Andrew Jackson and the Rise of the Democratic Party. By Mark R.Cheathem. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 2018. 241 pp.

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 720-721
Author(s):  
Quentin P. Taylor
1963 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry N. Scheiber

In September 1833, Andrew Jackson issued an executive order ending deposit of Federal funds in the Bank of the United States, which had been the government depository since 1817. The culmination of Jackson's long struggle with the Bank and its friends in Congress, this measure closed a chapter in the political history of the era. To the conservative Jacksonians, “victory over the Bank of the United States was a consummation” that freed the state banks and business enterprise from the control of a powerful and despised institution. To the radical, hard-money faction of the Democratic party, however, “removal of the deposits” (as the order was popularly termed) was merely a first step toward more fundamental reform—elimination of the monetary disturbances that they attributed to reliance on bank paper for the currency of the country. Because of this divergence of views, partisan and factional disputes over Jacksonian financial policy did not cease with victory over the Bank. Central to the continuing debate was the relationship of die Treasury Department to the group of state-chartered banks, usually called the “pet banks,” in which Federal funds were deposited after September 1833. My purpose here is to review Treasury operations in die period 1833–1841, to suggest the political role of die pet banks and the economic impact of financial policy in die administrations of Jackson and Van Buren.


Bosom Friends ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 42-65
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Balcerski

Chapter 2 turns to how Buchanan and King established themselves within the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson. In both cases, the chapter stresses the roles of intimate male friendships and the Washington boardinghouse, or mess, in developing a cross-sectional, though partisan, approach to their politics. Equally, it looks at important moments of conflict in each man’s life: King’s factional fighting with Democrats in his adopted state of Alabama, where he established a plantation called Chestnut Hill near Selma, and Buchanan’s struggles against the various elements of the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania. It also recounts Buchanan’s experience as the American minister to Russia, highlighting the ways in which his foreign exile connected him to King and prepared him for his future role as senator and secretary of state. These formative experiences served to harden their future political convictions and bespoke the continued need for intimate male friendships in their future endeavors.


1948 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 412-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter F. Drucker

The American party system has been under attack almost continuously since it took definite form in the time of Andrew Jackson. The criticism has always been dircted at the same point: America's political pluralism, the distinctively American organization of government by compromise of interests, pressure groups and sections. And the aim of the critics from Thaddeus Stevens to Henry Wallace has always been to substitute for this “unprincipled” pluralism a government based as in Europe on “ideologies” and “principles.” But never before—at least not since the Civil War years—has the crisis been as acute as in this last decade; for the political problems which dominate our national life today: foreign policy and industrial policy, are precisely the problems which interest and pressure-group compromise is least equipped to handle. And while the crisis symptoms: a left-wing Thirl Party and the threatened split-off of the Southern Wing, are more alarming in the Democratic Party, the Republicans are hardly much better off. The 1940 boom for the “idealist” Wilkie and the continued inability to attract a substantial portion of the labor vote, are definite signs that the Republican Party too is under severe ideological pressure.


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