
nobody should serve in office for very long. What's important
(11:27):
is to move him along so that after three years
people or whatever period of time you want to rotate into.
After that period of time, people start to develop roots,
they start develop contexts, they send out tentacles. It's only
human nature. So move them along before that happens, before
they develop a self interest in the fortunes of their office,
(11:51):
and thereby they'll serve the public interest. That was more
important to him than being experts. He had a really
strong aversion to self proclaimed expertise and expert knowledge. So
there are good aspects of that, and there are bad
aspects of that. From our present standpoint, who we want
a common person with no knowledge of nuclear physics to
(12:16):
run nuclear regulatory agencies? Probably not, But there are many
other things where the installation of experts leads to an
evisceration of democracy itself. Really a fascinating character and one
whose fortunes have gone up and down. In the assessment
(12:38):
provided him by historians, one of the things that made
his reputation go down and stayed down was his Indian policy.
What to do with the Native American population in this Ever,
expanding American colosses, bent on occupying the entire continent as
(13:05):
an expression of its manifest destiny. He was a man
of the people, He was a man of the common man,
but he didn't fully extend this empathy to Native Americans,
whom he feared and also in some ways looked down on.
(13:26):
He also rejected their claim that American land was their homeland.
To be fair to Jackson, there were a lot of
other points of view that were much less humane than
the path that he settled on. But there were also
points of view there were much more humane in recognizing
(13:48):
that Indians might have some right to their ancestral lands,
and that moving them to territory that was of no
current use to the Western European white European population was
not necessarily the most humane approach. His answer was to
(14:11):
resettle the tribes in the eastern part of the country
to land west of the Mississippi River. The Indian Removal
Act was signed into law in eighteen thirty five, and
it relocated close to fifty thousand Indians, fifteen thousand more
of which would be relocated after Jackson's presidency. When the
Army forced the Cherokees in Georgia to depart for the
(14:35):
Oklahoma Territory along a brutal eight hundred mile path that
would become known as the Trail of Tears, along which
nearly four thousand Indians would lose their lives. One French
visitor to America wrote eloquently about the policy of Indian removal.
(14:59):
He witnessed it at firsthand in eighteen thirty one when
he stumbled on, by mere chance, a group of Talctaw
Indians crossing the Mississippi River near Memphis. And here is
what that Frenchman, Alexis de Toqueville, wrote in his epic
(15:19):
work called Democracy in America. It is impossible to conceive
the extent of the sufferance which attend these force emigrations.
They are undertaken by a people already exhausted and reduced,
and the countries to which the newcomers betake themselves are
(15:42):
inhabited by other tribes which received them with jealous hostility.
Hunger is in the rear, war awaits them, and misery
besets them on all sides. In the hope of escaping
from such a host of enemies, they separate, and each
individual will endeavors to procure the means of supporting his
(16:03):
existence in solitude and secrecy, living in the immensity of
the desert, like an outcast in civilized society. The social
tide which distress had long since weakened, is then dissolved.
They've lost their country, and their people soon desert them.
(16:26):
Their families are obliterated, the names they bore in common
are forgotten, their language perishes, and all the traces of
their origin disappear. Their nation has ceased to exist, except
in the recollection of the antiquaries of America and a
few of the learned of Europe. I should be sorry
(16:48):
to have my reader supposed that I'm coloring the picture
too highly. I saw with my own eyes several of
the cases of misery which I've been describing is the
witness of sufferings which I have not the power to portray.
(17:12):
That Touville ended this passage on the subject, and it
ended the first volume of his amazing book Democracy in
America with these words, these are great evils, and it
must be added that they appear to me to be irremediable.
(17:34):
I believe that the Indian nations of North America are
doomed to perish, and that whenever the Europeans shall be
established on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, that race
of men will be no more. The Indians had only
the two alternatives of war or civilization. In other words,
they must either have destroyed the Europeans or become their equals.
