H.W. Brands
Subject: Jackson vs. Trump
Bio: Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and a two-time Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Reading: Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times is here
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Jackson vs. Trump.
Our speaker today is H.W. Brands who is a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Bill is a two-time Pulitzer Prize Finalist who will discuss his biography Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times. Andrew Jackson was the first populist president. He attacked the established norms for governing and that caused turmoil in Washington. Several of my friends have commented on the similarities between Jackson and Trump, so I thought it would be worthwhile to do a podcast and dig deep into the history to see what relevance there might have for today’s politics.
Bill, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
H.W. Brands:
25 years ago, I decided to write a book about Andrew Jackson. I had conceived this project of writing the history of the United States in the form of biographies, one biography chained chronologically to the next. I had written about Benjamin Franklin, and he died in 1790. So, I needed somebody to pick up the story there who also encapsulated the experience of the United States during this person's life. And the obvious person was Andrew Jackson. The last line of my Benjamin Franklin book, sets up my Jackson book, comes out of the constitutional convention. He is asked by a matron of Philadelphia, what have you given us Dr. Franklin? A Republic, if you can keep it, says Franklin. This is the challenge to the next generation. What is going to become of this American republic is this American democracy. The task of Jackson's generation was to convert this aristocratic republic into a popular democracy. And by the time Jackson died in 1845, that change had been accomplished.
Jackson was the first president who was chosen under this new expectation of what a president was supposed to be. Andrew Jackson was second only to George Washington in patriotic heroism. But the two individuals could not have been more unlike. Washington became president at the time when a political figure could expect the ordinary public to look up to him. So, by the time Jackson became president, the expectation of what a president was supposed to be was different. The president now was the personal representative of the American people. George Washington was not seen in the same way, but Jackson was. Jackson was considered the first people's president. He was for his generation, the most popular American, and he remained the most popular American until Franklin Roosevelt Andrew Jackson was Franklin Roosevelt's model of how to be a president. By the 1960s, Jackson fell out of favor, and Jackson is remembered these days, not for his contributions to American democracy, not to his defeat of the British at the Battle of New Orleans. What do students know about Andrew Jackson? Three words, Trail of Tears. Jackson is known today as this great villain. And so, I wanted to dig into that and see, why was he so popular to begin with? And then what happened to his reputation after that? I try to tell my stories through the of the individuals that I am writing about. Jackson has a distinctive voice. Jackson was not eloquent, but Jackson was very vigorous in his speech. When Jackson wrote, you could almost see the smoke rising from the paper that he was writing on. Jackson was this figure who almost leaped off the page, and the fact that he is the only president ever to have killed a man in cold blood, that was just a bonus.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to expand on the Indian wars and the Trail of Tears. The battles with the Indians were vicious. They killed civilians, mutilated bodies, scalped people, and killed children. Indians were viewed as an existential threat and had to be separated from the whites. Jackson believed that as did his peers.
It was not really a land grab, more of a perception of safety for the children and women. Tell us about that perceived existential threat, why that resulted in battles, why the people of Georgia decided for their local Indian tribes to leave the state, and how Jackson got involved when he was president that resulted in the Trail of Tears.
H.W. Brands:
When white settlers wanted to move into Tennessee, they wanted the land. There were Indians there who did not want them to have the land. They came into conflict. Now, each side felt justified in it. We want it. If we can take it, we are going to. There were few people who were shedding tears for the Indians at that time.
The people who complained about Jackson's Indian policy were people who lived in Boston, and Jackson pointed out to them, where are the Indian tribes of Massachusetts? Where are the tribes of New England? They have all been annihilated. They have disappeared from history.
When Jackson got around to articulating his Indian policy as president summarized in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, he said that it is in the nature of the clash of civilizations that the two civilizations cannot coexist. And he said, look at the history of America from the initial founding, the early 1600s for 200 years until now. Where are the tribes of Massachusetts? Where are the tribes of New York? In Georgia, if the Cherokees hope to continue to exist as a tribe, they will have to move out of the way of the settlers. This is the way of the world. And the Indian removal policy was a way of making this happen.
