Jackson+and+the+West



media type="custom" key="11175690" Our next unit deals with rise of mass democracy in the United States as the genteel “classical republicanism” of Jeffersonian democracy yielded to an impetuous, impatient, and vibrant Jacksonian democracy of political parties, naked self-interest, and territorial expansion. The “common man” (or at least the “common” white men) came to the fore as the United States sought to fulfill its “manifest destiny” in achieving the American republic from “sea to shining sea.” Along with traditional American folk music these images mostly come from the Hudson River School of painting where mid-19th century painters sought to interpret the exciting new influence of Romanticism to the American landscape and “the West.” They are very much creatures of their time and place: Jacksonian America.

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media type="custom" key="11178368" The “better sort of folk” had ruled in America during the colonial era, and then they saw their hold shaken during the American Revolution when plain farmers and artisans began to participate more in political affairs in the context of the “spirit of ’76.” Even after the Revolution and through the “Virginia dynasty” of the first five presidents, the traditional elites wrote letters to one another and chose who would be the next leaders, even if they claimed to lead in the name of the “people.” But by the 1820s property requirements for voting were dropping precipitously – or even going away, giving way to universal suffrage for white males – a revolutionary development, the beginnings of mass democracy. When the common man could vote and their numbers mattered, they chose Andrew Jackson as their hero and figure-head. The traditional elites of America (usually well-educated and from the established east) were not always impressed with Jackson, but they did not have the votes. Who were these “common people” (often from the newly important pioneer west) who saw themselves in Andrew Jackson? Who were “Jackson’s people”?

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media type="custom" key="11178372" At the end of the Napoleonic Wars after 1815 Henry Clay claimed to have studied the political economy of his times and declared that the future belonged to countries that followed Great Britain’s lead with a powerful banking system that funded manufacturers. This study, coupled with grave American problems of internal transportation and lack of credit and money during the War of 1812, persuaded him to part ways with orthodox Jeffersonians in the Democratic Republican Party and politic for a new “American System.” As fellow congressman (and ex-“war hawk”) John Calhoun of South Carolina explained it, “Let us conquer space” and “bind together” our Union by “internal improvements” that would create a single national market economy, allow military forces to move from place to place in defense of the country, and facilitate quick and efficient communication that would allow for a more cohesive national politics. From a loose collection of regions geographically isolated from each other, the “American System” would help create what would, in effect, be new: one country. It would help change the “united States” into the “United States.” After the War of 1812, that was the plan.

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media type="custom" key="11178378" The “American System” at its heart was straightforward: allow the federal government, through taxes collected by tariffs and other duties, to take money from the people (who are in the vast majority small farmers) and give it to the Second Bank of the United States where it could be made available to business people who could build roads and canals and create primitive mills and other infrastructure for manufacturers. It was government “priming the pump” for the early stages of the “industrial revolution,” and this wrenching economic change in the nature of work had profound implications for the way Americans lived and worked. The products available to consumers, the price of food and clothing – advances in transportation and in the production of goods would greatly change American society, in ways perhaps good and bad.

//"We are greatly and rapidly--[I] was about to say fearfully--growing. This...is our pride and danger, our weakness and strength...Let us then bind the Republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals. Let us conquer space.”// -- John Calhoun

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media type="custom" key="11178414" The shift from an agricultural to an industrial society (the “industrial revolution”) was a profound and wrenching change for “traditional” cultures such as the America of 1818. This new mode of living and working offered direct and tangible benefits: more and cheaper consumer goods, a “smaller” world and the ability to move around, etc. But economists were only beginning to understand the “boom” and “bust” cycle of dynamic capital, and 1819 was the first “panic” in the post-American System world brought about by Henry Clay, John Calhoun and other “National Republicans.” There would be hell to pay as voters (mostly at the state level, at first) sought to punish the “evil banks” and their supporters, as orthodox Jeffersonians claimed “I told ya so!” But the will of the people came into contact with that unmovable force, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. Hamilton might be long dead and buried, but his ghost lived on in the figure of John Marshall whose rulings supported the primacy of contract and the power of the federal government against the democratic will of outraged majorities at the state level seeking to undo the “American System” through the ballot box. Jefferson would continue to rue the “twistifications” of Marshall and his undemocratic judicial authority. Marshall, for his part, might remind Jefferson about the rights of the minority and explain the United States was a nation of laws, not men.

media type="custom" key="11178610" Before we launch into the 19th century "Romantic" art form, let's look at what is just about behind us: the "Classical" era of the late 18th century. It is smooth as silk and as elegant as Monticello in its clean straight lines and seemingly natural ease. It engages; it is accessible. This piece of music by Haydn to me symbolizes that time of history when Washington was inaugurated and Mozart in his prime. But is all this "naturalness" really a bit artificial? Have we rubbed out the raw edges and sheer spontaneous passion out of life with such refined elegance? Might there be a reaction building that seeks extreme states of mind and intense experience of the rawness of life? Storm and stress.... romanticism?!?

