April 29, 1980 NEW SOLIDARITY Page 7

"How can Americans, liberals and conservatives alike, look back on a traitor who tried to turn the country over to the British and claim him as their political model?"

Andrew Jackson: A Perfidious Hero

by Felice Gelman

Jackson's spoils system and whiskey barrel campaign tactics, a precursor to the vote buying and fraud of today, were repeatedly attacked by early 19th century cartoonists. This one, titled "Office Hunters for the Year 1834," shows Jackson as a demon, dangling the spoils of his office, including banquets, money, weapons, and appointments above his greedy supporters.

Most U.S. liberals of the Kennedy family ilk would be very embarrassed to find themselves publicly in policy agreement with staunch conservatives such as those identified with The Spotlight newspaper—and vice versa. Recent commentaries on the life and presidency of Andrew Jackson by The Spotlight and Kennedy family Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. respectively, however, have put them in just such a position.

The Spotlight, in its March 31 issue this year, portrays Jackson as the greatest American President, whose administration set the course of national policy for the

rest of the 19th century. Schlesinger's biography of the nation's seventh President agrees completely. The Age of Jackson cites Andrew Jackson as the inspiration of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Wait a minute, you may ask. What's going on here?

A close examination of the real history of Andrew Jackson—sweeping aside the myths carefully cultivated by the line of anti-Constitutional historians, from George Bancroft through Charles Beard to Schlesinger and the current day "revisionists"—answers the fundamental epistemological question.

Andrew Jackson, from the time he entered public life in 1790 as attorney general for part of the western territories, until the very day he died, was involved in treasonous conspiracies against this nation on behalf of the interests of City of London bankers. The political outlook Jackson reflected, and the political forces he organized, were the instrumentality the British hoped to use to break up the United States and restore America to its colonial status.

Under the direction of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, the United States had secured its independence from Great Britain by establishing a form of republican government capable of defending itself militarily, creating and controlling credit particularly for the development of industry and transportation, and educating its population to understand the potential for human perfection. At every point, Britain, through its agents, like Aaron Burr and Daniel Webster, intervened in an effort to sabotage this process. Their three major weapons were secessionist conspiracies, Jacobinism, and trade war., Jackson was in the center of all three.

By the time he had completed his term in office in 1837, Jackson had insured U.S. dependence upon British credit, had reshaped the American economy and had unleashed Jacobinism and secession as major forces in American politics. It was through his removal of government deposits from the Bank of the United States, and then his veto of a new charter for the Bank that Jackson turned the tide against the American system of industrial development created by Hamilton, Clay, Mathew Carey, and Friedrich List.

The campaign against the American System, it can be proven, was carried out directly by agents of Britain. Aaron Burr, a proven agent of the Barings, began Jackson's political career. Roger Taney, who joined the government straight from

the Rothschild stronghold of the Union Bank of Maryland, controlled Jackson's final attack on the policies of economic and political independence. It was Taney who, while attorney general, convinced Jackson to embark upon the "Bank War" and withdraw government funds from the Bank of the U.S. When two secretaries of the treasury resigned rather than carry out that illegal policy, Taney became secretary of the treasury and performed the deed even before his appointment had been approved by the Senate. That act alone set off an orgy of Rothschild and allied speculation against the United States. The pro-Bank forces predicted the result: British banks cut off all credit to Americans; state banks were unable to maintain a uniform currency or even protect the government deposits they had received.

Jackson responded to the catastrophic collapse his own policies had created by claiming that the panic was proof that the Bank of the U.S. was "too powerful" and had to be destroyed. He then unleashed the economic policies which created the greatest depression the country had ever known— the Panic of 1837-1842. The new charter for the Bank of the U.S. was vetoed, ending all controls over currency and credit. A speculative boom, particularly focused on land sales, unfolded.

This Jackson fueled by paying off the entire national debt, feeding money directly into the unruly state banks and thus into the speculative whirlpool. Then, to "control" the inflated currency, Jackson, in July 1836 handed unsuspecting U.S. speculators directly over to the British banks. He ordered in the Specie Circular that the U.S. government would accept only gold or silver in payment for government lands. The Bank of England promptly announced that it would no longer discount bills arising from American trade. How would speculators and plantation owners pay for their lands? The price of cotton fell 25 percent by early 1837, sending all the planters, banks, and speculators—who had all overextended themselves hopelessly attempting to lay their hands on specie—to their ruin. Most American banks suspended payment, thereby also collapsing American industry. It appeared that the Rothschilds had achieved their goal of destroying entirely the United States' internal sources of credit and exchange.

