Letters.

The Jacksonian Tradition

I always look forward to reading Walter Russell Mead because he is a master of the jeu d'esprit. I recall especially a delightful article he wrote after the collapse of the Soviet Union suggesting that the United States purchase, develop and carve several new states out of ... Siberia. His recent article ("The Jacksonian Tradition: And American Foreign Policy", Winter 1999/2000), though by no means tongue-in-cheek displays Mead's habitual insight, wit and penchant for tweaking the conventional wisdom.

But does it work as history or contemporary sociology? Have his "Jacksonian" Americans, with their code of self-reliance, equality, individualism, easy credit and courage, really dominated American politics for the past 175 years, swallowing up immigrant communities with different values, and determining when, why and how the United States makes war? Must politicians and foreign policy pundits today really evince a "Jacksonian" spread-eagle, damn-your-eyes spirit if they wish to persuade a critical mass of voters to support foreign involvements?

I confess to a certain skepticism on both points. These paradigmatic dichotomies we all love to draw (e.g., Wilsonians vs. [Teddy] Rooseveltians, Hamiltonians vs. Jeffersonians) say more about contemporary politics than they do about history. Wilson and TR, after all, were both progressives and fierce interventionists and had far more in common with each other than either did with, say, Grover Cleveland. Likewise, however much Jefferson damned the Federalists' mercantile, nationalist vision in the 1790s, he proved as President to be a shrewd and tough promoter of the national interest. As for Andrew Jackson himself, his two terms were uniquely quiescent in foreign affairs, and (like late military men such as Grant, TR and Eisenhower) he never took the nation to war. Above all, it seems to me that Mead's Jacksonian category, so well chiseled at first, begins to lose its shape when it is made to contain everyone from ScotsIrish frontiersmen to inner-city blacks, hard-hats for Nixon and suburban yuppies.

The apparent pay-off of Mead's analysis, however, is in its implications for the selling of an interventionist foreign policy. He sees a profound disconnection between the various elite schools of thought on America's proper international posture and the "Don't Tread on Me!" Jacksonian masses whose inclination is to have no truck with "damned furriners" unless they trample on American interests or honor. And I think Mead is on firmer ground here. I will never forget the time I picked up a young white man hitchhiking outside El Paso in 1980 and asked him who he favored in that year's presidential race. Jesse Jackson, he replied to my surprise, "because he tells it like it is." But Jackson could never win, I said, so who was his second choice? "Oh, Ronald Reagan, of course." There was a true Jacksonian.

Still, I wonder if Mead's gap in opinions and values between the elites and the populace still matters. The people's Congress no longer declares wars; the President just sends armed forces overseas on his own authority. Neither do the people fight America's wars, thanks to the all-volunteer force. And to judge from the pronouncements of leaders in both major parties, globalization has put paid to the sort of visceral "robust nationalism" (to borrow Sam Huntington's phrase) so dear to Mead's

Jacksonians. To be sure, a future president needing to rally the masses to wage a "big" war--say, against China--might well have to adopt a Jacksonian swagger (and maneuver the enemy into firing the first shot). But absent a national mobilization on that scale, I suspect that whatever Jacksonian hearts still beat beyond the Beltway can be comfortably ignored in our comfortable age.

WALTER A. MCDOUGALL

University of Pennsylvania

Any resemblance between "the Jacksonian tradition", as rendered by Walter Russell Mead in your pages, and the historical Andrew Jackson is strictly coincidental.

Mr. Mead depicts Jacksonianism as warlike, trigger-happy, fundamentalist, nativist, paranoid, protectionist, suspicious of federal power, supportive of loose monetary policy, given to cowboy diplomacy, and committed to an anti-internationalist, unilateralist course in foreign affairs.

When I heard that Mr. Mead was planning an essay on Jackson's foreign policy, I sent him a note urging him to read J.M. Belohavek's standard work on the subject, "Let the Eagle Soar!": The Foreign Policy of Andrew Jackson (1985). Apparently he never got beyond the tide; his text shows no evidence that he ever read the book.

Did Jacksonian foreign policy represent a sharp break in the conduct of American foreign affairs? I quote Professor Belohavek:

The goals of the Jackson administration differed little from those of John Quincy Adams [his predecessor and, before that, a great secretary of state]; for both men, expanding commerce and settling claims remained the highest priorities. Yet Jackson succeeded where Adams failed.

Was Jackson warlike and trigger-happy? Jackson's past experience with Great Britain had hardly been harmonious. He bore the scar of a saber wound inflicted by a British officer during the War for Independence. A short fourteen years before his presidency he defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans. The British government expected that

the hot-tempered General would be eminently unsuccessful in his conduct of diplomacy toward Great Britain.... Instead, the opposite came to pass.... His attitude toward the English remained calm and dispassionate throughout.... Despite the gloomy predictions that had greeted the advent of a Jackson presidency, Palmerston [British foreign secretary] and Vaughan [British minister to Washington] could fairly say that they had received better treatment from Jackson than from any of his predecessors.

Was Jackson opposed to international agreements? His administration negotiated spoliations claims treaties with Denmark, France, Portugal and Spain and trade revisions or new agreements with Great Britain, France, Russia and Spain...