“You were here long before any of us”

Tags

colonialism, Erin Bartram, Jackson, land, Native Americans, New England

The president’s use of the word “Pocahontas” to refer to Elizabeth Warren yesterday wasn’t new, but it has garnered a lot of attention because of the setting in which he used it: at an event honoring WWII Navajo Marine veterans known as “Code Talkers,” while standing in front of a picture of Andrew Jackson.

Navajo code talkers in the Pacific, 1944

It’s worth considering the context for Trump’s Pocahontas remark, because while his reference to Warren was clearly intended to be a slur, his “positive” language about the Code Talkers he was meeting is also problematic, and taps into ideas that have a deep history in North America.

And I just want to thank you because you’re very, very special people. You were here long before any of us were here, although we have a representative in Congress who, they say, was here a long time ago. They call her “Pocahontas.”

Trump, I imagine, thought he was humorously contrasting “real Indians” – the Code Talkers – and “fake Indians” like Elizabeth Warren. As many have noted, Trump is remarkably focused on genes as markers of actual and potential greatness, sounding like early 20th century eugenicists at times. Even in the speech yesterday, upon finding out how old the Code Talkers were, he noted they must have “good genes.”

But he also has a history of using genetics, and Anglo-American ideas about the “authenticity” of contemporary tribal affiliations and practices, to fight his competition in the business world, as Shawn Boburg detailed in a piece for the Washington Post last summer.

Donald Trump claimed that Indian reservations had fallen under mob control. He secretly paid for more than $1 million in ads that portrayed members of a tribe in Upstate New York as cocaine traffickers and career criminals. And he suggested in testimony and in media appearances that dark-skinned Native Americans in Connecticut were faking their ancestry.

“I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up the reservations,” Trump said during a 1993 radio interview with shock jock Don Imus.

Trump is certainly ignorant of the history of New England tribes, and the broader history of economic, political, cultural, and personal relationships between European colonists, enslaved people, and Native Americans in North America more broadly.

But he’s not alone in this ignorance, nor in his belief that white Americans have the power to know and proclaim what and who is authentically Indian. His remarks also contain, in a line that some might read as innocuous, one of the beliefs that helps justify and sustain this white “knowledge” of authentic Indianness.

…you’re very, very special people. You were here long before any of us were here…

Jonathan Katz’s comments on Twitter outline clearly what’s problematic about these remarks.

The most racist thing about Trump's comments today wasn't the slur. It's that he doesn't understand the difference between a non-white person's ancestry and the person themselves.

— Jonathan M. Katz (@KatzOnEarth) November 28, 2017

In Trump's mind right then, he wasn't touching a man named Peter. He wasn't touching a U.S. Marine. He was touching an Indian, which was the same as touching any Indian who'd ever lived. Because he thinks they're all the same.

— Jonathan M. Katz (@KatzOnEarth) November 28, 2017

It’s insufficient for us to say “Trump’s racist so he thinks all Indians are the same.” We have to consider the very specific dynamics of this racism in North America. Certainly Trump’s emphasis on genetics suggests he thinks that’s enough to make them “all the same,” but by pointing out that they “were here long before any of us were here,” he’s using language that would be familiar to his hero Andrew Jackson.

Early 19th century Anglo-Americans increasingly framed all Indians as relics of history whose traditions and values could be carried on and refined by the next stage of civilization while they themselves vanished into the past. If they were soon to vanish, surely dispossessing them of their lands was nothing more than hurrying along a historical process by turning over that land to the next stage of civilization, one more capable of putting it to good use through agriculture.

This argument required, of course, a complete reimagining of European-Indian relations since colonization, one that erased clear Euro-American awareness of and participation in Indian agriculture and land sales. The cultural reimagining was given legal weight through treaties and through Supreme Court decisions like Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823).