These were the fruits of the policies which are urged by Jacksonian grass roots democrats, and which are avidly seconded by free-trade, free enterprise conservatives today. Jackson's term did indeed set in motion a revolution—one which led straight to the Civil War.

'Breaking Down This Degrading System'

Jackson's election in 1828 as President of the United States had been planned, in collaboration with traitor Aaron Burr as early as 1816. At that time Burr, working behind the scenes with a circle of co-conspirators, bribed a number of western and southern state legislators into support for Jackson. His efforts were assisted by the intense City of London financial warfare being waged against the United States at the same time. British bankers, working with the same New England merchants who joined Daniel Webster in the secessionist conspiracy of the 1814 Hartford Convention, began dumping manufactured goods on the American market at prices far below cost, causing the shutdown of the greater part of American industry and finally, by 1819 a full-fledged panic and political unrest.

When Burr's forces fell short of this goal, he began considering even the possibility of a military coup led by Jackson. He wrote his son-in-law John Alston, the governor of South Carolina, "The Moment is extremely Auspicious for breaking down this degrading system. . . If then there is a man in the U.S. of firmness and decision & having standing enough to afford even a hope of success it is Your duty to hold him up to public view—That man is Andrew Jackson."

Once before, Jackson had been recruited to an unsuccessful conspiracy by Burr—his treasonous 1806 attempt to force the secession of the Louisiana Purchase territory. When that affair began to crumble, Jackson hastily extricated himself and escaped prosecution—although he was subpoenaed as one of the two chief witnesses in Burr's treason trial. Similarly, Jackson cautiously withdrew from Burr's 1816 machinations, made peace with Jefferson and Monroe, and waited—confident that the military acclaim created for him by the press, coupled with the chaotic conditions created by British financial warfare, would carry him back into public life.

Although the overtly treasonous conspiracies failed, the process had been set in motion to strengthen the Jacobin mob elements and to permit them to determine the course of politics. Jackson had established himself as a military hero in the United States and one who could not be overridden by the President.

In 1818, while the United States was negotiating the purchase of Florida from Spain, Jackson led an army—ostensibly fighting a war against the Seminoles in Georgia—into Florida. The army seized Pensacola, and President Monroe was unable to overcome the widespread, mindless enthusiasm for Jackson, the "military

hero." Thus Monroe was forced to accede to an action which would only weaken Spain and strengthen the hand of Britain in the Caribbean and South America.

A cartoonist's view of Andrew Jackson's assault on the Bank of the United States. Jackson (the "Jack" ass) happily tramples the branch banks to the plaudits of the newspaper hounds chained to administration policy. Vice President Van Buren, the fox, stalks the central bank.

There is ample evidence this was precisely the intention of Jackson and his friends. He was urged on in his actions by Edward Livingston of New Orleans, one of his closest advisers, a close friend of Jeremy Bentham's and a paid agent of the City of London. Jackson also acted to protect the vast speculative real estate interests he had accumulated in Florida and Alabama—plantation interests financed by the same bankers.

Whiskey Barrel Campaigns

Jackson's 1824 and 1828 campaigns took the process of political devolution much further. The Federalist tradition of selecting the most able candidate was cast aside, in favor of a cult of personality. On the campaign trail, Jackson dealt not at all with the critical issues—strengthening America and its potential allies against

both Britain and the Holy Alliance, rebuilding the domestic economy, and developing the West after the disastrous British-induced Panic of 1819.

Instead, Jackson and his partisans took up Burr's earlier call to "break down this degrading system" (the nomination of presidential candidates by congressional caucus). He began to campaign in the state legislatures. Resolutions were sent to those legislatures urging denunciation of the caucus method of nomination. It was "undemocratic," "unconstitutional," it deprived "the sovereign people" of "inalienable rights." Jackson adroitly avoided the burning political question of the day—the American System—while the rest of the country disputed for and against protecting infant American industry. Instead he sought the adulation of the mob and attempted to win universal white manhood suffrage.

