"AMERICAN LION" -- Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham -- An Organizational Development Perspective!

"AMERICAN LION" - Andrew Jackson in the White House - by Jon Meacham

An Organizational Development (OD) Perspective

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Organization-Industrial Psychologist

© August 17, 2009

NOTE TO PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA - "American Lion" is a learner's leadership manual on OD!

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When I purchased this book, my wife looked at me and said, "Haven't you read enough books on Jackson? You must have read a dozen by now. How could there be anything new to say?"

True, I've read Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s celebrated "The Age of Jackson" (1971), Gloria Jahoda's "The Trail of Tears" (1975), the part Schlesinger left out, about Jackson's forced migration of American Indians to the North West, "Young Hickory" by Hendrik Booream (2001) about the making of Jackson, "Jackson's Way" by John Buchanan (2001) about his special appeal to the masses, "The Passions of Andrew Jackson" (2003) by Andrew Burstein written with an obvious bias, "Andrew Jackson" (2005) by H. W. Brands about Jackson's life and times, "From Sea to Shining Sea" (2005) by Robert Leckie about the War of 1812 where Jackson made his reputation and seeded the expansion westward, and now "American Lion" (2008) by Jon Meacham about Jackson's White House years and his presidential leadership, which was nothing like television's "West Wing."

Each biography displayed another dimension of the man with the "American Lion" focusing on Jackson's eight years as president (1829 - 1837) from the perspective of his contentious loyalty to family and friends and consuming passion for the American people and the preservation of the Union.

"American Lion" can be viewed from the perspective of organizational development (OD), particularly in terms of leadership. OD looks at the whole and assesses behavior in terms of its parts - culture, climate, demographics, geography, personalities and histories -- something Jackson did surprisingly well, as he attempted to preserve the Union against such pesky enemies as Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Nicholas Biddle of the Bank of the United States. Clay saw him as a want-to-be monarch, Calhoun, as enemy to states' rights for the South, and Biddle as a manageable nuisance.

Author Jon Meacham paints a vivid portrait of Jackson and his tumultuous years in power. In doing so, he creates a manual on leadership. At the same time, he shows how talented people can horribly misread events and their times and apply the wrong leadership. "The Age of Jackson," as his influence became known, is testimony this didn't apply to Jackson.

Such leaders apply the wrong rules because that is all they know. Consequently, they oppose new rules of engagement, which lead to glaring errors of judgment. Jackson intuited his times and the rising power of the people. He seldom confused role demands (the job) with self-demands (ego needs) and defined testy situations with a clarity that often escaped his enemies. Moreover, he believed with great confidence he was the father of his country ordained to preserve and protect his family, the Union, at all costs.

He was a flawed, conflicted and contradictory man, beloved and hated, venerated and reviled, crude and sophisticated, rude and mannered, calloused and sensitive, confrontational and compromising, brutish and kind. He often got in his own way but read big events with clear-cut simplicity. A country bumpkin and poorly educated, he had the carriage of a monarch. He was a highly prejudiced man with a gift for giving power to ordinary men. He was, in short, a lot like his country that was moving from an agrarian to an industrial society, and ever westward.

He would change the presidency forever, and in so doing, change America itself. He was the first president to recognize the burgeoning power of the Office of President, while like Washington, a student of its symbolic influence.

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Abraham Lincoln admired Henry Clay, Jackson's bitter enemy, and had the Kentucky senator's picture on the wall of his law office in Springfield, Illinois, yet he had far more in common with Jackson. Lincoln did agree with Jackson, however, that the will of the people was majestic, even magical. Perhaps Jackson being an unapologetic slave owner colored Lincoln's sentiment. That said Lincoln used Jackson's new rules of presidential leadership during his presidency including suspending habeas corpus.

John Quincy Adams, an abolitionist, has a meaningful role in "American Lion," which is revealed through his diaries and letters. He had visceral contempt for Jackson yet could appreciate his leadership. Unlike Clay and Calhoun, he understood why Jackson resonated with the people.

In contrast, Thomas Jefferson saw Jackson as nothing less than a scoundrel, uncouth and unlawful: "He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place (as president). He has very little respect for the law or constitution. He is a dangerous man."

