A Reviewer’s Notebook – 1959/10

It is an article of faith with nine out of ten contemporary American historians that this country has been made by legislation piled on top of the original social compact of 1787. We are, supposedly, the creatures of the Interstate Com­merce Commission and the Agri­cultural Adjustment Administra­tion, the Social Security Act, the minimum wage law, and the Re­construction Finance Corporation.

So ingrained is this way of thinking among the history writ­ing fraternity that when Father Bruckberger, a French Dominican priest, comes out with a book in­terpreting America in terms of such apostles of voluntary associa­tion as Henry Ford and Samuel Gompers, it is greeted with pained surprise by Arthur Schles­inger, Jr. Heavens, the ignorant Frenchman has talked about the vast increase in the number of ef­ficient tools available to the indi­vidual American worker, not about factory legislation! He has made Commodore Vanderbilt a bigger figure in railroad history than the author of the Hepburn rate bill!

He has made the inventor of the mechanical reaper more important to agriculture than Mr. Henry Wallace. If this goes on, what will happen to the tight little historical guild’s vested interest in the theory that it is “progressive” legislation that puts food on the dinner table?

The theory that it is the politi­cal party, not what the political party stands for in relation to the protection and liberation of non­political energies, that is impor­tant finds a muted but nonetheless pervasive champion in Robert V. Remini, author of Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (Columbia Uni­versity Press, 271 pp., $5.00). This is a good book in many ways: it establishes Van Buren as a man of good Jeffersonian principles and character, and it casts a vivid light on that period in our history when the making of Presidents was transferred from the congres­sional caucus to the politicians back home in the states.

Nonetheless, Professor Remini’s thinking about the Democratic Party suffers from the notion that it’s “splendor” as an organization derives from its responsiveness to the “people,” not from any princi­ples for which it happens to stand. Almost without knowing it, Remini has endorsed the subtle heresy of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Age of Jackson, which seeks to make Old Hickory into a sort of pre­monition of Franklin Roosevelt and the ancient Party of western frontiersmen, southern planter “aristocrats,” and eastern “loco foco” free traders and hard money men into a progenitor of the New and Fair Deals.

Cutting Across Party Lines

The truth is, of course, that both major parties since the eighteen nineties have had their conservative, libertarian, and Populist-inflationary wings. In the nineties there were Gold Demo­crats and Bryanites; in the early nineteen hundreds there were Mc­Kinleyite Republicans and La Fol­lettians and Rooseveltians. The seesaw between libertarianism and collectivism has never, in modern times, respected party lines.

In the days of Jackson, however, a truly libertarian political instru­ment was forged. The bias of the country called for it. Professor Schlesinger, seeking for “labor” antecedents for the modern Demo­cratic Party, has spoken of the eighteen twenties as “streaked with suffering and panic, shaken by bursts of violence and threats of rebellion.” No doubt there was a hangover of violence in the decade; after all, it took some time to digest the War of 1812.

But to view the eighteen twen­ties through the dark lenses of a Rooseveltian 1932 is, to say the least, just a bit foolish. As Garet Garrett, an “amateur” historian who is a good deal sounder than most of the professionals, has said, the generation of the eighteen twenties was a “breathless” one. To this “breathless generation,” there happened the steamboat, the railroad, the telegraph, the me­chanical reaper, the rotary print­ing press, the penny newspaper, the first public high school, ether, patent medicine, the Yankee peddler who took culture to the backwoods, McGuffey’s Reader, the China trade, the clipper ship, and the literature of the Golden Day. (The list is from Garrett’s The American Story.) No “age of Jackson” that tends to minimize this panorama of bursting ener­gies can be truly interpretive, and no political history that tries to narrow the origins of the Demo­cratic Party down to an expression of anticapitalist grievances can be legitimate.