In his decision, Chief Justice John Marshall, himself deeply invested in the project of Western land speculation, argued that European powers had, through their “discovery” of the land, claimed “ultimate dominion” over it, and any tribes allowed to remain there simply had the right of occupancy. The text of Marshall’s decision reveals this rewriting of history to consign Indians to history and make way for the next stage of civilization.

We will not enter into the controversy, whether agriculturists, merchants, and manufacturers, have a right, on abstract principles, to expel hunters from the territory they possess, or to contract their limits. Conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny…

The tribe at issue, the Cherokee, were agriculturalists. Not only did they farm, they had adopted slavery. Moreover, the colonial system of land ownership that white Americans had inherited rested on sales that were valid because the original parties owned the land.

Yet this reimagining was so successful that most contemporary white Americans – especially those in New England – would have no problem stating, in one breath, that Indians were hunters and gatherers with no sense of property ownership, and in the next, talking about how Squanto and Samoset taught the Pilgrims how to farm.

The “knowledge” that Indians were from an earlier stage of history, without the capacity to understand property ownership or agriculture (both markers of the next stage of civilization), helped white Americans make the argument that all North American tribes were naturally disappearing.

From there, it was not too far to make the argument that Indians were not just “historical,” they were relics or living fossils, persisting past their appropriate time in human history yet incapable of changing and integrating with modernity. They weren’t simply historical, they were ahistorical. Lewis Cass, who was governor of the Michigan Territory at the time, introduced his 1829 report on the progress of “a Board in the City of New York, for the Emigration, Preservation, and Improvement of the Aborigines of America,” with this famous passage:

The Indians have gradually decreased since they became first known to the Europeans. The ratio of this diminution may have been greater or less, depending on the operation of causes we shall presently investigate; but there is no just reason to believe, that any of the tribes, within the whole extent of our boundary, has been increasing in numbers at any period since they have been known to us. . . .

 
To the operation of the physical causes, which we have described, must be added the moral causes connected with their mode of life, and their peculiar opinions. Distress could not teach them providence, nor want industry. As animal food decreased, their vegetable productions were not increased. Their habits were stationary and unbending; never changing with the change of circumstances. How far the prospect around them, which to us appears so dreary, may have depressed and discouraged them, it is difficult to ascertain, as it is also to estimate the effect upon them of that superiority, which we have assumed and they have acknowledged. There is a principle of repulsion in ceaseless activity, operating through all their institutions, which prevents them from appreciating or adopting any other modes of life, or any other habits of thought or action, but those which have descended to them from their ancestors.

When Trump told the Marines he was speaking with that they were “here long before any of us were here,” he was not only separating them from “us,” he was subtly drawing on 19th century narratives of Indians as historical and, by continuing to exist rather than vanishing as white Americans had foretold, ahistorical.

Critiquing Trump for his use of the term “Pocahontas” is easy; it’s a clear racial slur, and many of us can unequivocally state that we’d never do such a thing. Examining the ways that he draws on broader stereotypes about the (a)historical nature of Native Americans might be much harder for many of us.

These stereotypes are fundamental to our dominant narratives of Indian dispossession, and have been spun into romantic narratives about one-with-nature, anti-capitalist Indians who were too pure for the modern world but who you can honor by purchasing a dreamcatcher. These ideas, whether framed as positive or negative, are why the New England Indian Council, when it formed in 1923, took as its motto the phrase: “I still live.”

______________________

If you’re interested in how this idea of “authenticity” plays out in later 19th century America, I highly recommend Paige Raibmon’s Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast.

 

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Chat: David Brooks’ manly virtues

Tags

Chris Bouton, Erin Bartram, gender, Jackson, masculinity, military, presidents, race, slack chat

Erin Bartram: In his weekly column, the more prominent of the two white men named David on the New York Times opinion pages wondered “where have all the real men gone?” Frustrated with the “varieties of wannabe manliness” he sees on display in the White House – the Bannonesque, the Scaramuccian, and the Trumpy – he urged us to consider his understanding of a Greek understanding of manliness instead. Be like the Greeks, he urged, which to him means be like John – Wayne, McCain, or Kelly. That, he believes, will rescue us from the “crisis of masculinity” we face today. Rarely will historians sanction the phrase “Throughout American history…” in a paper, but sometimes it feels like “Throughout American history, there has been a crisis of masculinity.” Today, we’re going to talk about how Brooks is using history to talk about gender roles, and how by doing so, he’s engaging in a long American tradition of freaking out about whether men are being the right kind of men. For once, the fact that we’re both 19th century American historians means we’ve read a lot about this.