media type="custom" key="11178438" It is claimed that Ludwig van Beethoven ushered in the end of Franz Joseph Haydn’s era of classical ease and aristocratic complacency. Haydn and Mozart would have recognized Beethoven’s raw and disturbing genius as “music” – but they would have decried it as “ugly music.” They would have admitted Beethoven’s music had power, but it was not pleasant to listen to – and the classical wanted to be pleasant and beautiful. But the classical era was maxed out. The time was ripe for war on the aristocratical 18th century. The aristocrats would never quite feel so secure in power after the Terror of the French Revolution had separated so many rich heads from so many rich necks, and the 19th century would be the era of the Romantic. Beethoven would not serve as a sort of “kept composer” for some duke or king somewhere, as did Haydn and Mozart. No, Beethoven would write music for large audiences and for money from adoring audiences – the musician as “rock star” or godlike artistic “genius.” This was a new. It was a new age and a new century, and it had a new “feel.” This is Beethoven – listen to the "Kreutzer Sonata" and understand.

media type="custom" key="11178442" Composer Robert Schumann was the son of a bookseller and grew up in a household oriented towards books and literature. Hence, we should not be surprised to see him write an overture to Lord Byron’s “Manfred.” This play is almost the perfect incarnation of the Romantic ideal: a doomed rebel on a lonely cliff in the Alps prepared to be damned for having committed some horrible, unnamed transgression. The clouds swirl around our anti-hero Manfred, the demons arrive to drag him down to hell, he spits defiance in their teeth, and then finally succumbs to his doom. "Old man! 't is not so difficult to die," Manfred proclaims to a bystander worried by Manfred's fate. Schumann’s music provides the perfect accompaniment to Byron’s dark brooding masterpiece.

media type="custom" key="11178392" The eminent American historian Forrest McDonald asserted the following: "Programmed into the human soul is a preference for the near and familiar and a suspicion of the remote and abstract.” Is this true? Is the Jeffersonian resistance to far away “elites” in government (London, Washington D.C.) a fundamental aspect of what it means to be “American”? Should society, as Jefferson envisioned it, be a local affair where neighbors should enjoy equality and freedom from banks, constraints, and government – to the extent practicable? Or should we follow Hamilton’s vision of one powerful national culture, dynamic economies of scale, and efficiency – even at the expense of individual freedom and diversity? Bart’s Books up in Ojai? Or Barnes and Noble? Simones or Latte 101? Or Starbucks? The local farmers’ market? Or Ralph’s or Von’s supermarket? Do you prefer the periphery? Or the center?

media type="custom" key="11178408" Perhaps when it comes to freedom of speech and electoral politics, Jefferson has triumphed over Hamilton. But when it comes to economic organization and cultural expression, one could argue that Hamilton has won out and diversity and local culture has lost out. In traveling through contemporary America on the freeway one knows from the shiny large new Walmart’s sign that one has left one city and entered: every city has a Walmart. Actors and news reporters from the south take classes to lose their regional accents, so as to blend in with the mainstream American English that reigns in our large-scale consumer culture. Their different dialect annoys our ears, after all. Does it bother you that everyone seems to speak the same way, shop in the same stores, watch the same shows, and speak the same gossip? The massive corporations in a mass culture where the powerful take advantage of the weak, and income inequality is on the rise as never before? Would Jefferson be ashamed to see what we have done with the country he worked so hard to found?

media type="custom" key="11257248" This lecture deals briefly with the biography and character of Andrew Jackson, followed by his rise to political power and the presidency, the Bank Wars, the Nullification Crisis, and the Trail of Tears. It also explains the larger changes around mass democracy that accompanied Jacksonian Democracy in terms of the "spoils system," nominating conventions, professional politicians, etc.

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media type="custom" key="11256042" This lecture deals with the final divorce between orthodox Jeffersonian Republicans and the National Republicans that resulted from the Bank Wars. It deals with the ideology and economics and politics of the Whig Party, and contrasts it with the ethos of the new Democratic Party - all sat firmly in the larger context of the change from Classical Republicanism to democracy with universal white male suffrage.

