As a general rule, the farther back in time one travels, the more difficult historical analogies become. The American economy was a very different beast in 1787 when the founding fathers drafted the U.S. Constitution. There were only three banks in the entire country and Spanish silver dollars could still be used to pay taxes. The poor state of overland transportation made it much more convenient, cheaper, and timely to ship goods from Philadelphia to London than to Pittsburgh.

By the 1820s and ’30s, America was quickly becoming a more industrialized economy, though modern observers may still regard the complex details of the political and economic convulsions of this period as akin to visiting a foreign country. This was the era of “the Bank War,” President Andrew Jackson’s famous political conflict with Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Second Bank of the United States.

The Second Bank was the Federal Reserve of its time. Like today’s Fed, which adjusts interest rates in order to provide price and employment stability, the Second Bank served as the nation’s central bank and performed important regulatory functions. It serviced the nation’s public debt, managed the Treasury Department’s fiscal priorities, propagated a nationwide uniform currency, and curbed excessive lending among the country’s numerous state banks. Through its network of branch offices and overseas agents, the Second Bank facilitated domestic and international trade.

But the financial tools available to Biddle and the Second Bank were limited compared to what’s currently at Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s disposal. Biddle could make minor adjustments in the nation’s overall money supply by selling government bonds, for example, but this measure paled in comparison to the complex and far-reaching operations conducted by today’s Fed. To inject money into our sputtering economy and lower interest rates today, the Fed purchases trillions of dollars of U.S. Treasury bonds and other assets. It acts on a scale unimaginable to anyone living in the 1830s.

This and other remarkable differences between the political economy of the U.S. in the 1830s and today render tenuous any direct comparisons between the two eras. Today’s GDP of $20 trillion is several hundred times greater than the $1 billion economy of 1830, which is equivalent to about $50 billion in today’s money. The Treasury Department, which collected around 90 percent of its revenue from tariffs, often ran budget surpluses (a rarity over the past century). Information didn’t flow with the ease it does today. It took at least two weeks to deliver a newspaper from Washington, D.C., to St. Louis. For a variety of reasons, there were no reliable unemployment statistics at the national level. Seventy-eight percent of the workforce was agricultural at the time, compared to less than 5 percent today. Slavery was fundamental not only to the South’s political, social, and economic structure, but also to the nation’s.

Today’s policymakers are thankfully not drawing inspiration from the antebellum era—a time in which risky financial institutions sometimes constructed houses of cards that collapsed into devastating economic panics, and did little to alleviate the crises’ worst effects. But some leaders are trying to take cues from the U.S. response to the Great Depression. In the late 1920s, a perfect storm of events came together to create the worst economic crisis the nation has ever faced: a roughly 10-year period of widespread bankruptcy, rural poverty, mass evictions and migrations, urban bread lines, falling wages, crippling deflation, idle factories, and workers’ strikes.

No single factor caused the Depression, and no single policy ended it. The stock market crash of October 1929 wiped out the life savings of millions of Americans, making them more reluctant to spend money. But even before the crash, numerous red flags signaled a struggling economy. Falling commodity prices made it difficult for farmers to pay back loans. Major economies in Europe struggled to meet the debt payments and reparations left over from World War I. High tariff rates strangled world trade. Economic inequality and a weakened middle class stunted consumer demand.

All of these worrisome developments were amplified and transmitted to the rest of the world through the international gold standard, a factor that historians and economists often point to in order to explain the severity and duration of the Depression. This was a system where most of the major world currencies were exchangeable in gold on demand, at a fixed rate. Neoclassical economists of the time believed that such a system would be automatic and self-regulating, requiring no intervention or regulation by central bankers.

But the gold standard did not work as intended. One of its many flaws was that countries did not always abide by the same rules, a phenomenon resembling the imbalances that plagued the Eurozone in the last decade. In 1931, the Fed made what was, in retrospect, a terrible blunder by raising interest rates. The nation’s central bank was attempting to rein in the excessive speculation in stocks that had contributed to the crash of 1929 and at the same time acquire enough gold to uphold a strong dollar. Conventional economic thinking held that this was the right move. But with the country already mired in a deepening recession, raising interest rates proved costly: Nearly one-third of the country’s banks failed, foreign investment declined, and unemployment levels approached a staggering 25 percent. Central bankers in virtually every major economy around the world made similar mistakes. Only when countries abandoned the gold standard did recovery begin.