Chris Bouton: It’s telling to me that Brooks immediately jumps to the Greeks as his exemplar of masculinity. He initially seems to idealize the Greek view of masculinity, but then complicates it. Suggesting that Greek views of masculinity had destructive elements.

Which of course, it did. The Iliad is all about honor and masculinity and its destructive force.

Then he pivots back to the US, where he sees 2 historical examples of the “magnanimous man.” George Washington and George Marshall, why those two? He never explains.

Erin: Another good Anglo name!

Magnanimity seems to be the key difference for him. If you look at his list of qualities, the one that he says is the problem is that the manly man is touchy: “He is outraged if others do not grant him the honor that is his due.” Frankly, it’s amazing he didn’t use George Washington as an example more thoroughly, or as the center of the piece.

Chris: And being magnanimous is about being generous to others, especially those below you. Brooks is writing in a frame of honor and masculinity, that there are those who have honor and those who aspire to it in some way, but fail

Erin: It sounds like the courtesy manual my students read in class, much like the one GWash copied over himself – respect thy superiors, despise not thy inferiors. A truly manly man (like a true aristocrat) just is, and doesn’t need external validation.

Chris: He’s also endorsing hierarchies of manliness and honor, but honor always relies on external validation. If honor is reputation, then it requires a societal judgment. At the top of his hierarchy are the Johns and the Georges and the thread that runs through all of them (McCain, Kelly and Washington, Marshall) is the military.

Erin: That, I think we can say, is something that is true and has been true for men and women, though the aspects of reputation/honor judged have been different.

Chris: Right they’re judged by different standards, but there is a judgment.

Erin: He’s trying to craft a definition of manliness that blends selflessness and sacrifice with the other manly virtues that are important to him. The willingness to fight, in a particular framework, is important. Would he consider MLK an ideal man? Or Father Daniel Berrigan?

Chris: Yes and as your framing question suggested, there’s nothing particularly new about it. Other than it’s been given the David Brooks gloss with crimes against the English language like “thrusting masculinity.”

How can masculinity thrust?

Erin: It can’t, that’s why it’s in crisis.

Also as a woman living in America, the crisis of masculinity is certainly thrusting itself into my space all the time

Honestly, much of my US I survey course centers around this perpetual, evolving crisis of masculinity, so Brooks’ paean to a masculine ideal of the past is familiar and frustrating. [I get that he wanted to go with Greece, but I was surprised not to see Cincinnatus in here]

Chris: I think this is a good chance to dig at the historical roots of this perpetual crisis.

Erin: As I think about how to get at those historical roots, I’m already expecting the question on the first day of my women’s history class in a few weeks, one that I always get: “So when did patriarchy…start?”

Chris: From the moment human beings attained sentience?

If we understand patriarchy as a social system of control, then from the moment those social systems/relationships began to emerge

Erin: Correct.

In terms of a colonial North American context, I think most of us think of gender order as one of the man things that informs the values of this colonial space, one that then shapes the racial system that emerges here. Whether you’re talking Edmund Morgan or Kathy Brown, you’re hard pressed to get away from the importance of particular ideas of what men deserve and expect in Anglo-Virginian society.

Chris: And what their concordant responsibilities are.

Brooks’ definition of a magnanimous man struck me as very much rooted in the American colonial/Revolutionary past. I’ll drop the whole quote in for context.

