Election 1824: Enter Andrew Jackson
In a feat never repeated (yet) Democratic-Republicans Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe completed three 2-term administrations in a row. Monroe did such a good job of bringing all sides together; the so-called “Era of Good Feelings” destroyed both the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties. Everything was great. No one had any real issues to complain about or rally behind. What emerged were sectional leaders, who accepted the nomination of their home-state’s caucus.
The Contenders
(left to right)
Speaker of the House Henry Clay (KY) – Although he couldn’t just come out and say it, Henry Clay was a Hamiltonian who believed bigger government was the solution to all major problems. A master negotiator, he brokered the Missouri Compromise, which put the slavery issue in a drawer for nearly 30 years.
Senator, General Andrew Jackson (TN) –In the Battle of New Orleans, fought after the War of 1812 ended, Jackson kicked way more British ass than any battle during the war. He became an instant national celebrity. There was no question, this man was going to be President.
Secretary of State John Quincy Adams (MA) – Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had all parlayed their time as Sec. of State to the presidency, so Adams seemed the natural successor. It didn't hurt that in 1820, he won the only electoral vote not awarded to President Monroe.
Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford (GA) – Crawford unsuccessfully ran against Monroe in 1816. His presidential ambition made him effective at his job but annoying to basically everyone.
The Fight
Despite some pretty major philosophical differences, all the candidates were publicly Jeffersonians. The contest would come down to personality. Jackson was the biggest figure to hit the American people since George Washington himself. John Quincy was the elite heir to the Adams family. Clay was the great orator of the Congress. Crawford had dared to take on the great James Monroe. Without formal political parties, it really was a free-for-all.
Predictably, the sections of the country that nominated their candidates stuck to them on election day. Adams carried New England and New York; Clay found success in the West, and Crawford held his own in the South, even though he had suffered a debilitating stroke. Jackson was the only candidate to seriously cross regional lines. By a 15 vote margin, Jackson won a decisive plurality of electoral votes. Adams won 2nd, Crawford 3rd, and Clay 4th. That's right, Clay lost to a stroke victim. Since no one won a full majority, the results once again deferred to the House of Representatives.
The Constitution stated that the Congress would have to decide between the top three vote getters. The issue at hand was who would get Clay’s 37 electoral votes. Clay’s role as Speaker gave him a ridiculous amount of authority over these results. Rumor has it, he made a deal with Adams, which would explain how Clay ended up as President JQA’s Secretary of State. Jackson's pissed off supporters immediately cried fix, feeling their people's champion had been usurped by the big, scary, corrupt government.
The Title
Adams was a shittier politician than his father, and he was thrown into the most volatile political situation than, well, his father. He implemented massive internal improvements, which would have been perceived as benevolent if he could sell it that way. He couldn't. He was so hated, his own Vice President turned on him. He did, however, spend a lot of time swimming naked in the Potomac.
Jacksonsonians went and turned themselves into the Democratic Party. Crawford's running mate Martin Van Buren mobilized Democrats into an organized effort to undermine President Adams, villify Clay, and get Jackson elected in 1828. In 2 terms as president, he beat the shit out of everyone, destroying the Bank of the US, turning the army on South Carolina, and changing the presidency forever.
Crawford died 10 years later, a Georgia superior court judge.
Clay fucking hated Andrew Jackson. He thought the former general was a tyrant whose single-minded style of leadership would turn this great country into a dictatorship. After his failed run against Jackson in 1832, he established the Whig Party, which formed under the single goal of taking down Andrew Jackson. With a loser like Clay at the helm, it took a while for their platform to really gel.
Next Up – Election 1840: A Cult of Personality
The Contenders
(left to right)
Speaker of the House Henry Clay (KY) – Although he couldn’t just come out and say it, Henry Clay was a Hamiltonian who believed bigger government was the solution to all major problems. A master negotiator, he brokered the Missouri Compromise, which put the slavery issue in a drawer for nearly 30 years.
Senator, General Andrew Jackson (TN) –In the Battle of New Orleans, fought after the War of 1812 ended, Jackson kicked way more British ass than any battle during the war. He became an instant national celebrity. There was no question, this man was going to be President.
