WHY LEADERSHIP MATTERS!

WHY LEADERSHIP MATTERS!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 2006

The past is prologue to the future.
James Joyce (1882 – 1941)

ABSTRACT
This is taken from a work-in-progress and deals with a particularly colorful leader, Andrew Jackson, who defied tradition and the modality of his times to be called by many “the second Washington.”

Jackson’s victory in the Battle of New Orleans (July 8, 1815) saved the Mississippi basin and stifled expansionistic threats from Spain and Great Britain. It also displaced Indians from their native lands, while signaling America’s own aggressive westward and northward expansion across the continent. Prior to this crucial victory, the worry was that this new republic was so fragmented that it might split into two separate and rival nations. Today, the Battle of New Orleans is considered a pivotal event in the Union’s history.

The queen city of New Orleans would be carried to almost fabulous heights as a port and market for cotton and slaves. New Orleans came out of the war stamped with its lasting reputation for glamour and gay living, elegance and wickedness. Then, as now, African Americans (Negroes) were a large element in the population, and contributed to the exotic flavor of the city in music, art, architecture, manners, and morals.

Thereafter, Jackson was considered “America’s Hero,” ultimately riding his popularity to the presidency. As president, he had a personal style of leadership that resonated with the people of his times. The style came out of the open, amoral, and wild western frontier. While offending many with his stormy temperament, it made connection with common folk, a fact that frustrated his more sophisticated contemporaries.

As Jackson personified the leadership of America’s emerging new frontier in the first half of the nineteenth century, two centuries later a new frontier has surfaced in the Information Age. This frontier is looking for new leadership to give it direction, stability and resonance against the reality of declining expectations.

Early America was conflicting polarized between two aspects: seeing itself mainly European in manners and morals, or becoming a utopian pastoral society. Neither aspect fit the pent up energy of the people. Jackson’s cheekiness was a reality check. His leadership leveraged the nation to become unstuck, releasing this energy and changing the course of American history. Currently, America is stuck in its addiction to progress at any cost, the consequences be damned! When people don’t own the problem, the problem owns the people. Only leadership can change this and restore balance.


PERSONAL REFERENCE

Leadership has been an interest of mine since I was a boy. My da resented authority because it bowed him as a man. This made an impression on me. Living at home and attending church, through grammar and high school, college and work, my curiosity was picked by the discharge and efficacy of authority. I saw my da exalt other men, but never himself. He had little sense of his own worth, a humility that masked his insecurity. Yet, he was a man never to back down from a physical fight no matter the other man's size. This incongruity was never resolved, as he died a young man. I set my mind to live the life he put on hold. It me found a student of leadership, and in the process, coming to be acquainted with Andrew Jackson.

Jackson was born before the Declaration of Independence (1667) was signed. He fought in the Revolutionary War, became an Indian fighter, lawyer, judge, congressman, senator, and general before becoming the seventh president of the United States, and all this without a formal education. He was the original self-made man, and proud of it.

Jackson’s America on the frontier personified constant struggle with survival never certain. Even with all his follies, he never became stuck, never looked back, but always forged ahead, embracing new experiences and challenges. Reality was his companion and survival his only focus. He brought that reality to his young nation.

Critics point to Jackson’s flawed character, and it was flawed, but he was also real. We seem to prefer flawless Teflon proxies as leaders, leaders who look good, sound good, and promise good, and behave as scripted to behave. Jackson’s passion obliterated the frontier barrier of his age, and reinvented the presidency as we know it. We are now confronting a new frontier in the transparency of the “Information Age.” This requires boldness comparable to Jackson’s while we look as if stuck in leaderless leadership and cosmetic change. Polls, economic models, market forecasts and a plethora of analysis drive the stake of denial further into our psyche. Economic watcher Paul B. Farrell writes:

Economists use elaborate computer models to simulate how America works. Past performance is projected using complex mathematical formulas. But they cannot predict wars, pandemics, another 9/11. By screening out these high costs, unpredictable variables, economists build denial into their forecasts, coating over increasing dangers, then feeding us forecasts that are misleading and wrong.

Our addiction to rationality and numbers is even more dangerous in marketing and trading systems. Institutions and individuals use esoteric theories: Eliot wave, Gann, Fibonacci, Candlesticks, Astro-Harmonics, and other systems. They hypnotize “numbers addicts” like drugs, creating a false sense of control, ever rationalizing losses.

It is the disposition of a society that clings to the remnants of utopia that spells its ultimately doom. Such a society resists a “wake up” call and becomes stuck in the surreal belief that no matter what the calamity the resources and resilience will be there to dispatch it. Often only messy, atypical, passionate, and determined leadership can reverse this insane hubristic trance, as Jackson proved, making it abundantly clear why leadership matters.




WHY LEADERSHIP MATTERS

Leadership matters, but differs from age to age. What prevailed before will not likely prevail now. What was apropos to circumstances then will unlikely fit circumstances now. The dominant themes of a time define good leadership. They call for constant reinvention to match a changing population, changing society, and changing world. An English visitor, Frances Trollope, early in the nineteenth century noted the American obsession with the dollar. Wealth was not equated with beauty, happiness, peace or tranquility, or indeed, with power, but with how much everything cost. It put her in mind of the consistency and purposefulness of an ants’ nest.

Preoccupation with the dollar suggests capitalism and class struggle, which are now being replaced by the digital revolution. Society is moving from being dominated by print and broadcast mass media to the age of global interactivity, which is at least as frightening and foreboding as the western frontier in America’s nineteenth century. Jackson wrestled power from Great Britain, Spain and France, and then from Congress, the Supreme Court, and the banks to establish a strong presidency in a democratic society.

Now capitalism and nationalism are being challenged by attentionalism; by those who would harness and control global networks of information and master new forms of communication in business, industry, finance, education, and government to create new elites. Jackson penetrated the monarchical elite of New England in his day. Who will challenge these new elites in the third millennium?

The Jackson Age was transitioning from an agrarian to an industrial society. We are now in the post-industrial age driven by the Internet, mobile communications, and electronic networks. It suggests we are moving beyond capitalism in doing business, organizing actions, and acquiring knowledge and information, and into a wilderness we fail to understand.

The Internet has been advertised as a radically decentralized unpredictable phenomenon thriving beyond the control of individuals, corporations, and governments. The only thing true about this is that we are in a state of chaos with no one seemingly in charge.

Many still entertain the utopian idea that it will all work out; that a transparent and non-hierarchical society will soon greet the Information Age. That is a myth. Man needs hierarchies not unlike other animals on the planet. These hierarchies, however, will not likely follow capitalistic structures, or along lines of wealth and academic credentials, or the so-called “professional class,” but will reside with those who sort and provide information.

