Celebrity Presidential Rehab

If you've kept up with this (tragically underposted) blog, then it's probably not a stretch for you to imagine me as the kind of kid who would ask people who their favorite president was. This is the reason why whenever I think of Andrew Jackson, I think of my mother, who named him as her favorite president back when I was six or so.

This doesn't jive with my contemporary understanding of my mother, though--the mother who, along with my father, drove me and my little sister out West to visit pueblos and powwows, who, when she and my father visited me last month, picked
The National Museum of the American Indian as her number one sight to see in DC, a town she hadn't been to since 1981.

And if you've read or listened to Sarah Vowell on the subject, you know the problem of Andrew Jackson and Indian Removal. More than any president, we associate Jackson with the stealing of American lands. He's the guy on the $20 bill, but he's the original Great White Father, the man who states in his second annual message to Congress that "toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people."

Or, in other words, demolish their way of life in order to make them more like us.

So, cue the music: how do you solve a problem like Andrew Jackson?

Jon Meacham gives it the old college try in American Lion, which attempts (and, given its success, Pulitzer and all that, succeeds) to rehabilitate Jackson into a man for whom the Union was paramount, trumping all concerns--even those of the humanitarian sort.

Meacham writes that "in the hierarchy of Jackson's concerns, the sanctity of the Union outranked any other consideration. As long as the Indians were in the heart of the nation, they were threats--and as threats they had to be removed."

Does this work? Does framing a pretty atrocious act (Indian Removal) within the larger good (preserving the Union) count as a way of rescuing a president from the Bad list? We won't read about FDR until September of 2011, but does the general idea of protecting America from attack justify the specific idea of putting American citizens in internment camps? We won't read GWB until August of 2012, but does the general idea of protecting America from attack justify torture?

I've thought before that writing a biography is an act of love. But now I wonder what kind of love it is: is it the kind of love a child has for a parent--Daddy can do no wrong--or the kind of love a spouse has for his/her partner--I love you despite your flaws?

Skipping Over Some Ugly Details

You know you're in biographical trouble when your author starts the paragraph on your presidency this way: "It may confound some readers that biography of any American president should devote only a single chapter to his administration. Nevertheless, such brevity seems appropriate for John Quincy Adams."

Yikes. That can't be a good sign.

Nagel's right, of course: Adams does not have a good presidency by any standard (even that of his father, who, until his son matched him, was the only single-term president). What is significant about JQA's term in office is how it ends: with what we can accurately call the first real presidential campaign. In the elections leading up to 1828, candidates were generally expected to avoid campaigning--to see the idea of being elected as a noble calling that they passively received, a burden borne by those chosen. Their supporters, on the other hand, felt free to go after the other candidates with knives sharpened.

In 1828, Adams (who lost the popular vote but won in the House of Representatives) ran against the man he'd simultaneously lost to and beaten in 1824: General Andrew Jackson. Jackson, wildly popular as the winner of the Battle of New Orleans, had won the popular vote in 1824. Adams's crew went after him with vigor; not only did they accuse him of executing deserters and killing men in duels (which was, um, true), but they also went after Jackson's wife, Rachel. They accused the couple of committing bigamy, since Rachel was technically still married to another man when she and Jackson were wed (the divorce went through later, and the Jacksons had a second marriage performed to try to make up for it, although that never stopped the gossip).

The stress and strain of the campaign took its toll on both Jackson and his wife, and in the latter's case, it actually proved fatal; Rachel Jackson died in December of 1828, one month after her husband finally won the presidency.

The founding fathers feared political parties, seeing them as unnecessarily divisive. But the presidents who followed them, especially JQA, Jackson, and Van Buren--develop the idea of political party towards what it is today.