Jackson said if the Indians of Georgia, if they want to stay where they are, they must obey the laws of the states in which they live, because what the Indians were contesting for was not simply holding onto the land but being exempt from the laws of white folks.
Jackson was a state's rights guy, and he believed that if you lived in the borders of the State of Tennessee, you had to obey the laws of the State of Tennessee. He said the Cherokees can stay in Georgia, but if they do, they will have to behave just the way other citizens of Georgia do. But they can't stay there and have their separate governments and their separate nation within a nation. If they want their nation in a nation, I've got a deal for you.
I will give you some land out in what is going to become Oklahoma, and this land will be yours. We'll give it to you for free, and we will also pay your moving expenses. And Jackson pointed out, he said, and speaking of his own family's experience, what is being asked of the Cherokees is what most white settlers and their parents and grandparents experienced. They were uprooted. They had to leave the land of their birth. In the case of Jackson's family, they were displaced by economic changes in Northern Ireland. So, they had to move, and we do not wring our hands over this. This is just the way of the world. The Indian tribes of the Cherokees, the Choctaws, this will be their best chance to retain their existence as tribes.
Some of the Indian tribes accepted this as, we are not crazy about the idea, but this is the way the future is going. A substantial portion of the Cherokee tribe said it is inevitable. We're not going to be able to hold onto this land. But there were Cherokees who decided to stick around and ignore the law. And Jackson was not president at the time of the Cherokee migration that led to the death of 4,000 of them. That is known as the Trail of Tears. His successor, Martin Van Buren was president by then. But there is a direct line of the policy from Jackson's time, and Jackson did not do this by executive order, Congress passed the law. So, this was a majority opinion in the United States.
Larry Bernstein:
You, in your opening remarks, mentioned Benjamin Franklin's line which is you have a republic, if you can keep it. Andrew Jackson had lost the race for president in 1824. He won more votes than everybody else. But because of the electoral college, John Quincy Adams became the president. And one of his first suggestions upon becoming president was the abolition of the electoral college, and it reflected his desire for more pure democracy in opposition to Franklin's view of maintaining a republic. Tell us about Jackson's view of democracy relative to a republic.
H.W. Brands:
A republic is a political system in which political power and authority rises upward from the people. There are various ways that it can do this. The people can vote directly on legislation. Occasionally you get these referendums. But what we have is a representative republic. We vote for people who then make the laws. Now, how do we vote for these people? In 1789, most adult white males could not vote because there were restrictions. You had to own property, you had to have been fairly long in residence at a place. But starting with the Declaration of Independence and its assertion that all men are created equal that was pushing in the direction of more equality.
Once you say that the people are the basis of political authority, well, which people, and this is crucial in the rise of Andrew Jackson. The idea that ordinary adult white men, not everybody, can vote, that's a huge expansion of the franchise. It happened first in the West, in states like Tennessee because in those days, states wanted to attract settlement.
Larry Bernstein:
One of Jackson's first actions as president is to fire a number of the federal employees. Sounds familiar?
H.W. Brands:
Yes.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell us about why he decided to do that and why that rings true to the American people as a legitimate action by the executive.
H.W. Brands:
Jackson was the first president to make a hostile takeover of government since 1800. From 1800 it had been the same party staying in the White House. By the time Jackson becomes president at the beginning of 1829, it has been almost 30 years that there has been this real changeover from one party to the next.
The entire federal workforce in 1829 when Jackson becomes president is minuscule compared to what it is today. This consisted of postmasters and customs clerks, and that is about it. There is a postmaster in every county and in places where if there was a coastline and you could import stuff, there were customs clerks.
We are talking about tens of thousands of people. Nobody used the term deep state. They delivered the mail or collected tolls and tariffs. But there was this idea that these folks had been in office for too long and that they could talk as though the jobs were theirs.