Secretary of State John Quincy Adams (MA) – Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had all parlayed their time as Sec. of State to the presidency, so Adams seemed the natural successor. It didn't hurt that in 1820, he won the only electoral vote not awarded to President Monroe.
Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford (GA) – Crawford unsuccessfully ran against Monroe in 1816. His presidential ambition made him effective at his job but annoying to basically everyone.
The Fight
Despite some pretty major philosophical differences, all the candidates were publicly Jeffersonians. The contest would come down to personality. Jackson was the biggest figure to hit the American people since George Washington himself. John Quincy was the elite heir to the Adams family. Clay was the great orator of the Congress. Crawford had dared to take on the great James Monroe. Without formal political parties, it really was a free-for-all.
Predictably, the sections of the country that nominated their candidates stuck to them on election day. Adams carried New England and New York; Clay found success in the West, and Crawford held his own in the South, even though he had suffered a debilitating stroke. Jackson was the only candidate to seriously cross regional lines. By a 15 vote margin, Jackson won a decisive plurality of electoral votes. Adams won 2nd, Crawford 3rd, and Clay 4th. That's right, Clay lost to a stroke victim. Since no one won a full majority, the results once again deferred to the House of Representatives.The Constitution stated that the Congress would have to decide between the top three vote getters. The issue at hand was who would get Clay’s 37 electoral votes. Clay’s role as Speaker gave him a ridiculous amount of authority over these results. Rumor has it, he made a deal with Adams, which would explain how Clay ended up as President JQA’s Secretary of State. Jackson's pissed off supporters immediately cried fix, feeling their people's champion had been usurped by the big, scary, corrupt government.
The Title
Adams was a shittier politician than his father, and he was thrown into the most volatile political situation than, well, his father. He implemented massive internal improvements, which would have been perceived as benevolent if he could sell it that way. He couldn't. He was so hated, his own Vice President turned on him. He did, however, spend a lot of time swimming naked in the Potomac.
Jacksonsonians went and turned themselves into the Democratic Party. Crawford's running mate Martin Van Buren mobilized Democrats into an organized effort to undermine President Adams, villify Clay, and get Jackson elected in 1828. In 2 terms as president, he beat the shit out of everyone, destroying the Bank of the US, turning the army on South Carolina, and changing the presidency forever.
Crawford died 10 years later, a Georgia superior court judge.
Clay fucking hated Andrew Jackson. He thought the former general was a tyrant whose single-minded style of leadership would turn this great country into a dictatorship. After his failed run against Jackson in 1832, he established the Whig Party, which formed under the single goal of taking down Andrew Jackson. With a loser like Clay at the helm, it took a while for their platform to really gel.
Next Up – Election 1840: A Cult of Personality
Labels: elections, presidents
posted by Daroff at
8:15 PM
0 Comments
Clinton should have learned from Wilson. Bubba gets a lot of flack for encouraging people to buy houses, leading to sub-prime mortgages, leading to the recession. His real problem was not Republican-proofing his plans. Dude, learn from history: Americans fear change. In the modern age, before you reform, you must make your policies regressive-proof. If you push too much reform, you will be handing the presidency over to the Republicans. Oh, and while we’re at it, Gore’s an idiot. You can’t under-estimate your VP choice. I will argue til I’m blue that Lieberman’s the reason he lost, like Ferraro brought down Dukakis, Quayle brought down Bush, and Palin brought down McCain.
If Bush had paid attention to history, the Republican Party might not be in such disarray. Bush took a Harding-like approach and overturned everything Clinton accomplished, both the good with the bad. Thus, he falls somewhere near Harding in overall job performance. Had he followed the Eisenhower approach of trying to continue Clinton’s reforms, we may have avoided the recession. In the end, it was our own faults he got re-elected. How did we let him use “flip-flopper” as a negative? Lincoln’s giant flip-flop from conservative to liberal saved the Union and ended slavery.