(18:04):
That book of Toakville's, the two volume set called Democracy
in America, may be the greatest study of American life
and culture ever written. It captured very good things and
great things about the nation, but it also captured the
nation's flaws. I often tell my students if they were
(18:32):
to pick one work on America to take to a
desert island, on only that one work, I would still
say Democracy in America, published in the eighteen thirties and
eighteen forties and two volumes, would be the choice. Because
Toauville captures many things about America that are permanent part
(18:54):
of our national character. Our makeup have not changed. And
one of those elements is the elements of tragedy that
have attended every stage of our development, every stage of
our expansion. Tokville was not an American booster and not
an American cheerleader, but he was an astute, an objective observer,
(19:20):
from the foreign land of France. In fact, he often
entered into his explorations with explicitly the thought, how can
we in Europe learn from the American experience? Because America,
as he saw it, was the vanguard of the future.
All nations of the world were going to become democratic.
(19:45):
America was leading the way, So let us look closely
at America. He had advised and learned from its successes,
from its failures, from its tragedies, and from its tribe.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery himself a Hillsdale College graduate,
and a special thanks to Professor Bill McLay the story
of Andrew Jackson the Jacksonian era. Here on our American Stories.
And we returned to our American stories. Up next another
installment of our series about Us, the Story of America series,
with Hillsdale College professor and author of the terrific book
Land of Hope, Professor Bill McLay. In eighteen twenty eight,
a political revolution took place. Andrew Jackson, a political outsider
(00:31):
from the frontier, had beaten the son of a president, No,
the son of a founder, John Quincy Adams, in a
hot and often vile election, their second showdown. Let's get
into the story. Here's Bill McLay.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
He taught the country a lesson. He taught Adams a
lesson the hard way, that to be high minded and
snobbish was not going to work with this growing, expanding
and diverse electorate, often highly imperfectly educated electorate in America.
(01:15):
That was the reality of the thing. It's a reality
that's still with us. Mass democracy requires a discourse, a language,
a mode of expression that can reach people where they
are instead of telling them, well, if you want to
know what's going on, you've got to raise yourself to
my level. You got to go to college, you got
(01:35):
to get a degree. You got to learn how to
talk like I do. No, you got to learn how
to talk like they do. One symbolic expression of this
change was the inauguration of Jackson in Washington, which was
not like the previous affairs that had been decorous and
(01:58):
very much high level ritual, almost liturgical affairs. In this case,
the fans of Jackson, many of them, were rather rough
hewn characters and rowdy in their demeanor. They crowded into
(02:19):
the city today line Pennsylvania Avenue, They came to receptions
at the White House, and there are all kinds of
stories about them muddying the carpets with their muddy boots
and this sort of thing that char as much myth
as truth. But the point is this reflected a change,
a change in the climate, a change in the climate
(02:41):
of American democratic politics. Jackson was a self made man
if there ever was one. He was a frontiersman. He
had a hard life. He was a fighter, he was
a dueler. He'd risen the ladder of American society through
sheer force of his will, his talents, his determination, but
(03:05):
never forgetting where he came from, never forgetting he was
one of the common people and letting them know. He
remembered his roots as the saying goes. He didn't try
to rise above his raising. He was an empathic towards
ordinary people, towards working class people, strivers who hadn't come
(03:27):
as far as he had, but whose objectives were not
unlike his. They wanted to be landowners, they wanted to
be their own boss eventually, and that was the American
way of thinking about equality that had that element of
opportunity of striving. Jackson brings in a different vision of America,
(03:58):
and it's different from Jefferson. And you know, Jefferson was
a very democratic, small d democratic guy in a lot
of ways. And Jefferson was in his own way an
anti elitist. He famously said that a moral issue presented
to a plowman and a professor might well be decided
(04:19):
better by the plowman. He didn't place stock in air
addition for its own sake. And he did write the
words all men are created equal and endowed by their
creator with certain unalienable rights. Those were Jefferson's words, and
as the country evolved, those words become more and more
of a reality. But Jefferson's vision of democracy included an
(04:45):
emphasis on education. And that's by the way that that's
Wes never left us. We have a huge faith in
the power of education, proper education to lift people out
of the circumstances into which they were born and improve
their lot in life. Jefferson's vision was that the common
man needed to be lifted up by a proper education,
(05:07):
and thus he would be able to speak the language
of and engage in debate with those who are more
privileged in their upbring so they wouldn't have to defer
to the well born. Jackson, on the other hand, believed
the common man was perfectly well equipped as he was.
