Shaping America Final Script
TITLE: Lesson 15: "A White Man's Democracy"
PREPARED FOR: Dallas Telelearning
WRITER: Gretchen Swen
PRODUCER: Julia Dyer
DRAFT: Final
DATE: February 23, 2001
Final Script “Lesson 15: "A White Man's Democracy"” · 02/23/01 · XXX
Visual Audio
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FADE IN:
INTRODUCTION
1 MONTAGE OF IMAGES REFLECTING THE VITALITY OF THE 1820S AND ‘30S: PERIOD DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS OF A PENNY PRESS, A GYMNASIUM IN USE, COUPLES DANCING THE POLKA, A HORSE RACE, A THEATRE PRODUCTION, A LECTURE HALL, A POLITICIAN STUMPING, BUSTLING STREETS LIKE THE “FIVE POINTS DISTRICT” IN NYC, AND ADS FOR FURNITURE, INDOOR PLUMBING, STOVES2 IMAGES OF CANALS, STEAMBOATS, RAILROADS—B-ROLL OF ERIE CANAL (6802/6804) AND 19TH CENTURY TRAIN
3 IMAGE OF “GRASSROOTS” CAMPAIGNING / NARRATOR: The 1820’s were marked by continuous change and dynamism. Americans dug canals to connect far-flung rivers, rode in steamboats, laid railroad tracks, and pushed against geographic and social boundaries in search of a better quality of life. This era also witnessed a dramatic transformation of American democracy itself.
4 HARRY WATSON ON CAMERA (21:10:09:24)
/ HARRY WATSON: When society cracked open and the western movement became much more active and the market became much more active, some people saw the opportunity to increase their liberty in enormous numbers of ways. But at the same time they also feared that the new opportunities were going to create a situation in which other people would have power over them, whether it was an employer, a landlord, a lender, somebody who was going to sell them land or who could deny them a sale of land.5 RICHARD ELLIS ON CAMERA (BELOW 1:05:29:15) / RICHARD ELLIS: People begin to look upon the government and realize that the government makes economic decisions. And they want to control these decisions, because the decisions often might benefit one group of elites you know as opposed to the other or the elites as opposed to the public, as such. So politics becomes open and so forth, and one of the ways this emerges is with someone like Andrew Jackson who in 1824 becomes the first grass roots candidate for the presidency.
SEGMENT ONE
“THE PEOPLE’S POLITICIAN”
6 PORTRAIT OF JACKSON AND CAMPAIGN LITERATURE USING HICKORY SYMBOLS
/ NARRATOR: Affectionately known as “Old Hickory,” Andrew Jackson, like the tree itself, was tough and imposing. He reflected the vitality and irascible confidence of the common man, railing against “the system” and boldly asserting his right to take center stage within the political arena.7 HARRY WATSON ON CAMERA (21:12:37:26)
/ HARRY WATSON: Jackson, first of all, was an enormously appealing masculine figure to a very masculine self-assertive electorate. He was a highly successful general who never had a day of formal military training. He just seemed to come by it naturally. He had pulled himself up from what could have been an absolute disastrous childhood to the pinnacle of personal success and then he had gone out and further asserted his personal strength by whipping the Creek Indians and the British at the Battle of New Orleans.8 PERIOD IMAGES AS WELL AS FOOTAGE OF THE HERMITAGE
/ NARRATOR: Jackson became the first congressman from Tennessee, and subsequently served as a senator, as a judge on the Tennessee Supreme Court, and as governor of the Florida Territory. But his reputation for violent outbursts, his obsession with honor and vengeance, and his aggressive militarism alarmed many.9 RICHARD ELLIS ON CAMERA (BELOW 1:15:19:09)
/ RICHARD ELLIS: People were scared of him, literally scared of him because his whole experience had been drenched in violence. I mean he fought duels. I mean no other president had actually killed other people the way Jackson had in duels.10 B-ROLL OF THE HERMITAGE (6827/28)
/ NARRATOR: Jackson was also a bundle of contradictions. He possessed a life-long suspicion of the rich and powerful—yet he was quite proud of the wealth he had amassed and placed on display at The Hermitage. Jackson was guided by a belief in equality, but he was one of the largest slaveholders in Tennessee. He insisted on deference, yet he did not seek the approval of the elite.11 CARTOON LAMPOONING JACKSON’S TEMPER
/ ACTOR: Andrew Jackson.“They expect to see me with a Tomahawk in one hand, and a scalping knife in the other.”