Notice how IBM, GE, GM, and Ford are scampering to stay afloat while kids in garages and basements are rewriting the codes by which we live, breathe, work and play. Notice, too, how our academic institutions are lost in their own mazes unable to catch up because they are unable to catch on. Then there is government that creates wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) it can’t win, while unable to explain the mismanagement of a natural disaster (Katrina) it can’t handle.

Power will no longer lie with those who own the means of production, but be in the hands of those who can create and sustain attention. People who can manipulate networks and the information that runs through them will inherit the future. Venture capitalists will simply supply the funding. The old guard of institutions is atavistic, and institutional life is anachronistic, waiting for the next iteration of both.

That said this age is no more challenging than Jackson’s. There couldn’t have been a more improbable leader for his time than he was. As one historian puts it:

His rise was nothing short of phenomenal. He was not learned, not particularly bright. There is no account to suggest he was studious at any time during his formative years. He may have been poorly educated, but everything in the written record says that he was secure in the belief that he knew right from wrong and understood the people of his times.

The morality of a time needs leadership. To deny this reality is to flounder as we are floundering now. Yet, morality is not static as some would prefer, but a dynamic of moving values that require someone of substance, someone of a constitution that understands the human heart of the time, and has the temerity to make connections with that individual, and by extension, with the collective spirit and will of the people who desire to be led.

Leadership is an individualistic enterprise. Authentic leaders sense that they are special long before it is clear to those they plan to lead. Jackson always knew he was a leader. Leaders are narcissistic with one eye on opportunity and the other on posterity. Leaders court posterity with the same enthusiasm as they court supporters. Often they care for people only as much as people confirm what they believe about themselves and the world around them. They use people like mirrors to reflect their own self-image.

There are no such things as humble leaders. For one, the led wouldn’t be interested; for another the led are attracted putatively to the infallible and powerful. These leaders display the confidence to appear never to second-guess themselves. They court posterity by keeping journals, records of correspondence and events, or see to it that their acolytes do, creating a hagiography of their watch and time.

Leaders are seldom brilliant or especially creative, but decisive, disciplined, dedicated, determined, and self-directed doers. This is not enough, however, to make them stand alone as leaders. They must have a cause; something that resonates with the people, penetrates their lives, and lifts them out of their confusion. Leaders must first convince themselves that they are special and gifted to lead. Jackson came by this naturally. Conviction requires a belief that only they can achieve their people’s goals.

Though leaders are selfish and self-interested to be convincing they have to feign selflessness and other-directedness. It eases them through the conflict barrier of suspicion. Even with all this, there is no certainty they will be successful. Leaders must possess a singular ambition, an ambition that husbands their resources to fuel their desire to carry them to where they want to go. Ambition may be loud like Jackson’s, or quiet like Thomas Jefferson’s, expressed in capital letters or implicit whispers, but it is necessary because talent is never enough.

Leaders have clear responsibilities to the led, but equally true, the led have obvious responsibilities to the leadership. This is often played down, as the led are quicker to criticize than to see their complicit role when things go awry. In a democratic society, a community, company, or country gets the leadership it deserves. Selective forgetting fails to change this. Leaders must realize people vote with their hearts, not with their heads. The twentieth century demonstrated this fact with painful clarity.

The Germans of post-World War I, following the indemnities assessed at Versailles, coupled with the world economic depression of the late 1920s, chose a demagogue, Adolph Hitler, to lead them. Hitler orchestrated their pride to seduce them to become a warring nation. This led to a humiliating defeat in World War II. Germans are now in a state of post-traumatic recovery some sixty years later, while the shroud of the Holocaust remains a permanent scar on the Germanic psyche.

The United States carries its own baggage. It is now as vulnerable as Germany was in 1929; only it is another kind of war, a war of economic displacement and societal realignment, while escaping into wars of nation building and policing the world. The “Information Age” and Internet has placed the nation on a global frontier where what was known and applicable no longer applies. The leadership that brought the country to this frontier will not suffice to carry it safely through it.

This frontier differs little in its confusion with the American frontier of 1829 when Andrew Jackson became president. The great colonial powers of Great Britain, Spain and France were receding on the North American continent while new powers cells were jockeying for control and influence. Only forty years earlier, George Washington was elected the first president of the United States. Chaos ruled that day as old sins and new injuries were surfacing and looking for redress.

Native American Indians were being wiped out by disease, displacement and betrayal. Treaties were broken; tribes were being removed from their sacred lands to make way for white settlers. Devious means were launched to reduce Indian populations by such means as the distributing of pox smeared diseased blankets among tribes. This resulted in cholera and small pox epidemics. At the same time, slavery was still a sad stain on the land, especially in the south where the slave population nearly equaled that of the whites.

It was a time when only men of property had the vote and the working class did not, while each slave counted as three-fifths of a vote. Thomas Jefferson would not have been elected president without this non-voting constituency.

It was also a time when America was in transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. Railroad mania took hold in America in the 1830s in the same way that canals had boomed in the 1820s. President Jackson in 1833 became the first president to travel by rail. In 1830, the United States had 1,200 miles of canal, and only 73 miles of rail, including the spur lines from coalmines. By 1840, there were 3,326 miles of canal and 3,328 miles of rail, or a virtual dead heat. As the nation was becoming a mobile rail society, it was also moving rapidly into the ill-defined virgin territory of the western frontier with no clear vision of the future.

Hesitantly, America was turning from a monarchical dominated society of landed gentry in imitation of European pomp, circumstance, power and manners, to a wide-open society of the “common man.” President Andrew Jackson became pivotal to this transition. He changed the office of the presidency, the landscape of an expansive minded nation, the way the nation did business, while giving birth to a corporate society that reverberates across the nation and the world today. In a word, Jackson proved why leadership matters.


AMERICAN AND JACKSON TEMPERAMENT

Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville toured America from New York to New Orleans, encompassing seven thousand miles in less than nine months (1831 – 1832). This was during President Andrew Jackson’s first term (1829 – 1833). Jackson was the first president elected from the western frontier (Tennessee), or outside of Virginia and Massachusetts.

Tocqueville wrote of a country in which manners held power over politics, and where legislators were subject to the daily passions of their constituents; where it was easy to stir up paranoia, as the people were prone to jealousy and mistrust. He saw the popular seventh president as a “slave to the majority,” a president who trampled on his personal enemies whenever they crossed his path to the delight of the people.

Tocqueville saw America as an accidental republic, but that it would survive because of its natural endowments of impatience, energy, and acquisitiveness. He found democracy a mixed blessing because he could not see men establishing an equality with which they could be contented. He generalized that there was little suicide in America, but much insanity because the American dream was mainly illusory. Yet, he saw that dream being treated by most Americans as if it were real.