No, the jobs are not yours. The jobs belong to the people. This is a democracy. Jackson, at the behest of some of his advisors, including Roger Taney, who was Attorney General, and then Treasury Secretary, and then appointed to the Supreme Court, developed this theory of what they called rotation in office. The people who've had the jobs for a while, it reminds them that the jobs aren't theirs, and they need to pull their weight in the private sector just like everybody else, and it makes other people have a chance for a job. Jackson called it rotation in office, and his critics called it the spoil system. It led to corruption when people were doing what they could to get jobs.
Larry Bernstein:
Another major issue was the Bank of the United States, the equivalent to the Federal Reserve Board today, and I want you to start your story with what currency existed, the role of state banks and script that they issued, and then why Jackson's opponents were huge fans of the Bank of the United States, and why that resulted in a political struggle.
H.W. Brands:
The official currency of the United States consisted of gold and the silver coins. The problem with this was that the economy was growing more rapidly than the money supply. When this happens, it tends to drive prices down. There's just not enough money around. So, prices fall, and it has a suppressive effect on the economy. Gold and silver coins from the very beginning had been supplemented with various forms of alternative money. Now, the most common form was bank notes, and these were IOUs issued by banks, and the banks would have a certain amount of gold in their vault, and then they would write notes against this. And if you trusted the bank, then you would say, I will give you $10, and you can give me $10 in paper money and people will use it. It's more convenient than carrying the gold around. And other people, if they trusted the bank, would accept that money.
It was a means by which bankers made money because they would charge interest on these loans, and they would make money. Now, people like Jackson in the West tended to distrust banks for a couple of reasons. One is the banks were almost all headquartered in the East, and so in the perception of Westerners, like Jackson, gold went to the east, and paper money came back. There was that.
There was also this suspicion of bankers because at a time when most people in America worked physically for a living, they were either farmers or did stuff where you would sweat. Bankers were typically the wealthiest people in town, and they never broke a sweat.
In those days, appreciation of monetary theory was rudimentary. Now, combine this with the fact that in the earliest days of the first Congress, there was created something called the Bank of the United States. The apostle of the Bank of the United States was Alexander Hamilton, who was one of the founders of one of the first banks.
Larry Bernstein:
The Bank of New York.
H.W. Brands:
Exactly. The Bank of the United States was the focus of distrust of people like Andrew Jackson, but also James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who thought this was a power grab by Alexander Hamilton, who was allying the government with the merchant and professional classes, the lawyers and so on.
Larry Bernstein:
England typically was used as the example of what to follow in their common law and the court system, democracy, et cetera. They had the Bank of England and was like The Bank of the United States. It was predominantly privately owned, as was the Bank of the United States. It was responsible for currency, and it took the deposits of the Crown, and it was a lending institution.
Let's say you wanted to get a loan to build a house, you could go to the Bank of the United States. And because it had the deposits of the United States government, it could lend money at a better rate than a state bank in Tennessee. And they viewed it as unfair.
When there were runs on the banks, it always hit the state banks first and resulted in bankruptcies of those institutions relative to the East. There was this antagonism between these two parties that reached the political world. Continue the story from there about why this became a hot spot.
H.W. Brands:
When Jackson became president, there were seven years left in the charter of the Second Bank in the United States. And Jackson was opposed to the bank in principle, but he thought it would be too disruptive to try to terminate the bank. He would just let its charter lapse. But Henry Clay decided to make the Bank of the United States an issue in the 1832 election. Clay was a very astute politician, and he managed to arrange an early renewal of the Bank of the United States. So, the renewal is not supposed to take place until 1836, but he gets Congress to pass a bill saying the Bank of the United States is now renewed for another 20 years, and he dares Jackson to veto the bill. And I mean, you can read Clay's letters on this. He'll never do this.
