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Energetic Embryo. So runs the Jackson legend. Now Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., son of the professor of American History at Harvard University, in a brilliant justification of the New Deal disguised as a history of the age of Jackson, says that the legend and the facts do not jibe at all. In 577 pages, he implies that the "Jacksonian Revolution," which finally drove the Federalists out, and brought entirely new social forces into political power in the U.S., was just the Roosevelt revolution in embryo. The social forces that broke the Federalists and the power of the "mercantile classes" and made Old Hickory President were the same kind of forces that made the New Deal powerful. (The COMMON MAN reversed his field when Old Hickory bequeathed him an executive successor in the form of Martin Van Buren, the Harry S. Truman of the time.)
Mr. Schlesinger's purpose in the Age of Jackson is to re-examine the political ideas and motives that animated the Jacksonian leaders of the masses, and to establish these ideas as the missing link between the somewhat contradictory body of theory and practice known as Jeffersonianism and the somewhat contradictory body of theory and practice called the New Deal. The result is an unusually readable history about one of the most opaque episodes in the American past.
In a series of crisp biographical sketches, Schlesinger resuscitates the men around Jackson, some of them members of his official family, some of them members of the unofficial "Kitchen Cabinet" which sometimes played a more effective role in governing the country than the cabinet officers. Many of these men have been forgotten. There was Thomas Hart Benton ("He had a giant conviction that he and the people were one. 'Nobody opposes Benton,' he would roar, pronouncing it 'Bane-ton,' 'but a few blackjack prairie lawyers; these are the only opponents of Benton. Benton and the people are one and the same, sir; synonymous terms, sir; synonymous terms, sir.' ").
There was C. C. Cambreleng, "the crony of Van Buren"; Roger B. ("Dred Scott") Taney, "the spearhead of radicalism in the new cabinet" ("a tall sharp-faced man, with irregular yellow teeth, generally clamped on a long black cigar, he made a bad first impression," but his reasoning and his conviction won him friends). There was Amos Kendall, the Harry Hopkins of the age ("his chronic bad health may have created a special bond with the President, and Jackson soon began to rely on Kendall for aid in writing his messages. . . . Gradually, Kendall's supreme skill in interpreting, verbalizing and documenting Jackson's intuitions made him indispensable").
There was John Taylor of Caroline, farmer, Jeffersonian theorist and author of An Enquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, which John Randolph considered "a monument of the force and weakness of the human mind," and Mr. Schlesinger considers great political writing.