The actions that ended the Great Depression provide clues to the sorts of things central banks and regulators can do to help—but they hardly offer us easily translatable solutions for the current crisis. We have no gold standard to abandon today. New Deal agencies inaugurated the modern welfare state, imposed stricter financial regulations, and recognized workers’ rights to collective bargaining, but some of them also perpetuated the racism of Jim Crow. Work relief programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) employed millions of workers, but it was really government spending on the military during World War II, furthered by the growth of the Cold War military-industrial complex, that ushered in an unprecedented era of American prosperity. So, would increasing America’s already-enormous military budget be helpful today?

The larger point here is not to eschew historical analogies or ignore the instances in which they can deliver fairly straightforward verdicts on policy questions. Rather, it’s to note that even expert knowledge of previous recessions may only help us so much in the current chaos; there will always be some degree of uncertainty and contingency in the way things panned out.

While we have an extensive historical record of what conditions and policies helped the U.S. recover from the Great Depression, we will never have the scientific certainty of running an experiment 100 times to see if it was FDR’s confidence-inspiring speeches, or raising the price of gold, or creating the WPA, that helped the most. All we have is the singular experiment of the historical record. An approach to history that leaves plenty of room for ambiguity and uncertainty allows us to appreciate the uniqueness of the past and present, to note significant changes over time, and perhaps above all, to recognize the limits of our expertise.

The post The Great Depression Will Not Help Us Solve the COVID-19 Downturn appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Conspiracies appeared even at the founding of the country, when, during the early decades of the American republic, the Federalist and Jeffersonian Republican Parties engaged in conspiratorial rhetoric on a regular basis. Following the War of 1812, the Federalist Party faded, leaving the Republicans as the predominant national party. Their hold was so great that in 1816 and 1820, James Monroe, the Republican presidential candidate, ran virtually unopposed. In 1824, however, the Republicans splintered into factions. Five viable candidates ran in that election cycle, and John Quincy Adams won the presidency.

The controversy around Adams’s victory quickly fueled suspicions: Tennessean Andrew Jackson had won the most electoral and popular votes and the most regions and states, but because he did not win the majority of electoral votes, the U.S. House of Representatives was constitutionally required to choose the president in a runoff of the top three vote-getters. Jackson’s supporters believed that House Speaker Henry Clay, who had placed fourth in the regular election, helped Adams win the House election in return for being appointed secretary of state. The Jacksonians’ charges of a “corrupt bargain” between Adams and Clay ensured that the 1828 election would, in part, be fought over this conspiracy theory.

During the hotly contested 1828 campaign, Jackson’s opponents, too, trafficked in conspiracy theories: In particular, administration men accused Jackson’s supporters of plotting a coup d’état if their candidate lost to President Adams. This “theory” held that pro-Jackson congressmen, upset about the national government’s attempts to impose a new tariff on imports, held “secret meetings” to discuss “the DISSOLUTION OF THE UNION.” One pro-Jackson supporter “declared that he should not be astonished to see Gen. Jackson, if not elected, placed in the Presidential Chair, at the point of fifty thousand bayonets!!!” The thought of a national military hero such as Jackson leading a military rebellion had no basis in reality, but the conspiracy theory fit the tenor of the times.

Jackson won—and conspiratorial rhetoric remained ever-present in his presidency. In the run-up to the 1832 election, for example, the national organization of Freemasonry drew conspiracy theorists’ attention. Spurred on by the murder of a New York Mason named William Morgan, who had threatened to disclose the fraternal order’s secrets, an Anti-Masonic political party had emerged during the 1828 election. Frequently repeated accusations that Freemasonry was secretive and elitist reflected larger concerns about the ways in which the ruling elite undermined the nation’s democratic institutions through corruption. And for the Anti-Masons, Jackson was no better than Adams; in their view, the Tennessean’s promise of “rotation of office” was simply cronyism.

