More on American History

So we've jumped from Pearl Harbor back to the American Heritage series on presidents, where Graham has me reading the one about William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and James K. Polk. Polk has virtues, but by and large it ain't that scintillating.  Graham just liked it because that's when we fought with Mexico.

But I feel this big yawning gap in there. We skipped right from George Washington to here. Jefferson is a big enough thing to have skipped over, as well as the Monroe Doctrine, but really what we've missed is Andrew Jackson. That guy was the paradigm shift, the moment that American History got some hair on its chest and stopped being some logical extension of the Enlightenment. For better and for (considerably) worse, Old Hickory was the Elvis of the 19th century.  He even changed men's hair.

 .... went back and looked quickly at the Wikipedia article on Jackson. Given the themes he brings up

• winning the popular vote in 1824, but having Henry Clay do a backdoor deal to get John Quincy Adams in the White House sets up the "people" vs the "elite" theme
• railing against the Bank of the US as empowering the rich, the elite, the foreign..

it's interesting the Tea Party crowd chooses to go with the rather staid founding fathers as role models when they've got a true kinsman in Old Hickory.  But look at what he did when he destroyed the bank:

The bank's money-lending functions were taken over by the legions of local and state banks that sprang up. This fed an expansion of credit and speculation. At first, as Jackson withdrew money from the Bank to invest it in other banks, land sales, canal construction, cotton production, and manufacturing boomed.^[33] However, due to the practice of banks issuing paper banknotes that were not backed by gold or silver reserves, there was soon rapid inflation and mounting state debts.^[34] Then, in 1836, Jackson issued the Specie Circular, which required buyers of government lands to pay in "specie" (gold or silver coins). The result was a great demand for specie, which many banks did not have enough of to exchange for their notes. These banks collapsed.^[33] This was a direct cause of the Panic of 1837, which threw the national economy into a deep depression. It took years for the economy to recover from the damage.

Basically, the lesson is that you can't trust a redneck with monetary policy.

As an aside, we may note the Jackson was said to have been born just across the NC-SC border on the South Carolina side. Ben Bernanke, of course, spent most of his childhood in Dillon, SC, and worked at South of the Border as a teenager.  Spooky.