We Have Been Here Before

We have been here before. 

 It could get ugly and messy but we can survive.

by an Ordained Church Leader from California

            The presidential race was between a secretary of state with more than three decades of public service, who had familial ties to the presidency, and a crude man known to be a short fused racist.  The year was 1824.  

John Quincy Adams was the son of our second president.  He had served as Ambassador to the Netherlands, Russia, and Great Britain.  He had served as Monroe’s secretary of state.  Andrew Jackson was a slave holder from Tennessee who had made a name for himself fighting Seminole Indians in Florida and defeating the British at New Orleans.  He was known to bend the rules.  His short fuse had gotten him in duels, in which he had been wounded and killed another.  While he had served as a United States Senator, he was the quintessential outsider of his day. 

            Like 2016, the election of 1824 was close.  Indeed it is the one of two times that a presidential election was decided in the House of Representatives.  That is where the story gets even more interesting relative to our present experience.  While Adams did not have email servers and private foundations to create a firestorm of accusations that he was crooked, he was accused of a nefarious backroom deal with Henry Clay.  The contention is that Clay used his influence to tip the balance in Adams favor in the House of Representatives, thus electing Adams over Jackson.  When Adams named Clay to be Secretary of State, at that time seen as the stepping stone to the presidency, the so-called “corrupt bargain” became the war cry for the 1828 rematch.

            When these two faced each other again, the race was nasty.  While the contenders stayed above the fray (would that those days would return!), there was plenty of mud thrown around.  A bit of sex was thrown in with subtle suggestions made of impropriety in Jackson’s marriage to his beloved wife, Rachel.  Much was made of the foreign born wife of Adams. 

             Does this sound familiar?  And while MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Fox’s Shawn Hannity were not on the scene, their ancestral kin, the National Intelligencer for Adams and the United States Telegraph for Jackson, were churning out screeds with little concern about balance, fact and truth. Forgeries and made us stories were tools to ruin reputations and win elections.  Ring any bells?

            So, we have been here before.  When Andrew Jackson took over from Adams, the urbane and educated gave way to the earthy and scrappy.  Jackson also came into office with a very firm view of things and a bit of a chip on his shoulder.  The nation was changed significantly by his presidency.  While five of his six predecessors had been slave holders, his actions in combat against native Americans presaged the Trail of Tears, one of the marks of inhumanity that our nation cannot wash away.  His economic policies led to the destruction of the Second Bank of the United States; the Panic of 1837 was a direct result of this imperious and impetuous action. For six years, the economy of the United States was in a shambles. What the elections of 1824 and 1828 also made abundantly clear were the sectional divisions in the nation that would become fully evident and explosive in the civil war.

            Trump’s election represents the rejection of careful, informed and reflective leadership.  What is ascendant is reactive, reflective, and intuitive leadership.   Trump evinces certitude in position and trust in his own instincts that will not be altered by expertise or even facts.  This has proven to be powerfully attractive to an electorate that is distrustful of those who are more educated and experienced.  It doesn’t matter that he has no cogent details.  He is attractive and compelling because he gives voice to the feelings of the dissatisfied.  It makes no difference that his vague assertions belie reality. 

            This worked for Jackson, got him elected, reelected, and even got his handpicked successor reelected.  This all happened in spite of the fact that he was the only president censured by the United States Congress and was often caricatured as King Andrew.  But then the wheels came off the bus.  Who knew that when Jackson retired to the Heritage in Davidson County, Tennessee that the United States would endure a succession of one term presidents of notable mediocrity for the next 24 years.   Only Civil War and Lincoln would change this. 

            The good news is that we survived all of this.  However, the United States did not play out its identity crisis on the world stage. The president was not a world leader trying to make senses of the nation’s role in a changing world.  The economic realities were not global. 

            Arguably, Jackson was able to do so much damage because the nation was so young.  Its customs, traditions, and case law were nascent.  After all, the constitution had only been ratified for 39 years.   Today, we have a much more robust tradition to impede any one person president or not from detaching our nation from its core values and traditions. 

Or perhaps we should know better!

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