The magnanimous man has a certain style. He is a bit aloof, marked more by gravitas than familiarity. He shows perfect self-control because he has mastered his passions. He does not show his vulnerability. His relationships are not reciprocal. He is eager to grant favors but is ashamed of receiving them. His personal life can wither because he has devoted himself to disinterested public service.

Erin: He wants republican masculinity.

Chris: “Mastering passions” not reciprocal relationships, “disinterested public service.” He’s swallowed John Adams whole

Erin: Musical interlude #1

And it’s quite clear what historical ideas of masculinity he sees in the White House: Jacksonian masculinity, the liberal individual.

Chris:

Unrestrained by passion – “peacocking” as he describes it.

Erin: And “touchy,” which I took to mean: if he does the baseline decent thing in a situation, he gets pissed when you don’t give him a cookie for it.

Chris: I’m struck by this idea of “touchy” since it gets at the root of the “crisis.” So much of masculinity and honor culture depends on that public acknowledgement, and when men don’t get that acknowledgement, they’re “touchy” about it, because they measure their honor against one another. Go back to Achilles sulking in his tent.

Erin: Frankly it’s why his use of McCain in this situation is a bit of a tell. It reveals to us that when he says there should be no peacocking, he just means “not tooooooo much.”

Chris: And the problems come when the personal sense of honor doesn’t align with the public.

Right, because McCain’s vote on the health care bill was a masculine performance.

Erin: The two other Republican women – who embodied every one of the virtues he calls “manly” – just voted and got it over with.

Chris: He won, in Brooks’ eyes, honor for himself through his public behavior. In this case, McCain’s personal honor and his reputation were aligned (from Brooks’ perspective)

Erin: His column put me in mind of Amy Greenberg’s book Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. She talks about two kinds of masculinity in the mid-19th century – restrained and martial.

Chris: Yes, I’ve been thinking about Greenberg this whole time.

Erin: Brooks, like so many other men we study, seems desperate to find a way – or at least a living example – of blending the two.

Chris: Because a man should exercise self-control, but also needs to be able to kick some ass when needed. There’s a recognition that neither type of masculinity can solve the “crisis.” Restrained men can be too passive and martial men too violent.

Erin: And “his personal life can wither” because another person is supposed to take care of that anyway.

Chris: George Marshall had Mrs. Marshall to care for the children and the like.

Erin: He never says it, but there’s one thing that’s at the core of his ideal masculine world, one thing that I think he thinks is missing. The magnanimous man never takes favors (charity) and can think about public disinterested service only if one part of his life is secure. Without the economic security and credit he thinks men are due, they can never be the kind of men he wants.

Chris: To go back to the American Revolution context, he must free from dependence, he must independent.

Erin: Bingo.

Chris: Hence property owning requirements for voting and office holding. Now all of these colonial/Revolutionary men who proclaimed this ideal were in debt up to their necks…

Erin: And they were in debt even with the unpaid labor of their wives, children, and slaves.

Chris: Jefferson needed that French wine!

Erin: And when most white men can’t meet those requirements, the choice is either tell men they can’t vote even though their fathers could, or change the way one becomes eligible to vote.

I mean, I don’t actually want to read this column, but I would like to know, given what he claims as “manly” here, what is left for women? I’m not sure he actually even cares that much, so intent is his focus on men.

Chris: And that’s also historically fitting.

Erin: Defining white masculinity against a variety of dependents.

Chris: Exactly.

And it’s no wonder that masculinity is always in crisis when you look at the arguments and assumptions underlying it.

Erin: It also reminds us of the ways that Obama’s masculinity was constantly questioned. His fashion sense? Effete. His refusal to get angry? Submissive. His mustard choices? Elitist and possibly gay.

Chris: Out of all the figures that Brooks cites, Obama’s masculinity came closest to his definition. In terms of his behavior in office, I mean.

Erin: Absolutely, though I think few who read Brooks and agreed with him would acknowledge that.

He didn’t even let his private life wither away! He could do it all!