Four years later, the Anti-Masons had gained enough supporters to run William Wirt for president against the Democratic incumbent Jackson and the National Republican candidate Henry Clay. During the 1832 campaign, they accused Freemasons of a number of transgressions beyond Morgan’s murder, including subversion of free speech and democracy. Rhode Island Anti-Masons, for example, warned that Freemasons were “darkening the public mind” by attempting to quash public criticism of their organization in the state’s newspapers. Vermont’s William Strong charged the Democrats with following the Masonic dogma of “the end justifies the means” to elect Jackson in 1828 and secure government patronage for party members.

But in that same election of 1832, Anti-Masons themselves became the target of conspiracy theorists. New York Democrats saw a plot afoot in the coalition of the Anti-Masonic Party and the National Republicans in their state. How was it possible, one New York newspaper asked, that the Anti-Masons had nominated Wirt, yet had allied themselves with Clay? It was not because of principled opposition to Freemasonry, as all three presidential candidates were Masons. The only answer was that it was a “deep laid conspiracy to defeat the wishes of the people” to elect Andrew Jackson.

During Jackson’s second term, much of the conspiratorial rhetoric centered on the Bank War, the political battle between the president and the Second Bank of the United States, the nation’s chief financial institution, which held both government and private funds and was supposed to remain non-partisan in its loans. Jackson, however, believed that the bank’s president Nicholas Biddle had used the institution’s deposits and influence to assist John Quincy Adams in the 1828 election. If true, this was a blatant misuse of the people’s money. Consequently, Jackson exerted his power as chief executive to remove government funds from the Second Bank, which would cripple its financial power. In retaliation, Biddle began calling in the bank’s loans across the country, precipitating a financial recession to pressure the president to restore the government’s deposits.

As a result, accusations of conspiracy flew on both sides. The anti-Jackson Whig Party (which had replaced the National Republican Party of the 1832 campaign) accused Vice President Martin Van Buren of being “at the bottom of all this hostility to the Bank.” Allegedly, the “Little Magician” was using his “arts and tricks” against the Second Bank to further his presidential prospects in 1836.

Democrats then responded by constructing their own conspiracy theory about “the Boston Aristocracy” and its control of the Second Bank. Stretching back to the early days of the republic, they claimed this “nefarious conspiracy” had used the Second Bank to target the anti-aristocratic Southern and mid-Atlantic states, “producing universal panic and distress” by constricting the money supply in those regions. These same conspirators, according to Democrats, were now employing “the whole power of the present Bank to embarrass the administration and distress the country,” not to mention hurting the Democratic Party’s chances of retaining the White House.

In the 1836 presidential campaign, which pitted Van Buren against three Whig candidates—William Henry Harrison, Daniel Webster, and Hugh Lawson White—the Whigs used conspiracy theories in an attempt to derail the Democrats’ chances for a political victory. They accused Van Buren of being a member of the Catholic Church and of participating in a “popish plot” intended “to conciliate the Catholics, in the U States for Political purposes.” Van Buren, who was raised in the Dutch Reformed Church, denied the accusation.

Whigs also accused Democratic vice-presidential candidate Richard M. Johnson of wanting to force Washington society to accept his two daughters, who were the product of his relationship with an enslaved African-American woman. According to one Richmond Whig, Johnson’s “depraved tastes” threatened to destroy the racial barrier that kept African-Americans in a subordinate position, and endangered “the purity of our maidens, the chaste dignity of our matrons.” Van Buren and Johnson won in 1836, but Johnson’s family circumstances continued to plague his political career and harmed Van Buren’s standing with some Southern voters in 1840.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly how many votes changed because of conspiratorial rhetoric, either then or now. It seems clear, though, that American politicians believe that this type of rhetoric makes a difference—and that American voters have always had to be politically literate to determine the difference between conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies.

