THE AGE OF JACKSON—Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—Little, Brown ($5).
Once upon a time, when the Yewnited States was just a little shaver among the nations, but already very spoiled along the literate Eastern fringes, there lived younder in Tennessee a lovable old man with a tongue like a rat-tailed file and a face so hard they called him Old Hickory. He was a great hero. In the War of 1812, he licked the British in the Battle of Noo Orleens (some time after peace had been made). Everybody loved him because he had come up the hard way from nothing to a plantation and owning slaves, but he never forgot the COMMON MAN. Sitting on his plantation porch of an evening, he would say: "I still love the COMMON MAN," and, with a jet of tobacco juice slanchwise between the Ionic columns, would drown a doodlebug at five yards. So they called him the SAGE of The Hermitage (his plantation).
Now, in the big city of Philadelphia, across the mountains, lived a very wicked man. His name was Nicholas Biddle. He was president of the Yewnited States Bank, which was a wily scheme to get hard money away from the COMMON MAN and give him scraps of paper in exchange. This Biddle was a bad actor. He did not eat with his knife and he foregathered with cronies who drank soup in silence so they could hear each other plot against the COMMON MAN. They were called Federalists. They held that some of the COMMON MEN could be hoodwinked all of the time, and that that was enough. They plotted to keep the COMMON MAN from being hoodwinked by anybody else.
One day Old Hickory got so mad he roared: "My name is Andrew Jackson, fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with snapping turtle. I can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride a streak of lightning, slip without a scratch down the honey locust, whip my weight in wildcats, hug a bear too close for comfort and eat anybody opposed to the COMMON MAN! Come on, boys, let's get Nicholas Biddle."
So all the peckerwoods and rednecks and the big planters from the South (who did not like the tariff) and the farmers from the West (who did not like the Bank), they voted Old Hickory to be the seventh President of the Yewnited States. Then they all marched to Washington. Old Hickory kicked Nicholas Biddle higher than the day before yesterday and the Yewnited States Bank higher than the day before next. Then they all went to the White House for free grog and climbed over the fancy chairs with muddy boots. Everybody got jobs with the Government because, as Old Hickory said: "To the victors belong the spoils!" And everybody agreed that it was democracy at work.
Everybody, that is, except the Federalists, who were right pokey about it and thought that democracy could be made to work quite well without the cowhide boots, and that the great thing about democracy was that it gave the COMMON MAN the chance not to be common.