Have I mentioned that I’m related to all the
Presidents? Well, I am, and I figured out where and how in every case. All it
takes is the internet, plenty of free time, and an unending store of
narcissicism. In most cases the
connections are way distant. You can do it for almost anyone with
Anglo-American heritage. Some wiseacres figured out how Obama was
related to the Bushes, for example. But in certain cases I have a
President’s patrilineal line right in my own tree and sometimes not even too
many generations back. This doesn’t mean I am directly descended from any
Presidents. I am not. But I am descended from people from whom THEY are descended, such
as John Adams' great grandfather’ the immigrant Henry Adams, whom
I’m descended from four different ways. And I have Adamses all the way down to
one of my great great grandmothers. But I recently learned of another a line to which I
am tied a bit farther back, 16th century Yorkshire, but which extends
all the way down to my great grandmother, Andrew Jackson. The Adamses and Jackson then are the two Presidents to whom I appear to be most closely releated. Which I find
delightfully perverse. John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson were polar opposite
political enemies in just about every way.
Adams was one of America’s elite class. His
ancestors had been here for two centuries before he was born and he had every advantage. He began
apprenticing for government under his famous father when he was 13. Naturally
he went to Harvard. He was born and bred
and trained for national leadership. In addition to being president, he had
been Secretary of State, US Senator, US Congressman, and at different times the
US ambassador to the UK, Russia, Prussia, and the Netherlands. There was no
insider who was more inside.
By contrast, though it may be hard for many to
comprehend now, in the early 19th century, Andrew Jackson was a
relative outsider, a self-made man, who started out as a poor orphan from
recent immigrant stock. His parents had come from Ireland, although they were
of Anglo-Scots heritage. Jackson developed a reputation as a lawyer and local
Tennessee politician and became a national military hero by fighting and
defeating his two hated enemies, the English and various Native American
Tribes. This made him vastly different from the four Virginia planters and two
Boston Adamses who had been our previous Presidents. As a congressman Jackson
had once voted against a resolution thanking George Washington for his
services. He later left the Senate because he couldn’t even deal with the Adams
administration. Jackson was a Jeffersonian,
a faction much more radical and egalitarian and sympathetic to the French
Revolution, tumbrils and all. The Federalists were Anglophiles, but the
Democratic Party which Jackson helped bring into being were the party of
immigrants and the Common Man.
Why was this so earth-shaking? Because at the
time of which I speak, the majority of white males were among the
disenfranchised and disadvantaged people of the earth. For centuries, like
nearly everyone else, poor white males were locked into their station for life
as serfs, then indentured servants, tenant farmers, or laborers. They may have
been the most powerful people in their own homes, but they could not vote or
hold office. They could only trust that they were being taken care of by men in
powdered wigs. Even the American Revolution, which liberated this country from
a despotic monarchy and an aristocracy, merely transferred political power to a
prosperous class of merchants and planters. There were a few self-made men like
Benjamin Franklin and my fellow bastard Alexander Hamilton, but
those were rare. So this new movement marked the completion of an unrealized
part of the American Revolution, the Thomas Paine part, something more
in line with the French Revolution, which is to say, an actual revolution.
The
movement seems to have been kicked into action by the War of 1812, which
brought about a new era of nationalism and finished off the elitist pro-British
Federalists, who had been against the war. They were discredited, and a
national movement was born to distribute power more widely. In 1821, New York
State did away with the property-owning qualification for voting. This elevated
the Common Man politically to full citizenship. The Tammany Society was
instrumental in that triumph. Many states followed suit and the number of
Democrats swelled, leading to the election of Andrew Jackson as President from
1829 to 1837. There is a giddy, almost intoxicating, joyous. celebratory
quality to the Jacksonian Democracy in accounts of those times. When you look
at the popular culture of those days and for many decades afterward, you find
constant reiteration of this concept of the People. The People’s Theatre, the
People’s Press, the People’s Vaudeville. But as had been the case in the old
world for centuries, even in a republic like Rome, or a Democracy like Greece,
politically speaking. the People was still actually only some of the people.
The
word for this elevation of part of the people, and making them believe they are
ALL of the people, is Populism. The fuel of Populism is resentment and
scapegoating. Jackson’s two-pronged enemy targets were elites and Native
Americans. Though these two different groups were at opposite ends of the
pecking order, there were issues on which they could be bundled together, For
example, President Jackson’s political enemy and predecessor John Quincy Adams had
been relatively humane in his dealings with Native Americans. In 1826 he signed
a treaty with the Moscogee Tribe that allowed them to remain in Georgia, much
against the wishes of the state government and local populace. This is the sort
of thing Jackson and his followers hated. When he became President Jackson
signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, clearing the way for all America’s
Indian policy going forwards, essentially America’s Final Solution.