Still, this enduring belief in vast, unexplainable conspiracies has often contributed to voters’ feelings of powerlessness, increasing their cynicism and apathy. And of course, conspiratorial rhetoric undermines the nation’s democratic institutions and practices. Politically motivated conspiracy theories, ultimately, bring the same result as conspiracies themselves: a small number of elite Americans wielding immense power over the future of the United States, power that may not account for the will of the majority.

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Gradually, though, he came around to the idea of a grander mint, and became personally involved in many aspects of the building’s design, from its placement in a prime location, backed up to one corner of Centre Square, at the literal center of Philadelphia, to the rich materials used in its construction. Brick became marble, a copper roof was substituted for the original tin. When the cost of building the mint doubled, it was Jackson who assured that Congressional appropriations were adequate to execute the design. 

Jackson’s embrace of the grand architectural style known as Greek Revival wasn’t as strange as it may seem. In an emerging American Republic whose early citizens had to define the national character from scratch, the stately building style, borrowed from the ancients, became a perfect mode of expression. By the 1830s, most public buildings in the U.S. were being designed as Greek temples serving some other function: temples of commerce, temples of law, temples of learning. You can still see the Greek style’s imprint in the North and in the South, in cities and in rural areas, on modest shopfronts and in grand monuments.

The Greek Revival style of architecture—imbued with balance, adaptability, and democratic roots—became the first truly national manner of building in our new country, the dominant architectural style from the 1810s until the onset of the Civil War and one that still echoes in our culture today. Its greatest champion was the very man who designed the mint that so captured President Jackson’s imagination: the Philadelphia-based architect William Strickland.

Strickland was born around 1788 in the wilds of Monmouth County, New Jersey and raised in Philadelphia, where his father, John Strickland, worked as a carpenter. The elder Strickland, a gregarious fellow, befriended the first professionally trained architect in America, Benjamin Latrobe, in 1798 while he was working on the architect’s first Philadelphia building, the Bank of Pennsylvania. Architecture was an uncertain profession in America’s early days, when all you needed to do to become an “architect” was hang out a sign calling yourself one, but Strickland got something close to a real education in the subject. Latrobe got to know the family and was impressed with young William Strickland’s drafting talent. He took him on as a full-time apprentice in 1801.

Latrobe, who had emigrated from Britain in 1796 and ultimately settled in Philadelphia, had been trained in the Neoclassical style, but he soon had to adapt to his new surroundings. Nowadays, the term “Neoclassical” is usually used—even by people who should know better—as a catch-all stylistic shorthand for just about any building with columns. But Neoclassicism was originally a movement that aimed to uncover the origins of the art of architecture. In the Neoclassical imagination, Adam’s hut in Paradise morphed into Greek temples and Roman palaces. Along with this fictional history, Neoclassical architects made great use of elemental geometric forms like cubes and spheres. Elegant and highly intellectual, Neoclassicism was a hit in places like Paris but supremely ill-suited to the earthy temperament of the American continent, which in the early 19th century was preoccupied with the future, not the past.

Latrobe never abandoned his love for the Neoclassical manner, but he soon realized it was going to be a non-starter in his new country. Inspired by the 1762 publication of Antiquities of Athens by the Englishmen James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, he switched to the Greek style. Stuart and Revett were architects who spent several years drawing the fragmentary remains of ancient Athenian buildings and making the most detailed depictions of these structures published to date. Latrobe had never been to Greece, but it was no longer necessary to have seen a Greek building to know exactly what one looked like. Antiquities erased any uncertainty about the details. It was a book whose time had come. Latrobe passed his reliance on Antiquities to his apprentices—including William Strickland.

Strickland didn’t leave behind any writings about architecture or his design philosophy, but it is clear that he was positively smitten with the Greek manner. (One story, which I have not been able to confirm, holds that in later life he told his own apprentices that all an aspiring architect needed was a copy of Stuart and Revett.) On a personal level, the style may have provided him a means to break free from the Neoclassicism of his master, Latrobe. But Strickland seems to have had another reason for designing Greek buildings that was more public, and more profound: He presented the Greek style as a basis for a truly American style of architecture.

His indefatigable devotion to it made him a dominant architect in the United States for almost 20 years.