Michel Chevalier came from France to America in 1833 and stayed for two years. He found Americans to demonstrate a general ease, but at the same time a significant drive “to redeem a world from savages, forests, panthers, and bears.” Conquest was in their hearts and violence was in their language. He noted that democracy had no soft words, no suppleness of forms, little management or control, and confused moderation with weakness. Americans, he concluded, equated violence with heroism, a violence that was native to them while claiming to be peace loving. He also found them little use to self-control, but paradoxically, would give control unreservedly to friends and set them up as idols. Andrew Jackson was such a friend, a man they only knew by reputation but called friend because he was roughshod, irascible, self-made, ordinary, unprivileged, and white like they were.

English traveler Frances Trollope saw the American people consumed with money rather than by power. She was impressed with the spirit of enterprise, but noted people could not talk of enterprise without lacing their conversation with dollars. Money was their monarchy. She was disappointed with their coarseness while marveling at their industry. They informed her repeatedly that any man’s son might become the equal of any other man’s son with consciousness, concentration and a spur of exertion; that any man could become president. This was also President Jackson’s catechism and conduit to power.

Tocqueville, Chevalier and Trollope came to the same conclusion that Americans were obsessively concerned with the improvement of their personal circumstances, concluding Americans were “all business” with their souls absorbed in the pursuit of a visibly better life. This made the pace of life in America much faster than that in Europe.

The American people in the 1820s and 1830s appeared restless, and fortune seeking, seemingly measuring their worth according to their industry and effort. They took pleasure in telling you how hard they worked and how much they made. No two Americans could carry on a conversation about their satisfaction without the dollar being pronounced loudly. Mrs. Trollope confessed she had never seen such unity of purpose anywhere before and was appalled by this admission.

Americans’ peculiarity was seen, both by others and themselves, in their common manner of honest and earnest dealings, as the only way to reach their goal of living well. Andrew Jackson, as no other politician of his time, understood the American temperament and spoke to it warmly and proudly, as it was also his own.

Jackson also understood that Americans saw the Union as a white nation, a deliberately chosen place on nature’s spectrum for civilized whites and not a place for morally unfit Indian “barbarians.” To Jackson’s mind, it was inevitable that the North American Indian would disappear from the white man’s America. He saw Indians in the developmental model of American nationhood, as children who could not mature, and therefore were a dying breed unequal to the task of taming and improving the land. It never occurred to him that they preferred to live in harmony with it.

He was responsible for the “Trail of Tears” in which tens of thousands of Indians were displayed and pushed to reservations in the far north and west with a cruelty that seldom has received much attention in history books.

Jackson mindset and motivation suggests why leadership must be studied individually. He had much in common with Indians. Like them, he knew and respected the land, valued courage and loyalty as a warrior, and saw compromise as weakness and an opening for exploitation the same as they did. This found him tagged with the same savage stigma as Indian. The shadow of the savage unyielding to the will of civil society followed him to the White House. At his inaugural, reporters referred to his lodging as “the Wigwam.” Regrettably, he spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to erase this impression, but without success.

As a consequence, Jackson ‘s take on Indians was far from romantic. He saw them as enemy combatants and as brothers in a savage unforgiving land. He knew their mind as they knew his. Where Indians were dismissed as not belonging in polite society, so had he been. It was rumored he carried a scalping knife in one hand and a tomahawk in the other always ready to knock down and scalp any person who differed with his opinion. Images of the savage president, however, could not capture the whole man. He was flexible and genial at home at the Hermitage in Nashville, Tennessee, but inflexible and resolute, intimidating and biased in public. These opposing pillars of his character confined him to a cultural prison from which he could hardly escape, even if he wanted.

Paradoxically, Jackson was appalled at the image of the Indian as the lordly savage and unrestricted son of the forest and not rule-bound, yet that is precisely how friend and foe saw him. He was the native son of the frontier west, a new character on the national stage, and his critics in power were legion, but apparently not equal to his passion.

Jackson wasn’t the first leader that wanted to forget his past while being blindsided by it. His childhood was traumatic, parentless, and driven by the immutable pain of constant struggle. This annealed his resolve, and put steel in his spine, but cut him off from introspection or the solace of looking inward. He was driven. When his beloved wife died just as he was elected president, the only thing that allowed him to carry on was his sense of duty. He had killed a man with his own hands, had ordered the execution of others, had been responsible for thousands of deaths in battle, and never lost a minute of sleep to guilt. But losing his wife was different. His winning the presidency had not merely turned to ashes in his mouth, it had turned to an ache in his heart that would never cease. He only left one person truly in, and she was gone.

That said what made Andrew Jackson one of the most popular presidents in history was his ability to relate to the people. Others with brilliant minds and powerful rhetoric such as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Edward Livingston, John Quincy Adams and Aaron Burr failed to bond with the emerging American as Jackson could.

Jackson had an executive temperament, as opposed to that of a legislator or administrator. He could make decisions far more easily than he could make compromises. He had much greater confidence in his own judgment than in that of others. Action came naturally, patience harder. He believed a single honest man more likely to find truth than any committee. He was a born leader that couldn’t make himself into a follower.

He was comfortable talking to “real folks,” and they were uncritical of his liberal language sprinkled with malapropisms, solecisms and cuss words because his message was clear, which was always directed in their minds to their self-interests. He was one of them and he was on top, and they loved it because that meant they were on top, too.

In spite of that, Thomas Jefferson was moved to say, “I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President. He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has very little respect for law, or constitutions. He is a dangerous man.” It turned out that in many ways Jefferson was right, but ultimately wrong because the nation needed such a dangerous man to get it unstuck.

WASHINGTON, JEFFERSON, AND JACKSON

It is no accident that Washington and Jefferson are considered “great men,” as they were most diligent to leave a record of their work and lives to register that assessment. But Jackson, who was equally inclined to preserve the “great man” mantle, was less successful in doing so.

All three men were great correspondence and record keepers. Although they all made liberal reference to the Almighty, none could be said to be truly religious. Jefferson, of course, was the most intellectual and created his own abridged bible, a version that incorporated his philosophy of life.

All three men stood more than six feet tall and towered over most other men of their time. Washington and Jackson married women that had previously been married, while Jefferson was widowed. Only Jefferson, however, fathered children. All three were fond of children with Washington and Jackson rearing foster or step children.

Honor, duty, loyalty and virtue, while tolerating no form of dissent, meant everything to them. They thought of themselves the most virtuous of men and therefore infallible judges of others. In that sense, Jackson was the most tragic figure of the three because the flaw of self-deceit seemingly ran deeper being rooted in good intentions. Jackson pursued virtue in politics where virtue seldom resides, which suggests he was less cynical than his predecessors and therefore more naive.