So Andrew Jackson has a kind of Janus legacy.
He was a one man fork in the road, progressive and prejudiced at the same time.
He was instrumental in extending political rights and power to American men of
every class -- just not of every color. And not to women. But considering what
had always been before this is not nothing.. Good came of it, and not just with
respect to white men. The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln was made
possible by Jackson, and Lincoln then brought freedom to enslaved African
Americans. And Voting Rights for black people, later assured by LBJ,
also from poor circumstances, was thus also made possible indirectly by Andrew
Jackson. As were our two Irish Catholic Presidents, and a President and a Vice
President of color. So Jacksonian Democracy is like the second rung on a ladder
with many others above it and it became a template for refining our
constitutional system so that suffrage would later be extended to people of
color and women and immigrants and young people, and for the extension of other
rights to all, over the decades and centuries. The New Deal and the Great
Society are among these refinements. You know where I learned to articulate
that? Barack Obama, who was also made possible by that process. This
evolutionary model is in fact the only conception of American history that can
possibly redeem the country. Bad things did happen in the past and you can’t
change the past but you can acknowledge it and repair damage and vow to do
better now and in the future. That is what redemption is
Some people don’t see it that way. They like
things how they were. A certain faction of America never moved away from this
ideology of white supremacy and mysogny. Civil war era Democrats were
pro-Confederacy, they rioted in the streets of New York rather than fight on
behalf of the people of color. After the Civil War came the Southern Dixiecrats
who then switched parties after the Civil Rights movement and became Nixon’s
hardhat and Southern Coalition and then Reagan Republicans. That was
basically my dad’s political evolution.
We come now to a certain President from New York.
That’s right! Martin Van Buren! It’s often said that Andrew
Jackson proved that anyone can grow up to be President…but isn’t it really Martin
Van Buren who proves that anyone, really anyone can be President? I mean, love
or hate him, okay, hate him, but Jackson was actually an extremely able guy,
otherwise he would have remained a small town lawyer no one ever heard of.
Whereas Van Buren was just this hack politician from New York who helped get
Jackson elected and so Jackson turned around and rewarded him, according to his
philosophy of patronage. If we wanted to
be really proud of America’s first president from New York, it should have been
someone of the caliber of the first half dozen Presidents, men like Alexander
Hamilton or John Jay or George Clinton or Robert
Livingston or even a a pre-duel Aaron Burr As it was, those guys did
get close to the top job as vice presidents, cabinet officers or Supreme Court
justices. My point here is, a lame President set a lame precedent.
Okay, then so I guess it’s the next President
from New York that I mean. Well, no, that’s Millard Fillmore. Fillmore
was elevated to the Presidency when Zachary Taylor died after serving a
year in office due to a digestive ailment caused by eating too much fruit and
milk. Look it up! Anyway after his one term, Fillmore was run again as the
candidate for an outfit called the Native American party. You heard me! The
Native American Party. That’s gotta be good, right? Nah! It’s not what you
think. These Native Americans were not an organized political party of indigenous
people seeking to oust the Europeans from the Americas, although that might
have been cool. It was a party made up of SECOND Americans, the descendants of
the bunch that came in the 1600s, my people, seeking to oust the newer arrivals in the
1840s and 50s. They called themselves Native Americans because they were born
here and their ancestors had been here for a couple of centuries, not because
they were first. If you have seen Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York,
it’s men like that faction led by Daniel Day-Lewis who have street
fights with the Irish. The Native
American Party was nicknamed the Know Nothings, not because they were ignorant,
although let’s face it, but because, much like the Ku Klux Klan, they began as
a secret society or a fraternal organization, so when they were asked anything
about their group they claimed not to know anything. Always a good sign that
you’re on the right side of history when your slogan is the same as Sgt.
Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes. Anyway, the Know Nothings – not irrelevant to the
present moment.
The third and fourth Presidents from New
York…were the Roosevelts who were pretty superlative overall, but far
from ideal as regards their policies toward Native Americans.
TR of course spent more time in the far west than
any other American President. In the early 1880s he moved to the Dakota
territory where he hunted bison and ran a cattle ranch. He wrote numerous books
and articles about his experiences as a millionaire cowboy and later in the
decade he published his four volume history The Winning of the West, a brutal,
bloody account of the Indian Wars, which technically weren’t even over yet. In
1886 he gave a speech where he stated that 9 out of 10 Indians were better off
dead and he wasn’t so sure about the 10th one. As President in the
early 20th century his Native American policy consisted of the
vigorous enforcement of the Allotment Act, the general idea of which was to
break up reservations, and deal with tribal members as separate individuals, in
order to dissolve the native cultures. His administration also issued the hated
“haircut order”, wherein food and supplies were withheld from native men who
didn’t adopt European style short hair and dress. And while many naturally
admire Roosevelt the conservationist, thousands of Natives were in fact
displaced to accommodate the national parks. And it was under Roosevelt’s watch
in 1907 that the remaining Indian Territory was dissolved and became the state
of Oklahoma.