Immediately after his 1824 defeat to John Quincy Adams (in which Lafayette's triumphal tour of the United States, recalling the principles of growth and development for which the American Revolution was fought, played no small role), Jackson issued his first campaign plank—abolish the Electoral College by constitutional amendment. He then continued his campaign on two themes: reform government and purge corruption. (Familiar themes to Americans who permitted themselves to be victimized by them in the 1976 presidential election). On the real issues his campaigns advisers urged: "Say nothing and plant cotton." His supporters invented the trappings of popular democracy—a campaign waged with barrels of whiskey, in which the only issue—the continuation of the American System—was drowned. Vote fraud became a mainstay of the electoral system.

Upon election Jackson claimed his victory was a "mandate from the people" and that he directly represented their wishes without the mediation of Congress. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story wrote a friend, "Though we live under the form of a republic, we are in fact under the absolute rule of one man."

Story overstated the case, for Henry Clay, Mathew Carey, and others maintained a core of resistance to the economic policies Jackson instituted—policies which threatened to turn the United States directly over to City of London bankers. But the conscious political resistance, steeped in the history of thousands of years of humanist resistance to barbarism, was shattered. Political alliances tended to be cast increasingly in the form of "the people" versus "the aristocracy," precisely as the Bank of the United States head, Nicholas Biddle, warned:

"Distrust all demagogues who proffer exclusive love for what they call the people . . . the country has nearly been cowered by the efforts to break the mutual dependence of all classes of citizens to make the laborers regard their employer as their enemy and to arouse the poor against the rich. . .

Dismantling the 'Monster Bank'

Biddle became Jackson's chief target as he set about dismantling the fledgling independent credit system established in the Second Bank of the United States. From his appointment as head of the Bank in 1822 on, Biddle employed its resources to gradually retire foreign debt holdings, create a regulated stable national currency, encourage the development of industry and manufactures, and to finance a national transportation system.

"In truth," he wrote, "every mile of railroad westward, every section of a canal in the remotest part of the Union is serviceable to all the American cities. They add to the movement and the mass of the nation's wealth and industry; they develop its resources; and the share of these advantages which each can obtain is a fit subject of generous competition; not of querulous rivalry."

These policies Jackson attacked by an assault on "the monster Bank," a struggle The Spotlight describes as "one of the great conflicts of American history, freeing the American people from bankers' conspiracies." However, there is no similarity between Biddle's use of the Bank of the United States to fund American industrial development and Paul Volcker's use of the Federal Reserve to fuel the "controlled disintegration" of the economy worldwide. Jackson's attack on Biddle and the Bank of the United States, in fact, accomplished precisely the same "disintegration" of the economy which Volcker is so busily plotting now. Spotlight historians have their eye on the wrong bankers.

Even before Jackson vetoed the re-charter of the Bank of the United States and removed government deposits, they were placed in selected state banks—all identifiable by their close connection with the City of London Rothschild banking house. The same banking house, in coordination with the Barings and other large London bankers, cut all credit to the United States, creating a disastrous credit squeeze.

After the veto, all credit and currency controls vanished and an orgy of speculation developed, with land sales quadrupling in less than one year. Far from freeing the

American population from the control of "the Monster Bank," Jackson's measures placed the U.S. economy in thrall to British bankers who used a series of expansions and contractions, booms and busts, to milk the system of any wealth it created, to retard industrial development, and to promote the spread of the plantation system.

The treasonous economic policies of Jackson, applauded today by confused conservatives, set America on a path straight to Civil War. Jackson's veto of the Bank of the United States charter unleashed an orgy of speculation by state banks who had received government deposits. It was this totally unregulated, undirected frenzy that led to the quadrupling of land sales in the West and vast new investments in slave plantations. In response to the speculative frenzy, Jackson ordered that all payments to the government must be made in specie. Bank after bank folded as the land speculators went under leaving them with vast chunks of worthless real estate. However, the effects were even more widespread. In 1836 Nicholas Biddle wrote to John Quincy Adams that, "By this unnatural process the specie of New York and other commercial cities is piled up in the Western States—not circulated; not used but held as a defense against the Treasury—and while the West cannot use it—the East is suffering from the want of it. The result is, that the commercial intercourse between the West and the Atlantic, is wholly suspended, and the few operations which are made are burdened with the most extravagant expenses . . . we are suffering because, from mere mismanagement the whole ballast of the currency is shifted from one side of the vessel to the other. . ."