A sense of being more virtuous than others is a failing common to the overeducated as well as the ignorant. The human condition is shaped by circumstances. Jackson, an orphaned child of the Tennessee-Carolina frontier, grew up in adversity with a desire to redress the injustices he experienced.

He saw war firsthand as a boy of fourteen in the Revolution. Captured by the British, an officer demanded he clean his boots. Jackson refused, suffering a blow to the arm and shoulder with a saber. His brother also refused, taking a blow to the head, dying a few days later. For the rest of Jackson’s life, Great Britain was a mortal enemy. He needed enemies to sustain him. This passionate antipathy carried him to victory in the Battle of New Orleans (1815).

The discontent he experienced in an unstable world led Jackson to take chances and gamble to climb the social-political ladder. He was ambitious and sought to be noticed. Early on, he realized the acquisition of land and wealth was not enough. He had to acquire honor. He had to show the world he was not common, that he could rise above the ordinary.

He became an Indian fighter. George Washington had said, “Indian cunning and craft cannot be equaled. Indians are the only match for Indians.” Jackson proved him wrong in the Creek Wars against Tecumseh and the Red Sticks.

After a reckless youth, he developed a Spartan constitution with a love of valor and contempt for easy riches. What he needed more than anything was a cause, something to put a fire in his belly and throw him into the fray. This impulse is common to all potential leaders. He decided his cause was to dislodge the power of the eastern establishment, and to serve and protect the interests of the emerging self-made common man like himself. He did this by reducing the eastern establishment to “political aristocrats” and “financial aristocrats,” and making them his and the people’s common enemy.

Besides needing a cause, the potential leader must have an unfailing faith in his ability as a moral guide. Jackson had this believing anyone who failed to recognize his worth was wicked or evil. He sought the power to reward and punish as a means to repel the forces of destabilization. In a half-settled and contentious world, where people on the frontier felt embattled and besieged surrounded by enemies that would subdue them if not vigilant, Jackson was in his element and their champion. Paranoia had to have a face and Jackson gave it first the face of the Indian on the western frontier, and then that of the eastern politician in the nation’s Capitol of Washington.

He was not alone in his paranoia. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had also perceived being surrounded by virulent enemies plotting against them at every turn.

The three have often been called the great early presidents. While historians have been inclined to depict Washington and Jefferson as noble, and deserving of this distinction, they have had no qualms about raking Jackson over the coals for his limitations. Yet in truth Washington’s intellectual limitations were as real as Jackson’s. In fact, prominent men of Washington’s time scoffed at his qualifications for national leadership, as they had Jackson’s. This wounded the pride of both generals, and aggravated their temperaments to periodically explode into irrational harangues.

The more humane Jefferson was quieter in his belligerence, but he was moved on one occasion to wish Patrick Henry dead for opposing his legislative agenda. Washington termed Alexander Hamilton a slanderer despite his critical dependence on him. Early American politics were, indeed, nasty. Neither Washington nor Jefferson nor Jackson was accepting of a loyal opposition. They had monarchist temperaments believing they knew best and preferred to be unopposed in their deliberations to effectively conduct the people’s business.

Washington and Jackson had much in common. They were both sharp businessmen and hungry speculators in land. They thrived on taking risks. In politics, they required men of letters with superior intellects to help them shape and present their ideas to the public. Washington had Alexander Hamilton; Jackson had Edward Livingston. As wartime commanders, they exhibited horrible fits of temper when their integrity was challenged.

Washington’s manner was extremely sober and aloof, ill at ease with strangers and notably impersonal, while Jackson was more natural and companionable, yet both were as headstrong as they were daring. Neither man could take responsibility for failure, as they did not believe themselves capable of a flawed plan. They both worked hard to court posterity by elevating their presidencies and military careers to that of godlike mythological status. Yet, amusingly, Washington and Jackson worked hard to convey the impression of exhibiting the qualities of being selfless persons.

In Jackson’s day, Washington faults were long forgotten. Hagiographers secured his status as “Father of Our Country” with a serenity of mind, cool and collected wisdom, and a cautious and deliberate judgment. Not so Jackson. He is remembered to this day in tyrannical terms with a military disposition and unbending will to Congress, the Supreme Court, or any civil or otherwise authority that opposed him.

George Washington was remembered with the quiet force of his personal bearing, while Jackson was “Old Hickory,” thin and hard like the hickory branch and impossible to break, limited and flawed, but unconquerable in action. The focus was on his personal forcefulness as opposed to Washington’s virtuous reserve. This was due in part to Washington, who grumbled in private, while Jackson blistered the air in public.

Knowing that Washington was as erratic, as covetous of land, and as hot-tempered as Jackson, should give us pause, but it doesn’t because our founding fathers were courted in near fabled terms. As the west was opening up, reality had a rawness to it that demanded bear bone honesty. Jackson came out of these woods and on to the national scene infected with that reality. The sartorial resplendent Washington and the philosophical Jefferson were of another age, and no match for Jackson’s reality check.

Still, Jackson initially adopted Jefferson’s distinctive view of the west, that of a landscape suitable for hardy yeoman farmers. He loved the pastoral life, but unlike Jefferson was more amenable to America’s inevitable industrialism. Moreover, both men were highly suspicious of urbanism with its physically inactive city-bound speculators in stock paper. Jackson labeled this a pariah of “financial aristocrats.” Agrarian idealism made Jefferson and Jackson closer than either was to Washington’s pro-urban, pro-commercial, centrist government of elite Federalists.

Once Jackson was president, when stymied by advocates of a strong federal government, he would push even more relentlessly for westward agrarian expansion, warning the “political aristocracy” of the moneyed few that they would not be allowed to dictate states’ rights. Unlike Washington, both Jefferson and Jackson provoked political unrest, while emphatically denying that they did so. They were moralists and ideologues and possessed a strong intuitive sense that they were needed to prevent corruption.

Jefferson envisioned a near utopian society of a nation of happy farmers, who cultivated their crops by day and read great books by night. He was often more doctrinaire in theory than in action, as intellectuals are inclined to be, while pragmatic Hamilton envisioned an industrialized America. The differences between the two men were profound. Jefferson once epitomized these differences in an anecdote.

Hamilton came to his office in Philadelphia and noticed portraits of three men on the wall. Who are they, he asked. Jefferson informed him they were the three greatest men that the world had ever produced. The portraits were of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke. Jefferson continued that Bacon was renowned for his application of the empirical method in science and philosophy, Newton for fundamental discoveries in mathematics, physics and astronomy, and Locke for advancing the ideas in political science that were seminal in the European Enlightenment. Hamilton was not impressed. The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar, he countered, the exemplar of dictatorial power and military conquest. Were Jackson present, there is no doubt he would have sided with Hamilton, as his true hero was Napoleon.