Great men often misread other great men. John F. Kennedy was once hosting a state dinner, and toasted his guests: "Never has such a distinguished assembly dined here than when Jefferson dined alone." It is impossible to imagine him saying this of Jackson. Some presidents, such as Jefferson, get a free pass but never the likes of Jackson.

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We have a classless society of distinct classes. It is defined by money, which is our civil religion according to Lewis Lapham in "Money and Class in America" (1988). Money and power have been pivotal in our nation's history. This was true of Jackson as he took on the establishment and the bank, an outsider without pedigree but with an iron will. Ever since he had read of a failed land scheme in England, Jackson confessed, "I have been afraid of banks." He had also learned to fear debt and lenders in the most personal way.

In 1795, Jackson became involved with a speculator in Philadelphia and ended up in "great difficulty" narrowly escaping. From that point forward, he remained skeptical of promissory notes, land speculation, financial maneuvers, and banks. This mindset, Meacham shows, changed American history forever.

He was a self-possessed man confident in the knowledge who he was without apologies. By a combination of intuition and rational determinism, he read the times from the perspective of the common people that escaped his more celebrated contemporaries.

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Orphaned at fourteen, Jackson never knew his own father, who died the year he was born. From childhood on, he was in search of a structure in which he could fit, find reassurance and stability, and come to control. He took this into his adulthood treating the personal and political as a common core.

When the Union was threatened by John Calhoun's proclamation of nullification, insisting that states could choose what federal laws they would obey, he wrote, "I call upon you in the language of truth, and with the feelings of a Father to retrace your steps."

Indeed, he saw the Union as his family, as he had no family of his own, with his wife, Rachel dying as he was about to be president. With no children from the marriage, he adopted the American people as his family and he as its father.

His White House years roiled with intrigue, war and sexual scandal, patronage, and corruption. It left a permanent mark on the nation. Author Meacham provides a portrait of these complex relationships within Jackson's intimate circle that reads like a soap opera. Yet, it never threw the president off his game. On the contrary, he seemed to thrive on the chaos and intrigue.

Jackson's vision was to take the pomp out of the presidency and to establish a political culture in which a majority of the voters chose a president, a president chose his administration, and his administration governed by its lights in full view of the people. He made no apologies for his federal appointments, which became known as the "spoils system," believing he better than anyone knew who could best serve and reform the Republic. This legacy has helped shape the way we live now.

WHY READ "AMERICAN LION"?

Jackson was not afraid to express his passions or display his loyalties. This troubles historian Andrew Burstein. He insists Jackson conceived of no political direction for the country, acquired wealth, and achieved prominence although virtually uneducated, while displaying the confidence that he alone could restore virtue to American politics as the people's president implying Jackson was a Machiavellian leader. This is far from the case.

In organizational development (OD) terms, Burstein inadvertently gives legitimacy to Jackson's leadership by detailing his development and interventions. Meacham, on the other hand, provides the basis for my declaring Jackson was the first OD practitioner in the White House.

Since the personal and political were regarded as the same, Jackson reacted vehemently to attacks to people close to him, the most celebrated being that of Margaret Eaton, the wife of one of his advisers, John Henry Eaton. The power of OD is when subject and predicate are one as feelings trigger the mind to action.

Eaton was an architect of Jackson's political career and a trusted secretary of war. The claim was the Eaton's had lived together in sin before marriage and Mrs. Eaton had had a series of affairs with other men before and during the marriage. It created social as well as political turmoil and resulted in Jackson dissolving his cabinet, and creating the "the kitchen cabinet," which reflected the will of the president. Jackson never wavered in his loyalty, or in his actions against those disloyal to him.

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Such passion and loyalty calls to mind President Truman's letter to the Washington Post music critic Paul Hume (December 6, 1950) who had written of the president's daughter's operatic singing: "She cannot sing very well and cannot sing with anything approaching professional finish."

Truman wrote to the critic, "Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!"

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In the 1988 presidential campaign, Bernard Shaw asked Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in a debate with George H. W. Bush, "If Kitty Dukakis was raped and murdered would you support the death penalty?"

The governor showed no passion only analytical detachment and composure as he gave a legalese answer, and lost the election. The Bush campaign capitalized on his bland affect with a series of devastating Willie Horton television ads.

Horton was serving a life sentence for murder without the possibility of parole, but was released from prison on a furlough program in Massachusetts supported by Governor Dukakis. While on parole, Horton committed assault, armed robbery and rape.

