“'[T]he man on horseback,' the despot who could ride reactionary populist energies to power, had been a specter in American politics since at least as early as the presidency of Andrew Jackson in the 1830s." Sarah Churchill, American Fascism: It Has Happened Here NYBooks 06/22/2020
Churchill's article is dated at least a day to early to have been referring to this incident: Rebecca Shabad, Protesters in D.C.'s Lafayette Square try to topple Andrew Jackson statue NBC News 06/23/2020.
I don't want to get too deep in the weeds of statue-toppling, at least not in this post, although I am fascinated by it. Arguing over statues is one of many ways that current political values as well as historical memory is formed. But the current nationwide uprising has focused on police accountability. And concessions from authorities about statues - or even direct action to remove them - don't get directly to the complicated problem in reinventing policing and restoring the rule of law to police departments.
Still, anyone who's occasionally checked in with this blog for a while may recall that the original version of this blog was called "Old Hickory's Weblog," Old Hickory being the fond nickname Andrew Jackson's followers had for him. It was my own effort at making a political narrative around the image of the President who, along with Thomas Jefferson, is historically regarded as a co-founder of today's real existing Democratic Party.
After Trump, following Steve Bannon's twisted propaganda notions, adopted Andrew Jackson as a mascot, it effectively elevating him to a new white supremacy symbol for Trump's devoted followers. He claimed to view Jackson as his hero. Without actual journalistic or documentary sourcing, I will say with a very high level of confidence that Bunker Boy not only does not regard Jackson as his hero, but he has no clue about what happened in Jackson's life or Presidency. The Battle of New Orleans? The fight over the Bank of the United States? The Nullification Controversy? Bunker Boy has no idea about any of those things.
I went into some detail at the time about how historically bizarre it was for Bunker Boy to adopt Old Hickory as a mascot: Donald Trump as Andrew Jackson? Not even in an alternative universe! 03/16/2017.
I took up that theme again a few weeks later in Trump puts Andrew Jackson back in the news 05/03/2017.
Since I saw the story about the attempted Jackson statue-toppling, though, I've kind of regretted changed the blog name. Because right now people might be checking this blog out and posting nasty comments about it on Twitter. Oh, well, I'll just have to live without that!
Since there is no shortage of posts I've done on Jackson, including two linked above, so I won't try to recap them here. The pre-2019 posts of this blog are at two separate Web address. Version 1 still has the Old Hickory's Weblog title. Version 2 has the Contradicciones title although I didn't actually change the name until 2017.
I picked the name "Contradicciones" as a new label because it doesn't include the name of any actual person whose symbolic meaning may someday come into disrepute. It has some Hegelian vibes, and I'm fine with that. Maybe I'll do a review here sometime of Klaus Vieweg's new philosophical biography, Hegel: Der Philosoph der Freiheit and indulge in some polemics against people like Karl Popper who tried to stigmatize Hegel as some sort of reactionary or totalitarian.
By the way, "Contradicciones" is the Spanish word for "contradictions," not some kind of Internet-ish alternative spelling of the English word.
There's a continuity, because one of the fascinating things about Jackson's historical and political heritage is that it is in some ways strikingly contradictory. He was a slaveowner who took a firm stand against John Calhoun's dry run of secession in the Nullification Controversy. He was a wealthy man who led a political movement that fought the power of concentrated wealth and developed a proto-populist political language. In other words, the political directions he chose were not the ones that his narrow self-interest might have suggested.
I don't think you will find anything I've written in the blog about Jackson's Indian Removal Act that defends it. But even though there was explicit opposition to that Act in Congress, meaning opposing it cannot be dismissed as anachronism, i.e., imposing today's standards on an earlier time, American liberals and leftists today would find it awkward to adopt the opposition arguments uncritically. One of them was that since some of the Indians to be displaced owned black slaves, not removing them would help shore up the institution of slavery.
At the time I started the blog in 2003, I had been actively taking part in an Internet discussion group looked at how the heritage of the civil rights movement was playing out in the South, including the persistence of blatant white supremacy. I had also followed closely the debate over the Mississippi state flag, when a statewide referendum voted to retain the flag that includes the Confederate battle flag as part of its design. So I was very focused on refuting neo-Confederate ideology at the time. And every April since 2004, I've posted daily items as a counter-celebration of Confederate "Heritage" Month, focusing on both historical events and ideological trends in the context of debunking neo-Confederate white supremacist ideology.
The "Jacksonian" narrative I was using has never translated into sympathy for the Confederacy or neo-Confederate ideological nonsense.
Churchill's article quoted at the top of this post is a really good one about the American fascist movement in the 1930s. (I might quibble with a couple of other minor points, but not right now.)
Sam Seder's Majority Report brought up the Jackson statue on Tuesday and thought it was a great idea to take them down. Even the statue of Jackson in Jackson Square in New Orleans, which commemorates Jackson's victory over the British (imperialists!) in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. 6/23 Those Who Know Don’t Say (somewhere after 50:00 in this video).
The story about protesters trying to pull down the Andrew Jackson statue in Lafayette Park is a sad reminder of what I mean when I say the Republicans are just more clever at evoking historical imagery than the Dems. If there is an evil spirit of Trumpism, it's the spirit of John Calhoun, not of his arch-enemy Andrew Jackson. But Bunker Boy has claimed that Jackson symbolism for himself.
I'm also nearly convinced that their probably is some kind of 150-year rule by which anything earlier than that nobody but academics and history geeks are actually going to know anything about. But that's another matter.
Here are a few Twitter early reactions to the attempted Jackson statue toppling.
The Lafayette Square statue of Andrew Jackson was built, in part, by an enslaved man named Philip Reid.— Geoff Bennett (@GeoffRBennett) June 23, 2020
Records show that Reid was "purchased" for $1,200 "when he was quite a youth...because of his evident talent."
There are no known images of him.https://t.co/Ladokw0fBz
Andrew Jackson was a racist slave owner responsible for the Trail of Tears, the forced migration of 60,000 Native Americans that killed 4,000 through exposure, disease and starvation. If I was near Lafayette Park tonight, I would have joined the effort to pull down his statue.— Jon Cooper 🇺🇸 (@joncoopertweets) June 23, 2020
Donald Trump is threatening protesters with 10 years in federal prison for defacing a statue of prominent racist Andrew Jackson.— Max Burns (@themaxburns) June 23, 2020
Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort got 7 years for tax fraud, betraying his country, and lying to the FBI.
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