(2 of 6)
For our outgoing Presidents an important part of the history that has yet to happen is the future intellectual climate of the country and in particular the temper of the book-writing classes. History struck an extraordinary long-range blow at Andrew Jackson, President from 1829 to 1837, when in 1975 a Berkeley political scientist named Michael Rogin published a book Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. Rogin says he was writing under "the sway of the Viet Nam War." He sees Jackson as little more than a vicious Indian hater, "presiding over American expansion and Indian destruction," presaging general American attitudes toward "native peoples" everywhere. Andy Jackson, in fact, has been one of the most volatile of Presidents in his historical repute. The dominant historians of the 19th century, proper New Englanders and other Eastern gentry, sniffed at him as an uncouth frontiersman and a dangerous demagogue about money and banking. Then the "progressive historians" of the early 20th century began to celebrate him as a democratic hero, come out of the West to fight the moneyed Eastern "interests." Arthur Schlesinger Jr. carried the celebration still further in his classic The Age of Jackson, finding under his leadership an almost New Deal-like coalescence of West and South and Eastern workingmen.
Jefferson has undergone even wider swings in the historical standings, perhaps the greatest for any President. He had savage critics while he was in office; "Mad Tom" was one of their epithets for him. (Washington was called "a tyrant" and Lincoln "a baboon." Lyndon Johnson, touchingly, took comfort in those contemporary misjudgments.) The conservative Northeast historians of the 19th century held essentially to the Hamiltonian belief in a strong central government and saw Jefferson as the exponent of weak government and of an excessive trust in the people. Jefferson did not fare much better with progressives, who loved the people all right, but thought a powerful government, wrested away from the interests, was the only sure protector of the people. (Teddy Roosevelt 100 years later was still fuming about Jefferson's foreign policy: "a discredit to my country.") Woodrow Wilson made scholarly attempts to rescue Jefferson from the presidential scrap heap. It was left to Franklin Roosevelt, no scholar but a superb manager of political stage effects, to elevate Jefferson to the presidential pantheon. The intellectual sleight of hand was simple enough: the New Deal was the modern embodiment of the Jeffersonian "spirit," in which government, depending on its purposes, was either "a threat and a danger" or "a refuge and help" to the people. And to this day the Democrats hold Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners.