November 21, 2024 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, in our 22nd episode of our Story of America Series, Bill McClay, author of Land of Hope, tells the story of the first President to appeal to the popular sensibilities of Americans in The West.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next another
installment of our series about Us, the Story of America series,
with Hillsdale College professor and author of the terrific book
Land of Hope, Professor Bill McLay. In eighteen twenty eight,
a political revolution took place. Andrew Jackson, a political outsider
(00:31):
from the frontier, had beaten the son of a president, No,
the son of a founder, John Quincy Adams, in a
hot and often vile election, their second showdown. Let's get
into the story. Here's Bill McLay.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
He taught the country a lesson.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
He taught Adams a lesson the hard way, that to
be high minded and snobbish was not going to work
with this growing, expanding and diverse electorate, often highly imperfectly
educated electorate in America. That was the reality of the thing.
(01:17):
It's a reality that's still with us. Mass democracy requires
a discourse, a language, a mode of expression that can
reach people where they are instead of telling them, well,
if you want to know what's going on, you've got
to raise yourself to my level. You've got to go
to college, you got to get a degree. You got
to learn how to talk like I do. No you
(01:40):
got to learn how to talk like they do. One
symbolic expression of this change was the inauguration of Jackson
in Washington, which was not like the previous affairs that
had been decorous and very much high level, ritual, almost
(02:02):
liturgical affairs. In this case, the fans of Jackson, many
of them, were rather rough hewn characters and rowdy in
their demeanor. They crowded into the city day Line Pennsylvania Avenue,
they came to receptions at the White House, and there
(02:26):
are all kinds of stories about them muddying the carpets
with their muddy boots and this sort of thing that.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Char as much myth as truth.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
But the point is this reflected a change, a change
in the climate, a change in the climate of American
democratic politics. Jackson was a self made man if there
ever was one. He was a frontiersman. He had a
hard life. He was a fighter, he was a dueler.
(02:55):
He'd risen the ladder of American society through sheer force
of his will, his talents, his determination, but never forgetting
where he came from, never forgetting he was one of
the common people and letting them know. He remembered his
roots as the saying goes. He didn't try to rise
(03:18):
above his raising.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
He was an empathic.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Towards ordinary people, towards working class people, strivers who hadn't
come as far as he had, but whose objectives were
not unlike his. They wanted to be landowners, they wanted
to be their own boss. Eventually, that was the American
way of thinking about equality, that had that element of
(03:43):
opportunity of striving. Jackson brings in a different vision of America.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
And it's different from Jefferson. You know.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Jefferson was a very democratic, small d democratic guy in
a lot of ways. And Jefferson was in his own
way an anti elitist. He famously said that a moral
issue presented to a plowman and a professor might well
be decided better by the plowman. He didn't place stock
(04:23):
in air addition.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
For its own sake. And he did write the words.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
All men are created equal and endowed by their creator
with certain unalienable rights.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Those were Jefferson's words.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
And as the country evolved, those words become more and
more of a reality. But Jefferson's vision of democracy included
an emphasis on education. And that's by the way that
that's Wes never left us. We have a huge faith
in the power of education, proper education to lift people
(04:56):
out of the circumstances into which they were born and
improve their lot in life. Jefferson's vision was that the
common man needed to be lifted up by a proper education,
and thus he would be able to speak the language
of and engage in debate with those who are more
privileged in their upbring so they wouldn't have to defer
(05:20):
to the well born. Jackson, on the other hand, believed
the common man was perfectly well equipped as he was.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
He didn't need to be raised up.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
He was perfectly equipped as he was to vote and
to govern as they were.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
So this great respect for the.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Common man's abilities without being tutored in the direction of
democracy is what makes us refer to Jackson as our
first populist president. Now, I'm not going to take time
to try to find the turn populism, which has a
lot of different definitions, but this is one way of
defining it. That populism is a belief in the power
(06:06):
of the people as they are, without vetting, without selectivity,
without heredity, without educational credentials, the power of the common
person to govern himself in herself in a democratic arena
in which there's a level of playing field. So that's
(06:28):
one way of looking at populism and populism. It's this
faith in the untutored, good common sense of the ordinary person,
and populism almost always carries with it a resentment of elites.
(06:50):
There's an edge of bitterness often in populism towards those
who are well born, and this certainly showed itself with
Jack and a lot of what he did is president
was to stop things from happening. He was a sort
of a like a hockey goalie, No, you're not going
to work with me, except he was more aggressive than
(07:13):
the hockey goalie.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
He'd go up the ice.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
He used his veto pen often more than all the
other prior presidents combined. He was the president veto and
above all else. The great passion of his presidential career
was the National Bank. He opposed the National Bank, and
(07:36):
he was unwaveringly opposed to its being rechartered. The charter
of the bank ran out and would have to be
would have to be rechartered, was it was not established
in perpetuity. So that became the great that we called
it the Bank War. His war against the bank. All
the political cartoonists had so much fun with this depicting
(07:59):
Jackson and the bank war.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
And he was not.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Afraid to openly challenge the Supreme Court and John Marshall
remember that burr in the saddle imposed on Jefferson by
Adams and still serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,
a federalist remnant in this sea of democrats.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And you've been listening to Professor Bill McLay share with
us the story of Andrew Jackson, his rise to power
and ultimately to the White House and the first real
populist president. Understanding that there's a way to reach this
mass democracy and the masses, and it's not through well
high falutin language. It's the language the people use. Jackson,
(08:49):
as Professor McLay noted, stop things. He used his power
to block block legislation time and again, more times than
any president before him. When we return more of the
story of the rise of populism in America, the story
of Andrew Jackson's presidency continues here on our American Story,
(09:39):
and we return to our American stories and our series
about us, the Story of America series with Professor Bill
McClay author of the terrific book Land of Hope. When
we last left off, Professor McClay was describing Andrew Jackson's politics.
He was an anti elitist. He hadn't forgotten his roots
after all, and he'd opposed what we'd call big government today,
(10:03):
preferring turnover in our nation's halls of power. Let's return
to the story. Here again is Professor Bill McLay.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
Now, like Jefferson, Jackson was a strict constructionist.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
He did not believe in the.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Necessary and Proper Clause of the Constitution as a gateway
to all kinds of other goodies. He wanted to keep
government limited. You remember Jefferson's saying that government governs best,
that governs least, and that really reflected the sentiments of Jackson.
He was also a great opponent of the what he
(10:49):
saw as the alliance of government and business, what we
today would call crony capitalism. He would have opposed the
growth of what we call.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Today the admitted straight of state.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
These agencies not accountable to the voters, not held accountable
to rotation in office, which was.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
A figure that Jackson often used.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
It was an approach to service for the public that
he favored.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
That is that nobody should.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Serve in office for very long. What's important is to
move him along so that after three years people or
whatever period of time you want to rotate into. After
that period of time, people start to develop roots, they
start develop contexts, they send out tentacles.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
It's only human nature.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
So move them along before that happens, before they develop
a self interest in the fortunes of their office, and
thereby they'll serve the public interest. That was more important
to him than being experts. He had a really strong
aversion to self proclaimed expertise and expert knowledge. So there
(12:06):
are good aspects of that, and there are.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Bad aspects of that. From our present standpoint, but.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
We want a common person with no knowledge of nuclear
physics to run nuclear regulatory agencies? Probably not, but there
are many other things where the installation of experts leads
to an evisceration of democracy itself. Really a fascinating character
(12:31):
and one whose fortunes have gone up and down. In
the assessment.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Provided him by historians.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
One of the things that made his reputation go down
and stayed down was his Indian policy. What to do
with the Native American population in this Ever, expanding American losses,
bent on occupying the entire continent as an expression of
(13:06):
its manifest destiny. He was a man of the people,
He was a man of the common man, but he
didn't fully extend this empathy to Native Americans, whom he
feared and also in some ways looked down on. He
(13:26):
also rejected their claim that American land was their homeland.
To be fair to Jackson, there were a lot of
other points of view that were much less humane than
the path that he settled on. But there were also
points of view there were much more humane in recognizing
(13:48):
that Indians might have some right to their ancestral lands,
and that moving them to territory that was of no
current use to the Western European white European population was
not necessarily the most humane approach. His answer was to
(14:11):
resettle the tribes in the eastern part of the country
to land west of the Mississippi River. The Indian Removal
Act was signed into law in eighteen thirty five, and
it relocated close to fifty thousand Indians, fifteen thousand more
of which would be relocated after Jackson's presidency. When the
Army forced the Cherokees in Georgia to depart for the
(14:35):
Oklahoma Territory along a brutal eight hundred mile path that
would become known as the Trail of Tears, along which
nearly four thousand Indians would lose their lives. One French
visitor to America wrote eloquently about the policy of Indian removal.
(14:59):
He witnessed it firsthand in eighteen thirty one when he
stumbled on, by mere chance, a group of Choctaw Indians
crossing the Mississippi River near Memphis. And here is what
that Frenchman, Alexis de Toqueville, wrote in his epic work
(15:20):
called Democracy in America. It is impossible to conceive the
extent of the sufferance which attend these force emigrations.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
They are undertaken by.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
A people already exhausted and reduced, and the countries to
which the newcomers betake themselves are inhabited by other tribes
which received them with jealous hostility. Hunger is in the rear,
war awaits them, and misery besets them on all sides.
In the hope of escaping from such a host of enemies,
(15:57):
they separate, and each individual will endeavors to procure the
means of supporting his existence in solitude and secrecy, living
in the immensity of the desert, like an outcast in
civilized society.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
The social tie.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Which distress had long since weakened, is then dissolved. They've
lost their country, and their people soon desert them. Their
families are obliterated, the names they bore in common are forgotten,
their language perishes, and all the traces of their origin disappear.
(16:38):
Their nation has ceased to exist, except in the recollection
of the antiquaries of America and a few of the
learned of Europe. I should be sorry to have my
reader supposed that I'm coloring the picture too highly. I
saw with my own eyes several of the cases of
misery which I've been describing, the witness of sufferings which
(17:02):
I have not the power to portray. Touville ended this
passage on the subject, and it ended the first volume
of his amazing book Democracy in America with these words,
(17:26):
these are great evils, and it must be added that
they appear to me to be irremediable. I believe that
the Indian nations of North America are doomed to perish,
and that whenever the Europeans shall be established on the
shores of the Pacific Ocean. That race of men will
(17:46):
be no more. The Indians had only the two alternatives
of war or civilization. In other words, they must either
have destroyed the Europeans or become their equals. That book
of Toakville's, the two volume set called Democracy in America,
(18:10):
may be the greatest study of American life.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
And culture ever written.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
It captured very good things and great things about the nation,
but it also captured the nation's flaws. I often tell
my students if they were to pick one work on
America to take to a desert island, and only that
one work, I would still say Democracy in America, published
(18:42):
in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties and two volumes,
would be the choice. Because Toauville captures many things about
America that are permanent part.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Of our national character. Our makeup have not changed.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
And one of those elements is the elements of tragedy
that have attended every stage of our development, every stage
of our expansion. Tokville was not an American booster and
not an American cheerleader, but he was an astute, an
objective observer from the foreign land of France.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
In fact, he often.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Entered into his explorations with explicitly the thought, how can
we in Europe learn from the American experience? Because America,
as he saw it, was.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
The vanguard of the future.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
All nations of the world were going to become democratic.
America was leading the way, So let us look closely
at America. He had advised and learned from its successes,
from its failures, from its tragedies, and from its tribe.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery himself a Hillsdale College graduate,
and a special thanks to Professor Bill McLay the story
of Andrew Jackson the Jacksonian era. Here on our American Stories.
And we returned to our American stories. Up next another
installment of our series about Us, the Story of America series,
with Hillsdale College professor and author of the terrific book
Land of Hope, Professor Bill McLay. In eighteen twenty eight,
a political revolution took place. Andrew Jackson, a political outsider
(00:31):
from the frontier, had beaten the son of a president, No,
the son of a founder, John Quincy Adams, in a
hot and often vile election, their second showdown. Let's get
into the story. Here's Bill McLay.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
He taught the country a lesson.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
He taught Adams a lesson the hard way, that to
be high minded and snobbish was not going to work
with this growing, expanding and diverse electorate, often highly imperfectly
educated electorate in America. That was the reality of the thing.
(01:17):
It's a reality that's still with us. Mass democracy requires
a discourse, a language, a mode of expression that can
reach people where they are instead of telling them, well,
if you want to know what's going on, you've got
to raise yourself to my level. You've got to go
to college, you got to get a degree. You got
to learn how to talk like I do. No you
(01:40):
got to learn how to talk like they do. One
symbolic expression of this change was the inauguration of Jackson
in Washington, which was not like the previous affairs that
had been decorous and very much high level, ritual, almost
(02:02):
liturgical affairs. In this case, the fans of Jackson, many
of them, were rather rough hewn characters and rowdy in
their demeanor. They crowded into the city day Line Pennsylvania Avenue,
they came to receptions at the White House, and there
(02:26):
are all kinds of stories about them muddying the carpets
with their muddy boots and this sort of thing that.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Char as much myth as truth.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
But the point is this reflected a change, a change
in the climate, a change in the climate of American
democratic politics. Jackson was a self made man if there
ever was one. He was a frontiersman. He had a
hard life. He was a fighter, he was a dueler.
(02:55):
He'd risen the ladder of American society through sheer force
of his will, his talents, his determination, but never forgetting
where he came from, never forgetting he was one of
the common people and letting them know. He remembered his
roots as the saying goes. He didn't try to rise
(03:18):
above his raising.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
He was an empathic.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Towards ordinary people, towards working class people, strivers who hadn't
come as far as he had, but whose objectives were
not unlike his. They wanted to be landowners, they wanted
to be their own boss. Eventually, that was the American
way of thinking about equality, that had that element of
(03:43):
opportunity of striving. Jackson brings in a different vision of America.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
And it's different from Jefferson. You know.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Jefferson was a very democratic, small d democratic guy in
a lot of ways. And Jefferson was in his own
way an anti elitist. He famously said that a moral
issue presented to a plowman and a professor might well
be decided better by the plowman. He didn't place stock
(04:23):
in air addition.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
For its own sake. And he did write the words.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
All men are created equal and endowed by their creator
with certain unalienable rights.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Those were Jefferson's words.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
And as the country evolved, those words become more and
more of a reality. But Jefferson's vision of democracy included
an emphasis on education. And that's by the way that
that's Wes never left us. We have a huge faith
in the power of education, proper education to lift people
(04:56):
out of the circumstances into which they were born and
improve their lot in life. Jefferson's vision was that the
common man needed to be lifted up by a proper education,
and thus he would be able to speak the language
of and engage in debate with those who are more
privileged in their upbring so they wouldn't have to defer
(05:20):
to the well born. Jackson, on the other hand, believed
the common man was perfectly well equipped as he was.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
He didn't need to be raised up.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
He was perfectly equipped as he was to vote and
to govern as they were.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
So this great respect for the.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Common man's abilities without being tutored in the direction of
democracy is what makes us refer to Jackson as our
first populist president. Now, I'm not going to take time
to try to find the turn populism, which has a
lot of different definitions, but this is one way of
defining it. That populism is a belief in the power
(06:06):
of the people as they are, without vetting, without selectivity,
without heredity, without educational credentials, the power of the common
person to govern himself in herself in a democratic arena
in which there's a level of playing field. So that's
(06:28):
one way of looking at populism and populism. It's this
faith in the untutored, good common sense of the ordinary person,
and populism almost always carries with it a resentment of elites.
(06:50):
There's an edge of bitterness often in populism towards those
who are well born, and this certainly showed itself with
Jack and a lot of what he did is president
was to stop things from happening. He was a sort
of a like a hockey goalie, No, you're not going
to work with me, except he was more aggressive than
(07:13):
the hockey goalie.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
He'd go up the ice.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
He used his veto pen often more than all the
other prior presidents combined. He was the president veto and
above all else. The great passion of his presidential career
was the National Bank. He opposed the National Bank, and
(07:36):
he was unwaveringly opposed to its being rechartered. The charter
of the bank ran out and would have to be
would have to be rechartered, was it was not established
in perpetuity. So that became the great that we called
it the Bank War. His war against the bank. All
the political cartoonists had so much fun with this depicting
(07:59):
Jackson and the bank war.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
And he was not.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Afraid to openly challenge the Supreme Court and John Marshall
remember that burr in the saddle imposed on Jefferson by
Adams and still serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,
a federalist remnant in this sea of democrats.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And you've been listening to Professor Bill McLay share with
us the story of Andrew Jackson, his rise to power
and ultimately to the White House and the first real
populist president. Understanding that there's a way to reach this
mass democracy and the masses, and it's not through well
high falutin language. It's the language the people use. Jackson,
(08:49):
as Professor McLay noted, stop things. He used his power
to block block legislation time and again, more times than
any president before him. When we return more of the
story of the rise of populism in America, the story
of Andrew Jackson's presidency continues here on our American Story,
(09:39):
and we return to our American stories and our series
about us, the Story of America series with Professor Bill
McClay author of the terrific book Land of Hope. When
we last left off, Professor McClay was describing Andrew Jackson's politics.
He was an anti elitist. He hadn't forgotten his roots
after all, and he'd opposed what we'd call big government today,
(10:03):
preferring turnover in our nation's halls of power. Let's return
to the story. Here again is Professor Bill McLay.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
Now, like Jefferson, Jackson was a strict constructionist.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
He did not believe in the.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Necessary and Proper Clause of the Constitution as a gateway
to all kinds of other goodies. He wanted to keep
government limited. You remember Jefferson's saying that government governs best,
that governs least, and that really reflected the sentiments of Jackson.
He was also a great opponent of the what he
(10:49):
saw as the alliance of government and business, what we
today would call crony capitalism. He would have opposed the
growth of what we call.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Today the admitted straight of state.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
These agencies not accountable to the voters, not held accountable
to rotation in office, which was.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
A figure that Jackson often used.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
It was an approach to service for the public that
he favored.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
That is that nobody should.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Serve in office for very long. What's important is to
move him along so that after three years people or
whatever period of time you want to rotate into. After
that period of time, people start to develop roots, they
start develop contexts, they send out tentacles.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
It's only human nature.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
So move them along before that happens, before they develop
a self interest in the fortunes of their office, and
thereby they'll serve the public interest. That was more important
to him than being experts. He had a really strong
aversion to self proclaimed expertise and expert knowledge. So there
(12:06):
are good aspects of that, and there are.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Bad aspects of that. From our present standpoint, but.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
We want a common person with no knowledge of nuclear
physics to run nuclear regulatory agencies? Probably not, but there
are many other things where the installation of experts leads
to an evisceration of democracy itself. Really a fascinating character
(12:31):
and one whose fortunes have gone up and down. In
the assessment.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Provided him by historians.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
One of the things that made his reputation go down
and stayed down was his Indian policy. What to do
with the Native American population in this Ever, expanding American losses,
bent on occupying the entire continent as an expression of
(13:06):
its manifest destiny. He was a man of the people,
He was a man of the common man, but he
didn't fully extend this empathy to Native Americans, whom he
feared and also in some ways looked down on. He
(13:26):
also rejected their claim that American land was their homeland.
To be fair to Jackson, there were a lot of
other points of view that were much less humane than
the path that he settled on. But there were also
points of view there were much more humane in recognizing
(13:48):
that Indians might have some right to their ancestral lands,
and that moving them to territory that was of no
current use to the Western European white European population was
not necessarily the most humane approach. His answer was to
(14:11):
resettle the tribes in the eastern part of the country
to land west of the Mississippi River. The Indian Removal
Act was signed into law in eighteen thirty five, and
it relocated close to fifty thousand Indians, fifteen thousand more
of which would be relocated after Jackson's presidency. When the
Army forced the Cherokees in Georgia to depart for the
(14:35):
Oklahoma Territory along a brutal eight hundred mile path that
would become known as the Trail of Tears, along which
nearly four thousand Indians would lose their lives. One French
visitor to America wrote eloquently about the policy of Indian removal.
(14:59):
He witnessed it firsthand in eighteen thirty one when he
stumbled on, by mere chance, a group of Choctaw Indians
crossing the Mississippi River near Memphis. And here is what
that Frenchman, Alexis de Toqueville, wrote in his epic work
(15:20):
called Democracy in America. It is impossible to conceive the
extent of the sufferance which attend these force emigrations.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
They are undertaken by.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
A people already exhausted and reduced, and the countries to
which the newcomers betake themselves are inhabited by other tribes
which received them with jealous hostility. Hunger is in the rear,
war awaits them, and misery besets them on all sides.
In the hope of escaping from such a host of enemies,
(15:57):
they separate, and each individual will endeavors to procure the
means of supporting his existence in solitude and secrecy, living
in the immensity of the desert, like an outcast in
civilized society.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
The social tie.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Which distress had long since weakened, is then dissolved. They've
lost their country, and their people soon desert them. Their
families are obliterated, the names they bore in common are forgotten,
their language perishes, and all the traces of their origin disappear.
(16:38):
Their nation has ceased to exist, except in the recollection
of the antiquaries of America and a few of the
learned of Europe. I should be sorry to have my
reader supposed that I'm coloring the picture too highly. I
saw with my own eyes several of the cases of
misery which I've been describing, the witness of sufferings which
(17:02):
I have not the power to portray. Touville ended this
passage on the subject, and it ended the first volume
of his amazing book Democracy in America with these words,
(17:26):
these are great evils, and it must be added that
they appear to me to be irremediable. I believe that
the Indian nations of North America are doomed to perish,
and that whenever the Europeans shall be established on the
shores of the Pacific Ocean. That race of men will
(17:46):
be no more. The Indians had only the two alternatives
of war or civilization. In other words, they must either
have destroyed the Europeans or become their equals. That book
of Toakville's, the two volume set called Democracy in America,
(18:10):
may be the greatest study of American life.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
And culture ever written.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
It captured very good things and great things about the nation,
but it also captured the nation's flaws. I often tell
my students if they were to pick one work on
America to take to a desert island, and only that
one work, I would still say Democracy in America, published
(18:42):
in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties and two volumes,
would be the choice. Because Toauville captures many things about
America that are permanent part.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Of our national character. Our makeup have not changed.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
And one of those elements is the elements of tragedy
that have attended every stage of our development, every stage
of our expansion. Tokville was not an American booster and
not an American cheerleader, but he was an astute, an
objective observer from the foreign land of France.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
In fact, he often.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Entered into his explorations with explicitly the thought, how can
we in Europe learn from the American experience? Because America,
as he saw it, was.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
The vanguard of the future.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
All nations of the world were going to become democratic.
America was leading the way, So let us look closely
at America. He had advised and learned from its successes,
from its failures, from its tragedies, and from its tribe.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery himself a Hillsdale College graduate,
and a special thanks to Professor Bill McLay the story
of Andrew Jackson the Jacksonian era. Here on our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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