With South Carolina removing the Confederate flag from its capitol grounds, state and local Democratic parties seem to have developed an urge to purge. Salena Zito of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports on an effort to get rid of the party’s founders:
Georgia, Connecticut, Missouri and Iowa have already removed (Thomas) Jefferson and (Andrew) Jackson’s names from their dinners, and several more states are considering it.
I’ve ranted at length about my distaste for Andrew Jackson, and I shall not repeat those criticisms here (though I’m tempted to). Instead, I’d like to take a moment to thank the Democrats for having finally abandoned Thomas Jefferson.
He never really belonged to them in the first place.
Founding fathers go in and out of style. James Madison is all the rage these days, but 100 years ago Charles Beard made sure that his name was associated with mud. Jefferson’s reputation is at a nadir of late. I find this strange, given Madison’s recent popularity. The two were attached at the hip for thirty years, so how one can be esteemed while the other reviled is a little beyond me.
I have long been irked by Democrats wrongly claiming Jefferson as a founder. I am so happy they are ditching him I won’t object to their absurdly presentist reasons for doing so. I will only point out that, if Democrats are looking to thin their ancestral herd based on who had a good record on civil rights, they will discover that almost every national leader up to and including Jimmy Carter was wanting in some way on this issue.
The truth is that Jefferson is no more a founder of the Democratic party than he is a founder of the Whig party. He never belonged to the Democrats, and I’m happy to have his memory released from their clutches, even if it is accompanied with their typical moral preening.
The party that Jefferson established was widely known in its day as the Republican party — named as such to signal that its members were the keepers of the true republican faith embodied by the Revolution. Today, the Jeffersonian party is often called the “Democratic-Republican party,” but this is (mostly) a neologism to distinguish it from the modern GOP.
The Jeffersonian Republican party formed around 1791 and lasted, more or less intact, until the election of 1824 — after which it split into two factions. The divide came down to the role of government in developing the domestic economy. On one side was Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and eventually Daniel Webster. They favored a national bank, federal sponsorship of internal improvements, and protective tariffs. They would become the National Republican party, later the Whigs. Eventually, the Lincolnian Republicans would spin off mainly from the remnants of this coalition. On the other side were New York senator Martin Van Buren, Treasury Secretary William Crawford, and (eventually) Andrew Jackson. They opposed such a bank, wanted to limit government expenditures, and were very aggressive about acquiring western territory.
Importantly, both sides of this split had some claim to the Jeffersonian mantle, neither of which was perfect.
The connection between the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Democrats mostly depended on Jackson’s opposition to the Second Bank of the United States, which he claimed favored the wealthy over yeoman farmers. This was reminiscent of Jefferson and Madison’s opposition to Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States. However, Jefferson retained the Bank after he became president, and Madison chartered the Second Bank in 1816. Moreover, neither would have approved of Jackson’s patently illegal removal of federal deposits from the Second Bank.
There are other ideological tensions as well. Jackson’s allies in Congress sponsored the most onerous tariff the country would see until Smoot-Hawley, something that the tax-cutting Jefferson never would have abided. Plus, the Jeffersonians thought that the executive branch had become too powerful and supercilious under Alexander Hamilton. As president, Jackson would embody many of these very fears. Most significantly, during the disputed election of 1824, both Jefferson and Madison disapproved of Jackson becoming president.
Clay and the Whigs had Jeffersonian roots of their own. Granted, Clay’s activist agenda surpassed that which Jefferson and Madison ever accepted. In 1817 Madison vetoed on constitutional grounds a Clay-sponsored bill that would have used Second Bank profits to fund internal improvements. Even so, Clay’s economic program — the “American System” — had a decidedly Republican cast to it. Its purpose was to find policies that benefited all quarters of the country equally. Clay certainly advocated more government than Jefferson ever endorsed, but this was an earnest attempt to realize the ideal of Jefferson’s 1801 inaugural address: “We are all Republicans. We are all Federalists.”
The truth is that there was a split in the Republican ranks after the War of 1812 that hopelessly scrambled the lineage. While Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans salvaged the nation’s pride, a portion of the Republican party concluded that the old Jeffersonian program was insufficient to realize the national interest. They judged that the country failed to achieve its lofty wartime goals because it lacked good infrastructure, a reliable financial system, and a well-trained military, so the party’s program had to be modernized. Meanwhile, an old guard thought that the only true form of republican government was one that hewed to the original orthodoxy. Both groups could claim at least a portion of the Jeffersonian heritage.
Thus, to say that Jefferson is the founder of the modern Democratic party is to tell just half the story. The Whigs could claim him as a forefather as well, which means that today’s Republicans can make an indirect bid, too. After all, the nationalism of Abraham Lincoln traces back to Clay, and in turn to Madison.
Indeed, the Jeffersonians can be said to be the forefathers of both modern parties — because the Federalists were not a party in the conventional sense of the word. The Federalists had been a party in the way that Edmund Burke would have meant the term — a collection of gentleman in government united around common principles. The Jeffersonians were, too, but they were much more. They developed the idea of a party that appeals directly to the people at large. They cultivated and encouraged mass participation in politics through the party, making it a vehicle for the public interest. Today’s two party system is an elaboration of this innovation.
If progressive Democrats don’t want Jefferson anymore, the GOP should snatch him up as quickly as possible. History is prone to faddishness, after all, and in another 100 years Jefferson might be the founder enjoying a renaissance. The Republicans would do well to get him before the Democrats realize the mistake they’ve made.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.