By 1837, economic ruin was apparent. Bills denominated in the pound sterling (rather than the dollar) sold for a 12.5 percent premium, domestic credit disappeared, specie payments were suspended and innumerable banks and other commercial companies failed. It was not until Nicholas Biddle, through his now privately chartered bank, intervened and cornered the cotton market to force prices up, that the panic was reversed.

By that time however, the British banks had firmly established themselves in the South particularly, but also in the West through their establishment of Planters' Banks. This development, financed largely by the Rothschilds, ensured the expansion of the plantation system and the slave trade and ended all possibility of industrializing the South and avoiding Civil War.

In the early 1830s, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee were all considering proposals for the emancipation of slaves. Jackson's "populist" fight

against the Bank made slavery and land speculation the most profitable forms of investment—ensuring a course leading directly to the Civil War.

Obviously Jackson was hardly America's greatest President. Had his policies persisted for 80 years, as The Spotlight asserts that they did, America would not exist today. It would have been dismembered and turned into an agrarian backwater.

Then how can Americans, liberals and conservatives alike, look back on a traitor who tried to turn the country over to the British and claim him as their political model?

Lockean Irrationalism

What both admire in Jackson is his absolute commitment to atomize society, to return it literally to a Lockean "state of nature" where every individual is "free." But the Lockean idyll on which Jacksonian democracy is constructed is the political concoction of the Dark Ages oligarchists. A society in which every individual contests for his own narrow interests is the ideal of the evil faction that nurtures heteronomy within the narrow spheres created and determined by its own rule. Would-be patriots who cling to the Jacksonian tradition have adapted themselves to the world-view of the environmentalists and other irrationalists they believe they oppose. They are adapting themselves to the idea of an end to human progress.

As a political process, it was precisely that variety of unreason the Jackson administration unleashed in the American population. The City of London had no objection to radical democracy, just as it had no objection to the Jacobins they created and funded during the French Revolution who murdered every humanist scientist and thinker they could find. So during Jackson's presidency, the "Utopian" socialist Robert Dale Owen was dispatched to New York to organize a radical workingmen's party in opposition to the workingmen who joined in an association with Nicholas Biddle to reconstitute the Bank and to develop American industry.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller—all ardent cultists under the domination of British "liberal" historian Thomas Carlyle—were deployed to popularize literary and religious irrationalism in direct response to the efforts of John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Lafayette and others to preserve the

humanist intellectual tradition of the American Revolution. Clay, in his famous 1824 speech on the American System, says that his proposal "has the sanction of the best and wisest men, in all ages, in foreign countries as well as our own, of the Edwards, of Henry the Great, of Elizabeth, of the Colberts, of our own Franklin, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton. . ."

Jackson's response? Soak the population in whiskey, religious fundamentalism, personality cults, and kookery. His success? That it is possible for honest American patriots to lose sight of the thousands of years long battle that culminated in a stunning victory for the forces of reason—the American Revolution—and ally themselves with their worst enemies.

Who Says What About Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson

"The Jacksonian revolution of 1828 was as important for America as the drafting of the Declaration of Independence 52 years earlier, the Constitutional Convention of 1787, or the movement which brought forth our Bill of Rights. The forces unleashed by Andrew Jackson governed the U.S. for nearly 80 years thereafter.

Today, the conditions which produced the Jacksonian hurricane are more acute than in his day; yet, the lessons of those years have been lost through the decades."

—The Spotlight, March 31, 1980

"The tradition of Jefferson and Jackson might recede, but it could never disappear. It was bound to endure in America as long as liberal capitalistic society endured, for it was the creation of the internal necessities of such a society. American democracy has come to accept the struggle among competing groups for control of the state as a positive virtue—indeed, as the only foundation for liberty. . . This was the tradition of Jefferson and Jackson, and it has been the basic meaning of American liberalism."

—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson

"It will never be possible for any length of time for any group of the American people, either by reason of wealth, or learning, or inheritance or economic power to retain any mandate, any permanent authority to arrogate to itself the political control of American public life. This heritage . . . we owe to Jacksonian democracy—the American doctrine that entrusts the general welfare to no one group of class, but dedicates itself to the end that the American people shall not be thwarted in their higher purpose to remain the custodian of their own destiny."

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Public Papers