Strickland began to build his reputation with the Second Bank of the United States. He won a competition to design the bank in 1818, and it kept him busy for about six years. The Second Bank was the first modern construction explicitly based on the Parthenon on the Athenian acropolis, with its eight fluted columns supporting a correct Doric entablature and triangular pediment. Prominently sited on Chestnut Street, a block or so east of Independence Hall in downtown Philadelphia, this was the building that first established the connection between money and the classical styles in the United States that lasted until the middle of the 20th century. The bank was an instant critical success, not only within Philadelphia, but up and down the entire Eastern seaboard and abroad. It became the first internationally famous American building and a must-see attraction for any sophisticated visitor to Penn’s city. 

For all its fidelity to Greek roots, Strickland’s Second Bank was a particularly American project. It was, after all, a bank: a no-nonsense temple of Mammon, and one of the key foundations supporting a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people. Cephas Childs, a noted Philadelphia engraver and publisher, knew Strickland, and quoted the architect’s description of the Second Bank while adding his own gloss: “In this new and growing region where so many states are displaying the honorable pride of sovereignty,” he said, “[…]it is natural to look for the simplest style of architecture in that nation, which above all others, has assumed as the basis of its institutions the utmost simplicity in all its forms of government.” The Greek manner fit the bill.

Painting of William Strickland by John Neagle, 1829. Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.

Over the course of his career, Strickland designed over 40 U.S. buildings and monuments that could be described as Greek: custom houses, federal mints, a merchants’ exchange that was the most elegant building in Philadelphia in the early 1830s, an Athenaeum in Providence, Rhode Island, theaters, hotels, and houses large and small. He found the Greek style adaptable to almost any architectural purpose in America. Its simplicity of ornament reflected the sturdiness and authenticity of Americans. Transcending politics, it appeared in the columned homes of Southern planters and the stylish abodes of well-to-do New England Whigs. It’s no accident that, in a toned-down form, Greek Revival architecture even followed Western settlers to the frontier, where it was frequently radically simplified in the hands of unskilled builders. “Carpenter Greek” was distinguished by its use of wood rather than stone or brick, and the almost invariable central portico with a pediment supported by square pillars—a demonstration of its ability to express a democratic egalitarianism.

The volume, consistency, and success of Strickland’s work suggests that he understood this connection between the Greek Revival and the development of a national architecture for the young democracy—and that he transferred his zeal to the patrons he met along the way. The federal mint building in Philadelphia, which so piqued President Jackson’s interest, is a perfect example. Samuel Moore, the director of the mint, wrote to the Secretary of the Treasury about Strickland’s proposed new building, talking about “the general character of the Edifice and [its] style of execution,” which, he stressed, were “appropriate to the purpose to which it is devoted and to its national character,” which is “what the Pres[iden]t had in mind.” I believe that these associations must have come directly from Strickland, who was in close contact with Moore throughout the planning of the building.

Just as Strickland’s Second Bank of the United States was the first really significant example of Greek Revival design in this country, his Tennessee State Capitol, in Nashville, turned out to be the last great building in the style. The building, standing atop Campbell’s Hill, in the center of town, is an improbable, but successful, combination of a Greek temple of the Ionic order and a central vertical tower based on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, an Athenian structure Strickland reverted to several times in his long career. It was a spectacular culmination of Strickland’s decades-long preoccupation with Greek architecture.

Strickland didn’t live to see his Capitol triumph, which had come against all odds—largely because the Tennessee legislature balked at paying for the building. Strickland had been hired to design the building by the state of Tennessee in 1845, soon after Nashville was chosen as the permanent capital, but the building’s construction dragged on until the eve of the Civil War. Strickland apparently understood that the Capitol was going to be his last building; at his request, the building committee persuaded the legislature to pass an act allowing Strickland to be buried in it.

