Sunday, January 09, 2005

Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson (1945)

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The Age of Jackson.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945.

(Book information at Amazon.com.)

This book is a history of domestic politics in the United States from the late 1820s through the 1850s. The author fawns over radical democratic ideologues of the urban north east (Boston, New York, Philadelphia) and disparages or ignores the political developments of democrats' opponents, for example, the Whig Party. Schlesinger seems to view this historical epoch not on its own terms, but rather through the anachronistic lens of the socialism of his own day, the 1930s and 1940s, in terms of a conflict between "progressives" or "liberals" and "conservatives," which I regard as an ill-defined and false dicotomy. A flawed (deeply partisan) classic of American historical literature, this book deserves to be read with cautious skepticism, and under no circumstances should you read it as your sole source for this period.

Schlesinger focuses generally on economic class warfare, particularly in the urban, industrialized North: New York (source of Martin Van Buren, Jackson's successor as President, and a hotbed of radical democrats) and Massachusetts (another hotbed of radical democrats); and on the journalistic propagandists of "Jacksonian democracy," many of whom obtained govenment employment in the administrations of Jackson and Van Buren.

Chapter 31, "Minorities and Majorities," contains a nice discussion of the seemingly perverse alliance between anti-property / anti-business / anti-capitalist Democrats of the North and pro-slavery Democrats of the South (e.g., John C. Calhoun). But at the same time Schlesinger deliberately ignores the political thought embodied in The Federalist, particularly number 10, or perhaps that is representative of the radical democrats of that time. (This is perhaps due to the Jeffersonians', the Democrats', and also Schlesinger's, disparagment of all things Federalist. Their empahsis on democracy to the exclusion of all the political philosophy upon which American constitutional republican government is based I consider a fundamental and obvious defect. It bears repeating: the American government is not a democracy; it is a constitutional representative federal republic which occasionally conducts democratic elections.) I find Schlesinger's analysis and defense of the Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island in 1842 an unconstitutional abomination. It appears to me that the Democrats of the time, and Schlesinger himself, became intellectually unhinged when confronting the fact that the Democratic Party, a self-described "Party of the People," could lose an election to a majority of the people, as in the Presidential Election of 1840.

This book might have been more accurately titled "The Rise and Fall of the Jacksonian Democratic Party." I found the book relatively weaker for the period after 1840. The 1840s was a period of division and decline for the Democrats. Both the Democratic and Whig Parties split and collapsed in the 1850s over the issue of Slavery, the Whigs never to recover. Schlesinger covers the 1840s and 1850s with sketchy brevity as the Jacksonians were consumed by party division and died off. The Republican Party would rise in the 1850s as, generally speaking, the anti-Slavery party, inheriting components from both the Democrats and Whigs; however, that subject is beyond the scope of Schlesinger's book.

Other Books:

Some Links:

Posted by at