Trump’s portrait of president with NI links replaced at White House
Biden’s decision ‘is attempt to restore reason and decorum’, says QUB academic
PRESIDENT Joe Biden’s decision to replace a portrait of President Andrew Jackson with a Benjamin Franklin painting shows his attempt to “restore reason and decorum” to the White House, an academic has said.
President Jackson, who served two terms as the seventh commander-in-chief between 1829 and 1837, has strong links to Northern Ireland.
His father, also named Andrew, and his mother Elizabeth hailed from Carrickfergus and emigrated to America two years before their son was born in 1767.
An Ulster-scots thatched farmhouse, which was home to his parents, is now a tourist attraction, known as the Andrew Jackson Cottage, Co Antrim.
Last June a bronze statute of Jackson — who was one of a number of US presidents who owned slaves — was attacked by protesters in Washington, DC in the wake of the George Floyd protests.
Another controversial figure within American history, former President Donald Trump, is reported to be a huge admirer of President Jackson and specifically requested a portrait of the figure in the Oval Office.
On his own first official day in the Oval Office, President Biden removed any signs of his predecessor, including Jackson’s portrait. In its place hangs a painting of Benjamin Franklin, one of the United State’s revered founding fathers who was also a scientist, writer and philosopher.
He also removed a bust of Sir Winston Churchill which prompted Downing Street yesterday to insist that it was “up to the President” what goes on display in his office after Boris Johnson criticised Barack Obama for doing the same thing in 2016.
At the time the Prime Minister attracted criticism for saying Mr Obama removing the sculpture “was a symbol of the part-kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire”.
Professor Philip Mcgowan, an expert in American studies who teaches at Queen’s University, said Mr Biden’s change in Oval decor shows that he is attempting to end the populism which defined Trump’s era.
“Biden’s decision to replace the portrait of President Jackson with Franklin’s may have raised the odd eyebrow or two, but not as many as were raised when his predecessor had chosen to display Jackson’s portrait in the first place,” he said. “Whatever about Jackson’s connections to Northern Ireland, Jackson remains a controversial figure within US Presidential history and within American culture more broadly.
“His name is synonymous with the ‘Trail of Tears,’ the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation from its own lands east of the Mississippi River under the terms of the Indian Removal Act signed by Jackson in 1830. By 1839, 4,000 Cherokee had died on their journey west to Oklahoma.”
Prof Mcgowan said the Franklin’s “commitment to the truths offered by science and philosophy” will reflect Biden’s own approach of tackling Covid and “reinstituting a culture of decorum and reason to the White House and to American political discourse”.
“In Jackson, Trump identified the populism with which he himself sought to govern over the last four years. Now both have been removed from the Oval Office by a new administration keen to heal the nation with scientific fact and demonstrable truths.”
‘Jackson remains a divisive figure in American culture’