(05:29):
He didn't need to be raised up. He was perfectly
equipped as he was to vote and to govern as
they were. So this great respect for the common man's
abilities without being tutored in the direction of democracy is
what makes us refer to Jackson as our first populist president. Now,
(05:54):
I'm not going to take time to try to find
the turn populism, which has a lot of different definitions,
but this is one way of defining it. That populism
as a belief in the power of the people as
they are, without vetting, without selectivity, without heredity, without educational credentials,
(06:16):
the power of the common person to govern himself in
herself in a democratic arena in which there's a level
of playing field. So that's one way of looking at
populism and populism. It's this faith in the untutored, good
common sense of the ordinary person, and populism almost always
(06:47):
carries with it a resentment of elite. There's an edge
of bitterness often in populism towards those who are well born,
and this certainly showed itself with Jack. A lot of
what he did is president was to stop things from happening.
He was a sort of a like a hockey goalie, No,
(07:10):
you're not going to work with me, except he was
more aggressive than the hockey goalie. He'd go up the ice.
He used his veto pen often more than all the
other prior presidents combined. He was the president veto and
above all else. The great passion of his presidential career
(07:31):
was the National Bank. He opposed the National Bank, and
he was unwaveringly opposed to its being rechartered. The charter
of the bank ran out and would have to be
would have to be rechartered was it was not established
in perpetuity. So that became the great that we called it.
(07:51):
The bank war, his war against the bank. All the
political cartoonists had so much fun with this depicting Jackson
and the Bank war. And he was not afraid to
openly challenge the Supreme Court and John Marshall remember that
burr in the saddle imposed on Jefferson by Adams and
(08:15):
still serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. A
federalist remnant in this sea of democrats.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And you've been listening to Professor Bill McLay share with
us the story of Andrew Jackson, his rise to power
and ultimately to the White House and the first real
populist president. Understanding that there's a way to reach this
mass democracy and the masses, and it's not through well
high falutin language. It's the language the people use. Jackson,
(08:49):
as Professor McLay noted, stop things. He used his power
to block block legislation time and again, more times than
any president before him. When we return more of the
story of the rise of populism in America, the story
of Andrew Jackson's presidency continues here on our American Stories,
(09:39):
and we returned to our American Stories and our series
about Us, the Story of America series with Professor Bill McClay,
author of the terrific book Land of Hope. When we
last left off, Professor McClay was describing Andrew Jackson's politics.
He was an anti elitist. He hadn't forgotten his roots.
After all, he'd opposed what we'd call big government today,
(10:03):
preferring turnover in our nation's halls of power. Let's return
to the story. Here again is Professor Bill McLay.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Now, like Jefferson, Jackson was a strict constructionist. He did
not believe in the Necessary and Proper Clause of the
Constitution as a gateway to all kinds of other goodies.
He wanted to keep government limited. You remember Jefferson's saying
that government governs best, that governs least, and that really
(10:40):
reflected the sentiments of Jackson. He was also a great
opponent of the what he saw as the alliance of
government and business, what we today would call crony capitalism.
He would have opposed the growth of what we call
today the strative state. These agencies not accountable to the voters,
(11:05):
not held accountable to rotation in office, which was a
figure that Jackson often used. It was an approach to
service for the public that he favored. That is that
nobody should serve in office for very long. What's important
(11:27):
is to move him along so that after three years
people or whatever period of time you want to rotate into.
After that period of time, people start to develop roots,
they start develop contexts, they send out tentacles. It's only
human nature. So move them along before that happens, before
they develop a self interest in the fortunes of their office,
(11:51):
and thereby they'll serve the public interest. That was more
important to him than being experts. He had a really
strong aversion to self proclaimed expertise and expert knowledge. So
there are good aspects of that, and there are bad
aspects of that. From our present standpoint, who we want
a common person with no knowledge of nuclear physics to
(12:16):
run nuclear regulatory agencies? Probably not, But there are many
other things where the installation of experts leads to an
evisceration of democracy itself. Really a fascinating character and one
whose fortunes have gone up and down. In the assessment
(12:38):
provided him by historians, one of the things that made
his reputation go down and stayed down was his Indian policy.
