Quote of the Day, Just Memory-Hole The Whole Democratic Party, Then edition.

There’s a certain bemused amazement that comes from watching a political party deliberately mutilate itself like this.  You have to wonder when the auto-cannibalism ends. If it ever ends:

The Democrat Party in Connecticut said this week that it has scrubbed the names Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from its annual fundraising dinner. The reasons? Jackson and Jefferson were slaveholders, and Jackson fought Native Americans.

[snip]

But why stop at Jefferson and Jackson?

Why, indeed. Personally, I think Thomas Jefferson wasn’t quite a man who could bear up under the consequences of his own principles, and that Andrew Jackson was a homicidal maniac. But they were both patriots, and the country would be a lot worse off if neither had been born*. Including the parts of the country who are freaking out at seeing Jefferson’s and Jackson’s names on a memorial dinner.

Moe Lane

PS: Seriously, though: if the Democrats simply must excise their history like this, Woodrow Wilson absolutely has to be next on the chopping block. The man was a racist totalitarian-loving monster whose career was only cut short by an exceedingly well-timed stroke.

*For one thing, it’d be a heck of a lot smaller. Thomas Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Purchase, and Andrew Jackson made sure that we kept it at the Battle of New Orleans.

12 thoughts on “Quote of the Day, Just Memory-Hole The Whole Democratic Party, Then edition.”

  1. And Andy J. kept the country together by sheer force of personality during the Nullification Crisis.

    1. Yes. But the Nullification Crisis only happened because of the Tariff of Abominations, which Jackson’s cronies pushed through Congress in 1828 to help him win the election.

  2. Given that the War of 1812 was already over when Jackson fought at New Orleans, one wonders how that battle had any effect on us keeping the Louisiana Purchase. But sure, okay.
    .
    However, he sure didn’t help some of *my* ancestors keep their land, IYKWIMAITYD.

    1. Clay, Adams, and the American delegation at Ghent were helped by the victories at Plattsburgh and Baltimore. American victories there kept the Brits from acquiring any of our territory up around Canada (which is what the Brits were really after). Jackson’s victory in NO mostly helped Americans feel good.

      2. Feeling good as a young country isn’t a bad thing. I’m not going to get Napoleon quite right, but isn’t it: ~ moral to the physical is three to one. ??

        Frankly, I would treasure a bit of feel good right now.

    2. If Jackson had done nothing, those ancestors would have eventually been killed or dispersed.
      .
      1. The Georgians wanted the land.
      2. The Cherokee were ‘not of the tribe’, so the other colonies would have been very unlikely to send fighters to support their efforts.
      3. Bloody Kansas suggests that other slaves states would support the expansion of slaves enough to supply the Georgians with any fighting capacity they lacked.
      4. The Cherokee couldn’t easily supplement their population with folks fresh off the boat from Europe.
      .
      It is likely that the extermination of the Cherokee wouldn’t have been complete, but they would’ve been extinct as a people.

  3. DemosthenesVW:

    The argument I’ve seen is that, although the Treaty of Ghent returned the situation to the status quo ante bellum, the UK hadn’t signed off on the legitimacy of the Louisiana Purchase. If Jackson had lost the Battle of New Orleans, leaving the British in charge of that city, the British would have continued to hold it, claiming that the US did not legitimately own it before the war. See, for example, http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/02/battle-of-new-orleans-crucial-us-victory-after-all-historians.html?comp=7000023317843&rank=2.

    Additionally, the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase were never defined, and, without the US kicking the British out of Louisiana at the Battle of New Orleans, it is likely that both the British and the Spanish would have been able to haggle terms far less favorable to the US in whatever equivalents of the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 and the Adams-Onis Treaty would happen.

  4. Someone whose only history is oral, and who gets that from later waves of immigrants might conclude that about Jackson. To modern eyes, he looks different from other notable figures of the revolutionary era.
    .
    The country had some very deep cultural divisions, and different populations had different standards of behavior. Remember Mead’s essay on the Jacksonian tribe? He came from one of the populations that had those qualities. He is much more normal if compared to certain frontier cultures of that era, instead of to people who lived in more settled or upper class conditions.
    .
    Criticizing Jackson is refusal to tolerate and accept his culture, and is thus racist.

  5. “…exceedingly well timed stroke.”
    .
    Not entirely unlike a certain sitting Israeli PM a few years back. I wonder how recent history would look if well timed strokes were not a “thing?”

Comments are closed.