American Lion

[lightreads]

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I picked this up largely on the strength of a hilarious Daily Show interview with the author. After reading, I think it was more a case of Jon Stewart’s awesomeness overwhelming all other considerations. Tragic.

Look, I could talk about how stilted the construction of this bio-history is, and I could talk about the frankly odd pacing and even odder notes. But my real problem with this book is a lot more subtle. Take a quote like this one: “. . . but Jackson, like many husbands before and since, may have loved his wife rather more than he listened to her.” Ninety nine percent innocuous, right? With just a smidge of a hint of an undertone, but hey the context all makes sense, so all right. Except when you add up a whole book of innocuous sentences like that, those little hints all accumulate into more of an . . . odor.

Jackson was an asshole of extraordinary proportions, and this book spent enough time rolling around with him to pick up some whiff of it. In that accidental way that’s just sloppy rather than authentic. History is by definition a project of perspective, but there are histories I trust, and this wasn’t one of them. Oddly, it was the extended passages condemning Jackson for the brutalities of Indian removal that did it. Pointing out the most obviously awful things the man did in a book with a clear pro-Jackson bias doesn’t add nuance or depth, it just makes both the condemnation and the extensive praise look shallow. We hear so much about Jackson as the founder of the Democratic party – of the concept of the President as an instrument of the people (his opponents thought it was inappropriate for him to ever address the press, incidentally, because he should only speak to Congress, and Congress should speak to the people). But never does it occur to this book that Jackson’s democratic principles were actually connected in a complicated way to his paternalism (he called himself the father of the nation, ug ug ug), and this book wouldn’t know a critique of paternalism if it patted it on the head and sent it off to bed.

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