Chris: And that’s why his fashion sense is effete, his lack of anger meant he was submissive etc. You can’t be more masculine/honorable, he’s from a historically dependent and marginalized group.

Erin: I’m thinking of François Furstenberg on autonomy and Manisha Sinha’s great piece on reading the caning of Charles Sumner in the context of racialized masculinity. IIRC, she argues that [Preston] Brooks’ caning of Sumner, rather than challenging him to a duel, was essentially to communicate “If you’re going to associate yourself with enslaved people, I’m going to treat you like one”

Chris: Brooks did not treat Sumner like an equal.

Erin: Musical Interlude #2

And that’s the thing [David] Brooks consciously or less consciously avoids: that a key part of American ideas of masculinity involves hierarchy and dominance and differentiation from those not capable of full independence.

Chris: Yes, these ideals of masculinity that he’s mourning and celebrating all rely on notions of inequality.

Erin: Without saying as much, by defining manliness this way, and only including white men as examples, he communicates as much.

Chris: His examples of masculinity tell us everything we need to know. Greeks, the Georges, and Johns.

Erin: Not, as we saw, the Hillarys, the Elizabeths, the Kamalas.

Chris: The Lisas and the Susans.

Erin: They’ve got those characteristics in spades, but sorry, David Brooks has reserved them as “manly virtues.” At best, a woman displaying them remains invisible. At worst, she’s pilloried.

Chris: Brooks’ work is so rooted in this veneration of Western Civilization and its traditional masculine heroes. It’s like he was born a century too late. Or should’ve been teaching Solon in the Classics Department at Harvard in 1840.

Erin: I believe those are the qualifications listed when applying to be a columnist on the NYT opinion pages. Seriously, we’re pretty close to explicit faculty psychology with this column.

Chris: Or your ability to turn conversations with cab/Uber drivers into sweeping generalizations about globalization. That’s right I’m coming for you Thomas Friedman and your the world is flat BS.

Erin: Can’t A Man Get A Manly Sandwich Anymore?: The Collected Columns of David Brooks

Chris: I feel like we missed one other key piece of the column. David Brooks wrote the words “it’s man-craving all the way down” and I’m pretty sure he has no idea the other connotations that phrase could take.

Erin: I mean, he uses the term “man-crush” as well, which makes me wonder how he’d process 19th century male friendships.

Chris: To turn away from the joke, his unconscious use of language reveals the hetero-normativity of his understandings of masculinity. After all, he ignores the Greek understanding of masculinity which involved same-sex relationships and was intimately tied up in these ideas of honor. Why does Achilles go back into battle? Because Patroclus dies.

Erin: And Trump’s adoration for Putin is marked as something inappropriate, stemming from Trump’s own masculinity issues.

Give me a primary source of a dude talking about manliness and I can have a fruitful discussion with any group of students.

Chris: Seriously, look how long we’ve talking about it.

Erin: I guess, David, we’ll call it a draw: you get to keep having your column, and we get to keep thinking it’s wrong.

Trump’s Boundless Historical Arrogance

Tags

Chris Bouton, civil war, Jackson

In recent posts, I’ve written about President Trump’s admiration of Andrew Jackson and how there isn’t any debate over the cause of the Civil War. In an interview with the Washington Examiner ‘s Salena Zito, Trump highlights his shocking level of arrogance and ignorance over both issues.

TRUMP: [Jackson] was a swashbuckler. But when his wife died, did you know he visited her grave everyday? I visited her grave actually because I was in Tennessee.

ZITO: That’s right. You were in Tennessee.

TRUMP: And it was amazing. The people of Tennessee are amazing people. They love Andrew Jackson. They love Andrew Jackson in Tennessee.

ZITO: He’s fascinating.

TRUMP: I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, “There’s no reason for this.” People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War — if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?

