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.

A LETTER TO A FRIEND

LETTER TO A FRIEND

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 2006

BACKGROUND:

My friend was recently mugged and beaten while going on his daily walk. He has done this for years, working his health into fine shape, losing more than 100 pounds.

Now, he is afraid to venture outside the door for fear a gang of youths will attack him again for the mere pleasure of disrupting his life without a thought to the consequences.

My friend lives in a large city, and has worked tirelessly with disadvantaged people for years, quietly, unobtrusively and without a thought of recognition or reward.

He has now sought counsel in a group of others similarly attacked, and a police office talked to them, and was less than reassuring in his platitudinous speech. It was in this mind that my friend contacted me.

Regarding my reference to New Orleans, I was robbed at knifepoint when I was in that city walking back to my hotel after giving a speech to a professional society. This was pre-Katrina New Orleans.

The experience has occupied a place of horror in my consciousness since, and I don't plan to expose myself to that possibility again. So, you see we have something in common. FEAR.

When fear wins, we always lose. The other reference is to a book that I have written on ecology of the mind and environment, now with the title TECHNOLOGY THE NEW RELIGION OF "NOWHERE MAN!"

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It is sad that when things like this happen to us -- the mugging -- that change the pattern of our lives, and we exaggerate the situation as a means of self-protection, that we retreat to a kind of prison.

I'm guilty of it with my attitude towards New Orleans, and you could be of the same mind with regard to your shattering experience. But you are dealing with it and I applaud you for it.

The police officer may not have been reassuring but you were involved in a dialogue with him and the group. It is together we find not only the answer but also the comfort and reassurance of togetherness.

People who have been reading my two parts on the NOWHERE book cannot believe I can't find a publisher. That doesn't mean they are (a) discriminating readers; or (b) would be likely to purchase the book.

NOWHERE seems to be the title of choice along with its connection to "the religion of technology." Those who would comment on it said that "utopian" doesn't mean much to people today, although I think they live in it.

My son's twin boys were one-year-old last weekend, and we were sitting around the table talking about things, and someone mentioned that they were "tired of all this depressing news about poverty in Africa and homelessness in Kashmir (due to the earthquake)."

I said that such an attitude saddened me as most people of the world, more than 50 percent, make less in a year than the typical American makes in a day.

The twins' maternal grandmother, who works part time, said, "Well, I only make about $100 a day, surely they make more than that in a year." I informed her to the negative.

Everyone else at that table including my son and daughter-in-law make several times that amount per day. No one else said a word.

We live in a kind of utopian existence, idealized and sanitized so that it fits our mindset that we can pollute the planet at our will and it will all work out because "technology will find the answer." The president assured us of just that in his State of the Union speech the other night.

A writer at best has very little impact even when he is published. What we like to do once tragedy or disaster or a form of Armageddon hits us is to go back and see whose fault it was and who had warned us about it, etc., etc., etc.

Learning fails to take hold. Katrina will be no different. 9/11 proved that.

We are a hapless people in the jaws of the future seeking perfection without ever being touched with reality. We dance around our problems without ever feeling the need to embrace them. History tells us we are not the first to do this dance, and most assuredly, we will not be the last.

My prayers and best thoughts are with you. As Scarlet O'Hara said, "Tomorrow is another day." And always be well,
Jim

WRITER'S RESPONSIBILITY TO THE READER!

Writer's Responsibility to the Reader!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2006

"If the story is in you," William Faulkner once said, "it has got to come out." All writers, whether they are writing of a new scientific discovery, recording their musings, writing their memoirs, or publishing a novel are telling some kind of a story. That is what writing is all about.

Faulkner, incidentally, drifted a good deal before he finally settled down to writing, reinventing himself, attending college and then dropping out almost immediately, taking a sinecure position at the local post office in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, and then when the war came on (World War II), going to Canada, purchasing a Canadian flyer's outfit, returning to Oxford with a limp, as if he had been in the war, all inventions, all adding to his repertoire as a storyteller.

“The job of fiction,” writes Stephen King, “is to find the truth inside the story’s web of lies.” Read biographies of successful writers and you will see that lying is source material, and exaggeration a critical component of their tool kit.

Oscar Wilde once said that all storytellers are consummate liars, but added, there is more truth in their lies than in people who live on the surface of life and call it truth.

A writer, especially a writer of fiction, is basically telling the story of himself from as many possible angles as he can possibly conceive. Gore Vidal said that Henry James had several original stories in his repertoire, but most writers only have one or two, no matter how many books they write, with the possible exception of Shakespeare who had scores of original stories in his catalog.

Now, a writer can only make connection with a reader if the story he is telling resonates with the reader. Faulkner, who had very little formal education, but read widely, expected his readers to have a considerable vocabulary, and a healthy appreciation of fear and conflict in the human heart. This was the truth the reader had to bring to the story. Henry James said essentially the same thing when he said the purpose of a novel is to help the heart of man know itself.

Where does that put modern techno-thrillers and mystery novels of the macabre? One could say a safe distance from the wellspring of the immortal soul. These are not stories but essentially erector sets that fascinate in the complexity of their design. It hasn’t always been so.

Kurt Vonnegut said of Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road (1949), “His journals remind me of a time, not all that long ago, when there were still a few people passionately responsive to writing. They are now extinct.” He was talking about people who looked directly at their hidden demons and recorded the terror in their hearts without blinking.

Kerouac, if anything, obsessively embraced his fears, and left no room in the workshop of his heart for anything, but the old verities and truths, as Faulkner might put it.

Faulkner was dedicated to poetry and the human spirit, and spoke to this in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Sweden in 1950:

“Until he (the writer) does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope, and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”

Joseph Campbell put this in terms of the “seven circles of charkas,” suggesting the “third level” or “solar plexus,” where animal instincts reside is the contemporary level of our “gland” culture. This has led to the expression “waist high culture,” or popular culture.

We have a lot of gland or “waist high” writers today, writers that hide in the shock and awe of technology, keeping themselves separate from their material, who wow us with what they think without revealing how they think, who divorce us from our pain and fear and allow us to lull in some vicarious pyrotechnical thrill.

Stephen King says, “Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affection.” The key words are “letting go.” He continues that the writer will find himself by recognizing that writing is found in what you really love to read.

He is also candid about why he sells a lot of books. It is because “book-buyers want a good story to take with them on the airplane, something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages.”

Page-turners are books the reader recognizes the people in the book, their behaviors, their surroundings, and their talk. He continues, “When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.” How much is determined by what the reader can remember of the book a day or two later.

Stephen King is not going to win a Nobel Laureate, as popular as he is, because writers such as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, while still writing entertaining works, have taken their work to the next level. What level is that?

William Butler Yeats describes it in this way: “Now that my ladder is gone. I must lie down where all ladders start, in the fowl rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” In terms of Charkas, the heart is the fourth level. This is the center of transformation, and birth of the spiritual life. Joyce has Leopold Bloom in Ulysses (1937) call this, “Jesus with his heart on his sleeve.”


There is no posturing at the heart level. Craving has been replaced by spiritual aspirations. Once the writer introduces us to this level, he must guide us through our doubt, as Faulkner has, and bring us through the mist into the clear, recognizing that as tough as things may get, “man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul.” In Charkas, the Yoga would say he has the radiance of God and the energy to look inward for fulfillment.

For the writer, he must decide if he wants to engage the reader in the code of the soul, or simply to entertain, and let it go at that. Dan Brown’s popular “The Da Vinci Code” approximates the latter with his journey into exploring the mystery of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. This is a safe voyage, which uses the devices of mystery puzzle solving. Its staying quality can be measured on what is remembered from the story. That is not to say that entertaining writing, per se, is bad. On the contrary, most readers read simply for pleasure, which is fine.

The limits of the writer, whatever his genre, however, are governed by being true to his roots, and writing out of that experience and the education that accrued from it. If he is honest with himself, and gives the reader the key to his, “House of Intellect” as Jacques Barzun puts it, the reader can decide if it is worth the effort.

Emerson said, regarding serious readers, “One must be an inventor to read well.” He was speaking of “self-trust,” what Harold Bloom says in How to Read a Book (2000), “is not an endowment, but is the Second Birth of the mind, which cannot come without years of deep reading.” Deep reading comes from writers who have pondered their soul and have the will to share their insights. Thomas Clayton Wolfe of “Look Homeward, Angel” (1929) and “You Can’t Go Home Again” (1940) fame was such a writer.

Where Stephen King is correct, “writing is likely to be close to what you love to read.” This is the writer’s “House of Intellect,” which may have an ironic connection to his roots.

An appreciation of irony is a powerful tool of the serious reader. Bloom suggests that this is frequently and unknowingly in quest of a mind more original than one’s own. Irony, in any case, is a powerful concept with such writing. Take Hamlet in Shakespeare. He constantly says one thing while meaning another. It challenges the reader, and drives him to ponder and identify with the troubled soul.

But as Vonnegut, Bloom and others have suggested, you cannot teach irony. It is a complex derivative of a mind that works on several levels, often contradictory, and still can carry the reader to a safe landing. Because of the demands of this, Bloom laments, “The loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what has been civilized in our nature.”

This missive was opened with the idea that all writers, whatever their genre, are storytellers. What is also true is that most novels are letters aimed at one person. Clearly, James Joyce’s classic novel, Finnegans Wake (1938) was written with his troubled daughter, Lucia, in mind. The novel is a powerful stream-of-conscious tale of a novelized version of her schizophrenic world with all its horrors, but treated with love, compassion, tenderness, and integrity.

In the end as in the beginning, the final assessment of the writer’s responsibility to the reader is to write as well as he can, as clearly as he can, and as honestly as he can. To do that, he must somehow master language well enough to record on the page what flies wildly and chaotically in his head.

The story the writer tells will still not be the story that is read. The reader will bring his own story to the book and connect the dots of his story with the story being read, thus creating a whole new story. Therefore, no two readers will have the same experience or derive the same benefit.

What brings about this peculiar marriage of writer and reader is that they both have live imaginations and an affinity for this invention called language in the printed word.

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Dr. Fisher is the peripatetic philosopher. His works are posted on his website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com.

THE WORLD OF AMBULANCE CHASERS!

THE WORLD OF AMBULANCE CHASERS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2006

My mother-in-law, a deeply religious woman, with a passionate and energetic proselytizing zeal, was telling me on one of my annual visits to her home in Minnesota, about yet another person who had dedicated her life to Christ, as a born again Christian.

This rebirth could be anything from overcoming drug addiction, child abuse, alcoholism, wife beating, profligacy, prostitution, gambling, compulsive lying, kleptomania, or any other version of the seven deadly sins.

When she finished describing this current person-of-interest that had embarked on a remarkable turnaround, I asked her, "What if you don't have any of these addictions? What if you are not guilty of any of these things? What if you are simply a person going along doing your thing without any of these demons ruling you?

She looked at me with an uncharacteristic hardness that erased her normal beguiling compassion with the comment, "Now we're talking about you? Can't you ever think of anyone but yourself?"

The comment stunned me. I recovered slowly, not knowing what to say. I could see how she could make that connection, but what I meant was that 99 percent of the people I met or knew did not fit these descriptions of dependencies.

They didn't come from dysfunctional families, poor, yes, but dysfunctional, no. They weren't exposed to terrible teachers in school, maybe a bit demanding, true, abusive, no.

In life, I have worked with many dedicated and hard working people, some ambitious, yes, others with private agendas, too, and still others that didn't like me too much, but wicked or evil, no.

Personally, I have had some monumental failures, some screw-ups, too, and not always the happiest of marital relations, but it didn't drive me into one of these behaviors because, someone early in my life, my mother, made it clear to me that I was operating on my own nickel, without portfolio, without a safety net, without people of influence paving the way.

She reminded me that when I screwed up I would only have myself to blame. It proved to be a very comforting and surprisingly resilient knowing I had to pick myself up, and go forward no matter what.

Sometimes I was a bit bloody, other times more than a bit disillusioned, and often confused, even it would be safe to say, bitter. But never so bitter to trust someone else to do for me what I could better do for myself.

My mother made me aware that I was lucky to be alive, and that in the end as in the beginning I only had myself to blame or credit for my rise or fall, and that both were the part of a life no matter who you were.

She had an expression that has stayed with me all these years, "You are always half-finished." Somehow that was comforting to know rather than to be anxiety producing.

I am now of an age in which many of these great people that have been in my life are dying of old age a little early. What little success I have had in life, and with what little of the good that they taught me that stuck, I am deeply beholden to them. I name names in my book In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel to honor their memory.

I mention this here because I have never had much patience with the "ambulance chaser mentality" of our society that makes Oprah and Dr. Phil such heroes of that vast wasteland out there called the television audience.

And that is why I asked my mother-in-law, whom I love dearly, "What if you are not guilty of any of these things?" Because, clearly, most people aren't. They will never see their names or pictures in the newspaper, never be interviewed on television, never have a radio interview, but will continue to go quietly about their lives, thank you very much.

We have a big thing about sin, and as I've written in a novel never published, I've never bought into the idea of sin in the first place, only into the idea of waste, wasted life, wasted opportunity, wasted energy, wasted health, wasted worry, and so on. In the end as in the beginning, we are all the same. We are born, we live, we die.

At no time in my life, for example, was I ever interested in smoking or drinking or taking drugs, but in working my way through my low periods as best I could with what support was there for me, or wasn't there for me, realizing that none of us ever escapes the narrow prison of ourselves completely, not even the best of us.

Anyway, what brings this diatribe out of me, was reading an article in The Tampa Tribune today in which Oprah, like the politician that she is, rescinded her earlier claim in support of an author who published his memoir as nonfiction when it appears to have been greatly embellished.

Apparently on "Larry King Live," while this author was being interviewed, Oprah called in iterating what a great book the author had written, and then saying to her regret, "truth doesn't matter."

Well, to her many listeners it seemingly does, which some have estimated at 50 million, if you can believe that.

These listeners are so "other-directed" and so dependent on other people's truth to realize their own, that they were understandably devastated. They were taking this author's troubles and deep lows, apparently largely invented, to be their own.

It was tantamount to a delicious vicarious ride to recovery without pain or struggle as if experiencing themselves being pulled out of whatever hole they were in and lifting them into the beatific light of rejuvenation, not realizing that the whole thing was a gigantic charade, the book a fraud, and now they believed, at their expense.

Oprah said that she feels that she has been betrayed and that her fans have been betrayed. I don't think so. No one can betray us but ourselves.

English playwright William Congreve (1670 - 1729) says it emphatically: "Man was by Nature Women's cully made; we never are, but by ourselves, betrayed."

Thanks to Oprah's endorsement, this author's book has gone through several printings, has made him a multimillionaire, and resulted in a seven-figure advance on additional books, with two books on the top twenty-five best selling list, with this particular book number five in amazon.com's listing of best sellers.

In the Shadow of the Courthouse is a happy book of a nostalgic period in which all these waste makers never crossed most people's minds because parents were too busy working in the war effort to keep America free, and kids were too busy creating their own play and inventing their own toys, because few had enough money to buy luxuries, and even if they did, there was rationing, so there was little point in wanting what they couldn't have.

My book claims on the cover that I have an imperfect memory of events but that this is what I will carry to my grave of those times. It is why it was called Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel.

Oprah doesn't know about the book although a lovely lady has attempted to tell her about it, but Oprah is an ambulance chaser and is not interested in promoting books about functioning families who recognize that struggle is not a curse but a blessing.

In the Shadow of the Courthouse has sold very modestly. Perhaps 2 million other books listed on amazon.com have sold more copies, but those who have read it are the backbone of this nation. They are the people who can see themselves in its pages, can remember themselves struggling. They have loving memories now as they grow into old age without regrets and without fanfare.

They are saddened by the bleeding hearts that have every excuse in the book for why their lives have gone bitter. But it does puzzle them why an author who turned his life from ruin to some purpose would feel the need to make it even more ruinous to delight an audience.

Most people go about their business knowing that sympathy runs deep for losers who appear late blooming winners, while accepting the fact that they are essentially invisible to ambulance chasers, as winning and losing are part of their normal day.

The Germans have a wonderful word for ambulance chasers. It is "schadenfreude." Ambulance chasers were around 2,000 years ago, and they will be around 2,000 years into the future. It is the weak that get our attention, but it is the strong that keeps this world alive, and quietly and unobtrusively so.

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Dr. Fisher is the peripatetic philosopher: www.peripateticphilosopher.com

REMEMBERING A REMARKABLE MAN!

REMEMBERING A REMARKABLE MAN!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2006

"Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye; and where care lodges sleep will never lie." Shakespeare

My sister, Pat Waddell, sent me the obituary of a quite remarkable Clintonian, the Most Reverend Richard "Dickie" Von Ah, who passed away on January 3, 2006. I remember Dickie with great affection because of two specific incidences. They have stayed with me these many years, and bring a smile to my lips.

In the first instance his Eminence, Ralph L. Hayes, Bishop of Davenport, was confirming us at St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Clinton, Iowa. That was a big moment for us in our preteen years.

Sister Mary Gertrude and Sister Mary Cecile had prepared us well to respond to the bishop's questions before he anointed us in the presence of our sponsors and families as "Soldiers of Jesus Christ."

To say we were nervous, as the handsome bishop looked down on us from the marble altar rail and lushly carpeted steps is to beg the question. Bishop Hayes was a striking figure, tall, with a thick mane of white hair, an imperial Irish face, and a powerful body draped in a red cassock and a long embroidered white surplice. One wondered if God could be any more regal.

Part of the ritual was for the bishop to quiz us on the tenets of our Catholic faith as our parents, relatives and friends looked on with anticipation. Words rolled off bishop Hayes's tongue in distinct melodious tones like quivering corn in a light summer breeze. The sound of his voice, alone, sent shivering chills up my spine.

He asked if anyone could recite "the Apostles Creed." Immediately, all eyes moved quickly to inspect their shoes, that is, except Dickie's. He not only looked the bishop in the eye, but also raised his hand to answer. The bishop with a beatific smile motioned with his hand for him to speak.

I was sitting next to Dickie, and his knees were knocking against each other so loud that it sounded as if the church were infested with crickets. It appeared I was the only one that noticed.

With his hand still in the air, out came the creed in a stuttering voice. It was clear he was nervous, and that this was a monumental display of courage as he tripped over phrases, and skipped over passages, coming to an abrupt, "Amen," with a sigh of relief.

The oratory resembled little of the Nicene Creed adopted at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., but it obviously impressed the good bishop.

Bishop Hayes was ecstatic. He stretched his arms out as if to embrace the whole congregation, his eyes warmly fixed on Dickie, and then, after a painfully long pause, said something so remarkable that it has stayed with me all these years.

"I don't know you, son, but I see the making of a priest in you."

I looked at Dickie to see his reaction. His eyes were locked on the bishop, smiling warmly as if they were in collusion on some great secret.

And of course, a priest Dickie did become with an illustrious career, touching the lives of many Iowans, including those in his hometown, being pastor for a time at Clinton's own St. Irenaeus.

Many years earlier, however, he was a student at St. Ambrose College in Davenport, while I was a student at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

Although both of us poor boys, we had the opportunity to work summers at Clinton Foods, a huge corn processing refinery, while going to college.

The company refined corn into starch, corn syrup, dextrose (corn sugar), dextrin (corn glue), lactic acid, livestock feed, and hops for breweries. What's more, the company paid us the same wage scale for the jobs we did as for the union workers. Consequently, a summer job here could go a long way toward paying the costs of room and board for college in the fall.

It was my second summer working at Clinton Foods, but it was Dickie's first. It would prove to be a fateful one for him. It was our first week on the job, and we were sitting on makeshift benches eating our lunch with other factory workers in the sugar refinery of plant one.

A worker was holding court complaining about the lunch his wife had packed for him that day. This grizzly old veteran, and not for the first time, was our lunchtime entertainment.

His comments went something like this, and I am paraphrasing from memory of a half century ago, but I think I retain the essence of his remarks:

"Can you f------ believe it! Look at this f----- lunch! Here my f------ wife has all day to make a decent f----- lunch, and what does she give me? She gives me this f----- lunch meat with this f----- cheese, and slops on this f----- mustard that now smells more rancid than rat's piss. Can you f----- believe it! She expects me to eat this f---- sandwich and work the f------ day without upchucking. If that isn't bad enough, she couldn't find more moldy bread if she f------- tried. If I threw it to the birds, one touch of their beaks and they'd give it a f------ pass. Now what the f--- does all this mean? I don't know. I'm just at a f------ loss for words. Do you think she doesn't give a f--- about her husband? Do you think she just throws the f------ thing together to get it f------ done? I don't know. She actually is a fine f------ old lady. But when it comes to f------ lunch making, she's f------ out to lunch. (Everyone laughs, except Dickie.)

It so happened that I was sitting next to Dickie once again, and his knees were knocking together as they had been those many years before during confirmation. Nobody seemed to notice because everybody was laughing at the lunchtime clown.

Dickie moved to the other side of the warehouse, and motioned for me to join him, which I did.

"That man is so disgusting," he said with venom in his voice. "He is so full of mortal sin that I pray providence will rescue him from his evil ways. He must change his life, or he's doomed for eternity."

Then he turned to me his face drenched in sorrow. "Jim, can you believe this awful man?" When I didn't answer, he nearly shouted. "I absolutely cannot take it! I can't work here! I'm quitting right now!"

I didn't know Dickie well. I knew him as our equipment manager on our basketball team. We were city and Catholic diocese's champs that year. I have a picture of that team on the wall of my study, which I wrote about in a recent memoir written as a novel.

At St. Patrick's, the seventh and eighth grade students were together in the same classroom, so I knew him as a student. When one class was studying, the other would be reciting, and so I remembered his supple mind.

There was no point in arguing with him. He was too upset. Instead, I asked him. "Dickie, what do you want to be?"

"A priest of course. You know that. I'm entering the seminary next fall after I graduate."

"Yes," I confessed, "I knew you were serious about the priesthood." Then feeling a bit coy, I added, "You'll make a good priest. I'm certain of it."

"Thank you," he replied shyly.

"But I have to tell you something." He looked at me curiously. "That man that so disgusts you is a member of St. Mary's parish." His look told me he didn't know. "Yes, he's a Catholic. His children go to school at St. Mary's. And, Dickie, he attends mass every Sunday.

"What I'm trying to say is that's the way he talks. I'll bet he has no idea how many times he says that f-word. I know him. He's not a bad guy. In fact, that's your parish, Dickie, guys like that."

He looked at me, didn't say anything, closed his lunch pail, and took off, never to be seen at Clinton Foods again. It was also the last time I saw him.

Reading his obituary, and seeing all the parishes he served over a long and successful pastoral career, I felt I was not the only one that never forgot that day. May his soul forever rest in peace now that he is home. He will be missed.

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NOWHERE IS A CONUNDRUM!

NOWHERE!
AN ESSAY ON A CONUNDRUM

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2006

My book "Near Journey's End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man" has failed to interest any publisher. It could be converted to a utopian novel of the negative variety, but I have too many other projects in various states of completion to consider that option.

I am thinking of publishing the complete book, less than 150 pages, on my blog, but with a title change: "NOWHERE! THE CONUNDRUM OF TECHNOLOGY AS SALVATION."

The reason for this change of heart was inspired by my reflection on a selection of utopian novels. It occurred to me that "NOWHERE" on my blog might be thought provoking enough for the reader to pursue the subject more deeply. That is the essence of utopian novels. They get you thinking.

"NOWHERE" is not a utopian novel, but yet it has a surprising connection with the genre, as I hope to show here.

"NOWHERE" is about ecology, or the lapse of it over the centuries, illustrating how "cut and control" thinking has tended to gamble on a new advantage without assessing the irrevocable price exacted for it.

The book might better be described as dealing with the ecology of the mind, as it is the mind, after all, that is preventing man from getting his ducks in a row to appreciate the threat to his freedom, his dignity, his self-respect, his integrity, and his need for love in a shrinking world that obsessively wants him to become a "thing" to be used and disposable without conscience as things can be.

Writers immemorial have addressed this conundrum and often through the utopian novel.

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The word "utopian" can be literally translated as "nowhere."

We have had several positive and negative utopian views of "nowhere" throughout the centuries.

How to make a better world for men to live in has fascinated the minds of thinkers in every age. From Plato to the present day, men have been thinking and writing about what the world would be like if men could create an earthly paradise. There have also been those that have felt compelled to paint an otherwise bleak picture of that possibility, especially in the last century.

Thomas More's "Utopia" (1516) combined a most penetrating criticism of his own society, its irrationality and injustice with a picture of a society, which, though not perfect had come to solve most of the human problems, which sounded insolvable to his contemporaries.

Less well known are the Italian friar Tommasso Campenella's "City of the Sun" (1602) and the German humanist Johann Andrea's "Christianopolis" (1619), the latter being the most modern of the three.

Closer to our time is the utopian novel by Edward Bellamy "Looking Backward" (1888). This novel is part of the great American tradition as expressed in the thinking of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in support of man's individuality and social perfectibility.

Bellamy, looking ahead 112 years to 2000 from 1888, envisions a society where there is no money; the state gives everyone no matter what his job, a card that contains the same amount of credit for a year's expense. There is no chance, however, for anyone to spend his credit foolishly as the government takes care to see that he is supervised.

Crime is treated as a mental disease with criminals placed in hospitals and treated as mental cases. Bellamy showed how crime was cut down considerably once money was abolished. Theft became silly when everyone had the right and power to own the same things.

The head of government was the President, who was controlled by Congress. Older professionals who reported to the President controlled education and medicine. A woman chosen by the women of the country had the power to veto any bill concerning the rights of the female population. There was no public discontent with government, and there was wonderful international cooperation. More than a socialist utopia, Bellamy rationalized a case for economic revolution.

In the twentieth century, this optimism and positive utopian mindset, after nearly two thousand years of Western tradition, saw hope transform into a mood and temper of despair, as 20 million mortals perished in World War I and World War II.

Man felt betrayed by capitalism, and then by socialism, and finally by Western Christianity. Barbarism, reactionism, and terror bordering on insanity appeared to grip the oldest centers of culture in the Western world.

War, too, had come to cause moral fatigue and disenchantment with conventional and institutional society stamped as the nemesis.

It is no accident that existentialism was given poignant expression by resistant fighters Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus after the terror they experienced in France and North Africa during World War II. "Now" and "nowhere" were on a collision course as they developed a dialogue to capture this. Nihilism, nausea, boredom and self-estrangement were their themes.

George Orwell would publish his compelling novel "1948" (1949) shortly after that war depicting the new mood of hopelessness, powerlessness, and meaninglessness, which would come to pervade our own age.

Then there was Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We: The Mathematical Society" (1923), where total regimentation is reduced to precise bureaucratic algorithms; Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932), where a world six hundred years into the future is described with human beings turned out by mass production; Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" (1966), where books are banned and combusting at that temperature; and Jack London's "The Iron Heel" (1906), which anticipated fascism in all its repressive ugliness.

These books express the mood of our present from some distance in the past with a warming for the future in a way similar to Orwell's.

These negative or anti-utopias sensed the mood of powerlessness of modern man just as the earlier pro-utopias anticipated the incipient mood of self-confidence of post-medieval man.

Utopian books alert us to change and access its price.

We see this as we have moved from the agricultural period, which placed some strain on Mother Nature with its "cut and control" clearing of forests for planting, and redirecting rivers for irrigation, while giving little mind to their impact on fragile eco-systems or the stability of the environment.

This "cut and control" inclination was then compounded in the industrial age which found economic reasons to justify slavery, exploit natural resources, regiment citizens into hostile slums, while ignoring the demands of public health and sanitation, or the consequences of population explosion, urbanization and toxic crime.

With positive utopia, everyone would have enough to eat, war would be unnecessary because technical progress would give every country so much wealth there would be no need for territorial conquest, and the globe would become unified in cooperation. This was the mantra of "Looking Backward."

On the other hand, Zamyatin's "We" envisioned a totally bureaucratized society in which man is a number and loses all sense of individuality. In Huxley's work the main tool for turning man into an automaton is "hypnoid mass suggestion," which allows the dispensing of terror.