Obama just needs to learn from general precedent. He's simply not going to get re-elected. If he wins in 2012, it will be the first time since Jefferson-Madison-Monroe that three presidents in a row successfully completed two full terms. Presidents elected in a wave of backlash against the current administration (Pierce, Harrison, Carter) rarely get re-elected. Presidents presiding over an economic downturn without clear and concise recovery (Van Buren, Hoover, Carter) hardly ever make it. Washington outsiders who lack the political skill to pass bills (Carter) usually cannot rally for a second win. With all this stacked against him, the question remains, why the fuck isn't he trying harder? Always with the coalition building. For a short period of time, he has a slight majority in both houses of Congress. Why the hell isn't he forcing through a Jacksonian or Teddy Rooseveltian wave of unbridled reform? Screw the second term, like Polk did in 1848. Dude, just step up and say "I'm the president, and I'm going to fix EVERYTHING right now, and I'm going to it my way. If when I'm done you feel like I've made your life better, vote for me. If not, fuck you." Seriously, Barack, you're not going to win in 2012, so stop trying to be Mr. Popular and starting being a fucking president.
Had Reagan not spent the 20’s dreaming about becoming a movie star, he might have noticed that President Coolidge spent his time in office spending and deregulating the country into the Great Depression. Reagan, like Coolidge, was wildly popular, but he was all talk. Anyone can look at a calendar and claim Reagan freed the hostages in Iran and ended the Cold War, but look closer, and you’ll see that it's probable Reagan was barely aware of what was going on around him. All that tough talk people attribute to Reagan was just Hollywood grand standing, and if the Russians weren’t so weak to begin with, the Soviet Union would never have fallen. Despite rumors to the contrary, Reagan was not a great president. He was a great Republican, and his party has every right to credit him with pulling them out of the gutter.
For all the flack he gets for flip-flopping on “read my lips,” Bush was an amazing half a president. His tax policy was just one example of his inability to lead at home. His foreign policy, however, was unmatched. His strong, wise leadership helped transition the world out of the Cold War. The man marched an international coalition into a a foreign nation that hadn’t declared war on any of them, and left without destabilizing the entire region. That takes cojones. That’s the double-edged sword of modern presidential politics. You can be a brilliant leader of the free world, but if you can’t match that by being the loving father of the US, you won’t get re-elected.
Historians have started downgrading this old fornicator’s god-like status to something a lot more average. His appeal had a lot more to do with his image than his actions. In his short time, he handled the crises before him deftly, but he didn’t accomplish anything overly groundbreaking, and based on his record, he wasn’t on his way to accomplishing much more. He did, however, start a grand modern tradition of the young, inexperienced candidate raising the grandeur of his ticket by attaching himself to a long-time Washington insider.
Unfortunately, Johnson was so widely hated, the American people actually turned to Richard fucking Nixon to save them from him. Back when he was Eisenhower’s VP, he was a young buck, ready to take on Washington. By 1968, he had morphed into Tricky Dick, ready to take the presidency back for the Republican Party, who by the way turned on him when he lost to Kennedy 8 years earlier. His accomplishments don’t fucking matter because he destroyed the office of the president forever. 
In 1967, the 25th Amendment finally established clear guidelines for passing power to the VP. The Amendment covered presidential incapacitation and resignation, but also the procedure for filling a vacancy in the VP’s office. Just 6 years later, the Amendment was used 3 times in less than a year: replacing the resigned Spiro Agnew with Ford, replacing the resigned Nixon with Ford, and filling Ford’s empty VP office with Nelson Rockefeller. I’m only focusing on cool historical precedent because Ford himself didn’t do much worth giving a crap about.
I had an hour to kill and decided to deposit my check. There was no one in line because it's Thursday, so I decided to ask if he had any dollar coins. They had a Quincy Adams.
Even though he was hated at the time, Truman earned his place as one of the great presidents by being FDR’s exact opposite. He was a good man, crappy politician. With the lowest approval ratings ever recorded, it's no wonder he almost lost to Dewey. Only because he operated in FDR’s shadow could he de-segregate the government, drop food aid on Germany, evolve FDR's New Deal into the Fair Deal, drop the bomb on a couple cities, got the ball rolling on NATO, and help establish Israel. For all your great accomplishments, 
A funny thing happened with Ike. He didn’t backslide. After 20 years of nearly non-stop reform, the pattern would predict Ike, a member of the opposition party, would try to turn back the New Deal. He didn’t. He was a forward thinking Conservative. No major reforms. Just keep everything as it is. Sorry, no jokes on this one. Just think about that for a second, and think about how something as simple as putting country above party should be something we take for granted, but it isn't. Nowadays, it's all about vengeance for both sides, and it gets us nowhere. A man like Eisenhower can't get elected today (see: Colin Powell, Wesley Clark), so we swing back and forth in 4-8 year increments ultimately getting nowhere. 
