Biographers of Andrew Jackson used to be cursed. On January 8, 1815, the General led American forces in a stunning defeat of an invading British Army, winning the Battle of New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812. With a political career in mind, he cast about for a biographer to chronicle his exploits. He settled on David Ramsay, a sixty-six-year-old South Carolina legislator and physician and gifted historian whose books included a “Life of George Washington,” published in 1807. But, before Ramsay had a chance to begin, he was shot in the back, three times, by a mad tailor on the streets of Charleston. (Ramsay had earlier ventured a medical opinion that the tailor was dangerously insane and, on his deathbed, he insisted that his assailant could not be held accountable for his actions.) Jackson next turned to his aide-de-camp John Reid, a man half Ramsay’s age, and very much in Jackson’s thrall. Reid went to work until, one day in January of 1816, he took suddenly and strangely ill. He died eighteen hours later. Before his demise, he had drafted only the first four chapters of the General’s life; he hadn’t got much farther than the Battle of Enotachopco, in 1814. (In which, to be sure, Jackson’s merits were much extolled: only twenty of his own men were lost, but a hundred and eighty-nine Indians lay dead on the battlefield, and many more died afterward, for, as Reid put it, “the greatest slaughter was in the pursuit.”)
His choices narrowing, Jackson then tapped as his biographer a twenty-six-year-old lawyer named John Eaton, who had served under him during the War of 1812 and was married to Jackson’s ward. Like Reid, Eaton had never written a book. At the Hermitage, Jackson’s thousand-acre cotton plantation outside Nashville, Eaton pored over Jackson’s papers and wrote seven more chapters. The biography was published in 1817 as “The Life of Andrew Jackson.” The next year, Eaton was rewarded with an appointment to a vacant seat in the United States Senate. In 1823, Jackson was elected as the other senator from Tennessee, and followed his biographer and friend to the nation’s capital. The two men took lodgings at the same Washington boarding house. The following year, Jackson was a candidate for the Presidency. Eaton headed his campaign. Jackson’s opponent John Quincy Adams refused to campaign at all. In keeping with the tradition of the first five American Presidents, Adams considered currying favor with voters to be beneath the dignity of the office, and believed that any man who craved the Presidency ought not to have it. Adams called this his Macbeth policy: “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me, / Without my stir.” Jackson’s supporters leaned more toward Lady Macbeth’s point of view. They had no choice but to stir: their candidate was, otherwise, unelectable. How they stirred has shaped American politics ever since. They told a story, the story of Andrew Jackson’s life. In 1824, Eaton published a revised “Life of Jackson,” founding a genre, the campaign biography. At its heart lies a single, telling anecdote. In 1781, when Jackson was fourteen and fighting in the American Revolution, he was captured. A British officer, whose boots had got muddy, ordered the boy to clean them: Jackson refused, and the officer beat him, badly, with a sword. All his life, he bore the scars. Andrew Jackson would not kneel before a tyrant.
Since 1824, no Presidential election year has passed without a campaign biography, printed about the time a candidate is nominated, chiefly for the purpose of getting him elected. (Although, since Reagan’s “A New Beginning,” in 1984, the campaign biography, as book, has been supplanted somewhat by the campaign film, screened at the nominating Convention.) The United States has had some very fine Presidents, and some not so fine. But their campaign biographies are much of a muchness. The worst of them read like an Election Edition Mad Libs, and even the best of them tell, with rare exception, the same Jacksonian story: scrappy maverick who splits rails and farms peanuts and shoots moose battles from the log cabin to the White House by dint of grit, smarts, stubbornness, and love of country. From Eaton’s Jackson, it’s more or less a straight line, right through Harrison, Garfield, Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton, all the way to Kaylene Johnson’s “Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned the Political Establishment Upside Down” (Epicenter/Tyndale; $15.95). Jackson wouldn’t polish those boots. Nixon learned how to be a good Vice-President by warming the bench during college football games. Palin forged bipartisan political alliances in step-aerobics class. Parties rise and fall. Wars begin and end. The world turns. But American campaign biographies still follow a script written nearly two centuries ago. East of piffle and west of hokum, the Boy from Hope always grows up to be the Man of the People. Will we ever stop electing Andrew Jackson?