NARRATOR: In 1824, Jackson ran for President on the basis of his military record, a fact that appalled the aging Thomas Jefferson.
12 PORTRAIT OF JEFFERSON
/ ACTOR: Thomas Jefferson.“Jackson is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place, an able military chief, perhaps, but a dangerous man.”
13 HARRY WATSON ON CAMERA (BELOW 21:25:29:00)
/ HARRY WATSON: Jeffersonian democracy still had a strong element of deference in it in which the average voter was not supposed to presume to be a congressman or even a president himself, but to choose which one among natural aristocrats should be the leader. Jacksonian democracy takes that position and moves it a little bit further in a populist direction and says that the role of the electorate is not only to choose the leaders but to produce the leaders and that the leaders should come out of the great body of the people.14 PORTRAITS OF THE VARIOUS PLAYERS—JACKSON, CLAY, ADAMS, WILLIAM CRAWFORD
15 B-ROLL OF OLD SENATE CHAMBER (6740)
/ NARRATOR: Jackson won the popular vote in 1824. But none of the four candidates received a majority of electoral votes, so the decision went to the House of Representatives. In what became known as the “corrupt bargain,” candidate Henry Clay threw his support to John Quincy Adams—then was promptly named Secretary of State in the new Adams administration.16 PORTRAIT OR STATUE OF JACKSON
/ ACTOR: Andrew Jackson.“Was there ever witnessed such bare-faced corruption in any country before?”
17 CAMPAIGN POSTERS AND CIRCULARS FROM THE 1828 ELECTION
/ NARRATOR: The presidential election of 1828 was a rematch between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. It would go down as one of the nastiest political campaigns in history. Adams was accused of being cold, elitist, and in the pocket of the special interests. Jackson’s men suggested that Adams had diverted public funds to buy himself foreign luxuries, and that he had equipped the Russian tsar with a mistress.Meanwhile, Adams’ men accused Jackson of being the bastard son of a prostitute, a dueler, a vigilante, and an unprincipled adulterer who had lived with his wife Rachel before her divorce was final.
18 PORTRAIT OR CARTOON OF JACKSON
/ ACTOR: Charles Hammon of the Gazette.“Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?”
NARRATOR: Although some of their accusations may have been true, the strategy backfired. By emphasizing Jackson’s fiery, iconoclastic nature, the National Republicans actually made him more attractive to many voters.
19 IMAGE OF JACKSON’S INAUGURATION
/ NARRATOR: Jackson’s victory meant different things to different people.20 HARRY WATSON ON CAMERA (21:18:24:25)
/ HARRY WATSON: To Jackson’s supporters, it meant that the people had triumphed. To people who were a little bit more cynical than that, it was the triumph of barbarism over reason, civility, civilization, common sense, educational attainments. A dualism was set up between the untutored voice of the people and the judgment of the experts, the elite, the people who had inherited advantages and so that created a kind of cultural tension that would be a rich source of American political culture.21 PAINTING DEPICTING THE INAUGURAL PARTY
22 IMAGE OF THE WHITE HOUSE
/ NARRATOR: Jackson, who had pledged to be a president for all of the people, literally opened the White House to all comers—starting with his inauguration. The raucous crowd that showed up to celebrate the occasion got so drunk, made so much noise, and broke so many dishes, that Jackson was eventually forced to escape the celebration by climbing out a back window.SEGMENT TWO
“THE JACKSON PRESIDENCY”
23 PORTRAIT OF JACKSON
/ ACTOR: Andrew Jackson.“I am governed by Principle alone. . .”
