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?