As for Franklin Roosevelt, in 1934
launched his Indian New Deal, which was largely about undoing the abuses of the
Allotment Act, by restoring tribal identity and sovereignty. The general
criticism of this phase of Indian Affairs was that it did not help Native
Americans economically or politically overall, restoring them to a state of
dependence and isolation. It also dissolved the legal status of 61 tribal
nations, though 45 of them have since been reinstated. But to be fair, that guy
had a lot on his plate.
But really it’s the fifth President from New
York we’ve been meaning to get to because he’s the one who very defiantly hung
a picture of Andrew Jackson in the oval office. Of course, Trump knows
nothing about history let alone Andrew Jackson, Steve Bannon told him to
hang that up as a signal to his base that he shares their prejudices and
animosities. Not just against Native Americans, but against everyone who was
not precisely like him.
Now, over the last few years, some of you may
have found yourself going “I’m glad so-and-so’s not alive to see this.” I’m
glad my parents were not alive in the current era because I’m terrified that
they might have enjoyed it to some degree. My father used to get worked up into
paroxysms of rage by the incitements of the right wing media and literally used
to dream aloud about storming the ramparts of Washington DC armed with a
pitchfork in order to stop some vague unspecified takeover of his country by
people he didn’t like the looks of. My mother was the type who loved oily
orange faced TV stars in tuxedos and limousines, and thought millionaires could
do no wrong, so I can’t imagine her giving a damn about pussy grabbing or any
related pecadillos. They both would have recognized you-know-who for a fool and
an idiot, but probably would have laughed off most of his shenanigans, while
very much enjoying his treatment of the people they mutually hated and
disrespected and felt threatened by. I’m not really a Puritan about sex and
violence in entertainment, but off screens, it must be pointed out that the
first has been known to compromise elected officials, and the last is the worst
thing an elected official can foster or encourage. That hasn’t seemed to matter
to some people.
Anyway, Trump knows as little about history as
he does about English, geography, math, gym, home room, or any of the other
required fifth grade subjects, but he did hang a portrait of Andrew Jackson in
his office. That was a signal. He relishes an angry, divisive style. He hates
elites. He hates the Bushes, for example, and Mitt Romney, all elites with
colonial origins, in the very same way Jackson hated the Adamses. Trump came
from the most diverse place on earth, Queens New York, and yet he scorns and
disrespects everyone who lives there. He is the son and grandson of immigrants,
but thinks America should pull the ladder up so new ones can’t get in.
Literally wanted walls so hot they would burn people, once they swam over the
alligator moat. January 6 reminded some
historians of the British destruction of the capitol in 1814; I was also
reminded of the drunken mob of Jackson supporters that made a shambles of the
White House at his first inaugural ball in 1829. “The President invited us!”
was their familiar excuse. And as for his treatment of Native Americans, I beg
you to recollect how he wrapped up the Keystone Pipeline stand-off at Standing
Rock in 2017, which you may have missed in the midst of his million other daily
atrocities. Is there any doubt but that if left unchecked he would wipe out,
WIPE out whatever groups of people he thought fit?
Happily, Jackson and Trump differ in at least
one crucial aspect: Jackson was terrifyingly competent. That’s how he went from
the frontier to the White House. When he set policies, for good or for ill,
they were carried out. By contrast, Trump’s only genuine success has been the
projection of an illusion that fools a minority portion of the population. The
son of a Queens landlord inherits a small fortune, branches out into Manhattan,
establishes a well known brand, hobknobs with celebrities, overextends, goes
bankrupt several times, loses several fortunes, inflates the value of his brand
on paper, borrows from banks who double down on him, cheats on taxes, stiffs
his contractors, releases ghost-written books, then has a TV show where he
plays a successful New York businessman who knows and understands the
intricacies of management and finance and economic levers and pullies, but all
he ever demonstrates is the ability to be mean to people. The only tools he
ever uses are: borrowing and not paying what you owe. He makes nothing, he contributes nothing, and
anything he has ever built has been
accomplished with stolen resources, but millions are convinced he is not only a
very smart guy but a good man, despite being caught ON CAMERA being the very
definition of a bad man, again and again and again and again, daily for
YEARS. Two thirds of the country look at
him and see a criminal but an astounding one third see their favorite TV star,
a guy who tells it like it is, a guy who speaks for them. When such a man is indifferent to human life, atrocities happen.
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