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The Rise of Andrew Jackson - Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics (Hardcover)
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The Rise of Andrew Jackson - Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics (Hardcover)
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The Rise of Andrew Jackson recounts our seventh president's
unlikely ascent to the highest office in the land. Born poor in
what became the border region between North and South Carolina,
Jackson's sole claim on the public's affections derived from his
victory in a thirty-minute battle in early 1815 on the banks of the
Mississippi River. A disputatious, often cruel man, he did not seem
cut out for any public office, let alone the highest in the land.
Yet he acquired acolytes-operatives, handlers, editors,
politicians-who for more than a decade labored to make him the
President of the United States, and who finally succeeded in 1828.
The acclaimed historians David and Jeanne Heidler are the first to
examine Jackson's rise by looking primarily at the men (and they
were all men) who made it possible, among them future president
Martin van Buren, the Karl Rove of his day; Sam Houston, later a
leader of the Texas Revolution; and John Overton, Jackson's onetime
roommate and romantic rival. They and other of Jackson's supporters
published quaint stories of kindness, such as the rescue of the
Indian baby Lyncoya. They made him the friend of debtors (he
privately dismissed them as deadbeats) and the advocate for low
tariffs or high tariffs (he had no opinion on the matter). They
styled him the ideological heir of Thomas Jefferson, though he had
openly opposed President Jefferson, and the Sage of Monticello
himself had been openly dismayed by Jackson's popularity. The
Heidlers have pored over the sources from the era-newspaper
accounts, private correspondence, memoirs, and more-to tell a story
of rude encampments on frontier campaigns and of countless torch
lit gatherings where boisterous men munched barbecue, swigged
whiskey, and squinted at speakers standing on tree stumps. Theirs
is a tale of ink-stained editors in cluttered newspaper offices
churning out partisan copy and of men pondering deals and pledges
in the smoke-filled rooms of hotels and meeting halls. The Rise of
Andrew Jackson is, in sum, an eye-opening account of the first
instance of deliberate image-building and myth-making in American
history-of nothing less than the birth of modern politics.
Eventually, Jackson's supporters would be called Jacksonian
Democrats and their movement would be labeled Jacksonian Democracy,
giving the impression that it arose from an ethos espoused by the
man himself. Yet as the Heidlers indelibly show, that was just
another trick of the men trying to harness the movement, who saw in
Jackson an opportunity not so much for helping the little man but
for their own personal revenge against the genteel politicos of
their day.
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