If Jackson had been asked that same question by Bernard Shaw, he wouldn't have hesitated to say, "You wouldn't have to worry about the death penalty. I'd have killed the bastard with my bare hands!"

This would not have been an idle boast. In 1806, he challenged Charles Dickinson to a duel over a horserace and a slur against his wife, Rachel. He allowed Dickinson to shoot first, carrying the bullet in his chest for the rest of his life, and then shot the man dead.

The media may have applauded the detached manner of the Massachusetts governor but the people didn't. They identify with passion. Dukakis was the darling of the media, but media couldn't rescue him after this display of dispassion.

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In the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican vice president candidate, Sarah Palin, who comes out of the same passion gene pool as Jackson, was asked in a television interview with Katie Couric, what newspapers and magazines she had read over the years to be informed.

Palin answered, "All of them, everything." When Couric tried for a more specific answer, Palin became defensive. The interviewer neutralized Palin's strength, her passion, by killing her appeal as a serious candidate by appearing a nonreader. Yet, was the questioning fair or even meaningful?

Of some 320 million American citizens perhaps less than 10 percent are serious readers of such publications as The Washington Post, The New York Times and other periodicals such as Foreign Affairs and The Economist.

Are we to assume HYPE (Harvard Yale Princeton Elite) should guide us into the future and that those of us of ordinary lights should oblige them? Jackson certainly wouldn't have as he had a contentious relationship with them in his day. Jackson spoke the language of the people. Palin did as well until she stumbled in this interview.

The Alaskan governor, born in 1964, educated at state universities, may not be a reader, but she belongs to the iconoclastic generation of doers of their own thing, who are now assuming leadership rolls. She has defied the programming of the establishment and embraced the untamed world of Alaska as Jackson embraced the untamed world west of the Allegany Mountains.

Imagine a Couric interview with Jackson who read hardly at all and didn't trust newspapers. Jackson would likely have said, "What a damn silly question to ask! I don't make my mind up by what you people print."

Palin is cut from the same cloth as the seventh president and needs to make no apologies for being so or for the passions that have brought her from the Wasilla shores into national prominence.

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Organization development (OD) is physician to the organization as the medical doctor is to the individual. OD accesses the relative health, stability and efficacy of the organization to accomplish its mission. It does this by taking readings of its culture and readiness to deal with internal stress and strain and accelerating external demands.

OD leadership is passionate but not necessarily polite, timely but not necessarily preemptive, empathetic but not necessarily accommodating. It is self-interested and makes no apologies for being so. It knows and uses its strengths and is not afraid to be a bit paranoid. OD knows what it does well (strengths) and what it does not (weaknesses) and makes corrections (acts). Jackson practiced this formula to perfection.

The "American Lion," while not intended, is an exercise in OD. Jackson was clearly a practitioner. While his critics chastised him for going over the head of Congress directly to the people, saying it was outside his constitutional authority, he recognized it was the only way to get things done.

John Calhoun believed the people should not be trusted with too much power. Jackson believed the opposite. Calhoun retreated into legalese, saying, "He (Jackson) claims to be the immediate representative of the people! What effrontery! Why, he never received a vote from the American people. He was elected by electors." Calhoun never grasped the power of symbolic interaction and symbolic leadership. Jackson did.

Jackson believed a congressional-financial-bureaucratic complex controlled the country. Imagine what he would think of the tens of thousands of lobbyists that feast on the pickings of Congress in Washington D.C. today. As president, he positioned the will of the people to crush the will of the few, never questioning his moral authority.

Was Jackson excessive? Meacham implies he was. He suggests government (Congress and the Supreme Court) failed to appreciate the new rules of engagement or the new role of the United States as an international power. Instead, they were consumed with regional disputes and provincial concerns.

Jackson wouldn't allow an inward-looking Congress to limit him. It threatened to impeach him for his bravado, especially going directly to the people to compromise congressional authority. Congress saw itself as representative of the people, and the president limited to working through it. Nearly two centuries (177 years) later, the problem is academic.

Remarkably, Jackson even looked at corruption in OD terms. He didn't look at it from its symptoms, but discerned it causes. Corruption wasn't limited to scandals and mismanagement, but in the broader sense was marshaled by how institutions used power and influence. With the few profiting at the expense of the many, Jackson saw the problem in system terms.

Jackson was not against competition in the marketplace of goods and ideas putting faith in the capacity of free individuals to work out their destinies. When institutional barriers prevented such possibilities, it was seen as his role as agent of the people to remove such barriers.

He worried in particular about the power of the Second Bank of the United States, an institution that held the public's money but was not subject to the public's control, or to the president's.

He was to meet his match in its president, Nicholas Biddle, who was brilliant, arrogant, and as willful in his way as he was in his. It became war. He saw the Bank of the United States a threat to the common good and believed nothing less than destroying it was on order. The battle consumed his administration, but he eventually won.

In January 1832, Biddle challenged Jackson (never a good idea) to sign the bank's renewed charter or veto it and suffer defeat for reelection. Biddle thought he could box the president in on the Bank's terms, believing Jackson would do anything to get reelected. He was wrong on both terms.

Henry Clay, who was running against Jackson, was confident this strategy would put him in the White House. It was a terrible mistake. It led the bank into the political arena or out of its depth, where the president presided with skill. It also showed Senator Clay misread the times by playing by old rules where campaigners didn't directly engage the public, but acted presidential above the fray.

Jackson vetoed the charter, and soundly defeated Clay at the polls capturing the Electoral College votes by a convincing margin of 219 - 49 with over 55 percent of the popular vote to Clay's 37 percent.

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The Nullification Act of Calhoun also failed putting Calhoun in the same livid state of Clay. They gained a measure of revenge by leading the Senate to censure the president for exceeding his authority in removing the deposits from the Bank of the United States. Friday, March 28, 1834, was, in retrospect, one of the most significant days of Andrew Jackson's life. He was censured for his removal of the deposits. The tally in the Senate was 26 to 20.

(Lost in this intrigue is that Jackson, by compromising on tariffs as they impacted cotton growers, caused nullification to be tabled and succession of South Carolina and other southern states from happening, thus postponing the Civil War by 28 years.)

Nearly two centuries later, presidents Bush and Obama concomitantly did essentially the same thing when the federal government took control of many investment banks that took TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bailout funds during the 2007 - 2008 economic collapse. This included closing down several banks across the nation.

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Currently, president Obama has a Jackson like initiative in his healthcare reform. Time will tell if the president has made a gross error in turning healthcare reform over to the House of Representatives, where Congress has made a mess of things, especially the confusing "public option" in competition with private healthcare insurance providers.

Jackson would never have done that. He would have gone to the people as Obama is now doing, measured its disposition, and then marshaled his reform in a way to garner the overwhelming endorsement of the people. At present, because of Obama's turning control of the initiative over to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, healthcare is mired in red tape and bound up in thousands of pages of confusion, which has led to conflict, anger and misunderstanding. This is not good OD.

Imagine if Jackson had deferred to Congress on dissolving the Bank of the United States. Obviously, it never would have happened. It happened because Jackson convinced the people it was the right thing to do. True, he was censured for the action, but that was only a symbolic move. Jackson took on the hubris and arrogance of Biddle and Congress and transferred the people's money to other banks with the strong possibility of being defeated for a second term, yet he did it. He succeeded because he did his homework and guided the effort through leading the charge.

One wonders if Obama's taking his case to the people in town hall meetings now after the cow is out of the barn will work. For his first deferring to Congress, we have a stalemate and the healthcare reform bill, should it pass, may be so watered down to make little impact on the uninsured.

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A president must use his power, all of his will, and all of his attributes, Jackson would insist, to establish his leadership. Obama would profit from reading the "American Lion." Jackson was not inclined to please the establishment to do the people's business. Ironically, he is an iconic figure today, but then was a much-maligned man of action with an OD orientation.

Fortunately, we have had strong presidents in critical times. Imagine if President Truman had waited for Congressional approval before dropping the atomic bomb on Japan to end WWII in the Pacific. Imagine the stalemate that might have ensued. Chances are the war might have gone on for years, as it did in Vietnam and as it does now in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Time will tell if Obama will become a bold leader. Charlie Rose on PBS television routinely asks his guest experts and media observers how Obama is doing. Invariably, they give "thumbs up" on his leadership, yet from an OD perspective comparative to the Jackson presidency, I don't see it. That is why I hope the president reads "American Lion."

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