In 1854, Strickland died, and was interred in the north porch of the still-unfinished capitol. The Greek Revival was waning, to be replaced by other styles after the Civil War. Some, such as the Gothic and Renaissance Revivals, had been around since the 1830s, and others, like the Baroque Revival—commonly known in this country as the General Grant style because of its flourishing in the 1870s, during Grant’s presidency—became popular after the War. But even as the chaste columns and pediments and rigid symmetry of the Greek manner gave way to a profusion of Victorian ornament, humble, quirky, and homemade examples of the Greek style would still be built almost everywhere across the country, in high-style buildings like banks, and in purely utilitarian structures, like waterworks. In its flexibility, versatility, and charm, the Greek is perhaps as close to a truly American architecture as we will ever have.

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Jackson’s contemporary notoriety, however, far exceeds his actual impact. To be sure, he remains well known for his “war” on the Second National Bank of the United States and for signing the Indian Removal Act, which resulted in the forcible eviction of thousands of Native Americans from their homes to lands west of the Mississippi River. But soon after he left the presidency, Jackson’s way of social, economic, and racial thinking was eclipsed—and it is not likely to be durably revived, by Trump or anyone else.

The true long-term winners of the “Age of Jackson” were actually his opposition—the Whig Party. After the 1860s, the Jacksonians’ articles of faith—agrarianism, states’ rights, and slavery—were relegated to history’s ash heap. It was the priorities of the Whig Party—the short-lived moderate party of antebellum America—that prevailed, and shaped the world to come.

The Whigs did not capture as many presidential elections as the Jacksonians (only two in five contests), rarely controlled Congress, and in 1854 dissolved into the Republican Party. But their party was in the forefront of modern American development in a way that the Jacksonians, a Southern-dominated coalition, never were. And thus its impact was both superior and lasting.

To say that the Whigs advanced a “modern” outlook is to note their support for what the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay called the American System, an economic plan to use the power of the central government to encourage internal improvements in the states. Canals, railroads, industry, and a more centralized banking system were to be the fruits of this program. Culturally, Whigs were known as the party of religious and educational reform. Typically, they were opposed to Indian removal and many were hostile to slavery. They comprised a coalition of entrepreneurs and evangelicals.

The Jacksonians’ unreflective emphasis on private capitalism and states’ rights came to a head in the disastrous Panic of 1837, which touched off a major recession that lasted for several years. The panic resulted from Jackson’s destruction of the Second National Bank, which had been a vital engine of development and financial regulation in the country. Jackson put the Bank on the road to extinction by vetoing an 1832 bill to recharter it, and then removing government deposits from the Bank. In the early 20th century, Congress would rectify his mistake—and acknowledge that Whiggery had gotten it right—with the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

During his Bank War, Jackson’s actions concerned many Americans. His rejection of the Bank bill was one of 12 presidential vetoes during his two terms—more than all the vetoes by the previous six presidents combined. Jackson sometimes refused to sign congressionally approved legislation that he merely disagreed with personally, which led to accusations that he was governing as a king rather than as a president.

Opposition to Jackson’s monarchal behavior was a big part of the Whigs’ identity. In fact, the very name “Whig” was chosen to align Jackson’s critics philosophically with the British Whig Party, thus portraying the Jackson camp as American Tories. In a similar vein, one of the Whigs’ biggest concerns was the growth of executive authority—a concern that was not only justified, it remains of vital importance in our republic today.

It’s also significant that Jackson’s opponent in two presidential elections, John Quincy Adams, is in many respects a more relatable figure to us than Old Hickory. His support for federal aid in economic development, his criticism of slavery, and his desire to see the United States move beyond a narrow agrarian states’ rights orientation were not always political winners in his own time. But they were positions that would push the Republican Party to victory in 1860, continuing in their modern permutations to inform economic and cultural conversations today. Perhaps that is why John Quincy Adams is such a hot topic for contemporary historians. Since 2013 no fewer than four major biographies—by Herb Giles Unger, Fred Kaplan, James Traub, and William J. Cooper—have appeared; earlier this year the Library of America released an edition of The Diaries of John Quincy Adams.