Schlesinger tries to make Jack­son into a partisan of the Hamiltonian state directed to Jeffer­sonian ends. Though this sounds impressive on the face of it, it actually means little. True enough, Jackson insisted on the preserva­tion of the union in the South Carolina nullification crisis. But he appointed States’ Rights judges, including that most per­tinacious States’ Righter of all, Roger Taney. His campaign against the Bank of the United States was supported by hard money men on the one hand and the proponents of decentralized state banking on the other.

In short, Jackson, insofar as he consciously thought about it at all, considered the State to be the guarantor of rights that were be­yond the reach of legislation. He believed, in short, in unalienable rights.

The Jacksonian Era

Schlesinger is too good a re­porter to leave the hard money men and the frontier enterprisers out of account. In The Age of Jackson, which is quite fascinating in some of its detail (and ex­tremely good reading, too) he gives vivid portraits of represen­tative early nineteenth century libertarians. There is Jackson him­self, who could declare that “equal­ity of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by hu­man institutions….” There is William M. Gouge, the hard money theorist whose view of the trade cycle might commend itself to Ludwig von Mises. There is Wil­liam Leggett, the passionate free trader of the old New York Post.

Richard Hofstadter, who is as right on pre-Civil War history as he is wrong when he comes to deal with the so-called Robber Baron age, caught the libertarian flavor of the Jacksonians when he treated Jackson as the voice of “liberal capitalism” in his The American Political Tradition. We may set it down to an emotionally induced myopia that Schlesinger cannot see the Jacksonian Demo­crats for what they were, the very negation of a New Deal state-dependent band.

It is not that Schlesinger doesn’t know there is another view of Jackson and his Party. He quotes from William Graham Sumner’s excellent little biography of Jack­son, which treats the old hero of New Orleans with a sort of con­temptuous approval as the “stand­ard-bearer” of a people who had become “bold, independent, ener­getic, and enterprising.” In Sum­ner’s view, the eighteen twenties, far from being an epoch of hard­ship, were entirely too prosper­ous to exhibit any deeply abiding concern for politics. The politi­cians of the decade made such a furious commotion precisely because the people were not easily disposed to listen.

As for the eastern “loco focos,” whom Schlesinger casts as the Tugwellians of the age, Sumner sees them as “equal rights men” who first committed the Demo­cratic Party to “sound doctrines and imperishable ideas.” The loco focos included laborers, but they were working men who wanted to be paid in a sound currency. “For a generation,” says Sumner, the Democratic Party was “by tradi­tion, a party of hard money, free trade, the noninterference of gov­ernment, and no special legisla­tion. If that tradition be traced up to its source, it will lead back, not to the Jackson party of 1829, but to the loco focos of 1835.”

The loco focos, being city men, were, of course, a prime source of the strength of Martin Van Buren, the New Yorker who was Jack­son’s Crown Prince and Heir Ap­parent. Van Buren knew how to weld a party together, as Profes­sor Remini shows in his book. A hard money man and a States’ Righter, Van Buren tried to build his party on principles as well as patronage. He compromised at times on the tariff, but he was es­sentially opposed to the “gimme” theory of government that was espoused by Henry Clay and the Whigs who were for protection and for federal pork barrel spend­ing on “internal improvements.”

Van Buren, then, gave a prin­cipled party to the people. The ad­jective, which Remini does not use, is what is important.

Professor Remini does insist on the Old Republican, or Jeffer­sonian, soundness of Martin Van Buren’s political philosophy. But the book, being committed to an exposition of the roots of party success, tends to endorse the idea that organizations should always be responsive to whatever the “people” want at the moment. The good political mechanic must, on this basis, always seek to adapt the organization to the prevailing wind.

Sumner would have disagreed. So, too, would those loco focos who first gave the Democratic Party the platform which Franklin Roosevelt so gaily kicked over in 1933. In the old Sumnerian view, a party should be like Washing­ton‘s “standard,” to which “the wise and honest” can always re­pair. It should be ready to risk un­popularity, knowing that, in time, it will always come back.