The message of negative utopian novels is clear:

Fear is dominant as modern society rushes to control man into a manageable "thing," to change his human nature so that he will forget his longings for freedom, for dignity, for self-respect, for integrity, and for love.

In Zamyatin's "We" a brain operation similar to a lobotomy is necessary to get rid of the human demands of human nature. In Huxley's "Brave New World" artificial biological selection (similar to cloning) and drugs are necessary, while in Orwell's "1984" it is unlimited torture and brainwashing to erase the conscience

War is also a "1984" theme. Arms production is an economic necessity or society could not function. So, it is constantly preparing for war, constantly afraid of attack, obsessed with finding new weapons to annihilate its enemies.

There are many other utopian novels that are meant to spike our attention. One that made me painfully aware of Nazism as a boy during World War II was "It Can't Happen Here" (1935) by Sinclair Lewis.

The Lewis novel was written during Hitler's rise in Germany. He could see the long tradition of irrational demagoguery in American politics being a perfect climate for a Hitler-like rise in our midst. It is perhaps the reason I was never taken in by Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s when I was in college and the communist "Red Scare" was the hysteria of the moment. McCarthy used this hysteria creating "the big lie," causing people in power, including the president, to cower to his demands. McCarthyism is now a word in our dictionary to describe this deceit.

Reading these books has caused me to appreciate how much they have contributed to my awareness of what is now happening. Yet, I must admit that NOWHERE IS A CONUNDRUM that cannot be solved by a book. Man must solve his dilemma, but he cannot solve it if he does not sense it; and once he senses it, he must take ownership of it, or he will remain like one hand clapping in the forest.

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THE PASSION OF AN OPRAH FAN THAT WANTS MY BOOK ON HER SHOW!

THE PASSION OF AN OPRAH FAN THAT WANTS MY BOOK ON HER SHOW

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2006

Reference: A person in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa wrote Oprah and thought that my book IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003) would be a good subject for her program. She is saddened and disheartened because she has not heard from Oprah, claiming, “I didn’t send her an email, but wrote her a personal letter.” Oprah might get 50,000 such letters a week. This was my reply.

The purpose of a novel is to help the heart of man know itself.

Henry James (1843 – 1916)
American Novelist


You are truly a dear friend. Thank you for writing to Oprah about my book.

No, I never heard from her, but I agree with you. She must get tons of such letters. Thank you for the effort.

The book has done better than I thought it would. I wish more Iowans, though, other than Clinton, Iowans would read it.

One of the things that I learned in my attempt to get the word out that there is very much a territorial imperative at play with Iowa readers, that is, the old saw, of NIH, "not invented here."

Clinton is a unique place which has produced perhaps more creative people per capita than most other Iowa cities, but Davenport, Des Moines, Iowa City, Dubuque, et al., would seem to command more respect. That is my take on it.

To wit, The Davenport Democrat never bothered to answer my queries; nor did the Des Monies Register, or The Daily Iowan (Iowa City), when I asked that the book be reviewed, offering to send a copy.

On the other hand, NPR radio in Rock Island did put a program on about the book, which I appreciated: as did KROS in Clinton. But strangely, that was the limit.

Nobody in Iowa City would take up the charge, not even my University of Iowa Alumni Magazine. They review many books, and I wrote them several times and asked why they didn't review mine, but never received a reply. They did mention the book in the alumni section.

However, the University of Iowa Collection ordered a copy, as did Iowa State University for their collection, but beyond that, "nada."

The book business is brutal, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they can handle rejection, disappointment, and discouragement as part of the profession.

This is not because book people are unfeeling people. It is because it is terribly competitive, profits margins are very narrow, and publishers have to offer big contracts to celebrity authors and their children, leaving little room to review much less edit manuscripts they do accept. Quality control is not great in the book business as typos stare out at the careful reader.

That said the City of Clinton was gigantically supportive of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, as was The Clinton Herald, Guzzardo's, and as were many, many Clinton individuals and the Don Farr Network.

Clintonians took the time to spread the word, as you did, as did many Clintonians spread across the United States.

People write to me and say that every member of their family has read the book, and that it goes from household to household.

Others apologize for buying it as a "used book" on line for a fraction of the cost of a new book. THAT IS OKAY! It was written to be read, not to make money.

I've even had people write and tell me they have read and reread it several times, getting something new out it each time they do. That is what a book is supposed to be, about touching lives.

Someone posted a review on amazon.com stating that it was a "me" book. Of course, it was a "me book." It was a memoir written as a novel, and what is a memoir but about the person who wrote the book?

Yet a memoir's hidden message is that the book IS NOT ALL ABOUT THE AUTHOR, but a way of introducing the reader to him or herself; to identify with the book in terms of his or her own life.