Whigs were not perfect, of course—they could be elitist, patronizing, and condescending. Too much a party of the Anglo, the industrial, and the educated, Whigs alienated some voters. But they also believed in societal unity—a view that contrasted with the slash-and-burn tactics of Jackson, who often spoke of irreconcilable interests in America and seldom sought compromise. Northern Whigs in particular, who were closer to industry and further from slavery than their Southern colleagues, demonstrated a far keener understanding of the challenges facing the nation by taking centrist positions on the vital issues of the day—counseling reform rather than destruction of the Bank, advising peaceful border negotiations with Mexico rather than war, and seeking to limit planter expansion into the country’s western territories.

Jackson and his party were undeniably the “victors” of the 1830s. But the Jacksonian vision collapsed within a generation and the Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln (a former Whig) put together a new American system that included a protective tariff, subsidized industry, and promoted education. These planks—along with the destruction of slavery—definitively overturned the Jacksonian order. Old Hickory may have carried the day, but his more moderate opponents won the war.

The post When a Fiery Populist Inflamed the Nation—but His Political Rivals Won the War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But what is populism, anyway? There is no easy answer, for “populism” describes a political style more than a specific set of ideas or policies, and most commentators apply it to others instead of themselves. Our textbooks usually associate populism with the People’s Party of the 1890s, but a little probing shows that the style has deeper roots than the “free silver” campaigns associated with William Jennings Bryan. Populism refers to political movements that see the great mass of hard-working ordinary people in conflict with a powerful, parasitic few, variously described as “special interests,” the “elite,” the “so-called experts,” and of course, the “establishment.” Populists often insist that plain common sense is a better source of wisdom than elite qualities like advanced education, special training, experience, or a privileged background. Populist movements can be choosy, however, in how they define the “people,” and have frequently excluded women, the very poor, or racial and ethnic minorities. Over time, movements labeled “populist” may have targeted the marginalized about as often as they have the elite, sometimes perceiving an alliance between the idle rich and the undeserving poor at the expense of folks in the middle.

Early populist notions appeared in the rhetoric of 18th-century English radicals who warned of an eternal struggle between liberty, virtue, and the common good against corrupt and tyrannical courtiers. Their ideas spread and evolved in the American Revolution, as the “war for home rule” became a “war over who should rule at home.” An anonymous writer captured the early populist vision in a 1776 pamphlet from New Hampshire entitled “The People the Best Governors,” and many others echoed him. “The people know their own wants and necessities and therefore are best able to rule themselves,” he declared, because “God… made every man equal to his neighbor.” In the opposite corner, many of the founders worried about unchecked popular power and placed numerous curbs on popular power in the Constitution, including the Electoral College, a Senate chosen by state legislatures, and lifetime seats for federal judges.

Despite early stirrings, it was the presidential campaigns of Gen. Andrew Jackson that made the populist style a major force in national politics. To many voters, the presidential candidates of 1824 were a lackluster, squabbling batch of what we’d today call Washington insiders. Known as “Old Hickory,” Jackson was the exception—the humble boy veteran of the Revolution and heroic victor at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, who had proved his mettle and virtue against the British and Indians alike. Testifying to his military toughness, his popular nickname also evoked his rural roots and common touch. As one admirer put it, Old Hickory “was the noblest tree in the forest.”

Supporters assured voters that the general’s natural talents far outshone the specious, elite distinctions of his chief competitor, John Quincy Adams—the son of a president, raised in royal capitals, who’d been a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a Harvard professor, and secretary of state. “Although General Jackson has not been educated at foreign courts and reared on sweetmeats from the tables of kings and princes,” sneered one typical editorial, “we think him nevertheless much better qualified to fill the dignified station of president of the United States than Mr. Adams.” In 1824, when Jackson won an electoral plurality but not a majority, and career politicians elected Adams in the House of Representatives, Jackson’s motto for his successful 1828 rematch was ready-made: “Andrew Jackson and the Will of the People.”