First, Trump shows that he knows little about Andrew Jackson. He described Jackson as a “swashbuckler,” a term used to describe brave and noble men (they’re always men) defending some higher principle or ideal. What did ideals did Jackson strive to protect? He committed genocide against Native Americans, held African-Americans in bondage, imprisoned government officials who opposed him, and ignored the judiciary when it suited him. Trump further praised Jackson’s character by claiming that “He was a very tough person, but had a big heart.” Jackson’s heart bore shrapnel from an 1806 duel in which he murdered a man who accused him of reneging on a bet and insulting his wife, Rachel. Historians have not reached a conclusion on the number of duels that Jackson engaged in, but estimates range from five to over one hundred. So, yes, let’s admire the “swashbuckler” who organized a genocide of Native Americans and shot a man over horse racing.

While Trump claims that Jackson was “angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War”, Jackson devoted his life and presidency to protecting and perpetuating slavery. I’m also going to be generous and assume that Trump did not mean that Jackson literally witnessed the Civil War since he had been dead for sixteen years at that point, but rather the political environment that led to the war. Jackson’s wars and forced deportations of Native Americans opened up vast new lands for the expansion of slavery. During his presidency, Jackson allowed Southern postmasters to suppress or destroy abolitionist literature in the South. Jackson himself owned one hundred fifty enslaved African-Americans at his death. While his slaves provided his wealth, Jackson’s “big heart” did not extend to granting them freedom or allowing them the fruits of their labor. Jackson would no doubt have been upset at the betrayal of Hannah, his wife’s “personal companion” who fled to freedom once the Civil War broke out.

Dividing up the spoils of the Cherokee Nation, thanks to Jackson’s “ideals”

Then we get to the crux of Trump’s argument which demonstrates both his profound arrogance and ignorance. Whenever Trump says “people don’t realize” or “a lot of people don’t know,” he’s putting his own obliviousness on full display. We’ve seen it time and time again with his comments on health care, North Korea, NAFTA, and NATO. Trump does not understand that the world exists outside of his own personal experience. As one of the hosts of the Pod Save America podcast recently put it, he’s our first president without object permanence. He never asked the question why was there a Civil War, so no one has ever asked that question. The instructors of every middle, high school, and college level American history survey would beg to differ. Nearly every student wonders why America had a Civil War.

Even more arrogantly, Trump implied that Jackson or some other strong leader,  like himself, could have avoided the Civil War. As he put it, “There was no reason” for Americans to go to war and he wondered “why could that one not have been worked out?” Not every issue can be resolved through negotiation, especially not one as morally, economically, and politically complicated as the enslavement of nearly four million African-Americans by 1860. The moral stain of slavery, perpetuated by those who claimed to uphold the principle of “All men are created equal” while holding other human beings in bondage, was not as simple as a real estate transaction. Or allegations of systemic racism in housing developments. Or a lawsuit settling fraud claims against a bogus university. Or resolving four corporate bankruptcies. Money and a team of lawyers couldn’t undo the past. Generations of enslavement and the denial of basic human rights can’t be bargained over a round of golf and some posturing on television.

It’s the height of historical arrogance and ignorance to suggest otherwise.

The Trouble with Andrew Jackson

Tags

Chris Bouton, corruption, Jackson, political parties

Since assuming the presidency, Donald Trump and his administration have embraced comparisons between Trump and Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. According to popular mythology, Jackson won election in 1828 on the backs of the “common man” and struck a blow against cultural and political elites (any of this rhetoric sound familiar?). He founded the Democratic Party and ushered in a new era of “Jacksonian Democracy.” Trump, through a spokesman, has described Jackson as “an amazing figure in American history—very unique in so many ways.” Steve Bannon described Trump’s inaugural address as “Jacksonian” in striking a populist and patriotic tone. Currently, a portrait of Jackson hangs in the Oval Office. For historians, this comparison with Jackson’s presidency is troubling. During his life, Jackson displayed a contempt for the rule of law, ushered in a new era of corruption in the Federal government, forcibly removed Native Americans from their lands, crashed the American economy, and redefined political rights along racial lines.