As a Presidential candidate, Andrew Jackson was, at the start, a hard sell. The nation’s first five Presidents— Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—were diplomats, statesmen, philosophers. It was difficult to imagine how any man could fill the shoes of the Founding Fathers. A generation had passed. John Quincy Adams, the son of the second President, seemed the most suitable prospect; a former Harvard professor of rhetoric and a U.S. senator, he spoke seven languages and had served as ambassador to the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, and Britain. As Secretary of State, he had drafted the Monroe Doctrine. But Andrew Jackson? He was provincial, and poorly educated. (The man spelled “government” with only one “n,” John Quincy Adams once sneered.) Jefferson declared of Jackson’s bid for the Presidency, “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place.” Granted, the Hero of New Orleans was wildly popular with the American people, but then so were gin and mountebanks. Jefferson regarded Jackson as no more than a military man who, for all his extraordinary valor, had a reputation as a despot: brutal, tempestuous, and vengeful. The Army needed men like Andrew Jackson. Whether the Presidency needed him was another matter. Even the General is reported to have said, “I know what I am fit for. I can command a body of men in a rough way, but I am not fit to be President.”
The election of 1824 brought the first campaign buttons, the first public-opinion polls (undertaken by and published in pro-Jackson newspapers), and the first campaign biographies. Eaton’s “Life of Jackson” was the one that established the genre’s enduring conventions. When Eaton revised it in 1824, he turned what was a history, if a decidedly partial one, into political propaganda; his changes are carefully annotated by Frank Owsley, Jr., in a facsimile edition published by the University of Alabama Press. Eaton cut out or waved away everything compromising (the duels Jackson fought, a soldier he had executed), lingered longer over everything wondrous (battles, mainly), and converted into strengths what pundits had construed as weaknesses. Eaton’s Jackson wasn’t reckless; he was fearless. He had almost no political experience; he was, therefore, ideally suited to fight corruption. He lacked political pedigree; his father, a poor Scotch-Irish immigrant, died before he was born—but this only made Jackson more qualified for the White House, since he was, to use a phrase that was coined during his Presidency, a “self-made man.”
In 1824, with Eaton’s biography behind him, Jackson won both the popular vote and a plurality, though not a majority, of the electoral vote. The election was thrown to the House, which chose Adams. Furious, Jackson returned to the Hermitage, vowing revenge. Eaton began still further revisions to his “Life of Jackson.” Meanwhile, editions were printed in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and even in Boston, where the book was spuriously attributed to “a citizen of Massachusetts.”
When Jackson trounced Adams in the Presidential election of 1828, he rewarded his Boswell by naming him Secretary of War. This alarmed Washington possibly even more than the rest of Jackson’s spoils-system appointments, because Eaton had, just before Jackson’s Inauguration, married a widow of dubious repute. The scandal of Eaton’s marriage dominated Jackson’s first two years in office. In a Cabinet meeting in 1829, the President vouched for Mrs. Eaton’s virtue: “She is as chaste as a virgin!” Only Jackson’s Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren, called upon the Eatons socially, a maneuver believed by many to have insured his place as Jackson’s successor. (As James Parton put it in his bestselling “Life of Jackson,” from 1859, “The political history of the United States for the last thirty years dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton’s knocker.”) What came to be called the Petticoat War led to much lampooning—one cartoon pictured Jackson, at a washtub, scrubbing a petticoat, complaining, “The more I rub this, the worst it looks”—but it got a whole lot less funny after it led to the dissolution, in 1831, of his entire Cabinet.
Jackson’s stormy and controversial Administration is the subject of Jon Meacham’s engrossing and admiring “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House,” which Random House will publish next month. Jackson retired the national debt. He killed the Bank of the United States. He made free use of the pocket veto. When the Supreme Court ruled against his plan to force the Cherokee to move to lands west of the Mississippi, Jackson went ahead anyway. Meacham thinks that most of what Jackson did was good for the country, a conclusion helped by the fact that he pretty much ends his story the day Jackson left office, instead of, say, nine weeks later, when the nation’s financial system collapsed. (In a brief aside, Meacham attributes the Panic of 1837 to the growing complexity of the economy.) By any measure, Andrew Jackson vastly expanded the powers of the President. What he could not do was protect John Eaton, the man who had scrubbed clean his own reputation. In 1831, Eaton and his wife were banished from Washington. A curse, when it hits, hits hard.