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media type="custom" key="11178426" The horror of the Irish potato famine saw the flight of millions of "famine Irish" towards the United States, but this was only one aspect of the explosion of 19th century Europeans onto the world stage as peace and better health standards in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars meant exploding European populations. But this presentation focuses on the Germans fleeing the Revolution of 1848 and the Irish fleeing famine in the decades post-1845. America has always struggled to assimilate/acculturate immigrant populations in an act which always brings with it tension, and the observant viewer will not fail to make connections between the Irish immigrants of the mid-19th century and the Mexican and Central American immigrants of our present time. America has always seen tension between respecting and welcoming diversity, and insisting on certain rules and norms in the name of national unity.

media type="custom" key="11178450" We talked extensively in class about Ralph Waldo Emerson serving not only as a scholar and philosopher in his own right but as patriarch of the “Transcendentalist” movement and touchstone for other (usually younger) thinkers. Within a few miles of Concord, MA these handful of loosely associated writers almost invented “American literature.” In fact, Emerson called for Americans to throw off the shackles of deadening European intellectual traditions imitated by “dead” American institutions like his own alma mater, Harvard University. Emerson called for a new literature for a new country – experimentation, individualism, creativity, passion – “mind on fire,” as the picture of the volcano in Emerson’s office incarnated. Almost literally, Walt Whitman answered this call for a new national poet and poetry. //“I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil,”// Walt Whitman explained.

media type="custom" key="11178456" This lecture explains the important influence of Emerson on Whitman, and his novel poetic style declaring his subject to be no less than America and himself its poet: free verse, etc. This is the first example we will see of a new, uniquely "American" style of imaginative literature.

media type="custom" key="11178462" Walt Whitman’s most famous work is his “Leaves of Grass.” He came out with multiple versions over several decades, although the main idea remains unchanged. This long and meandering poem of America contains much of his best poetry, and it is the best place to get a view of what the man is all about – America itself as a sort of poem, a metaphor for democratic North America in the 1850s as both cultural and physical geography.

media type="custom" key="11178464" There is perhaps no single better way to teach what “transcendentalism” means than to read closely Walt Whitman’s poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” The poem deals with being in a city – on a ferry with others, traveling from Brooklyn to Manhattan, to be exact – and coming into connection with others. But the absurd supposition that Whitman makes helps the reader “transcend” the now to touch the past – to show how time matters not – that there is no yesterday, no tomorrow – only the eternal now. As Henry David Thoreau put it: “Time is but the stream I go fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It's thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”

media type="custom" key="11178468" The era of the “American Renaissance” – or American “Romanticism – spanned from roughly the mid-1840s to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. It was a colorful time that saw the rise of the passion for reform, experimentation, and change. As Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed, ““…though the life of the Reformer may seem rugged and arduous, it were hard to say that any other was worth living at all… Not to have been a reformer is not to have truly lived.” From the Mormons to the Transcendentalists to the Oneidans and Shakers and Abolitionists, many Americans had concluded that several decades after its birth the American Republic was not living up to its promise. Coming primarily from the religious passion emanating from the Second Great Awakening, reformers sought to make Puritan John Winthrop’s call for America to be the “shining city on a hill” more a reality than it was in the middle of the 19th century. Whether they were “stay iners” or “come outers,” they had caught the era’s passion for reform. Emerson asked, “What is Man born for, but to be a Reformer, a Remaker of what man has made, a renouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?” The 1840s was only one of what would be many eras in American history where everyone seems crazy for change and experimentation – where one wants to shake off the dust of tradition and the past, embracing the experimental and the new. (Were the 1760s and 70s an era of reform and change? The 1930s?) And the 1960s for example, could be looked at as the 1840s recycled with old wine in new bottles, as history repeats itself again and again.

media type="custom" key="11178472" Walt Whitman’s poetry was often frankly and unapologetically sexual; and in his own time it was decried as "obscene," if it was noticed at all. The attitude in 1856 America towards sex was extremely conservative, and critics of that time probably would have said something like this to Whitman: “It is bad enough we have to engage in the sexual act to beget children, but do you have to TALK ABOUT IT OUT LOUD, too? And in poetry?!?” Whitman probably would have responded that if there was anything obscene in his poetry, it was brought there by readers, not by him. Whitman saw sex to be as healthy and natural as praying or pooping. He had no apologies for his poetry. The authorities for decades banned Whitman’s poetry as pornographic and obscene before they put in schools and museums for study and appreciation.

media type="custom" key="11178476" Henry David Thoreau famously asserted, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation." If this assertion is largely true, then one has almost to despair for our species. Are you "happy"? Do you derive joy from life on a daily basis? Is being "dutiful" and "following the rules of society" working for you? Have you never really even asked these questions of yourself? Why not?