Hamilton’s dream focused primarily on economic development, the steady expansion of manufacturing and merchandizing, with a vigorous flow of commerce aided by a strong central government. He saw this government being run by a powerful elite consisting of the wealthy, well educated, and privileged. He also held the belief that a constitutional monarchy would be preferable to a democratic republic, and that the British government was the best model in the world. Shortly before his death (in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804), he wrote a friend that what ailed America was “the poison” of democracy.

Jefferson’s dream focused on a free society with firm protection of states’ rights against federal encroachment. Individual Americans in a democratic republic would have the right to think as they pleased, and to do as they pleased to the greatest possible extent consistent with civil peace and safety. Like Hamilton, Jefferson saw the property class, not the people, providing this democratic leadership. He agreed with monarchists that men without property were not intellectually capable of ruling, or in fact interested in ruling, as they had no stake in the matter.

This is why Jackson’s arrival on the national scene proved so invigorating. He gave the common man a voice and permission to lead. He had struggled to reach the status of the “happy farmer,” but never forgot his roots, which identified him with the people whom he saw capable of ruling albeit not property owners, as he was once where they were.

Washington was weary of people. He did not believe that so fluctuating a wind as popular opinion could ever be tamed, and he had no respect for it. Jefferson and Jackson saw popular opinion as a remedy and sought to actualize it in policy. Uncannily, all three presidents professed to have the authority to bar power mongers from usurping the people’s rights, while only Jackson took the leap to confront these forces and to do battle with them. He took on Nicholas Biddle of the Bank of the United States, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Calhoun in Congress, and John Marshall in the Supreme Court. Only he of the three early great presidents was truly a confrontational leader, and at a time when such leadership was desperately needed.

Jefferson opposed the “Federalists,” or the monarchical party because they desired a strong central government while he preferred decentralized authority with strong states’ rights. The secessionist John Calhoun, a brilliant jurist, took his lead from this Jeffersonian pronouncement.

Jackson was a man of action, but a propagandist as well. Although his language invariably collapsed into clichés, he had an emotive style that stung his opponents with stereotypical identities: to wit “political aristocracy,” and “financial aristocracy.” He made it clear to his supporters that his depraved adversaries were theirs as well. His lack of subtlety appealed to them seeing him as a clear-cut, no no-nonsense man with undisguised purpose, a man with passion on display. He had an intuitive sense that a contrived vocabulary could do great damage to the political and financial elite, and he was proven correct. No one before his time used language with such incendiary political popular impact, and without apology or embarrassment. He talked to the nation as if he were in a neighborhood bar shooting the breeze with friends in unadulterated candor.

For comparison, Jefferson’s semantics were expressed in the ambiguous values of “harmony and affection,” while Jackson’s were unmistakably no nonsense: “do the right thing,” or “have no fear of the federal government.” Jefferson saw his enemies as “engines of despotism,” while Jackson saw his as “vile vipers and conspirators.” Distrust of government at the time was as huge as a fire-eating dragon, and the people trusted Jackson to be their dragon slayer.

Jefferson was the most refined political writer of his generation, and painstakingly sought to please his constituents and correspondents. He embraced the masses philosophically although his life of leisure and erudition was far removed from their workaday world. Not Jackson’s. He battled birth and breeding requisites for personal advancement placing as much store in bloodlines as pedigrees. He wrote with vigor but without classical allusions or euphonic phrasing that came natural to Jefferson. Thus, Jackson often spoke and wrote without tact, or with what the cultivated would say, “without class.”

As one friend noted of Jackson, he could think but could not write. Another friend noted that Jackson’s conversation and writing contained vigorous thought, but that he lacked the faculty of arranging such thoughts in a regular composition either in writing or in his speech. Jefferson was even more critical. When he was president of the senate, he found Jackson the prisoner of overpowering emotions: “Jackson’s passions are terrible. He could never speak from the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choked with rage.”

Anger was actually a device of Jackson’s leadership style. Again and again, at a crucial moment in his public life, he carried the day by terrifying his opponents with a mock temper tantrum. Observers liken him to a volcano; only the intrepid cared to see it erupt.

Yet, Jackson was an impressive communicator not so much for what he said but how he said it. His vigor and flare captured the moment, as he acted out his impulses as if thoughts were actions, spontaneous and unmediated. Jackson knew what nerves to touch with his audience, but was no surgeon skilled in the instrument of dissection. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine Jefferson ever saying or writing other than what he precisely meant to say or write at that time for the intended. Jefferson went to great pains to disguise his ambition and intolerances in his prose, while Jackson was in your face without disguise or guile.

Both Jefferson and Jackson recognized they were dramatic actors on a public stage. They displayed the confidence that their pronouncements rang true and gave voice to the cornerstone of American values, which was personal independence.

Tocqueville, Chevalier, and Trollope noted, however, an obvious failure of democracy for these three “great” presidents. Freedom and independence did not include people of color. All three presidents owned considerable numbers of slaves, and lived on sumptuous estates of regal splendor far removed from white unexceptional, entrepreneurial citizens.

The paradox regarding Jefferson was that he was a fiscal conservative in government, but lived far beyond his personal means. He was in debt to more than $100,000 when he died, which would translate into millions today. Thus the dilemma, he recognized the moral evil of slavery, but was convinced he couldn’t survive without it. He intellectualized this discrepancy away looking at race in scientific and philosophic terms, while endeavoring to be a benevolent master, rationalizing that slaves were better off under his management than if they were free.

Washington never bothered his mind about the ethics of slavery or his pecuniary spirit. He married the richest widow in Virginia, Martha Dandridge Custis, which brought him considerable additional wealth. A careful bookkeeper, when a friend died, in his letter of condolence, he added the sum due him from the estate that he would appreciate as soon as possible. When Washington was president, he refused a salary, stating that he would require only expenses. His expenses proved to be several times what salary he might otherwise have enjoyed. Pragmatic by nature, no longer in need of his slaves, he emancipated them in his will upon his death.

Jackson not only had slaves but also traded in slaves. He made and lost fortunes several times in his life, but he had no qualms about the ownership of human property. To him, it was a societal norm. Slaves were rewarded and punished with the same brutal justice that he discharged with his soldiers. His friends saw him as a hard but just man, his enemies as without compassion.

All three men considered blacks largely ignorant, irresponsible, and untrustworthy of freedom, or like children. No rewriting of history can change this unpleasant fact.

Washington and Jackson spent little time in school. It is difficult to imagine either of them as students if formal education had been readily available. The confinement of the classroom would have been suffocating. They preferred to learn on the fly: Washington as a surveyor and soldier, Jackson as lawyer and soldier. Jackson was not a man who felt himself superior to others, as Washington did, but he was certain that he was meant to lead.

