The Age of Jackson, Revisited
I’ve just finished reading Jon Meacham’s new book on Andrew Jackson, American Lion. I’ve always thought that Jackson’s life and presidency were under-appreciated as sources of drama and historic resonance.
Meacham does a good job of showing how Jackson created the strong presidency. He was the first chief executive to veto bills because he thought they were bad policy, not just because he thought they were unconstitutional. He was also the first chief executive to fire a cabinet secretary. Though Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder (and the promoter of what later euphemisms would call “ethnic cleansing” of Native Americans), he also stood up to Southern extremists on several occasions. When South Carolina insisted that it could simply ignore federal law, Jackson threatened to send in troops. As I wrote in my book on presidential speeches, Abraham Lincoln relied on Jackson’s ringing “nullification proclamation” when he wrote his own first Inaugural Address. Leading the “nullifiers” was Jackson’s own vice president. (Where’d you think West Wing got that plotline?)
But it seems to me that Meacham downplays one of the most significant aspects of Jackson’s two terms—one with deep implications for today. The lens is so tightly focused on Old Hickory himself that it blurs the democratic revolution that swept him into power. After being denied the presidency in 1824 by what he believed was an insiders’ deal in Congress, Jackson and his supporters organized the first real American mass political party. One step they took was to fight to abolish the property requirement, the rule that only those (white)(men) with property could cast ballots. Turnout doubled between 1824 and 1828, when Jackson finally won. By the mid 1830s, the property requirement had been abolished nearly everywhere in the country. The United States had taken a major step toward the vision of a full participatory democracy toward which we strive today.
What’s the relevance now? Barack Obama and his administration were swept in on a wave of citizen engagement, attracting scores of new voters. (That’s true even though turnout didn’t really rise that much – GOP turnout plunged, and all the new voters supported Obama.) It would be easy to now turn all attention to other substantive issues. After all, the thinking might go, the economy is reeling, so let’s not focus any attention on anything else. After all, the electorate will reward success and punish failure. Little else matters.
But that would be shortsighted in the extreme. As Andrew Jackson and his colleagues knew, changing the rules to widen the circle of electoral participation helped create the conditions for successful policy. They saw it as key to building their power. Major democracy reforms such as a system for universal voter registration would render the Obama bump in participation a permanent part of the political landscape. It would build power for his ideals, too. Such voter participation should not be seen as merely the artifact of one charismatic politician or one skillful campaign. It was the coupling of a skilled politician to the wider democracy reforms that made the 1830s what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. later dubbed “the Age of Jackson.”
It would be ironic indeed if today’s leaders found a way to make the voter surge permanent—by borrowing a page from a president who surely never imagined a day when Barack Obama could serve in the White House.