Throughout his life, Jackson disregarded the law when he saw fit. After the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson exceeded his military authority by declaring martial law across the entire city. In March 1815, he arrested a Louisiana legislator for criticizing Jackson’s dictatorial behavior. When presented with a writ of habeas corpus, signed by a Federal Court judge, Jackson had the judge thrown in jail as well. Even though the War of 1812 had ended, Jackson executed six militiamen for attempting to leave New Orleans before their enlistments had expired. Jackson eventually released the legislator and the judge from jail, but demonstrated his contempt for challenges to his power.

A political cartoon depicting Jackson’s spoils system. Here Jackson is the devil pulling the strings of his followers. 

A few years later during the First Seminole War, Jackson exceeded the authority given to him by President Monroe. Monroe had wanted Jackson to attack the Seminoles and push them back from territory in Georgia. Instead, Jackson took it upon himself to seize the whole of Florida from the Spanish. He burned houses and crops and executed two British citizens who had aided the Seminole Indians. Jackson’s actions sparked an international incident by taking territory that belonged to a foreign power without a declaration of war. The Spanish eventually sold Florida to the United States rather than engage in a costly war. The conquest, coupled with his actions in defeating the British in New Orleans, turned Jackson into a national hero among those who wanted to expand the size of the United States.

While president, Jackson sought to open up more land for his white supporters to settle on. How did he accomplish this? By taking land from Native Americans. In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, granting Jackson the power to buy land from Native Americans in exchange for territory further west. These treaties were not negotiations between equals. U.S. representatives compelled reluctant natives to sign agreements or struck deals with a small number of tribesmen and claimed that they applied to entire tribes. These actions lead to the forcible removal of Native Americans from the southeast and permitted the expansion of slavery. The culmination of Jackson’s efforts occurred in 1838 with the infamous Trail of Tears. This forced relocation of the Cherokee people from their historical homeland to lands further west resulted in the deaths of at least 4,000 of the approximately 15,000 Cherokee.

A political cartoon depicting the forcible relocation of the Cherokee. The Cherokee man is Gulliver from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as the Americans try to pull him apart for their own needs. 

Before the era of “Jacksonian Democracy,” men needed to own a certain amount of property in order to vote. “Jacksonian Democracy” saw the redefinition of voting rights along racial rather than class boundaries. The expansion of political rights for white men came at the expense of everyone else.  Women, of all classes and races, remained unable to vote. Native Americans had little political voice to stop the Jackson administration from removing them from their lands. As states rewrote their constitutions to expand the right to vote to include all white men, they made sure to exclude African-Americans, who in states like Pennsylvania could vote. The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1838 expanded the franchise to include all whites while taking it away from African-Americans. “Jacksonian Democracy” in other words, meant democracy for white men and no one else.

After his inauguration, Jackson fired long serving government employees and replaced them with his own supporters. Jackson and his adherents claimed that they had opened up the government to the common man and prevented corruption by kicking out career civil servants. In fact, the patronage system made party loyalty and access to wealth, rather than competence, the best qualifications for higher office.

Jackson supported laissez-faire economics—the belief that the government should not interfere or attempt to regulate the economy. This belief extended as far as the national banking system. Jackson, who believed that banks swindled the common man out of their money, attacked and destroyed the Second Bank of the United States. In 1833, Jackson withdrew Federal deposits from the bank, leaving its money lending operations to state and local banks. In the absence of a well-regulated central bank, reckless banking practices abounded. The issue came to a head in 1836 when Jackson demanded that people buy government lands in silver or gold currency. His executive order triggered an economic panic when banks couldn’t come up with enough hard currency. The resulting Panic of 1837 crippled the American economy for years.

Once again, the Trump administration has embraced history in a particularly troubling way. Andrew Jackson used his populist rhetoric to justify corruption, disrespect for the law, and promote white nationalist policies. Despite the uninformed ramblings of our president, there’s nothing “amazing” about Andrew Jackson at all.