Having said all that, I would encourage anyone that is a writer to keep on writing and never to be discouraged.

You are a successful writer if you are writing about the things that you know, love and understand, and desire to share.

A very dear friend of mine in Clinton says I need a good editor, and I do. I write quickly and passionately, and then move on, and often it shows. Editing is an important part of writing, but it has never interested me too much. I think people get the general drift of what I am saying.

Besides, I have so much to say, and the clock is ticking.

Thank you again for writing to Oprah. I am so happy that you did it, and now we all move on. Always be well,

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"IT IS NOT ALL ABOUT ME!"

IT IS NOT ALL ABOUT ME!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2006

“What comes through (watching the senate confirmation hearing on Judge Sam Alito for the Supreme Court of the United States) is that it is not all about him.”

David Brooks, Columnist, New York Times
On the Charlie Rose Show on PBS (January 13, 2006)


Watching the senate confirmation hearings on Judge Samuel Alito sent shudders through me for the lack of civility shown the man by some senators. Obviously, this bipartisan panel of senators has a duty to screen nominees to the Supreme Court. But this doesn’t give them the right to badger the person in reckless abandon before the television cameras for special interest groups.

Often, I had to move from the television my stomach tied in knots wondering how anyone could take such abuse. I was one with his wife when she rose in tears one day and left the senate chamber.

When my wife came home from work, she asked me, “How did it go today?” I shook my head. “It didn’t,” I said, adding with a touch of remorse, "it's a wonder we get anyone to run for this high court.” Clearly, Judge Alito proved more gifted than this panel, which instead embarrassed itself as well as the nation with its inane savagery.

It was tantamount to psychological abuse bordering on torture. Yes, I said torture!

It is probably clear at this point that I identified with the judge. He came out of a working class family and neighborhood, as I did, and rose to these heady heights because he believed in the work ethic, respect for authority, to be all you can be, and to pursue the American dream by paying attention to detail, practicing fairness, and being guided by a set of principles that give expression to your integrity, and concern for the rights of your fellowman. He has had a rewarding and useful life for the attention.

His strength and the reason he was unflagging in his patience comes from what columnist David Brook refers to as, “It is not all about me!” Some reporters described Judge Alito as not being as cultured or sophisticated as John Roberts, the last nominee. and now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Perhaps these comments were a reaction to his opening statements in which he told how he came from a working class neighborhood “twelve miles from Princeton,” finding there “very privileged people behaving irresponsibly.”

In the 1960, when he was at Princeton, and wanted to enter ROTC, the university abolished the program because it was all about that spoiled brat and privileged generation of students from elitist families that knew nothing about hardship, had little respect for authority, and drifted into self-indulgent crusading causes.

They became “the true believers” that Eric Hoffer has written about, the ambulance chaser mentalities that were always bent on saving the poor, the blacks, the disadvantaged and the underclass from themselves by attacking government, authority wherever they found it, and of course, their own university for not being attentive to their selective agenda, because to their mind it was, “all about them!”

It was in the 1950s that I was at the University of Iowa, what “Life” magazine at the time said was “definitely not for the sophisticated.” It was also a time of hysteria with the “Red Scare” and McCarthyism in play; when the Un-American Activities Committee was looking into people’s lives, and when “loyalty oaths” were required of teachers, writers, artists, and scientists.

Having read recently, “The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism” (2005) by Hayes Johnson, I wonder now if I am experiencing déjà vu, where the bigger the power vacuum the more ludicrous the attack.

Senator McCarthy played on American fears and angers with totally trumped up charges of Communists in the State Department, media and entertainment industry, claiming with little opposition that the nation was “rife with fellow travelers.” None of it proved true, while virtually all of his so-called “lists of communists in government” were found bogus. Yet, he managed to intimidate a generation of leaders into cowering to the lowest common denominator in the American psyche.

It is now a global issue. A colleague of the Korean scientist, who submitted phony stem cell research, becoming a national and international hero, observed, “Hwang Woo-suk wanted to be treated like a rock star.” In other words, he believed it was all about him. “We scientists,” the colleague continued, “find our satisfaction in the work we perform, and the little mysteries we solve along the way.”

There is certain sadness I feel in reflecting on the behavior of senators Kennedy and Bidden in these hearings. I once thought them the class of the senate in terms of hard work and passionate dedication to the people’s business. Now, I fear I see what they are actually made of.

My wonder is how could such men be for blacks, women's rights, and the disadvantaged and not be civil to this man? I was ashamed for them, but not so for Judge Samuel Alito. Whether he is confirmed or not, this was his finest hour. He makes me proud of my lower middle class background, which has allowed me in a humble way to realize something of the American dream. I wish him well, and God speed.

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See Dr. Fisher’s website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com. He writes about leadership issues in his books and articles, many of which are available on his blog.