It would bring down the wrath of the country upon him. And with Jackson, it was a mistake to dare Jackson to do anything because if you think I am not going to, I will.
And he did. He vetoed the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States. And when they did, then it was clear that Jackson had the support of the people in opposing the Bank of the United States, at which point the Director of the Bank of the United States, Nicholas Biddle, wanted to teach Jackson a lesson. Biddle began calling in loans, and he engineered a financial panic around the country. He could do this because a lot of the notes were callable and he could shrink the money supply, and people who owed money could not get money.
They began marching to Washington and banging on Jackson's door saying, Mr. President, save us. And he said, do not come to me. Go to Nicholas Biddle. He is the one who did this. You go tell him to make this right. And Biddle’s effort to show how essential the bank was to American prosperity backfired. It made people think that the bank was arrogant, and that America was playing with fire to give so much control to the bank. Jackson proceeded to withdraw the government's deposits from the Bank of the United States, and he hands it out to various state banks. He thought this was more democratic instead of this one monopolistic institution getting it all. He gave the US government’s bank deposits to other banks.
But it was a triumph for Jackson and for democracy. It turned out to be a disaster for the American economy because monetary policy does not lend itself to democracy.
This was the first full-blown financial panic in American monetary history, the Panic of 1837, which caused hundreds of state banks to collapse and people to lose their life savings. I need to add something important here at this point, there is no official US paper currency. The US Treasury is minting gold and silver coins, but it is not printing any money.
The Bank of the United States was a proxy because the Bank of the United States printed Bank of the United States notes, and they were backed by the gold and silver deposits within the bank.
Larry Bernstein:
Foreign policy in the Jackson administration. I want to focus on Texas’s desire for independence, the role of Sam Houston, who is a lifelong friend of Jackson, and how Texas becomes part of the United States. Take us through the role of the Jacksonian party and incorporating Texas to the United States.
H.W. Brands:
Texas in 1800 was part of Mexico. Mexico was part of the Spanish Empire. But in 1810, a group of Mexican nationalists’ revolt against Spain and carry Mexico out of the Spanish Empire. They gain independence by 1821 and Texas is with them. So, Texas is part of Mexico, and Mexico now is an independent country in the early 1820s.
Mexico, for fear that it was losing control of Texas to the Comanches, and other Indian tribes invites Americans to come in and act as a human shield against the Comanches. But some of the Americans came into Texas with ulterior motives. They wanted the land, but they then also wanted Texas to be part of the United States. Stephen Austin and Sam Houston would be the founding fathers of modern Texas. Houston came in for the explicit purpose of splitting Texas away from Mexico and then attaching it to the United States.
Houston arrives during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson never had any natural sons. Houston lost his natural father at an early age. Houston looking around for a second father, Jackson's looking around for a son he never had, and they meet during this campaign against the Creek Indians. Eventually he becomes Andrew Jackson's secret agent to travel to Texas and speak among the Americans in Texas saying, if the opportunity arises, would you guys like to break away from Mexico and become part of the United States?
Houston writes back to Jackson saying 80% of Americans want to be part of the United States. Jackson might have been tempted to promote a revolt in Texas, but he thought that Texas would eventually fall to the United States one way or the other. Jackson did try to purchase Texas from Mexico, but Mexico was not in a selling mood. Houston goes back to Texas, and he begins to foment this revolution. During Jackson's last year in office, Houston leads this revolution that springs Texas loose from Mexico. Later, they apply for admission to the United States as a state.
Larry Bernstein:
Andrew Jackson has been in the press recently because of his behavior and presidential style that resembles Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal has had two op-eds in the past few weeks, one with Peggy Noonan and this week with Karl Rove. I've also been in a number of business meetings in which other investors have compared Andrew Jackson to Donald Trump. Can you comment on similarities between these two men and their style?