As generals, they weren’t remembered so much for their brilliant military strategies but for their singular boldness in attack, and their tenacity in pursuit of the enemy. They both felt destined by fate to succeed against all odds, but if they should perish in that pursuit, they displayed the simple stoic fatalism typical of the soldier. This fatalism separated them from Jefferson.

When Washington was eleven, his mother died, and his eldest half-brother, Lawrence, and his wife, Anne Fairfax, reared him. Anne was a relative of Lord Fairfax, who eventually introduced Washington into polite society. Jackson, a child of the backwoods, was left without a family at 14. His climb to social prominence was more tortuous although he was as equally ambitious. Jackson’s ancestors came to America from Northern Ireland (Ulster) in the early seventeen hundreds, while Washington’s came from England (Northamptonshire) in the mid-sixteen hundreds. Neither man had much interest in books and none in science. Both were farmers, traders, risk takers, land speculators, as well as warriors. Their contemporaries saw them as the bravest of the brave and lionized them as leaders.

Courage was an executive quality that was rationalized by both men as far more important than intellectual proficiency. In Jackson’s case, he displayed a remarkable “unity of mind” that was not distracted by theories. He discerned every emergency with a precision that countenanced no critic. Both Washington and Jackson possessed a kind of sublime inner directedness that no formal education could adequately prepare a man. They looked to others to confirm what they already believed, and were not looking for opposing views or strategies.

One of the ironies is that Jackson boldly completed ideas that Jefferson considered hypothetically, but never had the inclination or temperament to complete; yet in their completion only Jefferson’s name is now attached, such as the Louisiana Purchase.

ANDREW JACKSON ON HIS OWN

Where Jefferson and Jackson parted company with Washington is that they welcomed social diversity in the growth of western settlements with the prospects of establishing a republican empire. Jefferson was bold in acquiring the Louisiana Territory without prior congressional authorization in 1803, but timid in moving aggressively to settle the land. Jackson demonstrated no such timidity in boldly taking Florida on the ground from Spain as a general, and then as president, supporting Sam Houston’s assault on Mexico in establishing the Texas Republic. Texas dangled as an ambiguous entity in Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.

Jackson departed further from the two former great presidents in that he was born for conflict and confrontation, and married to action. Fatherless, he was reborn in war, and always ruled whatever his professional status with military discipline. His personality was the absurd combination of imperiousness (unassailable opinions) with approachable identity with plain folks. It was not an act but precisely his disposition and strength. No other leader of his time enjoyed such an uncanny connection.

He was not given to reflection, but maintained sturdy principles of conduct that never steered him wrong. He was not a liberal democrat nor did he understand the “common good” as Jefferson did. He was neither interested in the free exchange of ideas nor in improving himself through the acquisition of new knowledge. The only law he respected was the law he made. And he had no qualms about using questionable means if he felt the ends were justified. Nor did he have a concept of social justice because his justice only reaffirmed his own impulses and experience. If it did not fit his crusade, he damned the unfamiliar. The possible repercussions to Indian removal from their sacred lands, or the enslavement of African-Americans never crossed his mind. He was confident that any problem that might arise concerning either policy he could handle.

One of the amazing things of his career is that such brilliant men as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Aaron Burr, and John Calhoun constantly underestimated him. They painted him into what they believed were impossible corners, yet his counter moves would not only prove them the losers, but also make them look bad for the exercise. What they failed to understand about him is that along with all his self-deceit, he knew himself well enough to see it in others, and thus to beat them at their own game.

He wished to preserve an idealized world of white gentrification, replicating his own path from stigmatized commonness to accepted respectability. He was not alone stuck in this unreal world of whiteness and personalized freedom meant only for property owners. It was the national mindset of the time. Tocqueville saw this bloated pride in American democracy as a rationalized form of bigotry.

Jackson rose out of this irrational world, a cultural system in which personal justification for action held more power over the mind than constituted jurisprudence. On the western frontier, assertiveness took one far; gentility did not. Both were forms of stagecraft, and Jackson was in his element in this masculine theater. Yet, he knew he must cultivate an urbanity that was not natural to him to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, he never totally succeeded because of the impetuosity of his nature.

Even his severest critiques acknowledge his making the executive branch the most powerful office in the land. His “spoil system” of favorites and “kitchen cabinet” of advisers headed a coalition of discontents. This coalition took on the Washington establishment, grabbed contentious power, closed down the influential Bank of the United States, and crippled patrician politics. It did this by appealing directly to the people over the politicians. This was then a new device.

He was also the first president to cavalierly circumvent congress and use the press without second thoughts to work his magic on the American people, while attempting to remake Washington by remaking political man. He did this not by listening to scholars or reading weighty tomes, but by harnessing his independent spirit and displaying his confidence as a manifestation of his power. Like in his soldiering, defeats were considered incremental to final victories. So, while not taking defeats in stride, defeats didn’t see him letting up the pressure.

Jackson, indeed, reinterpreted the presidency, using congress and his cabinet, as a litmus test to his insatiable will. His enemies saw him as a trickster or cult leader who worked on the vulnerable. Closer to the truth, he remained the military general with an unalterable purpose to serve the people as his lights saw that purpose. He won the presidency in 1828 handily defeating the incumbent president John Quincy Adams, winning a landslide victory for a second term in 1832, obliterating his archenemy Henry Clay with 219 electoral votes to Clay’s 49.

Jackson epitomized Walt Whitman’s “athletic democracy” that cut down trees, felled forests, carved out new roads in order to secure new settlements, ever pressing westward to tame nature to the American will. Athletic democracy was blustery, but so was the self-made president. Jackson made no secret of his frontiersman passion or vigor. Americans saw Jackson as one of them, thought like them, fought like them, and was brave and hungry for experience like them. He typified their energy and drive.

Historians have pondered as to what Jackson’s career tells us about ourselves, about our character and national psyche. What does it mean, they ask, when a man of platitudes, a mediocre intellect, and glamorous surface appeal is hailed strictly for his imagined sense of fairness and compassion? They concede it may be simply because he spoke the people’s language and understood their will that people trusted him, whereas other politicians schooled in erudition and refinement did not.

Jackson’s victory in the Battle of New Orleans pulled the nation out of the doldrums. The victory became a symbol of national confidence. It demonstrated peace through strength. This would become the national mantra down through the ages. It embodied the assumption that only an aggressive posture toward foreign threats was germane to American security. Indeed, that it was America’s destiny to position itself to police the less powerful less abundantly endowed nations of the world. Tocqueville and other European visitors were taken back by this Jacksonian self-assurance and complacency. They saw Americans acted as if nobody could touch them, or more importantly, would have the temerity to threaten their tranquility.