24 HARRY WATSON ON CAMERA (21:21:42:15)
/ HARRY WATSON: One of Jackson’s core beliefs and values was that he was the best man to represent the will of the American people, so that he had an enormously close identification with the masses if you will and thought that whatever he wanted must be what they want to.25 HARRY WATSON ON CAMERA (21:23:50:27)
/ HARRY WATSON: Now some uglier aspects of his core values would certainly be racism because he was a strong believer in African-American slavery. He was a strong believer that Native Americans had no right to hang onto land that white Americans wanted. I don’t think he ever gave the movement for women’s suffrage any serious thought at all in his life.26 PORTRAITS OF JACKSON—STARTING WITH ONE SHOWING HIS AGE AND GOING BACK TO ONE WITH HIS WIFE AS A YOUNGER MAN
/ NARRATOR: When Andrew Jackson assumed the presidency, he had little to lose: his health was ravaged, and he was convinced that the viciousness of the campaign had killed his beloved wife, who had died six weeks after the election.27 PORTRAITS OF THE VARIOUS PLAYERS—SEE THE TIME/LIFE BOOK COVERING HIS PERIOD
28 STATUE OF CALHOUN (6755)
/ NARRATOR: In deep mourning, he marched into the White House armed with steely resolve, demanding absolute loyalty. And the loyalty of his cabinet members was put to the test almost immediately when John Henry Eaton, Jackson’s Secretary of War, married Peggy O’Neal, the daughter of a tavern keeper.The wives of the other cabinet members, led by Mrs. John C. Calhoun, aggressively snubbed the young Irish beauty. This behavior enraged Jackson, who made it clear that any attack upon Mrs. Eaton was an attack upon him. Jackson never forgave his Vice President John C. Calhoun for the role he played in this affair, and it may have influenced Jackson’s response to a major event of his administration: the Nullification Crisis.
29 RICHARD ELLIS ON CAMERA (1:22:49:04)
30 IMAGE OF THE CONSTITUTION
/ RICHARD ELLIS: States’ rights was a very, very important belief that Americans had coming out of the Revolution. After all, much of this got codified to a certain extent, in terms of doctrine, by the Virginia-Kentucky Resolutions; which argued in effect that the United States’ Constitution was a compact among the states and that if the federal government overstepped its bounds, the states had a right to declare these laws unconstitutional.31 DRAWING OF CALHOUN ADDRESSING THE SENATE
32 B-ROLL OF OLD SENATE CHAMBER
33 IMAGE OF COTTON PLANTATION AND/OR B-ROLL OF COTTON
/ NARRATOR: The state of South Carolina, acting on the advice of John C. Calhoun, proceeded to nullify the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832. This action put the issue of states’ rights squarely on the table. South Carolina argued that the federal government had overstepped its authority by using the import taxes to prop up northern industries at the expense of southern agricultural interests.34 HARRY WATSON ON CAMERA (21:27:52:28)
/ HARRY WATSON: Jackson agreed with Calhoun that the federal government was a government of limited powers but he drew the limits in a different place than Calhoun did. Jackson believed that if Calhoun was right, then the federal government essentially had no power at all and would fall apart, then each state would have to arm itself against its neighbors. There would be wars between them. And in the midst of this anarchy and chaos, people would turn to a dictator who could at least guarantee them peace and quiet. So Jackson thought that Calhoun’s nullification policy was not only a faulty interpretation of the Constitution, he thought that it was an anarchical disaster that would destroy democracy itself.35 RICHARD ELLIS ON CAMERA (1:28:30:28)
B-ROLL OF CHARLESTON/ CHARLESTON HARBOR (6750/51)STATUE OF JACKSON IN OPPOSITION TO STATUE OF CALHOUN / RICHARD ELLIS: It became a crisis because when South Carolina actually nullified the tariffs of ’28 and ’32, Jackson really wanted to go down to South Carolina with military force. And he was gonna hang these people. He saw this as treasonous and he was gonna hang them. Any time you start talking about the President of the United States hanging the Vice President of the United States, you have a constitutional crisis.
36 STATUE OF HENRY CLAY (6709)
/ NARRATOR: The crisis was dissipated when South Carolina backed down and repealed its nullification of the tariffs. Meanwhile, Henry Clay put forward a compromise bill designed to lower tariffs gradually.37 PORTRAIT OF CALHOUN
/ ACTOR: John C. Calhoun.“The struggle, so far from being over, is not more than fairly commenced.”
38 RICHARD ELLIS ON CAMERA
/ RICHARD ELLIS: (1:26:50:10) The theory that Calhoun developed was that a state, a single state had a right to declare a federal law unconstitutional. Whereupon the federal government, the only thing it could do would be to amend the Constitution to give it the power to do things that had been declared unconstitutional. And then South Carolina would have a right to leave the Union. This was a new idea connected with states’ rights, the idea of secession. States’ rights and secession were not linked together until you get the nullification crisis.39 WHITE FLASH FOR TRANSITION