What to do with the Native American population in this Ever,
expanding American colosses, bent on occupying the entire continent as
(13:05):
an expression of its manifest destiny. He was a man
of the people, He was a man of the common man,
but he didn't fully extend this empathy to Native Americans,
whom he feared and also in some ways looked down on.
(13:26):
He also rejected their claim that American land was their homeland.
To be fair to Jackson, there were a lot of
other points of view that were much less humane than
the path that he settled on. But there were also
points of view there were much more humane in recognizing
(13:48):
that Indians might have some right to their ancestral lands,
and that moving them to territory that was of no
current use to the Western European white European population was
not necessarily the most humane approach. His answer was to
(14:11):
resettle the tribes in the eastern part of the country
to land west of the Mississippi River. The Indian Removal
Act was signed into law in eighteen thirty five, and
it relocated close to fifty thousand Indians, fifteen thousand more
of which would be relocated after Jackson's presidency. When the
Army forced the Cherokees in Georgia to depart for the
(14:35):
Oklahoma Territory along a brutal eight hundred mile path that
would become known as the Trail of Tears, along which
nearly four thousand Indians would lose their lives. One French
visitor to America wrote eloquently about the policy of Indian removal.
(14:59):
He witnessed it at firsthand in eighteen thirty one when
he stumbled on, by mere chance, a group of Talctaw
Indians crossing the Mississippi River near Memphis. And here is
what that Frenchman, Alexis de Toqueville, wrote in his epic
(15:19):
work called Democracy in America. It is impossible to conceive
the extent of the sufferance which attend these force emigrations.
They are undertaken by a people already exhausted and reduced,
and the countries to which the newcomers betake themselves are
(15:42):
inhabited by other tribes which received them with jealous hostility.
Hunger is in the rear, war awaits them, and misery
besets them on all sides. In the hope of escaping
from such a host of enemies, they separate, and each
individual will endeavors to procure the means of supporting his
(16:03):
existence in solitude and secrecy, living in the immensity of
the desert, like an outcast in civilized society. The social
tide which distress had long since weakened, is then dissolved.
They've lost their country, and their people soon desert them.
(16:26):
Their families are obliterated, the names they bore in common
are forgotten, their language perishes, and all the traces of
their origin disappear. Their nation has ceased to exist, except
in the recollection of the antiquaries of America and a
few of the learned of Europe. I should be sorry
(16:48):
to have my reader supposed that I'm coloring the picture
too highly. I saw with my own eyes several of
the cases of misery which I've been describing is the
witness of sufferings which I have not the power to portray.
(17:12):
That Touville ended this passage on the subject, and it
ended the first volume of his amazing book Democracy in
America with these words, these are great evils, and it
must be added that they appear to me to be irremediable.
(17:34):
I believe that the Indian nations of North America are
doomed to perish, and that whenever the Europeans shall be
established on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, that race
of men will be no more. The Indians had only
the two alternatives of war or civilization. In other words,
they must either have destroyed the Europeans or become their equals.
(18:04):
That book of Toakville's, the two volume set called Democracy
in America, may be the greatest study of American life
and culture ever written. It captured very good things and
great things about the nation, but it also captured the
nation's flaws. I often tell my students if they were
(18:32):
to pick one work on America to take to a
desert island, on only that one work, I would still
say Democracy in America, published in the eighteen thirties and
eighteen forties and two volumes, would be the choice. Because
Toauville captures many things about America that are permanent part
(18:54):
of our national character. Our makeup have not changed. And
one of those elements is the elements of tragedy that
have attended every stage of our development, every stage of
our expansion. Tokville was not an American booster and not
an American cheerleader, but he was an astute, an objective observer,
(19:20):
from the foreign land of France. In fact, he often
entered into his explorations with explicitly the thought, how can
we in Europe learn from the American experience? Because America,
as he saw it, was the vanguard of the future.
All nations of the world were going to become democratic.
(19:45):
America was leading the way, So let us look closely
at America. He had advised and learned from its successes,
from its failures, from its tragedies, and from its tribe.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery himself a Hillsdale College graduate,
and a special thanks to Professor Bill McLay the story
of Andrew Jackson the Jacksonian era. Here on our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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