In the eighteen-fifties, when James Parton began the research for his book about Jackson, he found, in the nation’s libraries and bookstores, “mountains of lies and trash” known as “ ‘Campaign literature,’ a peculiar product of the United States.” Measured against the puffery that came after it, Parton thought, Eaton’s campaign biography was a model of restraint. Still, Eaton’s “Life,” along with Jackson’s Presidency, rewrote the Presidential job description. When Henry Clay ran against Jackson in 1832, his biographer was left to apologize for Clay’s experience:
The Incumbent beat the Orphan in a landslide.
In 1834, Davy Crockett wrote the first Presidential campaign autobiography. Vying for the Whig nomination, he then wrote an ornery biography of his rival, upbraiding him for having traded his coonskin cap for a swankier hat. “Mr. Van Buren’s parents were humble, plain, and not much troubled with book knowledge, and so were mine,” Crockett allowed. But Van Buren had since put on airs: “He couldn’t bear his rise; I never minded mine.” In 1839, William Henry Harrison’s biographer, in a book called “The People’s Presidential Candidate,” tried both to nod to Tippecanoe’s founding forebears (his father, a staggeringly wealthy Virginia slave owner, had signed the Declaration of Independence) and to insist that he was nevertheless no more than an ordinary farmer who had “never been rich” and lived quietly among his crops and cows “upon his farm at North Bend, on the Ohio.” Harrison, who was sixty-seven, and fighting rumors of senility, had distinguished himself in war. If he were elected, one of his supporters observed, it would be “on account of the past, not the future. Let him then rely entirely on the past. Let him say not one single word about his principles, or his creed—let him say nothing—promise nothing.” Harrison obliged, earning the nickname General Mum. When the editor of a Democratic newspaper joked that “Old Granny” Harrison could be persuaded to turn down the nomination and “sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin” if he were treated to a pension and “a barrel of hard cider,” Whigs turned this on its head, dubbing Harrison—who lived in a mansion—the Log Cabin Candidate. Whigs built log cabins on wheels, hitched them to horses, and drove them across the country, handing out mugs of hard cider along the way. They built campaign headquarters out of logs. A Philadelphia distiller, E. C. Booz, sold whiskey in bottles shaped like log cabins. One Albany newspaper, attempting to expose the chicanery behind calling an aristocrat a mountain man, printed a glossary:
Harrison died, of pneumonia, a month after his Inauguration (which is why his successor, John Tyler, came to be called His Accidency), but the log cabin proved long-lived. “It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin,” Daniel Webster, a three-time Presidential aspirant, lamented, adding, “but my elder brothers and sisters were.” (As the literary scholar James D. Hart once observed, “Webster, a politician with older siblings, a mother who was not widowed, and a birthplace not built of logs, obviously sensed that his career could not extend beyond the Senate.”)
“Political biography,” the Democratic Review reported, mid-century, “has, for many years, consisted of the vilest fanfaronade and farrago.” During the election of 1848, frontier, log-cabin Jacksonianism had become so crucial to Presidential campaigning that a critic of the Whig nominee, Zachary Taylor, charged that his only qualification for office was “sleeping forty years in the woods and cultivating moss on the calves of his legs.” (Jackson had run as the “Farmer of Tennessee,” and Taylor and Harrison ran as farmers, too.) A biographer of Taylor’s opponent, Lewis Cass, defended his work by insisting that a candidate’s life was “the property of the people, who have a right to canvass and discuss in detail each item of his history.” By now, one biography wasn’t quite enough. Whigs accused the Democrats of issuing two lives of Cass, one for the North and one for the South. Taylor’s supporters offered no fewer than fourteen. The eleventh President could never have been elected without his biographers’ answer to the question posed by his opponent: “Who is James K. Polk?” But what voters mainly needed to know was his nickname, Young Hickory.