The question that lingers for historians: was Andrew Jackson necessary to his time? Was his boldness demanded in order to fulfill the founders’ dream of a manifest (continental) destiny? The expression, “manifest destiny,” was not coined until 1845, the year of Jackson’s death. It meant “The American Way,” or the rounding up of the Indians who occupied the land for centuries and segregating them into reservations. It also meant extending the borders of freedom for the white man from coast-to-coast. As to the Indians, the guiding principle was, promise them anything just so long as they get out of the way.

Washington and Jefferson entertained this notion of liberty-loving Americans sweeping across the continent. The Revolutionary War generation had neither the armed forces nor the will to actualize the vision. Moreover, it took an amoral boldness that neither of them possessed. Jackson gave them what they wanted but did not dare attempt. He proved the instrument of their will, while absolving them of any guilt in the matter.

A generation before Lincoln, Jackson strove to hold the expanding nation together while others such as John Calhoun and his confederates were promoting the doctrine of nullification along with the threat of secession. This doctrine claimed the right of states to veto the actions of the federal government, that is, for states to have the right to nullify federal laws as they pertained to states’ rights, such as the collection of taxes, tariff policy, and most specifically, slavery.

Jackson’s ignorance of the powerful dynamics of the slavery issue contributed to the rising forces of disunion. He did not feel that the morals of slavery were deserving of his careful consideration, taking comfort in the belief that it was another issue manufactured by his enemies. Fifteen years following his death in 1845, this disregard would implode into the Civil War.

America was bursting at the seams as one historian puts it. When Jackson was elected, the United States was only a little more than fifty years old. It had matured under the constant cloud of conspiracy and partisan politics. Many of the founding fathers were monarchists with a strong leaning toward Europe and the monarchy form of government.

Not Jackson. He didn’t like any of the Federalists from Alexander Hamilton to John Quincy Adams. Nor did he trust anyone but himself, and he trusted himself implicitly, a trust that seldom let him down, a trust that could see through conspiratorial fears. He branded British leaning Federalists as “monarchist puppets.”

To put this in perspective, Federalists in New England took the British torching of the nation’s Capitol in Washington in the War of 1812 as an assault on national pride and evidence of a country not able to protect itself from its enemies. Obviously, the blackened ruins of the White House and Capitol were designed to humiliate and dismember the country that most Britons had never considered legitimate. Several New Englanders agreed.

Gathering in Hartford, Connecticut in 1813, some spoke of session, others of amending the Constitution to weaken the hold of Republicans on the national government, having had two presidents in succession from Virginia. Radicals among the Federalists wouldn’t admit it, as one historian puts it, feeling closer to Britain than to president James Madison and his administration, but it was clear where their loyalties lay.

It was into this climate that Jackson and his Tennessee and Kentucky volunteers turned the tables 180 degrees giving the British a crushing defeat in the Battle of New Orleans on April 8, 1815. With the aid of the French pirate Jean Laffite, whose men were the best gunners in the Caribbean, and his motley regiment of Indian fighters, Jackson saved New Orleans, and in the process, saved the United States from disuniting.

This fledgling nation was on the verge of New England seceding, and the trans-Mississippi territories being apportioned amongst the Europeans and Indians. The Boston Gazette made no secret of its support of this sedition. President James Madison struggled to convey an optimism he didn’t feel.

Jackson victory quieted this storm as the British lost their commanding general, most of their field commanders, and nearly all of their commissioned officers with 291 dead and 1,292 wounded, and another 500 captured. Jackson’s forces lost 13 men and 39 were wounded

The battle was over in two hours. The Treaty of Ghent ending the war had already been signed in Europe 3,000 miles away, which wouldn’t be known for weeks. The victory was a boastful exclamation point expressed in these bold words: don’t tread on me!


WHAT TODAY’S LEADERS CAN LEARN FROM ANDREW JACKSON

Jackson’s triumphs were extrinsic to his character and to his political thought. What made him so popular was the people’s perception of him. They identified with him while he displayed the uncanny ability to make his triumphs their triumphs; his courage their courage; his heroics their heroics.

Symbolic qualities are powerful magnets. Being able to touch people’s hearts, and therefore their lives, means more to them than a display of native intelligence. As individuals, we believe what a person does is what he or she is.

We have different criteria for leaders. It is how we perceive them symbolically that matters most to us. We will follow our leaders to the death if they make us feel more than we are and stand for what we believe we should be. Such leaders create well-crafted personas that suggest invincibility if not infallibility. Heroes, as one historian puts it, remove the trauma of uncertainty. If Jackson was anything, he was a well-crafted hero.

Leaders can’t be packaged through a formal process of institutional education, nor can a well-honed network of friends create them. Leaders rise out of the muck of our misadventures percolating to the top of enterprise to see over our confusion. They often emerge as the answer to an imagined or symbolic crisis, which is nonetheless quite real in its consequences.

Leaders can know the pain that comes from struggle and deprivation, as Jackson had, but not always. Sometimes they are quite literate and removed from the people, as Jefferson was, but can see into people’s heart and articulate their desires.

In Jackson’s case, his father died as he was being born, his mother and two brothers died in the Revolutionary War, which found him an orphan without prospects at fourteen. He had a deprived upbringing, deprived education, deprived of parental love and caring, deprived of even a modest living standard, and deprived of much chance to develop self-esteem. To be sure, his ladder was gone, and he had to lie down where all ladders start, as William Butler Yeats puts it, “in the fowl rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” It was during his climb to prominence that America was also finding its center, and climbing with him. So it is with all leaders who resonate with the people and their time.

Andrew Jackson had a bleak boyhood that he quickly forgot. In adulthood, despite his many accomplishments in the military and politics, his enemies never let up ridiculing his inability to write a complete sentence without misspellings, and would cite every evidence of what they determined was an incurable ignorance. Yet, he changed the presidency, changed leadership as it was perceived, gave birth to a political party, and created a dynasty of like thinking presidents that has extended into the modern era, which has come to be called, “the Age of Jackson.”

Jackson had a point of view, and once he made his mind up no threat, no clamor of pending doom, no plea for prudence could come to sway him. “I care nothing about clamor, sir, mark me,” Jackson once said, “I do precisely what I think just and right without delay.”

Timing is everything. Jefferson realized on reflection that the Louisiana Purchase was done impulsively, hardly his style, but was one of the most dramatic decisions of his administration.

