President Trump commemorated the 250th anniversary of Andrew Jackson’s birth by praising the seventh president as a man who pursued all things “with courage, with grit, and with patriotic heart.”
To be sure, this was not in keeping with the fashion of the times. Most academics in this first fifth of the 21st century despise Jackson, and most young Americans — if they know Jackson at all — equate him with the worst dictators of the 20th century. They see in him a brutal slaughterer of Indians, the author of the “Trail of Tears.”
In truth, Jackson has gone in and out of favor since his presidency, with presidents as diverse as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan praising him.
Jackson was, Trump continued last year in his speech, not just a great man, but a great president. Indeed, Jackson was one of the greatest, our current president assured us. The elites of Washington, D.C., the 45th President continued, understood just how powerful an adversary Jackson would prove to be. He might even undo all of the advantages and ambitions they had secured for themselves as a “political class,” distinct from the rest of the country and living parasitically upon it. After all, Jackson was willing to call evil, evil. And he named names. Not so subtly, Trump ended his praise of Jackson with: “That all sounds familiar.”
Exactly how similar are Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump? Certainly, each man speaks his mind, usually without a filter. Each is of Scottish descent and endured mercurial successes and failures as businessmen. Each captured the zeitgeist as well as the aspirations and worries of the middle America of their time. Each has been embroiled in scandals involving marital difficulties and improprieties. And each has placed the interests of home above those of abroad.
Two of these similarities are worth considering at some length — the rhetoric and appeal as well as the marital scandals. As a self-made man, Andrew Jackson emerged on the American scene as a politician, an entrepreneur, a community builder, and, most importantly, a warrior. Unlike the first six presidents of the republic, Jackson had neither an elite background nor a liberal education. He came from poor stock, and he was left entirely to his own resources by the time he was 13.
From the moment he became a public figure, Jackson spoke honestly for the average, hard-working farmer and frontiersman. In this, he countered the sentimental New England cultural literati, as well as the entrenched Washington politicians and bureaucrats. Living off the wealth of the frontier, eastern elites criticized the very people who paid for their livelihoods. They saw their western counterparts as brutal barbarians, torturing the American Indians and raping the wilderness. Andrew Jackson was certainly bloody, but he was bloody and honest, not just bloody. A man of Southern honor and western energy, he spoke his mind, and he willingly defended it, often by force, much to the chagrin of those in D.C. and New England.
Some have labeled the support Jackson and Trump each enjoyed as “populist.” It might be equally true to say that the populism of each era is merely a form of righteous anger, whether properly directed or not. As with Andrew Jackson, Trump has inherited the mantle as defender of middle America. Neither, however, came out of Middle America as the “common man.” Jackson almost single-handedly masterminded the defeat of the largest empire in the world at the Battle of New Orleans. Not the stuff of “the common man.” Trump, while not a warrior, pursues the Art of the Deal. He and his family glitter with gilded adornments. Again, not the stuff of the common man.
Whatever Jackson’s and Trump’s faults, each successfully tapped into the righteous anger of those profoundly tired of paying for leviathan in D.C. and abroad.
In the end, we can see that Jackson’s two terms as president were quite successful. An entire era takes its name from his larger-than-life personality and his many notable successes.
We’re not even half done with Trump’s first administration, and the future is impossible to predict with accuracy. To be sure, each has spoken for the forgotten and overtaxed Middle American. The difference, of course, is that the Middle American of 1824 barely resembles the Middle American of 2016, which might help further explain the scandals of each. In 1824, the larger culture held marriage and family as sacred. In today’s insanity, marriage is old fashioned, restrictive, and an inconvenience.
The righteous anger of 1824 is far more righteous than the anger of 2018. Maybe our current president and culture can learn from that of the past. Or, at least, here’s hoping.
Bradley J. Birzer is the author of In Defense of Andrew Jackson (Regnery History, 2018).
