How Jackson’s portrait connects FDR, Trump and Biden
Does this quote sound familiar?
“If at times his passionate devotion to this cause of the average citizen lent an amazing zeal to his thoughts, to his speech and to his actions, the people loved him for it the more. They realized the intensity of the attacks made by his enemies, by those who, thrust from power and position, pursued him with relentless hatred. The beneficiaries of the abuses to which he put an end pursued him with all the violence that political passions can generate. But the people of his day were not deceived. They loved him for the enemies he had made.”
It sounds like, perhaps, a contemporary Republican speaking of former President Donald Trump, but this quote is from a much earlier time — coming from a speech President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave on Jan. 8, 1936.
He was speaking of Andrew Jackson at a Democratic Party dinner named for the seventh president.
Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage earned a ‘Trump bump’
Roosevelt and Jackson, two historical figures, recently crossed paths in the unlikely arena of current affairs when President Joe Biden removed a portrait of Jackson from the Oval Office and replaced it with, among others, a large portrait of Roosevelt, for whom Biden has a great fondness.
Removing the Jackson portrait has been depicted as a break from Trump because Trump insisted that Jackson was a political role model and hero to him in spite of Jackson’s racist policies gaining more scrutiny in the present day.
Nowhere is closer to the intersection of these cross currents than The Hermitage, Jackson’s Nashville estate, where a museum to his legacy now resides. The property has in the last four years seen a “Trump bump,” CEO Howard Kittell recently told The Tennessean , even as it works to put Jackson’s story in greater context.
For his part, Biden hasn’t really said exactly what his intentions were in his choice of décor, and presidents routinely redecorate the Oval Office to suit their tastes, but commentators who assume Jackson has been banished to some lesser place will find the general doesn’t go away easily.
FDR visited both The Hermitage and Fisk University on a trip to Nashville
Biden is a son of the New Deal generation, and his reverence for Roosevelt, whose 12-year presidency took on the Great Depression and World War II, is not surprising.
Biden’s early emphasis on speedy relief is taken directly from the Roosevelt playbook. In fact the 100-day measuring stick so often mentioned when any president assumes the presidency is a reference to Roosevelt’s dramatic actions taken immediately after he took office in 1933 to arrest the economic freefall.
Like Trump and a list of 20th-century presidents, including Roosevelt’s cousin Theodore, Roosevelt paid a visit to the Hermitage. On Nov. 17, 1934, Roosevelt and wife Eleanor came to see the house and Jackson’s grave before moving on to visit Fisk University, a historically Black university in Nashville. Even Roosevelt’s parade stand at his 1937 inauguration was modeled after the Hermitage.
Roosevelt’s admiration for Jackson is a little ironic at first blush. A son of privilege and the first Democrat to seek the votes of Black Americans, Roosevelt was tasked with ending the Great Depression. The slave-owning Jackson, a self-made man, may have caused a depression.
Still, Jackson, for all his faults as a leader and a man, absolutely represented America’s evolution.
‘Old Hickory’ was nothing like his predecessors
The six presidents before him were sprung from great wealth; Jackson’s immediate predecessor, John Quincy Adams, was himself the son of a former president.
Jackson, who had come up from immense poverty, was the first president who had won election without any of these advantages, though he had become quite wealthy as an adult. And when he was inaugurated in 1829, contrary to the buttoned-up tradition, Jackson flung the White House doors open for his supporters, the common folks.
This, along with Jackson’s military record, explains his predominant image as a transformative leader.
This was Roosevelt’s frame of reference, and it was appealing at a time when populist fervor was high.
It may be strange for some to square Roosevelt’s exclamations for Jackson’s “passion for justice” and “his championship of the cause of the exploited and the downtrodden” with Jackson’s depiction in modern political debates, yet Roosevelt believed Jackson represented a form of progress.
It is tempting at this point to draw parallels in history or extrapolate some master lesson uniting Biden, Roosevelt, Trump and Jackson, but this can easily get messy.
The one thing all four men represent, in their own ways, is the conflict between populist sentiment and power, and how best to use both. This conflict and the questions it raise will not disappear with a portrait.
For you may remove a portrait, but its shadow remains.
Alex Hubbard is a columnist for the USA TODAY Network Tennessee. Email him at dhubbard@tennessean.com or tweet to him at @alexhubbard7.