Self-sufficiently can be effective only when matched by an equally superb self-control. Jackson’s towering rages were often high theater, or more a way to avoid futile argument of naysayers and procrastinators. No one was more aware of his deficiencies than he was, but he felt he had survived many battles because of instinct. His intelligence was expressed in judgment (intuition) rather than analysis (cognition). He was both amused and troubled by people around him consumed with analysis, as if they feared the consequences should a decision fail. He had no such fear. His supreme confidence, which some took to be a deception, was actually his decision making bias as the only truth.

Jackson today would be called a “quick study” possessing a mind that was ever dealing with the substance of complex and often contradictory issues. This found him seldom very careful in regard to precise terms, but quite precise with regard to the actions demanded. His judgment was almost totally a rapid instinctive perception of a problem that invariably led to an instant and decisive action. John Quincy Adams dismissed this as a savage intellect without the seasoning of culture. Adams, on the other hand, was a most cultured gentleman but never an effective leader.

Jackson always saw problems in three-dimensions because otherwise he would never know the source of a sucker punch. To him, knowledge, per se, seemed entirely unnecessary. His three-d intuitive vision allowed him to reach conclusions by shortcutting the problem while others were beating around the bush for the game. The nature of his strength translated intellect into character. This compelled others that came within his reach of a much more brilliant aspect to be his tool; the more cunning the individual the sharper the tool that individual came to serve him.

He anticipated precisely how the huge British naval fleet would come to invade and attempt to conquer New Orleans, and he was right. He invaded Florida without congressional approval, and humiliated its leader, knowing that Spain had tired of its possession and was not in a position to fight. He saw this evidence on the ground, not through diplomatic circles. John Calhoun and Henry Clay attempted to egg him on to close the Bank of the United States during the 1832 presidential campaign, feeling that if he did it would kill his bid for reelection. He closed the bank and won by a landslide, knowing that the American people had the same contempt for the bank and its “financial aristocrats” that he had.

Leadership is not only seeing the problem clearly but also understanding how people perceive it. Otherwise, a vacuum is created with the rushing sound filling it of ear splitting chaos. Jackson understood that the irrational drives behavior. He knew people must first vent their frustrations and suspicions before the rational can come into play. It was then that he could make connection with plain talk, showing people he had their best interests at heart.

Henry Clay and John Calhoun could never reconcile their thinking to this simple dictum of letting people ventilate and choose. They both thought Jackson was misleading people, and felt obliged to stress this idea repeatedly in their public damning of Jackson. They failed to see that in damning him they were damning the people who believed in him. Both men wanted to be president, Clay running for the office three times, but never coming close to winning the prize. Jackson reduced Clay to a powerful orator but an indecisive leader, and Calhoun to a regional leader without a national conscience. Both men underestimate Jackson seeing clearly what he was not, but not what he was. This often happens to effective leaders by their enemies.

Jackson was not a man of reflection, not a dreamer, but a man of action. He created an age, led the way from American agrarianism to working class industrialism. In the last analysis, his strength lay in his deep natural understanding of the common man. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. captures this in The Age of Jackson (1945):

The America of Jefferson had begun to disappear before Jefferson himself had retired from the presidential chair. That paradise of small farms, each man secure on his own freehold, resting under his own vine and fig trees, was already darkened by the shadow of impending change. For Jefferson, Utopia had cast itself in the form a nation of husbandmen. “Those who labor in the earth,” he had said, “are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people”; and the American dream required that the land be kept free from the corruptions of industrialism. “While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff.” Far better to send our materials to Europe for manufacture, than to bring workingmen to these virgin shores, “and with them their manners and principles.” “The mobs of great cities,” he concluded ominously, “add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.”

An age is never ready for change. As great as Jefferson was, he was not ready to adapt to a new one. Often it takes a maverick to unshackle the age from its imprisonment. Jefferson and other founding fathers were enamored of Europe. Jackson was not. Many of them had a fawning admiration for the British monarchist caste system. Jackson did not; in fact, he despised Great Britain.

Tocqueville, Chevalier, and Trollope noted Americans obsession with the dollar. Jackson took the bank out of the hands of the money class. He pushed the envelop of executive power as far as he could even disregarding the Supreme Court. The presidency as it is today, and the Federal Reserve are legacies of “the Age of Jackson.”

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

We are now in the Information Age on a new frontier, a frontier that nobody understands or knows what lies over the horizon. Jackson was elected on the mass support of working class voters, a new development, which came to be called “Jacksonian democracy.”

The modern frontier is less physically dangerous and more psychologically intimidating than Jackson’s frontier. Electronics are changing work, workers and the workplace, which is displacing millions of America breadwinners from their traditional livelihood. Like in Jackson’s time, government has become high political theater where words are symbols that supplant action. Words, however, are never the things they symbolize.

As gasoline and home heating oil prices soar putting many on fixed incomes out in the cold, the word is that we are looking to develop alternative energy sources. Presidents since Nixon have been echoing this sentiment. Lawmakers speak in sound bytes on television with spin master precision. Nothing changes.

More Americans are losing their jobs, suffering bad educations, and unable to afford health care. Yet the cost of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq that few understand is approaching $450 billion, dollars that might better be spent elsewhere.

But as Jackson showed in his time those in power always need an enemy to pursue, even if it is not a legitimate one. We are told “victory” is at hand in Iraq when there is no discernible enemy to negotiate a peace treaty. The Labor Department reports new jobs each month, fast food and service jobs, while high paying manufacturing jobs continue to go to India and China.

Companies announce having “great years,” and then lay off tens of thousands of employees. A religious cartoon sets the Islamic world into a worldwide frenzy, but the attention is not on why this is so but focused rather on freedom of the press, which is an irrelevancy in the irrational climate.

People have become aware that they are under constant surveillance, and they have done nothing wrong. The government changes domestic spying to spying on terrorists, because terrorism is always the emotional card that dissolves protests. These things parallel to an amazing degree the time of Andrew Jackson when it became so clear why leadership mattered.

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SOURCES:

The Andrew Jackson Hermitage, Nashville, Tennessee
The Age of Jackson, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Konecky & Konecky, Old Saybrook, CT, 1945.
The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Andrew Burstein, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003.
Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times, H. W. Brands, Doubleday, New York, 2005.
Understanding Thomas Jefferson, E. M. Halliday, HarperCollins, New York, 2001.
Selection from Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Westvaco Corporation, 1975.
To America, Stephen E. Ambrose, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2002.
The Grand Idea: George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West, Joel Achenbach, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2004.
George Washington: A Life, Willard Sterne Randall, Galahad Books, Edison, N.J., 1997.
Democracy in America (Vols. 1 & 2), Alexis de Tocqueville, Vintage Books, New York, 1945.

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Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is the peripatetic philosopher who has penned a number of books and articles in the genre of organizational and leadership development. He is a former international corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. See his website for more information: www.peripateticphilosopher.com.