H.W. Brands:
The presidency in the 2020s is different than the presidency in the 1830s. Jackson never thought he was the driving force of American politics. He was president at a time when everybody understood what the founders had intended that Congress be the initiator in American politics. Jackson was the chief executive. It's called the Executive Branch because it executes the will of Congress and Jackson understood that difference.
Larry Bernstein:
Jackson had been governor of the State of Tennessee. He had been a congressman, a senator, a general. He had taken most of the positions available to an American in the federal government.
H.W. Brands:
He understood what the constitutional role of the president was. The closest parallel between the Jackson years and the Trump years lies in the people who voted for Andrew Jackson and the people who voted for Donald Trump. Andrew Jackson was the symbol of the populism of his day. The people who voted for Andrew Jackson could stick a finger in the eye of the Eastern establishment. They wanted to bust up what they consider to be the oligopoly of the Eastern powers. They looked at the two political parties that existed at the time, and they thought, they are not representing the people of the United States. We need somebody who represents us, who will fight for us. When I say that Andrew Jackson was extremely popular, he was, but 40% of the country loathed him. They thought he represented the decline and fall of the United States.
Somebody like Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay described him as a military chieftain, somebody who was going to impose his will on the country and shoot people who did not agree with him. He did not. But nonetheless, there was that feeling. Jackson was a very polarizing figure. And Donald Trump's a very polarizing figure because the people who like Donald Trump, they like him precisely because he wants to bust up the bi-coastal establishment, the liberal deep state.
In the 1820s, if that is the way you felt, you voted for Andrew Jackson. In the 2020s, if that is the way you felt, you voted for Donald Trump.
Larry Bernstein:
Jackson turns over his cabinet. He has ill will towards established norms of behavior. Trump wants to reimagine and undermine norms and institutions in Washington. Expand on why Jackson is viewed as a disruptor and as a hero representing the people?
H.W. Brands:
Jackson did not consider the government the enemy of the people, nor did he consider himself the enemy of government. Jackson had a reverence for the Constitution, and he believed that the Constitution was what held the union together. With Donald Trump in his second term, he is given every indication of trying to essentially break the government as it exists.
Larry Bernstein:
Why is Jackson still relevant? What is it about him that makes him a populist and why should we reengage with his history to better understand the present?
H.W. Brands:
If you agree with the idea of democracy, then you allow for the possibility you are going to get people like Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump. People who feel at odds with the existing arrangement, who rise to the presidency by virtue of challenging the status quo.
Other voters were comfortable with the status quo, and they were concerned because they felt that the republic was fragile.
In Jackson's day there was a widespread understanding that the American government was an experiment, and it might fail at any time. There were plenty of people still alive, including Andrew Jackson who lived through the American Revolution.
They knew of a time before the United States government, and they knew that the world was betting on the United States to lose. That the idea that people could not govern themselves that it will fall apart. A lot of people in Europe, in the early 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, looked on democracy the way Americans looked on communism in the 20th century. Many Americans believed that communism would fail because of its internal contradictions.
We live at a time 250 years into the existence of the American Republic. And it is tempting to think that it was inevitable that things turn out this way. If Andrew Jackson were alive today, he would probably say, be careful of what you do because you could screw this up. There is no guarantee that our governmental system will continue to work in the future. I had to make sure that it worked in my day, and I did not shoot Henry Clay and I did not hang John Calhoun, even though I thought I should have. Be careful. You could screw it up, and if you do, you might not get it back again.
Jackson was a state's rights unionist. He believed in democracy. He believed in this role for the States. He said, you got to hold the union together, and you do that under the Constitution. It is worth a reminder to us today.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Bill for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, the topic was Beating Boredom. Our speaker was James Danckert who is a cognitive neuroscientist and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo. James is the co-author of the book Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom.
James discussed the relationship between boredom and personal agency.
I would like to make a plug for our next podcast with Christine Rosen who will discuss her new book The Extinction of Experience. I plan to discuss how our interaction with new technologies might be problematic both for our mental health and wellbeing.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Beating Boredom, here.
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