media type="custom" key="17199304" Starting in 2002 for the discussions revolving around the “Reading” chapter in Thoreau’s Walden, Mr. Geib made his annual adventure to the local Von’s grocery store to see what books and magazines were sold there. While at the 6040 Telegraph Rd. Von’s in Ventura, California, Mr. Geib would surreptitiously take out his camera and start shooting pictures of what was for sale. It seems clear why Von’s would choose certain books and magazines to sell and not others: they sold what shoppers would buy. But what does the offering of literature at this Von’s say about us as a country? About our literary diet? Our spiritual lives? It would seem we Americans are heavy into physical looks (“lose weight!”), celebrity-gossip, video games, and murder mystery and romance novels. Thoreau claims that a diet of classic literature is imperative to a healthy and happy spiritual life? Is this true? It would seem we Americans tend more towards “entertainment.” In your opinion, is there anything wrong with this? What is your opinion about Thoreau’s “Reading” chapter?

media type="custom" key="11178496" An alternative take on Thoreau’s perhaps elitist view of what is happiness, this “suckumentary” sets one to reflecting on stereotypes of the idea of “failure” and “success.” Food for thought: instead of aiming for something as grandiose as “fulfillment” or “self-actualization,” maybe we should set our sights much lower. Ie. Happiness means: a new skateboard trick and a minor thrill.

media type="custom" key="11178478" The progress of the American Republic to experience its “manifest destiny” to expand physically from “sea to shining sea” came to fruition in the mid-19th century as the United States continued its role in either buying or seizing territory to the west. In fact, the “West” had always held a special meaning in the American mind – and continues to do so to this day. As much a state of mind as a physical locale, the West in American history had meant the frontier spirit -- democracy, individualism, freedom -- a breaking down of tradition and convention. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner even claimed that one found the most “American of Americans” on the frontier. Recent academics, however, have emphasized more the violence, racism, illiteracy, and ill health on the frontier. They have also reminded triumphant Americans of the cost by Native Americans, African Americans, and Mexicans for this dramatic westward expansion in this Age of Andrew Jackson (1825-1850). What remains beyond dispute, nevertheless, is the juggernaut of a rapidly growing United States of America overcoming any obstacle to expand towards the Pacific Ocean.

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media type="custom" key="11178482" “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!” exclaimed Porfirio Díaz famously. Anti-Americanism is as common as tortillas or Catholicism in Mexican culture and politics. It is not hard to see why: Mexicans never lose sight of the fact that the hated “yanquis” stole half their country in the middle of the 19th century, as they see it. Most Americans, on the other hand, barely even know their country fought a war with their southern neighbor. For many Mexicans, foreign affairs IS the United States, the giant to the north. For many Americans, even those living in a city like San Diego near the border, foreign affairs means looking east to Asia or west to Europe – Americans don’t naturally look south (or north, for that matter). But perhaps that is changing as Latin America changes the demographic completion of the United States with massive immigration over the past two decades. Maybe America will become more integrated with those nations and cultures to the south?

media type="custom" key="11257710" This lecture treats with the character of former slave Frederick Douglass and his narrative of his own life, and then continues on to examine the context of American slavery in the early republic. We look at slave families, forms of slave rebellion, the Underground Railroad. the burgeoning abolition movement, and the character of William Lloyd Garrison. All of this we look at through the lens of Douglass as he describes his life in Maryland and flight to freedom in the north.

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media type="custom" key="11178486" This “original sin” of American democracy, slavery, was present from the earliest days of our republic. Slavery was there in the “3/5ths compromise” of “persons held to service” in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. In effect, what the Founding Fathers said was this: slavery was too explosive to deal with at the moment, so let’s put off the question for future generations. They hoped slavery would die “a natural death” in the “fullness of time.” It did not. In fact, slavery grew in power and reach. It was slavery which prompted southern legislators to take such concern at the Tallmadge Amendment which prompted the Missouri crisis in 1820 and eventual “Missouri Compromise.” It was slavery which prompted the southern agriculturalist to take such offense at internal improvements and tariffs, resulting in the South Carolina (“Tariff of Abominations”) crisis during Jackson’s Administration and resulting compromise. “If they Congress can lay these tariffs and internal improvements, they can free every slave in the country,” John Calhoun and others southerners could see clearly. It was slavery which made the annexation of Texas such a tricky feat in 1845, and it was slavery which many northerners saw behind the evil of the Mexican War that started in 1846. And it was slavery and the question of California entering the Union which prompted the Crisis of 1850. Whig politico Henry Clay (“the Great Compromiser”) might have gotten a major assist from Democrat Stephen Douglass (“the Little Giant”), but the days of compromise in American politics were rapidly coming to an end. What was the rock that would dash to pieces the national political party system and bring secession and bloody civil war? It is simple: the question of slavery in the territories. The Wilmot Proviso? The “Calhoun Doctrine”? Extend the 36°30′ line all the way to the Pacific Ocean? Or “popular sovereignty”?

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