Jackson’s inauguration is one of the grand scenes of American history that everyone seems to know about. The speechmaking and oath-taking were solemn and boring, though one high-society matron remembered that the sight of “a free people, collected in their might, silent and tranquil, restrained solely by a moral power, without a shadow around of military force, was majesty, rising to sublimity, and far surpassing the majesty of Kings and Princes, surrounded with armies and glittering in gold.” The White House reception was far otherwise, at least as Mrs. Margaret Bayard Smith described it. “The Majesty of the People had disappeared,” she shuddered. “A rabble, a mob, of boys, negroes, women, children, scrambling fighting, romping …. The whole [White House] had been inundated by the rabble mob.” Mrs. Smith probably exaggerated, and the melee stemmed more from poor planning than innate barbarism, but she perfectly captured the attitude of America’s “better sort” to the mass of farmers, artisans, tradesmen, and laborers who now had final authority in its government. In theory they were sublime, but civilization trembled when they forgot themselves.

Jackson’s conduct in office made official Washington no happier. Mrs. Smith’s husband was president of the Washington branch of the Bank of the United States (a rough counterpart of today’s Federal Reserve), and eventually lost his job when Jackson attacked it. Many of his friends held high appointments in the Adams administration and rightly worried over Jackson’s policy of “rotation in office.” Proclaiming that no one owned an office for life and that “men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves” for government service, the president began to “reform” the government by replacing experienced Adams men with loyal Jacksonians. His policy evolved into the spoils system, in which politics outweighed other qualifications in filling the civil service.

Jackson’s populism appeared most clearly in his policy toward the banking and transportation corporations that were transforming the American economy at the dawn of industrialization. Corporate charters were valuable privileges distributed by legislatures, and state governments often shared corporate ownership with private investors. Jackson feared that public investments offered unearned advantages to insiders that would surely lead to corruption and as he put it, “destroy the purity of our government.” He quickly stopped the practice at the federal level, cheering his supporters but dismaying promoters of turnpikes and canals.

Jackson went much further in his war on the Bank of the United States. With a charter from Congress, the Bank was a public-private corporation partly funded by the taxpayers but controlled by private investors. Its hold on the nation’s currency gave it immense economic powers, but it faced no democratic oversight. Clearly foreshadowing modern controversies, Jackson was also sure the Bank made dubious loans and campaign contributions to influence politicians and editors and even to buy elections. Jackson vowed to destroy it.

When a bill to renew the Bank’s charter reached Jackson in July 1832, the president issued a slashing veto that bristled with populist attacks sounding quite familiar today. “The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” he charged. They sought special favors “to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful,” rightly leading “the humbler members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers … to complain of the injustice of their government.” The government should treat the rich and poor alike, but the Bank made “a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.” After the veto, the president withdrew the government’s money from the Bank before its old charter expired, an act his enemies condemned as a flagrant abuse of power that put the country “in the midst of a revolution.”

These moves by Jackson enraged leading businessmen, mobilized Jackson’s own Democratic Party like nothing ever had, and inspired a rival Whig party to oppose it. The parties’ ensuing clashes sent voter participation rates above 80 percent, and kept them high for decades. In his farewell address, President Jackson warned that “the agricultural, the mechanical, and the laboring classes”—populism’s “people,” in other words—“have little or no share in the direction of the great moneyed corporations,” and were always “in danger of losing their fair influence in the government.” That language is strikingly familiar to 2016 ears, as it would have been to populists in the 1890s and New Dealers in the 1930s.

Today, Andrew Jackson is no longer very popular, and many of his values are no longer ours. His vision of the “people” had no room for people of color. Some of his attacks on eastern financial elites were a continuation of the Jeffersonian attacks on urban, nationalist, Hamiltonian principles. Jackson’s populism was thus a Trojan horse for pro-slavery, pro-states rights interests. He was a wealthy slaveholder himself, with no qualms about African-American bondage and deep hostility to abolitionism. He ignored the early movement for women’s rights, and his infamous policy of Indian removal partly stemmed from demands by his “base” for plentiful free land.

Yet Jackson’s legacy is still with us, and not just the racist part. Ask Bernie, the scourge of modern Wall Street. Ask the Donald, whose promise to expel a minority group brings to mind Indian removal. As long as America venerates the Voice of the People, an evolving Jacksonian populism will survive on the left and the right.

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