A genius political science scholar, Wilson positioned himself as the new head of his party, thereby making his chief responsibility to guide Democrats in Congress, and by extension Democrats in state government. Mr. Smarty Pants missed a fundamental flaw in his plan, though. His reforms would only work if Wilson himself was president. Now watch as his successors, scared of change, roll back every single reform.
Harding deftly won by making everyone afraid of how smart Wilson was and opposing basically every reform since Hayes. He deferred authority to Congress and gave high offices to his buddies, who subsequently tried to sell off the country piece by piece. Rumor has it, his wife found out his buddies’ scandals were about to come out, so 
You’d think a Sec. of Commerce would be able to keep us out of a Depression. So did the American people. He did what his giant brain told him would save us, and he failed miserably. I guess these things happen. Oh, but he built a 
The Williams went head-to-head in 1896. Both wanted change, but McKinley’s pragmatic Progressivism won out over Bryan’s bat-shit crazy calls for massive and immediate government overhaul. The world was expanding around us and we couldn’t be isolated forever. Despite Bryan’s passionate opposition, the US scooped up Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and The Philippines as colonies. To kick the Spanish out of our neighborhood in Cuba, McKinley finally 
We have a tradition in this country of assassinating the best presidents. Garfield didn’t have a lot of time in office, but he spent it doing as much good as possible. He was so obsessive about Civil Service Reform that he personally, painstakingly interviewed candidates for basically every office (except of course the VP he got stuck with at the convention). Ultimately, 
Only a year and a half before Garfield’s death, President Hayes had removed Arthur from office in disgrace. Are we starting to see why the political machine needed reforming? As president, Arthur sought to prove he was above corrupt influence, and 
Cleveland was a super Civil Service Reformer. He went as far as letting Republicans keep their jobs if they were good at them. The bigger issue by this point, though, was tariffs. Cleveland supported lower tariffs, but Congressman William McKinley believed in higher tariffs. Cleveland stuck to his guns, but when the economy lagged, tariffs were blamed and he lost the election. Tariffs are much more juicy than Civil Service Reform, right?
Apparently, the best way to beat a Democrat in the 1800’s was to nominate a big war general to oppose him. This time, though, unlike WH Harrison and Taylor, he didn’t die. His wife did. In 1892, he sat at his wife’s bedside, so he didn’t campaign. Harrison was a regressive who believed the president had no power to do anything, so no one missed him.
Abraham Lincoln was a man with a modest beard and, believe it or not, was a giant flip-flopper. He thought slavery was abhorrent, but he just wanted the issue resolved so we could go back to peacefully killing Indians, like the good old days. It was only after careful study and consideration that he realized slavery was an issue so big and so evil that if the North won the war with this pox on our country, the war would never truly be won. Change after careful thought; funny how that works out.
Grant, despite a valiant effort, also totally fucked up Reconstruction. It’s hard to build relations with the South when you’re snorting coke and allowing your administration to sell-out basically everything and everyone. Kinda kills your credibility. He did, however, establish Yellowstone Park and made Christmas a national holiday. As a Jew, I thank him deeply for that last one.
In this age of bearded wisdom, the Republicans followed Grant with Hayes, who possibly was the founding member of ZZ Top. National unity, black rights, pshaw. He was a lot more interested in wrestling Civil Service Reform. I know, exciting, right? What could be so important about about Civil Service Reform that he sold out generations of southern blacks? More on that next week.
Born near Boston, I moved to L.A. to live the dream. That's right, I work in television. To stimulate my brain, I spend my spare time thinking
about the history of presidential politics, and trying to identify supporting actors in films.
Ooh, and I have an 