In 1852, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s college friend Franklin Pierce won the Democratic nomination. (“We Polked them in ’44,” the slogan ran. “We’ll Pierce them in ’52.”) Hawthorne, who had just finished “The Blithedale Romance,” offered to write “the necessary biography.” He was an ardent admirer of Jackson, and he saw his friend as yet another Young Hickory. He wrote the book in just over a month and was rewarded, when Pierce won the election, with the consulship at Liverpool (although, as a Northerner endorsing a pro-slavery candidate, Hawthorne lost a good number of friends). Hawthorne had much to offer: Pierce was obscure; Hawthorne was a celebrity. He also lent a masterly canniness to the book’s most telling anecdote. In 1847, in the Mexican War, Pierce had served under the command of the man he was now running against, Winfield Scott. (Scott’s supporters promoted his ties to Jackson by publishing, in one volume, “The Lives of Winfield Scott and Andrew Jackson.”) During a battle outside Mexico City, Pierce’s horse fell on him. Whigs, who called Pierce “the hero of many a bottle,” said that he was drunk. But Hawthorne turned what followed into an endorsement of Pierce from the mouth of his opponent. The next day, Scott summoned the wounded Pierce:
Franklin Pierce proved to be one of the most ineffective American Presidents ever. He served one term, and died, in 1869, of cirrhosis.
“I wrote the life of Lincoln which elected him,” William Dean Howells once boasted to Mark Twain. Howells wrote his “Life of Abraham Lincoln” in 1860, when he was twenty-three. (He went on to write some two hundred books, including “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” and to serve as an editor of The Atlantic.) It is the most affecting campaign biography I have ever read, but that probably has as much to do with my love for Lincoln as with my admiration for Howells, who managed to write at once the best example of the genre and a cunning parody of it. “It is necessary that every American should have an indisputable grandfather,” Howells began. About Lincoln’s ancestry he had not a clue: “There is a dim possibility that he is of the stock of the New England Lincolns, of Plymouth colony; but the noble science of heraldry is almost obsolete in this country, and none of Mr. Lincoln’s family seems to have been aware of the preciousness of long pedigrees.” Howells had only weeks to write; he had never met Lincoln; and, as it happened, he didn’t think his genealogy mattered. That was his point: we aren’t electing the man for his ancestors; we’re electing him for his ideas.
Howells proceeded to indulge in every one of the genre’s conventions but then, somehow, to transcend them, too. Lincoln’s childhood was characterized by nothing so much as “his struggle with the accidents of ignorance and poverty.” He lived in “the rude cabin of the settler.” He split timber for rails. “Until he was twenty-three, the ax was seldom out of his hand, except in the intervals of labor, or when it was exchanged for the plow, the hoe, or the sickle.” But Howells knew that, to lead a country that was falling apart, Lincoln had to bring more than brawn. “ ‘He has mauled rails!’ ” Democratic critics scoffed. “What backwoods farmer has not?”
To this question, Howells had an answer. Lincoln wasn’t somebody’s son. He wasn’t a military hero. He was, by nature, a scholar. The scene you can’t forget, in Howells, is young Lincoln reading Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of England” in the woods: “He threw himself under a wide-spreading oak, and expansively made a reading desk of the hillside. Here he would pore over Blackstone day after day, shifting his position as the sun rose and sank, so as to keep in the shade, and utterly unconscious of everything but the principles of common law.” Lincoln didn’t battle his way out of poverty. He read his way out. His was a democracy of literacy.
After the Civil War, campaign biographies got goofier, borrowing from Howells’s Lincoln not his love of law and learning but his name and his rough-hewn timbers. Garfield was born in a log cabin; his biographers provided illustrations of the family home, complete with measurements. (Garfield’s life was, literally, a Horatio Alger story, “From Canal Boy to President.”) McKinley—“From Tent to White House”—lacked even logs. Coolidge was born behind clapboards, in a house attached to his father’s general store, but his was nevertheless “another story of the Log Cabin to the White House.” “The story of Hoover,” born on a farm in Iowa, orphaned at nine and a millionaire before he was forty, was “the story of America.” Al Smith, the Democratic nominee in 1928, was among the first graduates of the “University of Hard Knocks.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose speech nominating Smith for the Presidency was itself published as a campaign biography, left his own biographer in a quandary. His origins were hardly humble. This didn’t stop one biographer from answering yes to the question posed by his book’s title, “Is Roosevelt an Andrew Jackson?” It wasn’t actually a lie to say that he was born in “the old family house on the ancestral farm.” (F.D.R. insisted that it not be called an “estate.”) And then there were the hardships of Groton: “The Boys slept in dormitories. The alcoves were small and bare. There was one tiny window. There was a bed, a chair, a bureau. That was all.”
Adlai Stevenson displayed remarkable candor when he admitted, in 1952, “I wasn’t born in a log cabin. I didn’t work my way through school nor did I rise from rags to riches, and there’s no use trying to pretend I did.” He wasn’t enough of an Everyman to compete against the “Man from Abilene,” Dwight Eisenhower, whose biographer played Ike’s home town for all it was worth: “The lusty pioneer energies that built it had moved farther West, but they left behind a robust, independent settlement whose rugged population knew the value of hard work and took for granted the virtues of sturdy individualism.” (That’s lusty, robust, rugged, hard, and sturdy, all in one sentence.) In 1956, Ike’s running mate, the son of a California grocer, merited his own campaign biography: “Life in the home of Frank and Hannah Nixon was good, but it was never soft.” (In a detail much like the footage of the teen-age Bill Clinton shaking Kennedy’s hand at the White House, Nixon’s biographer made a point of mentioning that, as a boy, Nixon slept beneath a portrait of Lincoln.) When Jimmy Carter ran for President, he wrote a campaign autobiography titled “Why Not the Best?” He, too, had the Jacksonian goods, which were getting harder to come by. (Except, maybe, in Alaska.) “We lived in a wooden clapboard house alongside the dirt road which led from Savannah to Columbus, Georgia,” Carter recalled. “There was no source of heat in the northeast corner room where I slept.” (Palin’s childhood bedroom was “unheated,” too. Aside from the woodstove.)
John McCain didn’t grow up on a farm, but he shares with John Eaton’s Andrew Jackson a rebellious youth and a “hair-trigger temper.” Jackson, “like too many young men, sacrificing future prospects to present gratification,” spent money on trifles, and was forever “irritable and hasty.” McCain, whose high-school nickname was Punk, was a regular James Dean: “Clad in blue jeans, motorcycle boots, and his overcoat, smoking a cigarette that dangled from his lips, McCain would sneak into Ninth Street in Washington, go to Waxy Maxy, and buy the latest record by Elvis Presley.” Like Jackson, McCain first achieved national prominence for his military valor and, in McCain’s case, for the tragedy of his long and terrible imprisonment and torture in Vietnam. That happened. It matters. John McCain refused to polish those boots. That this means McCain should be President is the message of Paul Alexander’s revised edition of “Man of the People: The Maverick Life and Career of John McCain” (Wiley; $14.95). “Man of the People” was first published in 2002. But, really, it’s a lot older than that.
Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” reads a bit like a campaign autobiography, the story of Obama as the story of America. But he wrote it at the end of law school, before running for office, and it’s too searching to belong to the genre: its telling anecdotes tell, mostly, that anecdotes don’t always tell you what you need to know. “Dreams” is Obama’s reckoning with some very old stories that his family told him, especially stories about his father, who left Hawaii to return to Africa in 1963, when Obama was two. (Obama’s Kansas origins are Jacksonian; his Kenyan origins aren’t.) For years, Obama’s maternal grandfather had said that the family left Texas after Obama’s mother, in elementary school, was tormented for playing with a black girl. Nah, Obama’s grandmother said; we left because your grandfather wanted a better job. “She’s wise that way, my grandmother, suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims,” Obama writes. “Which is why I tend to trust her account of events; it corresponds to what I know about my grandfather, his tendency to rewrite his history to conform with the image he wished for himself.” Sometimes your grandfather’s stories tell you only the half of it.
Americans first voted for a President whose campaign touted him as a rugged, stubborn, hot-tempered war hero, a man of the people, a hundred and eighty-four years ago. There is no older or more hackneyed gambit in American politics, no maneuver less maverick. The Erie Canal is younger. We don’t live in the Age of Jackson anymore. But even people who did had their doubts about Old Hickory, and about the kind of lore-loaded campaigning that his first biographer began. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, he named his own Boswell consul to Venice. Still, something troubled him. He read Howells’s “Life of Lincoln” soon after it was published, and in the margins he made corrections. In the White House, he reread it more than once. He checked it out of the Library of Congress twice. It was in his office when he was assassinated. Where Howells had written that Lincoln was, in the eighteen-thirties, “a stanch Adams man,” Lincoln crossed out “Adams” and wrote “anti-Jackson.” And when Howells told of how, as a young congressman, Lincoln had travelled miles and miles, by foot, to the Illinois legislature, Lincoln scribbled in the margin, “No harm, if true; but, in fact, not true. L.” ♦
